#though I’m currently out of town and mobile bound

[soraeia]

*peeks out from under rock, looking both ways*…I suppose…I shall hop on the bandwagon and rise from the tumblr grave as well…

[wkemeup]

Graveyard

summary: As the unofficial healer for the Avengers, you pride yourself on the ability to mend heroes with the touch of your hand. Only, your gift comes at a heavy price — one you keep secret from your friends —and when Bucky asks you to do the impossible, they’ll discover why your gift is called a sacrifice, too.  pairing: bucky x healer!reader word count: 10k warnings: canon level violence

As a child, you were told it was a gift; placed upon a pedestal above the quaint suffering of a rural town and removed of your innocence for the good of strangers. You’d been made to be revered – honored – for the touch that could mend the broken.  

It began with a cut upon your father’s finger – a slip of a kitchen knife that had left a small bead of blood in its wake. Curious eyes glanced up at your father as he hissed at the sting of it and you’d reach forward to place your infant hand upon the cut, a grip so mall it barely wrapped around his finger. He stilled as a soft glow began to emit from your palm. When you removed your hand and began to cry, your father was stunned to find his skin perfectly intact – no trace of a scar in its place.  

They told you it was a gift, celebrated you as if you were a blessing from Heaven itself. But they were cruel in their rejoice, selfish in their praise. They had not considered your gift was not a gift at all – but a sacrifice.  

Like energy, pain could not be destroyed— but it could be absorbed. It could be transferred. Your father’s cut had not simply disappeared, but instead manifested on the finger of an infant for a few short moments before it faded into your skin; laid to rest amongst a sea of foreign injuries that did not belong to you.  

“Look sharp, kid! We’ve got incoming,” Banner’s voice startled you from your thoughts as he stood at the doorway to your lab. Arms folded over his chest, an amused smirk upon his face, he must have caught sight of the quinjet landing in the hanger from the windows overlooking the loading dock.  

You nodded, setting down the drill beside the stun absorption pad you were engineering for Stark’s newest suit. You didn't have to wonder long who was on the latest mission and currently on their way to your office, because a familiar bickering began to carry down the hall and into the lab, forcing a smile onto your face.  

For a mechanical engineer, you saw more of the Avengers post-mission than the med wing did these days. You’d been hired for your multiple PhDs and borderline genius IQ, but once you’d rushed across the room to spare Stark from a rather unpleasant laceration on his palm from an experiment gone haywire, your lab had quickly become a rotating door of injured Avengers.  

Sure enough, Barnes and Wilson stumbled their way into the lab, Sam draped over Bucky’s shoulder, barely able to put any pressure on his left leg. While Sam tossed you his charismatic grin and those big, round, puppy dog eyes, Bucky favored to dispose of his partner on the lab table with an aggravated grunt.  

“What do we have today?” you smirked, rolling up the sleeves of your coat as Bruce shook his head in amusement.  

“Broken ankle, I think,” Sam replied, gesturing to the mess of bandages and improvised splint.  

You nodded as you stepped closer, examining the injury before you brushed a hand over the swollen joint. Sam whined at the contact, the pain clearly breaking through the lighthearted grin upon his face though he tried to suppress it. His hand curled into a fist.  

“You know I’m not a medical doctor, but I’d have to agree,” you nodded, planting your hands on your hips.  

“You could just get the x-rays and go through PT like a normal person,” Bucky grumbled off in his corner of the room, narrowing his eyes in warning upon his partner. “She’s not here as your personal healer, Wilson.”  

Bucky was always hesitant of your powers. He never said why, but you wondered most days if he was still seeking penance for the evils he’d committed under Hydra, if maybe he felt as though giving you his pain absolved him in a way he was not worthy of.  

Or perhaps it was a degradation of his pride. Men often found strength in their ability to withstand pain. Though, it seemed to bother him when the others would come to you for injuries like this, too, almost as if he worried they were taking advantage of you.  

He was a good man; certainly, more concerned with your consent in healing his friends than your parents and the town who spent your childhood exploiting you ever were.  

“I don’t mind, Bucky,” you told him, smiling encouragingly back at him until he started to relax his shoulders and uncrossed his arms, softening under your gaze. “If it means less time on the bench and more time out there saving lives and having your back, I don’t mind at all.”

“Yeah, Barnes, who’s going to watch your back if I’m held up in a cast?” Sam teased, chuckling under his breath until Bucky stepped forward and not so subtly bumped his hip to the side of the lab table. The sudden disruption of the table moved his ankle just enough to instantly wipe the grin from Sam’s face.  

“Try to relax for me, Sam,” you eased, stepping forward as you started to remove your gloves. You leaned over the edge of the table, slowly removing the splint and the bandage surrounding the swollen muscle. You handed it off to Bucky as you examined the dark purple and blue discoloration on his ankle.  

He hissed as you laid your palms on his leg, clenching down on his jaw.  

You closed your eyes, concentrating as you felt for the break beneath the surface. A crack splintered through the bone, the surrounding tissue swollen and aching.  

A gentle glow began to emit from your palms, a warmth that spread from your hands and directly onto Sam’s skin, through the muscle, and deep into the bone. You could feel the subtle fragments as they began to mend, the swell in his joint as it shrank, the slight movements as he regained feeling.  

Exhaling a tense breath, you shifted your stance onto your right leg as the pressure started to build in your ankle. It wouldn’t last long, just a few minutes in comparison to the weeks of treatment and months of physical therapy Sam would have endured – an easy trade for a man who spend his days so selflessly on the line in the service of strangers.  

You could sense Bucky watching you and you were careful not to let the pain show on your face. There was a privilege in healing the Avengers like this. It gave your life meaning beyond the injuries of your hometown; of careless teenagers falling off skateboards or angry men in bars who took an argument a drink too far. You’d happily take on a few moments of pain in service of heroes.  

Not that you’d let them know.  

“You should be good now.” You held your hands up, the soft glow fading away from your palms as you tucked your hands into your pockets. Careful of the momentary break in your ankle, you took a cautious step away from the table to lean on the chair at your desk. No one noticed the wince in your expression as you put the slightest pressure on the fresh injury.  

“I will never get tired of that.” Sam looked down at the foot in awe, rolling at the ankle and amazed to find the swelling and bruising disappeared completely. He jumped down from the table, bounding on his feet just to test out the freedom in his mobility.  

“Alright, Wilson. Enough,” Bucky rolled his eyes. “You’re going to hurt yourself again and Y/n’s not going to be so generous next time.”

Sam smirked, pausing for a moment as he contemplated. “Nah, my girl will always take care of me. Won’t ya, sugar?”  

It didn’t slip your notice when Bucky tensed up at the pet name. You started to laugh, the teasing smile dropping from his face as his hands curled into fists. Sam really knew how to press his buttons and it seemed, surprisingly enough, you were one of them.  

“Bucky’s got a point, you know. Fancy healing powers are reserved for field injuries these days.” You were only teasing, both of them knowing you’d have healed a papercut if they’d ask. Still, Bucky smirked, taunting Sam over your shoulder as if he’d won.  

You eased yourself off the chair as you started to regain feeling in your ankle, giving more pressure to the heel to find it barely noticeable. You rubbed at the joint with your right shoe to find the swelling had disappeared as well.  

A few moments to spare him weeks of pain. Easy trade.

“What about you, Sergeant?”  

Bucky paused, raising an eyebrow at you.  

You took a step forward, glancing over him in search of injuries. Nothing more than a few cuts that his own advanced healing would take care of overnight. Still, there was one injury you’d been trying to convince him to allow you to heal in the year since you’ve known him.  

“You going to let me work on your shoulder yet or are you still being a masochist?”  

Sam snickered under his breath as he crossed the room to watch what Banner was doing over his shoulder. Bucky gave you that knowing smile of his, the one that pushed up into his eyes and left behind beautiful creases and lines on his face; an exhale of a laugh on his breath.  

“It’s not necessary, doll. I’m fine.”

A frown tugged at your lips. “You always say that, and yet...”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Bucky shrugged. He was watching you with those sweet eyes of his, creating a warmth that spread in your chest entirely independent of the powers in your hands.  

“You shouldn’t have to handle it in the first place,” you pressed, a pain in your voice as he placed a hand on your shoulder, letting it slide down your arm. It was an intimate gesture, more contact that he had with most people, and he offered it willingly. You tried not to let the shivers show in your spine as he pulled away.  

It looked as though he wanted to say more, but Steve suddenly appeared in the doorway, causing Bucky to take an abrupt step away from you. You hadn’t realized how close you’d been standing to one another.  

“Debrief in five,” Steve ordered, eyeing Sam and Bucky, though paused as he saw you, offering a short smile in acknowledgement before disappearing down the hall.  

“I’m not letting this go, just so you’re aware,” you teased, pointing at Bucky’s shoulder as he started to wave Sam towards the door. He smiled, keeping his back to you until Sam was clear of the room and he leaned into the open frame, one quick glance back at you.  

“Wouldn’t expect anything less, doll.”

***

The next month saw another broken leg, a fractured clavicle, two minor lacerations, a sprained wrist, and a number of superficial cuts – all from various members of the team. Though there was always the one exception who wouldn’t accept your offer no matter how badly he was favoring his right arm.  

The clavicle was certainly a challenge to get through, but the world needed Natasha Romanoff in the field, not strung up on a gurney and a brace for a handful of months. It took longer than some of the other injuries to heal, but you’d managed, even if you had to excuse yourself to the restroom as soon as you’d finished, even if you had to shove a towel into your mouth to keep from screaming as it mended itself together under your skin.  

The truth was you liked being useful. You liked the stunned smiles on their faces and the appreciation in their eyes. You liked seeing them run a hand over perfectly smooth skin where an open wound had just been. It gave you a purpose.  

And sure – your work on SHIELD tech was important and perhaps not all of the injuries in your hometown had been a waste of your abilities, but there was something exceptionally gratifying in mending someone who was untouchable, in healing the people who saved the world.

You’d take a dozen broken clavicles for them.  

It was late after your evening shift and you’d taken to running a few laps on the indoor track around the gym. Blow off some steam, use the state-of-the-art equipment Stark spent thousands of dollars on, give your mind something to think about beside how you were going to rewire Sam’s wings to expand in a more fluid motion.  

You’d just started to break into a sweat when you noticed Bucky setting up at the row of punching bags. The gym was otherwise empty as the sky favored the stars over the sun, and you started to smile as you watched Bucky shrug off his jacket and drop the bag at his feet. He rolled back his shoulders, concentrating on the bag as he readied his fists. But as the first punch hit the bag, the smile quickly fell from your face.  

It echoed up into the rafters, startling you enough to still your sprint abruptly. He let out a grunt as he pummeled at the bag; left jab, right hook, kick, until it broke at the seams and split open to spill sand in heaps upon the ground. He moved on to the next one.  

You clasped a hand to your mouth, looking around the gym to confirm you were in fact alone with him. He’d been on a mission as far as you were aware for the last week. You’d missed him hanging around the lab, asking questions as you worked on new advancements on the stun guns for field agents. He must have gotten back a few hours ago and something clearly went wrong.  

“Bucky?” you called, voice far too soft to be heard across the gym and above the thunderous clash of his knuckles to leather. You jogged a few paces closer, wincing as he threw the entirely of his momentum into a hit that would have broken an ordinary man’s hand. “Bucky? Are you alright?”

But he didn’t hear you. You took a cautious look back at the doors, wondering if you should go find Steve, or maybe even Sam – someone who might know what happened, someone who might be able to talk him down. But you were the only one around. You cleared your throat, stepping up just behind him.  

“Bucky?”

You hit the ground before you knew what had happened.  

A blinding pulsing in the back of your head, the wind momentarily knocked from your lungs, you opened your eyes to find Bucky hovering over you. He held a closed fist in the air, the other digging sharply into your shoulder between his grip, pupils blown wide and dark. It took a moment before he seemed to realize who was laying under him.

“Y/n?” He blinked, confused. His stare flickered to the fist held above your head, knuckles dripping red and bloody, and he pulled away instantly, a flash of horror written over his features. “Shit-- I didn’t... What are you doing here?”

You rubbed at the back of your head, brushing over a slight bump that would certainly mend itself within a few minutes. Slowly, you sat up, careful of the sudden darkness that swept over your eyes, though something cool grabbed onto you before you could fall back against the floor.  

“Hey, come lean against the wall, okay?” Bucky urged, carefully guiding you to adjust your position until you could press your back to the chill of the plastered walls. You sighed in contentment, the pain in your pain already dissipating. Bucky swallowed nervously. “Did I hurt you?”

“I don’t stay hurt for long, Buck,” you told him with a teasing smile, though he did not return it. You set a hand on his forearm, squeezing it lightly before returning it to your lap. “I’m alright. I promise. Are you?”

Bucky narrowed his eyes.

“You were beating that punching bag within an inch of its life,” you clarified, chuckling as you gestured to the exploded bag on the floor, and then to the one still hanging with sand streaming down the seams.  

“Rough mission,” was all he said, his eyes downcast.  

You nodded. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He shook his head.

The two of you sat in silence for a while, listening to the soft buzz of the air conditioner and the faint chirp of crickets outside the windows. You didn’t expect him to say anything. Bucky was a man of few words, but you hoped the company was enough. He didn’t make an effort to move away, not even when your thigh brushed against his.  

He was trying to close his fist when you heard him hiss in pain. His right hand was coated in dried blood and fresh, open wounds on his knuckles. They’d barely started to crust over and with every attempt to close his fist, they cracked open, drawing a painful sting in their place.  

“Will you let me heal your hand?”

Bucky paused, setting his hand down on his leg. “Y/n, it’s not necessary. I won’t ask you to do that.”

“You’re not asking. I’m offering,” you countered. “Besides, it is necessary, actually. How are you going to punch the bad guys if you can’t close your fist?”

“I’ve got another,” Bucky argued back, though a smile had etched its way onto his face. He raised his left hand, making a show of it as he curled his fingers into a fist one by one. “This one’s pretty indestructible so...”

“Please, Bucky.” You turned towards him, folding your legs as you held out your left hand for him to take. “Just this once. Let me do this.”

A stormy array of ocean blue and thunderous skies stared back at you, unsure. His eyes flickered down to your hand. Always so hesitant to ask for help, always so reluctant to accept the good things when they were offered. But as he watched you, searching for signs to run, to back out, something softened.  

He swallowed and slowly, placed his right hand into yours.  

You smiled, adjusting your grip gently on his hand. You placed it to lay on you knee as you hovered your left hand over his knuckles. The warm glow illuminated from your palm and Bucky’s breath hitched as he must have felt the sudden rush of energy it produced.  

The scars began to mend before his eyes and just as you felt the stinging prick on your own knuckles, you quickly pushed your right hand into the pocket of your jacket to hide the scars as they formed.  

“That’s incredible,” Bucky exhaled, withdrawing his hand as soon as you were finished. He held it out in front of him, examining the dried blood coated around perfectly intact skin. He shook his head in disbelief. “You’re incredible.”  

A rush of heat burned in your cheeks as you looked away, a smile breaking onto your lips. It was enough to distract you from the stinging in your hand tucked away in your pocket.  

“Do you want to watch a movie or something?” you asked, biting on your lip nervously. “Think you could do with the company and I’d like to keep you from breaking more of these expensive punching bags.”

Bucky laughed at that, nodding. “Yeah, that sounds nice.”

He stood and offered you his hand, thinking out loud about which one of the movies on his list he wanted to try out next. You pulled your hand from your pocket and took his as he offered it to you; the knuckles already clean and healed.  

***

“You should see it, Fitz! It’s a goddamn stroke of genius.” You held up the ventilator no bigger than the pad of your thumb up to the light, admiring your work.  

“I’m sure Stark will be thrilled,” a thick Scottish accent crackled through the speaker on the com beside you. “Send me the schematics, will you?”

You pursed your lips, a smile etching through. “Think you can one-up me?”

“No never,” Fitz laughed. You could hear him tinkering in his own lab on the quinjet, the small clicks of metal and the buzz of a drill humming over the speaker. “Just want to see if I’m still head of our class or not.”

“Pretty sure we both know that title belongs to Simmons.”

There was a slight pause, then, a dreamy, “yeah, you’re right.”

A sudden knocking at the edge of the lab startled you as you spun around in your chair, nearly dropping the ventilator for Stark’s suit. Bucky stood in the doorway, clutching at his left shoulder as fingers dug into the muscle. He wore a sort of guilty look upon his face though he pushed out a smile and waved.  

“Hey, Fitz, I’ll call you tomorrow, alright?” you said over your shoulder to the speaker, waited a moment for his response and ended the call. You turned back to Bucky as a smile grew upon your face. “What can I do for you, Sergeant? I didn’t miss movie night, did I?”

“No, you’re in the clear,” Bucky chuckled, though it was tense. He stepped further into the lab, relaxing a little as he noticed no one else was around. It was pretty late for you to be working, but you were so close to finishing the ventilator, and well, time easily got away from you with Fitz on the other end of the phone.  

“Coming to keep me company then?” you teased. “I’m actually about done anyway, so we could set up the next movie on your—”

“No, I— um...” Bucky started, losing his nerve rather quickly. He exhaled a tense breath, eyes casting down to the floor. “I was, um, wondering if you could work on my shoulder?”

You raised an eyebrow. Even after that night in the gym, Bucky was still hesitant to your offers to heal his various injuries from the field. He’d give you that sweet smile of his, a soft pink in his cheeks, and tell you that he’d be fine on his own. You never doubted that, but it didn’t mean you couldn't spare him just a few hours of that pain.  

“The, um,” Bucky winced, gritting his teeth as he pushed his hand deeper against the tissue, “the nerve endings are acting up. Shuri said it’s to be, uh, expected given how Hydra butchered my arm all those years ago, but...”

“Come here.” You were already removing the files and paperwork from the table, gesturing for him to take a seat.  

His whole left arm was slack at his side as if he could barely tolerate to move it. Shallow breaths hitched in his lungs as he leaned against the table, settling against the hard, metal surface.

“Can you take this off?” you asked, nodding to his shirt. Bucky’s cheeks flushed and you cleared your throat nervously, playing with the ends of your hair. “It’ll be more effective if I can touch the area directly.”

He removed his right hand from the muscle at his shoulder and gripped at the hem of his shirt. Slowly, he started to pull it over his head, though you could tell from the harsh exhale in his breath that it was causing him considerable pain.  

“Here, let me help you.” You stepped forward and helped ease the fabric up his torso and gently guided it off his right arm, over his head, and eased it down his left. He seemed more at ease with the shirt removed, but a chill swept up his spine in the cool air of the lab.  

You kept your eyes on his, determined not to let your gaze fall to the hardened muscles on his chest and stomach.  

“I won’t be able to heal the scars,” you told him as you moved around to stand behind the table. “Just try to relax for me, okay? I’ll do what I can for the pain.”

Bucky nodded, his hands clenched into the lip of the table, enough to warp the surface. He could barely muster out a response.  

“My hands are a little cold, so...” you muttered out nervously, rubbing your palms together in an effort to warm them.  

Then, you set your hands against the mess of scar tissue surrounding his shoulder, starting at his shoulder blades as the glow illuminated bright enough to light up the corner of your lab. Bucky gasped, the first breath in a long time completely filling his lungs as he felt the relief within your touch. You could practically feel the tension melting off his shoulders.  

It didn’t take long before the pain made its way to your body. Starting out slow, in numbing aches, until it was so sharp, it felt like a dozen edges of sharp blades puncturing into your shoulder. You clenched your jaw, held your breath, thankful that Bucky couldn’t see your face when you bit down on the inside of your cheek and tears sprung into your eyes.  

“God, that... shit...” Bucky sighed, his grip releasing on the table. You could hear the smile in his voice, the relief, and it helped to push aside the pain as it manifested in your body.  

You moved your hand up his back, sliding along the scars where his skin met metal, taking as much of his pain as you could. Bucky was exceptionally strong, able to withstand far more than you could without passing out completely. You couldn’t take it all, especially if you wanted to keep him from knowing how your gift truly worked, but you took enough.  

You swallowed back the lump in your throat, preparing yourself as you moved around to face him. There was more on his chest, by his clavicle, you couldn’t reach from behind him. You'd had years of practice, learning how to keep the pain from displaying on your face. You could get through this for him.  

As you stepped in front of him, keeping a steady hold on his shoulder, you could feel his eyes watching you. The glow under your palms was bright enough to illuminate the lab, but it was a gentle light, as soft as the burn of a candle or the golden rays of a sunset. Bucky watched you with a kind of awe that made your stomach twist into knots.  

You guided your hand along the scar tissue on his chest, doing your best to ignore the goosebumps as they rose in your wake. Your heart was stammering, louder than the pain radiating in your shoulder, though it lessened the more you worked. The pain had nearly left him entirely as he started to take in more even breaths, relaxing his muscles as you felt them soften under your touch.  

You exhaled a tense breath through your nose, concentrating on gathering as much of the pain as you could, on mending the broken nerve endings as they misfired and frayed under the torn appendage. You barely noticed as Bucky crossed his right hand over his chest and laid his hand palm against your hands.  

“Thank you,” he whispered, his fingers curling around the undersides of your hands until he gently tugged them away. The glow faded until the lab was only lit by the soft light of the lamp at your desk and the reflection of the moon peering in through the window.  

You met his eye, the pain still prominent in your shoulder though you forcibly softened the clench in your jaw as he looked over you. His eyes flickered down to your lips for only a second, but it was enough. Your heart skipped.  

Bucky slowly released your hands, letting them fall gently against his thighs, as he leaned forward to cup the sides of your face. Fingers tangling into your hair, you stepped closer, pressed against the table between the parting of his legs.  

You wondered if he could feel how fast your heart was racing, or if he could hear it, because you were certain it was going to beat straight out of your chest. The fading pain in your shoulder you’d taken for him was nothing but a forgotten memory as he pressed his forehead to yours, just waiting.  

The moment his lips touched yours, you lost your breath; fireworks and butterflies, twists in your stomach and clamoring in your heart. You could feel his smile as it spread into his cheeks, your hands seeking more of him as you slid them up the sides of his bare chest. He was beautiful and perfect and so incredibly wonderful, you’d take hours of his pain, years even, if you could keep kissing him like this.  

“Hey, Y/n, I thought you were already done for the—oh, sorry!”

You jolted away from Bucky, restless and a little disheveled, Bucky’s cheeks flamed red, as you turned to find Banner standing awkwardly in the doorway. His hand was shielded over his eyes, his back quickly turned to you as papers littered the floor at his feet. You started to laugh, hand clamping over your swollen lips as you looked over at Bucky.  

“It’s no worry, Bruce,” you giggled, quickly skating over to the door to help him pick up the files. Bucky meanwhile shrugged his shirt back on, fixing the flyaways in his hair.  

“So sorry,” he mumbled again, clearly embarrassed by his intrusion as he glanced over at Bucky apologetically. He gathered the papers into his arms. “I’ll be going now and, um, I won’t come back, okay?”

You couldn’t help but laugh as Bucky’s eyes blew wide in Banner’s quick escape.  

“Still want that company?” you offered with a smile, extending your hand to him. The pain was long gone from your shoulder as he shook himself from the flush in his cheeks and nodded. He took your hand and led you down the hall to the living room. There was another movie on the list to get through.  

***

You couldn’t remember the last time you were this happy. Your cheeks began to hurt from how often you were smiling, as if it were a permanent fixture on your features. You’d even caught yourself humming along to the radio as you dusted the surfaces in your lab the morning after Bucky had kissed you goodbye on the landing dock in front of at least a dozen agents.  

He’d been away on a mission for the last few days, but he called when he could. You’d spend whatever spare minutes he could get on the satellite phone with him, distracting him from whatever was going on in his end of the world with talk about your latest project with Stark or old stories from the academy with Fitz or what the next movie on the list was going to be.  

He wasn’t a man of many words, but you liked knowing he was on the other end of the line. You could picture his smile perfectly in your mind, the way he chewed on his lower lip, how his eyes fell downcast to the floor by your shoes, the flush of pink in his cheeks. It was enough.  

“So, things are really heating up with you and Barnes,” Natasha commented as she sipped the top of her steaming coffee before it could spill over the edge. You shrugged, though it was hard to contain your smile. Natasha grinned. “I think it’s good for him. You, too. Don’t know the last time I’ve seen him this happy. He seems more relaxed. Like maybe he’s not carrying the whole world on his shoulders anymore.”

“Helps when he’s not in excruciating pain on a daily basis,” you added, tapping at your left shoulder. He’d let you work on it a few times since that first night. It always took some convincing, but the pain was never as bad as it was that evening. You could take it. You’d do it a thousand times for him without question.  

Natasha nodded, a pleased look upon her face. She parted her lips to say more, but a sudden commotion at the end of the hall stole the words from her tongue. You set your coffee down on the counter, peering out around the tables to find agents jumping out of the way of an oncoming train.  

“Y/n!” Bucky shouted, voice breaking in the effort as he sprinted down the hall and slammed into an unsuspecting agent. Papers flew into the air as he sprinted towards your room. “Y/n!”

“Bucky?” you called stepping out into the hallway where he could see you.  

He skidded to an abrupt stop, his hair flying over his shoulder as he turned in your direction.  

“Y/n! Thank God.”  

It wasn't until Bucky stood in front of you that you realized he was covered in blood; soaking into his hair, caked under his finger nails, drenched into his suit, and stained to his skin. Your eyes widened, breath all but leaving your lungs, as your hands clutched against his jacket. He tried to pull you back towards the stairs, but you couldn’t budge, not with that much blood all over him.  

“What-- What happened? Are you hurt?” You started seeking out exposed skin an effort to draw away any pain you could, even if you couldn’t see any exposed wounds.  

Bucky's hand slid over yours, pulling it away. He softened, though you could still see the frantic rise and fall of his chest.  

“It’s not my blood. It’s Steve’s.”

Your stomach sank; relief mixed into an ugly shade of guilt and grief. Natasha was already sprinting down to the med bay, coffee mug cracked and spilled upon the tile floors. Her footsteps echoed through the hallway, the sudden clanging of the double doors startling you from your daze.  

“Please, I—I need you,” Bucky begged, his voice shaking. Tears were burning in his eyes. You’d never seen him this afraid; this shaken and helpless. “It’s not good, Y/n. He’s-- He’s--”

“Okay.” You pressed a hand to his cheek, brushing your thumb sweetly across his face and smeared the tears as they cleaned the dried blood away. You didn’t need to hear anymore. All you wanted was to take his pain, even if your gift couldn’t touch it as it nestled deep into his heart.  

By the time you reached the med bay, a storm of chaos had already barreled through. Lab equipment was knocked over on its side. Dozens of agents frantically running around, shouting orders at one other. Papers and schematics lined the floor with imprinted of boots damaging the print. But it was the trail of blood that drew your attention.  

Droplets trailing from the loading bay of the jet to down the med wing to the surgical room. Dark red and oozing. Taunting. Far too much for any ordinary man to have lost. You tried to stifle the gasp as it hitched in your breath the moment you saw him.  

Steve was strung up on a gurney, suit cut down the middle and flayed open, exposing his chest and the three bullet holes expelling pints of blood. The hands of several agents were pressing down onto him, trying to keep pressure on the wounds, deep red slipping out from between their fingers. The look on their faces said enough – he wasn’t going to make it.  

“Where’s Helen?” you gaped, staring at Steve.  

“Ten minutes out.” Tony stumbled into the room as he rounded the corner, holding a stat phone in his hand. “She’s in the chopper.”

“He can’t wait ten minutes.” Bucky gripped tight to you hand and you could feel the tension radiating in his muscles. You wanted to take it for him but he pulled his hand before you could, turning to face you. “You’re all we have. Y/n, please. I can’t lose him.”

Bucky had never once asked you to heal someone like this. He could barely muster the will to ask you to heal his own wounds, to ease the constant stream of pain in his shoulder, and the open wounds on his hand. But with Steve’s life in the balance, he didn’t have room to be hesitant anymore. He couldn’t risk his best friend’s life.

But he didn’t know it would risk yours in the process.  

You swallowed, glancing back nervously at Steve. “I’ve never healed anything this bad before, Buck. I don’t know if I can--” survive this.  

Could your body heal fast enough to take on his injuries? Could you do them one by one? Would he live long enough to even try? Would either of you?  

“Y/n, please. He’ll die without you,” Bucky begged, his voice wavering. Tears reflected in his eyes; gentle pale blue obstructed by a swarm of fear and guilt and desperation, a redness straining into the surrounding white until his cheeks were wet. The dried blood cleared in streaks as they traveled down to his jawline.  

You watched him as he bit down onto his lip, shielding his face from the others as he waited. The frantic beeping of the monitor strapped to Steve’s chest was growing frantic, irregular, and you knew there wasn’t much time left.  

The worst you’d ever attempted to heal before had been the stabbing of a stranger. You’d found her clutching stomach in an abandoned alleyway in Queens, contents of her purse spilled to the pavement, jewelry torn from her neck. You'd knelt down beside her and took her pain without so much as a second thought.  

As her wound began to close, your skin split open, blood soaked into your shirt, your vision grew dark and hazy, until it was nothing at all.  

The last thing you remembered of that night was the horror in the woman’s eye as she scrambled away from you and ran back to the safety of the open streets. You woke in a pool of your own blood hours later – longer than it had ever taken to heal before.  

A scar remained on your stomach from that night. The only one on your body. A warning.  

Test the limits of your gift again and learn why it’s called a sacrifice.

But as you looked back at Bucky, at a man who never dared to ask you for anything until it was unbearable, who wore his own scars and healed his own injuries in fear of exploiting your gift, who was impossibly gentle for the evil he was surrounded in for decades – you couldn’t find it in yourself to say no. You didn’t want to.

Bucky must have noticed the change in your expression because his shoulders softened immediately, a heavy sigh sinking through his body. He pushed forward and pressed a quick kiss to your lips; short, chaste, and still—filled with a world of emotion, of gratitude, of relief. It gave you the courage to do what needed to be done.  

Tony began to shout for the room to clear the moment you approached the table. You stared down at Steve, whose skin had grown nearly translucent, the monitor above displaying his heart beat as it evened out to a nearly thin line. He was fading fast. You wouldn’t have much time.  

Everything around you became muted, distorted, as you channeled your focus; the huddled whispers of the agents hovering over Steve with their hands pressed to open wounds sounded as if they were miles away.  

Bucky stood at your side, watching anxiously though he tried his best to remain stoic and unaffected, though you knew he was splintering apart at the seams. Natasha and Sam were huddled in the far corner, talking quietly amongst themselves as they tried to put the pieces together as to what happened out in the field. Tony was shooing away stay agents with the threat of force, while Banner did his best to remotely disengage the power on Tony’s glove.  

None of it registered. Not beyond the flow of blood coating Steve’s chest and dripping onto the floor, your shoes stepping into the pool below. It was a miracle he was still alive at all. The serum was the only thing tying him to this Earth.  

You stretched out your hands, hovering over his chest and the agents quickly dispersed. You didn’t dare steal a glance in Bucky’s direction as the glow began to emit under your palms, afraid he might see the goodbye in your eyes or the apology for what he was about to witness. There wasn’t time.  

The pain was sudden. Sharp. Like you’d felt the bullets rip straight through you as if you stood on the battlefield in Steve’s place. You cried out at the impact of it, nearly thrown from your stance as you clutched into Steve’s body.  

Bucky jolted beside you, startled as you cried out again, desperate to choke down the screams before they passed your lips. He stared at you, wide eyed, as you clenched your jaw.  

“Y/n? Are you—”

Another scream tore through you and Bucky visibly flinched. You didn’t have the energy to hide the pain from him, not with three bullets tearing through you. You had to save Steve; put the full force of your power into healing his wounds before they consumed him whole. Damn the consequences. Damn the sacrifice of your gift.  

Your body was always meant to be the host of broken bones and bullet wounds and bruises. Made to be broken and mended. A host to others. A graveyard of injuries that did not belong to you.  

It was what your parents had told you from the time you were a child; that you were a gift to others, that you were a vessel to better the world. But it came at a price; one, it seemed, you’d soon enough pay.  

Your legs began to shake as a wave of darkness cast over your vision, tunneling, consuming the space around you. You could only vaguely make out Bucky’s voice calling your name, his tone laced confusion and concern, but you blocked it out. Daring to look in his direction now would only hinder your resolve and you needed to save Steve’s life.  

Concentrating your power, a scream ripped through your lungs as the glow illuminated the entire room, enough that Bucky was forced to shield his eyes.  

The wounds were taking hold on your body. One at your stomach. Another along your ribs. The third, just above your chest. Exit wounds opening on your back. You could feel the drip of blood as it slid down your skin; thick and unrelenting.  

You were growing light headed as the pain started to dissipate. But the wounds were still fresh on your body, still open and bleeding; the pain shouldn’t have faded so quickly.  

The steady beep of the monitor indicated that Steve was stabilizing, the flesh had nearly closed, and you barely registered Helen’s voice as she rushed into the room, ordering her team to take over.  

“Hey, hey, you did it, sweetheart. You did good,” Bucky exhaled. He had the most beautiful smile on his face; filled with a sense of pride an awe, stunning and handsome beyond belief, even with traces of concern still evident in his eyes.  

But you were stone. A statue. You couldn’t move without fear of collapsing completely.  

“He’s stable now, Y/n,” Bucky eased, trying to pull you gently away from the table. “Come here, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”

Bucky hand set against your stomach when you didn’t follow and he froze; the sticky wet residue of fresh blood on his hand. He stared down at his palm in horror as the blood began to seep through your shirt in three distinct spots, all perfectly aligning with the ones on Steve’s chest.  

Bucky darted forward, pushing up your shirt to find the wounds he’d seen healed on his best friend moments ago littered over your stomach. His mouth went dry, throat lined with sandpaper, rocks shoved down into his lungs. His hand trembled as it reached out and touched the bullet wound on your ribs. His breath hitched as he felt the warmth of blood and the tear of flesh in your skin.  

He couldn’t breathe.  

“Is Steve alive?” Your voice was barely a whisper and you wondered if Bucky could even hear you at all. His eyes were glossed over in fresh tears, lips parted in shock as he stared back at you. You could hardly keep your eyes open.

Before he could respond, your legs gave way and you stumbled back out of Bucky’s hold. Your vision was closing in, a dark cloud of black swarming around you as your foot caught on the edge of toppled lab equipment. You were in Bucky’s arms again before you made it to the floor.  

You didn’t hear him screaming for help, didn’t hear the shattering crack in his voice, or the crash of equipment behind you as Simmons raced into the room. You didn’t feel his hands as they desperately pressed onto the open wounds, or the heat of his breath as he begged you to ‘stay with me, sweetheart’. But you felt the warmth of his embrace.

It was comforting as the darkness pulled you under.  

***

A heaviness draped over you. Soothing. Pressing you into the soft cushion below. A repetitive chime rang above; even in tone, consistent. It drew you back from the kind embrace of shadows, calling you toward a flicker of light.  

Pressure squeezed at your hand. Cold and warm at once. Solid and soft.  

You listened for the chime; allowed it to guide you as the rest of your senses awakened.

The chatter of voices in the distant too muffled to distinguish. The distinct smell sterilizing alcohol that burned in your nose. The heat of a thick blanket tucked around your legs. The chill of a breeze streaming from the humming vent above. Scratchy bed sheets and laundry fresh clothes a few sizes too big for your frame.  

You groaned, trying to adjust to the influx of light as you opened your eyes. It was a room you recognized. White. Clean. Far too bright. You’d been within the walls dozens of times before, but never laid upon the bed. It was a strange view.  

Glancing down, you found yourself dressed in a dark grey t-shirt that didn’t belong to you. The logo was faded on the chest but it was still recognizable. Vintage. An eagle at the center of a circle, it’s wings remarkably similar to the symbol of the Howling Commandos. Around the edge: Strategic Scientific Reserve. You’d seen Bucky wear it until the hem frayed. Sure enough, as you reached for the bottom of the shirt, you found the split seams.  

A slight squeeze on your hand again drew your attention to your right. There, you found Bucky hunched over the side of the bed; both hands encasing yours, his forehead rested on the very edge of the mattress.  

A smile tugged at your lips until it started to ache. Unused muscles, must be. You wondered how long you’d been out this time. Must have been longer than a few hours. Bucky’s back would need your attention after the way he’s been sleeping.  

“Bucky,” you tried to call, but found your voice was nothing more than a breath of air. You winced, testing it again. “Bucky?”  

He only hummed in response. The sweet vibrations nestled against your arm. It took him a minute as he lifted his head, stretched out his upper back, matted hair fallen down into his face, before he caught your eye; glancing around the room, checking the door, the heart monitor above, like it had become routine, until he realized you were watching him.  

He froze, eyes wide. “Y/n?”

You nodded sleepily, pushing out a smile. “What’d I miss?”

Bucky didn’t laugh. His hands were still gripped tight to yours, squeezing at them as if he were checking to make sure you were real.  

Your smile began to fall the longer he stared at you. “How long was I out? Is Steve okay?”

Bucky cleared his throat, nodding, though it seemed strained. “Y-yeah, Steve’s fine. Doc said he’d make a full recovery thanks to you.”

“That’s good,” you replied, but Bucky couldn’t so much as force a smile. He couldn’t seem to look at you, his hands playing with the lines in your palms. It was then you started to notice the dark circles under his eyes, the wrinkles in days old clothing, the hallowed look upon his face. Your stomach sank. “How long was I out?”

Bucky’s paused for a moment, his movements stilling as he traced your lifeline. He sighed, resuming again. “Six days.”

“Oh.”

A silence swept over the room. You’d never been under that long before. Frankly, you were a little surprised you woke up at all given the extent of Steve’s injuries. Your fingers dipped under the hem of Bucky’s old t-shirt and grazed over the bullet wound on your ribs, feeling for the raised edges of a fresh scar. It didn’t heal, as you suspected the others hadn’t; laid to rest next to the knife wound from the woman in the alley. Injuries you were never meant to survive.  

“Were you ever going to tell us?”  

You looked up, startled by Bucky’s voice as it wavered. He brushed at his eyes; red and glossy.  

“Were you ever going to tell me?”  

“No,” you admitted and Bucky’s shoulders slumped. He sank back further into his chair and you could read the disappointment on his face. You gritted your teeth, preparing to deliver the same speech you’d been telling yourself for years. “My body could handle it, Buck. It was only a few minutes of pain to trade for weeks or months of your own. It kept you in the field and off the bench. The world needs you guys. It was worth it for me. I could handle it.”

“Until you couldn’t!” Bucky snapped, startling you as he tugged his hand from your grasp and began to pace around the room. His fingers raked into his hair, gripping at unwashed strands. “You almost died, Y/n! You almost died because I fucking begged you to use your powers to save Steve and I—Jesus, Y/n — if I had known what it does to you, I never would have asked you to do that!”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” you replied gently, wanting nothing more than to ease him. Bucky shook his head, unwilling to accept your answer. “Bucky, if you knew that healing a papercut hurt me, you wouldn’t let me do that either.”

He paused; arms folded over his chest though he wouldn’t look at you. “No, I wouldn’t.”

You softened, sitting up in the bed, though a dull pain rushed made it rather difficult, leaving you to clutch at your stomach. It ached as you moved, an unfamiliar feeling, and the tension quickly faded from Bucky’s shoulders when he heard you whine.

You pushed through the pain in your stomach, holding up a hand as Bucky started to step forward to help you. It would fade. It always does. You’d heal and move on, until the next injury came through. It was routine. It was your life.  

So, you told him as much.  

“I’d do it again.”

Bucky frowned. He looked like he wanted to just lay on the bed beside you, curl up against your chest and sleep. He was exhausted. And still—he couldn’t let it go.  

“You almost died—”

You shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

“A sacrifice?” Bucky’s face contorting in horror. “Are you insane? You're not a sacrifice, Y/n!”

You nodded, determined; the words of your parents, the village elders, ringing in your ears. “That what this gift is, Bucky! I can’t actually heal anyone other than myself, but I can transfer the injuries and the pain to my body. That I can heal. It’s what I was born for! It’s my purpose. I was made to be a sacrifice.”

“Not for me!” Bucky held his ground, voice firmer than you’d ever heard it. “Nothing is worth that to me! Do you understand that? I won’t trade your life for anyone’s, not even Steve’s, and I sure as hell don’t care how many bones I break or how bad the nerves in my shoulder misfire. I won’t put that on you again. The team won’t either.”

You clenched your jaw, heart starting race. No one had ever challenged you on this before. No one had ever questioned whether your gift should be used at all. No one ever seemed to care of the effect it had on your body, never thinking to look past the extraordinary abilities to the mutilation under the surface.  

No one until Bucky.  

You curled your hands into the thin sheets at your waist. “Bucky, don’t be ridiculous. I’m saving you all from weeks of unnecessary healing. I can handle the pain. It’s an easy trade for—”

Bucky’s fist met the wall. “You’re worth more than just a vessel for our pain, Y/n!”  

“What the hell is going on in here!?” Helen Cho rushed into the room, eyes darting between Bucky standing by the corner of the room, shaking out his hand, and you as you laid in the bed at the center, the heart monitor above pulsing far too quickly.  

Bucky seemed to notice the frantic beeping of the monitor and the anger quickly drained from his face.  

Helen glared at him as she stepped closer to you, beginning to check your vitals. “You should leave,” she shot over her shoulder. Your stomach twisted to knots as Bucky nodded defeatedly and walked to the door.  

“No, don’t--” you called, voice small, nervous. He paused in the frame, glancing back at you with a raised eyebrow. “Please, Bucky. Stay.”

Helen set a hand on your shoulder as if to ask if you were sure. You nodded.

“You may be able to heal yourself, but you’re still recovering,” Helen advised, tapping on the IV drip. “Take it easy, alright?”

Bucky remained stoic by the door after Helen left. He didn’t say anything for a while, his eyes focused on the tile floors at his feet, waiting until the heart monitor chimed in even, steady counts.  

“Will you sit down? You’re making me nervous,” you chuckled, trying to lighten the mood. It got him to look at you, at least. While he couldn’t muster a smile, it was clear he was drained of the anger that had quickly taken hold of his body; anger that was never once reserved for you, but for the voices in your head that deemed you unworthy of more than a body to be used by others.  

Bucky sank into the chair at your bedside.  

“When’s the last time you slept, Buck?”  

He stayed silent. It was enough of an answer. You didn’t dare ask the last time he left this room, not with the shiny reflection at his roots and the red strained in his eyes. Six days at your bedside, hunched over on a cold, unforgiving chair, clutching your hand. It ached deep into your bones.  

“I mean what I said,” Bucky mumbled, slowly brining himself to meet your eye. He reached out for your hand, letting the comforting chill of solid metal lay below as the warmth of flesh and muscle laid on top. He brought your fingertips to his lips and gently kissed at your knuckles.  

You sighed at the feeling. “Bucky, I...”

“You’re more important to us than your abilities,” he pressed, a sincerity behind his words and laced delicately into sweet shades of blue. “You do a lot of good to keep us safe with the tech you’ve been building and the adjustments to the suits. You’re incredible at what you do, Y/n. Your worth isn’t based on how many injuries you can heal or how much pain you can handle. We care about you. I care about you. Isn't that enough?”

You didn’t know.

You’d never known anyone to prioritize you over your gift. You parents had exploited it from the moment it was discovered your ability; showing you off, treating you as an idol to be worships and adorned. They put their child through broken bones and lacerations and asthma attacks. They sat back and watched as you healed strangers of arthritis and sprained ankles and migraines. Their child cried as they collected their winnings.  

Were you afraid it would happen again? Is that why you kept it from the team? From Bucky? You’d convinced yourself it was noble to silently suffer in their place, but you started to wonder if it amounted to little more than your parent's words whispered into your ear: your ability is a gift to the world, a sacrifice unto yourself.

“Would you ask any of us to suffer in your place?” Bucky questioned, drawing you from the mess inside your head with the gentle vibration in his voice.  

“I just want to help you...” you murmured, tears slipping past your cheeks.  

Bucky reached forward and brushed the tears as they fell, sliding his hand against your cheek and nestling against your hair. You leaned into the touch.

“So, we find a middle ground, okay?” Bucky offered, smiling enough to push into his cheeks, though his eyes were still heavy. “No trivial injuries. No life-threatening injuries. We take the stuff in-between case by case.”  

“Your shoulder,” you added, determined. Buck started to shake his head but you pressed harder. “Five minutes of pain to spare months of yours, Bucky. No lasting damage. Don’t argue with me on this one.”

It brought the smile back to Bucky’s eyes as he eventually nodded. You knew he had no real authority to decide what injuries you could and couldn’t heal, but you’d never had anyone who dared to put you first. You trusted him to do that; you trusted him more than yourself, anyway.

“We decide the rest together,” you told him. “I get the final say but... I need you to tell me if I’m pushing it too much, but I won’t be too cautious, either. No discriminating against Sam.”

“No promises,” Bucky chuckled, playing with the ends of your hair dreamily. “The other stuff I can deal with.”

“Okay,” you exhaled, relief sweeping through your body.  

“Okay.”

“Think I’ll be lucky if anyone on the team even lets me touch them for a few months after this ordeal, though, huh?” You laughed and though it ached in your stomach, it was considerably less than it was moments earlier. You didn’t mind the dull pain. It was familiar, almost a comfort. Steve was alive because of it.  

“Yeah, can’t say anyone was thrilled to find out how your powers actually worked,” Bucky chuckled. “But they’re happy you’re alright. I’m sure Steve will be, too. He was pissed when he woke up and learned what you did.”

You clenched your jaw. “Never good to be on Cap’s bad side...”

“No, it’s not,” Bucky agreed, wide smile pressed to the back of your hand, his lips touching over exposed skin. “He doesn’t like when anyone else pulls a self-sacrificial move. It’s kinda his thing. Diving into the Atlantic and all. We don’t really need two of you running around...”

“Alright, alright,” you laughed, swatting Bucky away. Your cheeks hurt from smiling, the pain in your stomach long forgotten, or maybe it had finally healed. You supposed it didn’t matter.  

They were scars that would never heal. Like the knife wound. Like mesh of hardened tissue around Bucky’s shoulder, stretching out onto his chest and back. Reminders of when you were too both close to the edge, to the brink of darkness. Reasons to push back towards the light.  

read the sequel here!

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[house-of-no-regrets]

No Regrets [in the wee hours]

Took a bit longer than expected, but I’ve finished the next little story! Hopefully I’ll be able to keep a decent pace on these. No overarching plot, just little stories in the same universe with the same characters. Warning for ~*murder*~ in this one!

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

I've been all-too-easy to wake up since I was a child; I'd often needed to go from dead asleep to functional, if groggy, as soon as I heard my father demanding action or attention. While I no longer need that reaction time, the old man long since locked up to rot, my brain is set in its ways and very convinced that I need to be able to bolt out of bed and fight God if a dust bunny moves too quickly in my vicinity.

Which is how I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, the sudden shift in the atmosphere bringing on consciousness with all the subtlety of a foghorn.

My room was silent, still, but I knew without opening my eyes that there was a spirit somewhere, and I didn't even give them a chance to speak before I pointed at the sign posted on my wall, barely shifting from my comfortable snuggle in my blanket and not even opening my eyes. Yes, this happens more often than I care to admit. No, I do not enjoy it. At all.

"Resurrection hours are noon to eight. I'm still alive and still need sleep to function."

There was silence, but the presence didn't leave, so I groaned and raised my head, finally opening my eyes to see the translucent, vaguely glowing, and unfortunately blurry spirit at the foot of my bed.

It did finally speak in a bewildered voice.

"Um, I'm being murdered."

Ah, fuck.

I grabbed my glasses from the bedside table and put them on. The spirit at the foot of my bed was tallish -- I've always been bad at estimating height, maybe half a foot shorter than Yvette? Five-nine... ish? -- and seemed to be in his twenties. There was a considerable dark stain on his chest and belly; likely blood, and the cause of his death. The newly-dead tend to show things like that, as they haven't had the time to get used to modifying their form.

I really hate it when brand new ones find me. I'm not sure how it started, but it seems like more and more often, now, the dead are drawn to No Regrets before they even realize they're dead, at least if they're the type to need my help. Wish I wasn't the one who had to break it to him. I'm not great with people.

"Sorry, bro, but I'm afraid they succeeded. Where was it? I'll get the police over there."

"Uhh... my house. I think. It's a little..."

I sighed. Right.

"You're probably a little out of it still... fresh dead usually are. C'mon, I'll take you around until things look familiar."

Climbing out of bed, I headed over to grab my hoodie from the back of the chair. I learned the hard way that sleeping is not a tits out sort of occasion when you're liable to get the dead dropping in at all hours of the night, so I sleep in pajama pants and a tank top. Little too chilly for tank tops outside, though. I shoved my phone in my hoodie and my feet into loafers, then started heading out of my room and down the hall.

"You remember your name?" I asked, trying to make conversation and learn what I could.

"Uh, Davis. Craig? Craig Davis."

"Well, Craig Davis, I'm sorry to hear about your passing. You're gonna need to possess me for this little adventure, by the way, but I'll walk you through it once we're outside."

"I- what?"

Considering how often I find myself lost in normal conversations, dealing with confused new spirits is especially difficult. Still shaking off my body's angry demands for More Sleep was not helping matters in the slightest, either.

"Possession. I'll explain it in just a minute." I rubbed an eye and yawned as I stopped in the foyer to pull a set of keys off one of the hooks on the wall.

Usually, I've got a driver. Not for vanity reasons, but after three or four near-misses caused by Sudden Spirits appearing in the car with me, I elected to hire someone to drive me into and around town as needed. But it was Fuck-This-Shit O'Clock in the morning, and Graves deserved their rest. The dead don't need to sleep, but they can if they so choose -- and it does, after all, conserve energy. The same goes for Yvette and Ashby; it was too early in the morning for most people to be out and searching for a necromancer to kill, so I wasn't gonna disturb them. I could handle a simple spirit chauffeur and 911 call on my own.

The keys were to the motor scooter; it was the better choice in this situation, allowing for more mobility and no passenger seat for any extra ghosts to drop into. That did, though, mean that Craig would need to ride shotgun in my body.

When I got out to the green scooter in the driveway, I paused and looked over at Craig.

"Hey, I know you're probably still a little out of it, so Possession 101." Script time. At least having this stuff memorized made it easier to do while dozy. "Our bodies need to take up the same space, so c'mere." I beckoned Craig over.

"So like… step into you?" He asked. Good, seemed like his head was clearing up some.

"Yeah, that's part 1."

He nodded and complied, crossing the space between us and settling in the same location, the two of us clipped into each other like bugged NPCs. It always felt so weird, those moments before a spirit actually possesses you. A sort of wobbly, in-and-out feeling like physics is trying to crush you and the spirit together, or, failing that, just kick your ass to the ground so you're not both in the same place at the same time.

"A'ight, now turn around and face the direction I’m facing, and overlay your hands onto mine as best you can." It was just a moment for him to obey, and I continued. "I'm not resisting, so you're gonna start feeling like you're being pulled in and pushed out at the same time. Space is trying to equalize. Let yourself be pulled in. It's gonna feel a bit like-"

The whirlpool effect kicked in before I could finish, the sudden snap and release of tension as Craig's spirit sank into my body. I wobbled a bit and grabbed the handlebar in front of me, then shivered at the sudden chill and dizziness. I'm pretty good at taking on passengers like this, but that didn't make it any more pleasant.

"You in there, buddy?" I asked out loud. Especially with new spirits, trying to think at each other was more trouble than it was worth. My lips moved to answer, though it wasn't my voice coming out.

"Uh- yeah. Yeah I'm here."

I grabbed the helmet hanging on the other handlebar and snapped it on, kicking the stand up and plopping heavily onto the seat.

"Great. Let's go."

"Wait, why am I not in control?" came Craig's confused voice. He felt almost frustrated, an undercurrent of emotion that wasn't mine despite being in my mind and body.

"Because this is my body, and I let you in willingly. Easier to keep control when you're letting someone in. Plus," I gave a little snort. "You just died, dude. I've been letting spirits possess me since middle school."

I felt his frustration turn to grumpiness, and then the pressure in my head, like a storm rolling in, that I knew from experience was him trying to take control. I froze and let out an irritated huff.

"You stop that. I'm not dealing with you doing some dumb shit with my body. Either chill out or get out."

"Oh- uh. Just wanted to see if I could…"

"Uh-huh. Anyhow, now that you're together enough to try joyriding, do you remember much about where you were before you were killed?"

I started up the scooter as emotions rolled through my mind, detached and distant, almost like the muffled dissociation I was used to mid-shutdown. Possessing spirits' emotions always felt weird like that, both mine and not mine, held at arm's length. Craig's was especially turbulent for a new death, but given that he had been murdered… I didn't fault him for being a little confused and angry. Even if it did put me a little on edge. 

"Uh- South Pine Street, Dogwood Acres housing development."

"Baller. That's not far from here. Once we get close to your body, you should be able to feel where it is, so I'll have a house number for the police. Don't want to have them scream in all blue lights and loud sirens and have your killer go to ground before they know which house, y'know?"

The muffled flare of anger that I felt was definitely not my own. I took a deep breath, hoped that the killer had panicked and tried to clean up instead of get rid of the body first, and puttered off towards Dogwood.

The housing development was quiet, lines upon lines of identical suburban boxes lit by flickering street lights that cast the sidewalks and yards in harsh white light. The occasional house had the glow of yellow within, but most of them were dormant. Weaving my way through the maze of streets, each one absolutely indistinguishable from the one before and the one to come, I felt terribly exposed -- and alone despite the spirit currently hitching along in my body.

I turned onto South Pine and brought my scooter to a puttering stop, stabilizing it with both feet on the ground. I couldn't help but bounce my legs to replace the vibration of driving; the sudden lack of sensation would ratchet my anxiety up even if I wasn't currently letting a frustrated dead man hang out in my head to catch his murderer.

...I should be more than a little anxious, really, but half-asleep Tabby once again wrote a check that more-awake Tabby is having to cash, and more-awake Tabby is very used to having to deal with the consequences of her idiot decisions. It occurred to me that normal peoples' consequences didn't usually involve murder, but when you live with the dead, you're bound to meet a few killers.

Two houses down, I could feel- not a tug so much as a presence, an echo of Craig's spirit reacting to his body. It was the only one on the street with its lights on and its garage, while not lit, was open. There was a car in the garage, another in the driveway, and a pickup at the curb in front.

"258?" I asked Craig, though I knew the answer already. His anger flared and I felt the oncoming storm again. I snapped at him. "That's two strikes, Craig. I'm sorry for your death, but if you end up driving my body into a crime scene or, god forbid, getting me killed next, I will kick your ass to whatever afterlife you're headed for and stay there to keep kicking it for eternity."

Big words for a short fat lady, but this is, in fact, my body on the line right now. I probably wouldn't be able to follow through on any ass-kicking, but dammit, I would try.

Craig was silent, and I could feel him steaming, petulant like a child denied a toy but with the power of a grown man behind it. With my stomach tying itself in knots and my hands starting to tremble, I dialed 911, hoping it would help quell the rising panic.

"258 South Pine Street. I think there's been a murder. I don't know the state of the crime scene or if the perp is still there, but you might be able to catch them if you hurry. The victim is Craig Davis, white adult male, either shot or stabbed in the chest, likely multiple times-"

"Wait, is this Tabby? The necro girl?"

Oh god I hope that isn't what the operators call me regularly-- I know I'm a bit of a 911 cryptid, since the usual intruder calls are to the non-emergency line, but if I get known as the necro girl I might have to move to a different state.

"Yeah, uh, necromancer, yeah-" I couldn't help but stumble over my words, now, with my train of thought derailed by the interruption. "-uh, murder?"

"Right! I'll send someone."

I murmured a thanks and hung up before she could ask me to stay on the line. I already had to stay around for the cops so Craig could give a statement, and making small talk with the 911 operator was not in the spoons tonight.

I don't like cops much, but in my line of work, they're kind of a necessity. I need to stay on the police force's good side because I need them to remove attempted murderers from my property on the regular. ...and also because graverobbing is still technically illegal, even if I do have the body owner's permission to dig them up.

At least most of the locals who know of me and my employees are chill about it. It took a bit of effort to get to that point, but now at least people don't run screaming from the less-presentable of my employees…

The blue lights of the police showed up fairly quickly, followed almost immediately by the red flashing of EMS. I puttered up slowly and parked my scooter just out of range as the officers set to work surrounding the house, then hung my helmet on a handlebar and walked up the rest of the way to watch the impending train wreck. I could feel Craig's anger boiling higher and tried my best to ignore it; Craig himself seemed to have fallen silent and sullen after I called him out.

"Tabby!"

I was standing just off to the side of the ambulance when someone stepped up behind me and called my name, making me jump and cringe.

"Oh- oh dear, I'm sorry, Tabs. I thought I heard you were the one who called this in!"

I straightened up immediately, face burning. I recognized that voice, bright and smooth and kind and--

"J-Jenna!" My voice was barely a squeak as I turned to face her, looking up at the round, dark face of one of the EMTs. She was a good six feet tall, maybe more, towering above me even in her uniform flats, with a brilliant smile and full lips and gorgeous natural hair pulled through the back of her uniform cap, the streetlight illuminating her from behind like a halogen angel.

Jenna had shown up to one of my early calls for assistance at No Regrets, and then she kept turning up, not every time I was in a situation where I'd be around EMTs, but often.

Concern showed on her face as she leaned to look me over.

"Are you okay? Did you see it happen, or-"

I shook my head, buying time to sort out words by tapping my temple with a finger.

"N-no, I uh- the victim woke me up, he's in here, uh, in case the cops need somethin' from him."

"Oh… are you getting enough sleep, dear? You sound exhausted. Do you want to sit in the back of the truck?"

It took me a second or two to recover from the way she called me dear, my face burning bright red. I couldn't make eye contact even for the second or two I can usually manage so that people don't immediately think I'm being dishonest.

"I- uh- um- w-well, it's, uh, it is like 4am--" I stammered, trying desperately to find words. "I-I guess 'm sleepin' okay, uh, how're… you doing??"

I have never been a great orator and the list of why that is gets a bit longer with every um and stutter.

Jenna's face bloomed into a gorgeous, open grin.

"I'm on 12-hour overnights right now, so I'm basically at least 60 percent Red Bull at any given time. Everyone okay up there at the House? Last I heard y'all were digging up half the lawn.”

I nodded, unable to keep from grinning. At least this was a subject I could talk to her about without making an absolute ass of myself--

"Yeah! The new girl, Chris, she's gotten Daryl and Roy to help her get the vegetable garden going! It's plenty big enough to take care of all of us, and I worked out a deal with the soup kitchen so that they get any of our excess, once things are running smoothly, and I can use their account to buy from that bulk food program that's usually only open to chari- oop-!" I bit my tongue and cringed. Right. I'm pretty sure that's technically fraud and I just admitted to it in front of-

There was a commotion from the house that snapped me back to attention, and the cops were leading a man out in handcuffs. He looked pale and shaken, spattered in blood, and not quite… present, like he had just checked out of reality for his own good. That… was a familiar look. I furrowed my brow. He certainly didn't look like a maniacal killer-

"He caught me with his wife," I said. Well. Craig said. I jumped. Jenna jumped. I flushed and covered my mouth reflexively.

"N-no that was him! The victim!" I squeaked. Jenna laughed, a hearty belly laugh, and covered her own mouth, though she was doing a terrible job of hiding her grin.

"I figured! If he caught you with his wife, it would be an upgrade!"

At this point, you could probably fry an egg on my face. Hell, my glasses were starting to fog up-- I stammered for a few moments, trying desperately to find something to say, and it was Craig who saved me, if you could call it that. I was too caught up in my embarrassment and awkwardness to realize how much anger and frustration he was radiating.

"Motherfucker told me he'd have my job! Son of a bitch thinks he can get away with doing this to me, he's gonna fucking pay--"

The oncoming storm crashed over me before I could get a grip on it, and all of a sudden I was lumbering forward, snarling words that weren't my own, and dragging a gardening pickaxe out of my truck -- Craig's truck -- on my way to the man and the cops--

I let out a shriek, in my own voice, feeling the sound cutting my throat raw. I wrested control of my body back with a lurch, falling on my ass in the yard with the force of it while the silvery-blue form of Craig was ejected from my body, screaming obscenities.

I threw my hand forward, fighting for whatever thoughts and words I could find to fix this. I saw Craig right himself and move back towards me, and the first incantation -- if you could call it that -- that my brain grasped left my lips in a single desperate breath, with a dizzying rush of power--

"INTHENAMEOFTHEMOONIBANISHYOU--!!"

The force of the hurried exorcism rushed outward like a sonic boom, strong enough for even the mundanes around me to feel, and Craig's spirit let out a yowl of rage for a brief second before twisting around itself and collapsing in with a sickening crunch, crushing smaller and smaller until it was gone.

I winced -- not my best exorcism. At all.

As the flare of adrenaline dropped almost immediately and I came back to myself properly, I realized -- blurrily, as my glasses had gotten thrown off somewhere -- at least two officers had their weapons half-drawn at me, though they were looking over at where Craig's spirit had disappeared.

I collapsed the rest of the way onto the grass, shaking, and covered my face with my hands, trying with everything within me not to start crying. I should have realized he'd try something like that, why hadn't I been paying attention- I could have been attacked, I could have been arrested, I could have had to watch myself beat a man to death and I- fuck--

The sob that came out was squeaky and pained, and I pressed my hands harder against my face, like that would stop anything else from going wrong. I should have brought someone-- I shouldn't have let him possess me-- I should have been paying more attention--

Warm tears ran from the corners of my eyes, down my cheeks, to pool in my ears, making my already-trembling body shiver harder with the unpleasant sensation. I'd let myself get complacent, hadn't lost control of a possession like that in years, and- I'd almost- fuck--

"Honey, honey, sit up for me. Tabby? C'mon, let's get you up--"

Numbly, I let Jenna help me into a sitting position, where she wrapped a blanket around me and pressed an open bottle of water into my hands.

"Take slow sips. Are you okay? Just shaken?"

I nodded, some part of me grateful that I couldn't quite see her face properly without my glasses, because I didn't want to see what she thought about me after that. She sighed, though, and sounded relieved when she murmured "Good."

My whole body felt like jelly, trembling so hard I could feel the water in the bottle sloshing around, and I kept flashing from too hot to too cold to too hot again, and I couldn't even sort out my thoughts--

Jenna sat down beside me and rubbed my back. If I wasn't having a complete breakdown, I might have enjoyed it.

I don't know how long it took for me to calm down and clear my head, but the car with the other man had left, and the other EMTs had loaded Craig's body into the ambulance while Jenna sat next to me and made sure I was doing okay.

After a while, though, I blinked and shifted my torso, then opened the blanket more and cursed at the bloom of red on my hoodie.

I heard Jenna curse as well as she stood up, but I grabbed her pants leg.

"N-no, 'm okay," I mumbled, and instead of trying to speak more, I reached to pull my hoodie and tank up my stomach to show bruised, but completely unbroken skin, covered in blood, rivulets following my stretch marks and making it look even worse despite my being otherwise completely uninjured. "See, 'm okay." This was not the first time I've had a possession lead to the dead's cause of death showing on my own body. It wasn't even the bloodiest.

Jenna sat back down, and I could see her leaning in a bit.

"Well damn. Magic ghost stuff, huh?"

I nodded.

"Magic ghost stuff."

I could see the flash of white against dark skin as she grinned.

"So that exorcism… Artemis or Usagi?"

It took me a moment to parse her.question, but all of a sudden I was completely back to myself, just in time to absolutely die of embarrassment.

"L-listen, I- y-you can exorcise i-in anyone's name, i-it's the power and conviction that counts--!!"

"Usagi, then." I could hear the laughter in her voice, laughter that bubbled out moments later. I wanted to crawl in a hole in embarrassment, but- it didn't feel like condescending laughter. I knew what that felt like. She seemed just genuinely amused. "I grew up with Sailor Moon, too."

I couldn't stop the squeak that eaked out, and I covered my face again.

"G-god I hope word about this doesn't get out, people already think I-I'm weird enough, and to- to fall back on anime for magic i-in a pinch is just--"

"Cute," Jenna finished.

I squeaked.

Jenna moved away for a moment, and then she settled my glasses on my nose. I couldn't make eye contact, but I did glance over at her and sheepishly murmur my thanks.

"The officers still want a statement from you, since you made the call and tried to go after the perp, but I don't think they're looking at any charges, given…" Jenna trailed off and looked over at where Craig had disappeared. "...yeah."

I nodded, slowly, and then found myself yawning, the adrenaline drop setting in especially hard.

"...d'you think it can wait 'til tomorrow… 've kinda had a rough night."

"I think they'll be okay with that."

[ineloqueent]

christmas eve of disaster

Brian May x Reader

synopsis: when Brian’s cousin announces her imminent arrival in town, the night before christmas, Brian sets out to find his niece a present for the occasion, and enlists his best friend to help.

warnings: swearing

word count: 1.4k

see the moodboard here!

⭒

in a parallel dimension, 2019

Brian had called you, sounding completely out of sorts, an incessant anxiety to his tone which announced his desperation for your aid, even before his words did.

“Please, you’ve got to help me,” he said, and you bit back a laugh, because you would never have refused a friend in need, despite how convinced Brian was that you were going to say no to helping him. “Spending Christmas in my dingy flat is going to be horrid enough as it is. I won’t be responsible for ruining the poor girl’s Christmas as well—”

“Brian—”

“—and her mother’s got nothing, with that stingy, slimy bastard husband of hers gone off to god knows where—”

“Brian—”

“—and I simply won’t— no, god dammit, I refuse to be the reason that— fuck’s sake— this is an absolute disaster—”

“Brian, will you shut up?!” you cried, and the other end of the line went silent, aside from a muffled apology. “Of course I’ll come with you to Hamleys, just let me get my blooming coat and shoes on.” You sighed, not with exasperation, but with the effort that it took to stand up from the sofa, when you’d spent the majority of the day curled up very comfortably in its depths. You held the phone between your ear and shoulder as you tugged on your shoes, hopping from foot to foot after nearly losing your balance. “When can you be here?”

The doorbell rang, and you frowned.

“Now,” said Brian over the phone, and you grinned involuntarily, at once hurrying down the stairs and throwing open the door.

Brian stood there with his phone to his ear, and he smiled in greeting as he ended the call and put his mobile away.

Tall and seemingly imposing, though not at all once you got to know him, your best friend had always been a sort of anchor to you. Slim and angular too, one would not have thought him an adept hugger, but that he was.

When you threw your arms around him now, Brian laughed and embraced you with equal enthusiasm, the weight of his arms around your waist and his unusually long, curly hair against your face familiar sensations, ones of comfort and homeliness.

“Have you missed me that much?” he asked, laughingly. “I saw you yesterday, you know.”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen you today,” you sighed into his shoulder, and he patted your hair with a chuckle.

“Thought you said we spend too much time together,” he mused, and you rolled your eyes as you released him.

“Not true. I said that some people might think we spend too much time together, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

“Oh, you’re a sap,” he said, but his tone was as fond as you were of him.

You stuck out your tongue at him, and when he reciprocated, you grabbed your coat from its hook by the door and slipped it on before looping your arm through his.

“C’mon,” you said, shutting the door behind you, “let’s go to Hamleys.”

⭒

Hamleys was packed to the rafters, and you couldn’t have chosen a worse day to go shopping in central London than Christmas Eve.

You and Brian were currently standing in the doorway to the place, feeling rather overwhelmed. Brian looked a little pale, in all honesty.

“So,” he said, “where in the world do we start?”

“Good question.”

It was a good question.

There were screaming babies and mothers fighting over the last sets of Star Wars Lego, bored looking fathers, and other young people your age, who looked as panicked and confused as yourself and Brian.

This was bound to be a disaster.

But luckily, if Hamleys had anything, it was signs, and rather well-placed, informative signs, at that. It would make your quest for a Christmas gift for Brian’s niece quite a bit easier.

You turned to Brian. “How old is she, again?”

He narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Four, I think.”

“So…” You tapped your finger against your lip, as Brian stood and stared rather helplessly into the abyss of Christmas shoppers. “What about watercolours? Versatile, neutral, but also promoting creativity..?”

“Perfect. Let’s go and then let’s get out of here.”

You nodded in agreement, and the two of you made for the staircase which led to Hamleys’ arts and crafts department.

The arts and crafts department was a significantly more calm atmosphere than the Lego department, and you breathed a sigh of relief upon reaching the top of the stairs.

“Got stamina yet?” Brian asked, and you raised your eyebrows. He explained, “I was hoping we could go for dinner afterwards.”

“Alright then,” you agreed, with a wink. “It’s a date.”

Brian flushed. “No! No, I didn’t mean it like that—”

“Oh, relax, Brian. I was just teasing you.”

He blushed further, and for the life of you, you couldn’t understand why. This was how it’d always been, the two of you batting flirtatious or spiteful remarks at each other, those the nature of both was always feigned. You and Brian had been friends for as long as you could remember, and nothing would change that.

“Right,” he said, quietly. You opened your mouth to ask him whatever the matter was, but he had already turned on his heel and gone down one of the many art department aisles.

Thinking this would be over faster if the two of you split up, you meandered down the neighbouring aisle, muttering to yourself as you sought the already-elusive watercolours.

“No luck?” you queried when you encountered Brian turning the corner, and he shook his head, his curls falling about his face prettily.

“None at all.” He sighed. “This is a disaster.”

You folded your arms as you glanced around, your jaw set in determination.Why should it be so hard to find the most timeless present for a child? And in a toy shop, for fuck’s sake.

Just then, an idea popped into your head. “If I’m not mistaken,” you said, “Hamleys has an online directory.”

“Oh brilliant,” Brian muttered. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because I’m the clever one,” you deadpanned, and your best friend, the astrophysicist, barked a laugh.

“‘Course you are.”

Pulling your phone out, you realised with dismay that it was dead, and you stuck your hand out with beckoning fingers. “Mine’s dead,” you told Brian.

“Ah.” He handed you his own, and wandered back down the aisle, still in search of a sign that would lead to the watercolours.

“Passcode?!” you called, before he could get too far away.

“You should know that!” he returned, and disappeared around the corner again.

“I should know that?” you asked yourself, tapping your index finger against the side of his phone. Nothing popped into your head, so you shrugged and decided it would serve him right to get locked out of his phone for being so confident in your recollection abilities.

But you lost your train of thought when the screen of Brian’s phone lit up, because smiling back at you, was you.

Well, you weren’t exactly looking straight at the camera, and you didn't remember when or why you’d been laughing, and much less that a picture had been taken, but there you were— laughing as you turned to face the photographer, who, undoubtedly was Brian, your eyes bright and your complexion rosy, the sunlight catching on your hair.

Your heart stuttered in your chest.

“Brian,” you called, beginning to walk in the direction he’d gone. “Brian!” you walked faster, propelled by an urgency you didn’t know the source of. “Brian—”

You had turned a corner, and found him. He was facing away from you, staring straight ahead, as though frozen.

Biting your lip, you walked forward slowly, and reached out your hand to touch his shoulder.

“Bri,” you said softly.

He turned, one hand fisted at his side, his lower lip between his teeth and his eyes narrowed to an apprehensive squint.

“I’m—” you started. “I’m your lock screen?”

Brian pressed his lips together. “You, uh,” he cleared his throat, “you weren’t supposed to see that.”

He glanced down, and his hand rose to muss his curls. You took a tentative step closer.

“Bri.”

That always got him. He looked up.

“Go out with me?” you asked softly, your voice small. “Actually go out with me? On a date?”

A slow smile crept across his lips. “Yeah,” he said in a rush of breath. “I’d like that.”

Butterflies fluttered in your stomach, and your smile mirrored his.

Maybe this day wasn’t so much of a disaster after all.

[artyblogs]

What are your Ahsoka headcanons? Also do you have any Togruta headcanons? We don’t really know a bunch about their species so it’ll be cool to see your view on them.

I meant to answer this a long time ago. I’m so sorry Anon. Hopefully, it’s worth the wait.

For those on desktop, there’s more under the cut. For those on mobile, my condolences.

So according to some sources that I don’t care to look up right now, Togruta language sounds like bird noises, or they just really like birds, and this detail alone is what I base all of my Togruta headcanons around. Shili is full of all kinds of birds of paradise, of all sizes, in all habitats, and all of them are revered by Togruta. All Togruta languages sounds like bird sounds, but different dialects sound like different bird calls entirely. Because Togruta kits are functionally deaf, there is a sign-language mode that incorporates both lek movements and hand movements.

Related to this: Walking through Shili cities, or through Togruta ethnic enclaves, is to be subjected through a glorious raucous of birdcalls.

Those who traditionally studied birds, who knew how to trap and release them humanely, who protected bird habitats and knew how to harvest feathers sustainably, who know how to sing traditional Togruta epics, are called Birdsong Priests and Priestesses, and are religious leaders in Togruta culture. Modern Ornithology is taught in universities, but the field is split between scientists, and the clergy class.

Birds are considered sacred because they can fly back and forth between the land and the sky. Thus, their feathers are considered sacred too. Featherwork features prominently in Togruta cultural artifacts, and can be found in regalia worn by traditional dancers, to feather standards and religious paraphernalia used in ceremonies, to headdresses and articles of clothing worn by all members of society. Sky blue feathers are reserved for the royal family only (anyone else caught using them face...consequences), and darker blue feathers for the nobility and aristocracy, but all other colors can be used by everyone else.

Speaking of traditional dancers, lots of Togruta traditional and cultural dances resemble the dances done by the birds of paradise. Because Togruta montrals are sensitive to gongs and sounds from metal instruments, traditional instruments are made of wood. There are lots of wooden drums and flutes. Dances are performed for all sorts of reasons, and religious dances are performed by the Birdsong clergy or are performed under their direction because they accompany a birdsong chant.

In addition to feathers, traditional clothes are woven through specially processed red and white ti grasses found all over Shili. These natural fibers paired with the pigments found in the soil of Shili make for especially pretty cloths stamped with geometric patterns. These patterns are inspired by the shapes of nature, like mountains, rivers, akul teeth, lek and montral patterns, etc.

(You probably suspect by now that a lot of my headcanons for Togruta culture is inspired by cultures found throughout Polynesia. This assumption is correct.)

Traditional Togruta weapons are made of akul teeth bound to carved pieces of native wood. Togruta martial arts are especially mean and vicious, and are not for the faint of heart.

Now for Togruta biology. Besides the birds, almost everything else on Shili has evolved to be the most dangerous creatures possible, and Togruta are no exception. Togruta bones, nails, and teeth are denser than most species’, their frames are packed with muscle, and runty adults still hit 6′0″ not including their montrals (I headcanon Ahsoka to be about 6′0″ without montrals). They have a special coating of cells at the back of their eyes that reflects light and allows them to see in very low light. Togruta are obligate carnivores, so they eat a lot of meat.

There’s seafood, pork, bantha, poultry, etc (obviously, they don’t eat birds of paradise lol). Togruta eat meat raw (their systems can handle it) and they also barbecue. Togruta barbecue is incredibly popular and tasty, and there are chains all over the galaxy.

Akuls are more reclusive than popularly believed; they tend to avoid civilization as much as possible. The akuls that do get hunted are old/sick/injured/desperate akuls that cannot hunt for themselves anymore, so they start killing people. When problem akuls pop up, locals of proper age just gear up and go out to get rid of it, and they happen to bring the kits that are old enough to learn how to defend the village/town/neighborhood. When the akul’s brought down, these kits get teeth for their headdresses. Akul hunts aren’t a solo thing as depicted in popular culture (holonet shows and holomovies).

Royalty and aristocracy Togruta usually reach 7′0″ and over. I personally headcannon Shaak Ti as 7′2″ (at least. She is TALL). She insists that she isn’t a chief, but whenever she visits Shili and Kiros, she’s called “Chief Ti” anyway. The King of Shili sent her a feather standard with dark blue feathers that she loans to a Coruscanti museum, where it’s on display.

Some history: The first king of Shili started as chief from one of the more powerful tribes. He envisioned a united and strong Shili to better politically maneuver through the oncoming Galactic Republic, so with the blessing of his birdsong priests, he waged war across the planet and won his crown (you know, as most incoming dynasties do). The current King of Shili is his great-great grandson, and he’s actually the most progressive king that Shili has ever had (not progressive as in like... pacifist though. He’s not a toothless fool lol).

This leads me to politics: Governor Roshti of Kiros was considered an odd one by Shili standards. While most Shili Togruta subscribe to "sheathed knife” politics, Roshti announced that the people of Kiros will employ “open hand” philosophy. After the whole Kiros colony was kidnapped by Zygerrian slavers, and was brought back only with the help of the Jedi, Roshti was quietly replaced with another governor with more “teeth.”

After the whole Kadavo debacle, the King of Shili awarded Ahsoka Tano with an honorary knighthood and Shili citizenship. This move is...controversial, because Kiros is trying to gain independence from Shili. For Shili to reward Ahsoka’s actions on behalf of Kiros, that has implications. And for Ahsoka to accept/reject this knighthood also has implications. I would like to read/write a fic that explores this (Shaak Ti comes along to serve as an advisor because she’s had more experience navigating these political waters and maybe other Jedi come too and it becomes a Three Musketeers AU? I don’t know, don’t look at me like that).

That’s all that comes to mind for now. If anyone wants to use these ideas in artwork or in fics, they’re very welcome to. Just let me know so that I can check it out too!

[wornoutmouse]

Illumi x Poc Reader

I wrote this cause I don't see any Poc readers with hxh like I do mha😫 Also not sure if I'll make this into a story what do you think?

You weren't the strongest nen user in the world, hell you weren't even in the top 50. So if someone were to ask you why you were currently having dinner with the most feared family in Padokea you would have no choice but to just shrug your shoulders. You glanced around quietly eating your meal as your posture became stiff as a board the longer the silence became. You were not naive to the fact that there were many eyes on you both literally and figuratively.

Sitting across from you was a rather large man with long white hair calmly eating his food. He was almost a mirror image of the older man to his left. Although shorter in stature you could practically taste the power radiating from him.

'This must be Illumi's grandfather' you thought

Next to the old man was a large boy with shiny black hair similar to Illumi's noisily chewing while focusing with a mobile game in his right hand. Someone you deducted to be his sister sat next to him in a black and pink kimono quite similar to the one your were forced to wear before arriving, she ate her food quietly. Finally turning towards the lady of the house who's hard gaze you could feel on your face ever since you arrived.

Clearing your throat you opted for small talk trying to lessen the tension. "Who made dinner, it's delicious." The woman clapped her hands together in a gleeful manor, "Do you really think so? The new butler prepared it but I found it a bit dry so they were promptly fired!" She replied voice getting hard at the word fired. It was not hard to understand that fired was Zoldyck for killed. You stared down incredulously at the rice and beef on the table that was practically oozing in tenderness and moisture. "Oh really?" You respond lightly trying to keep a blank face as the woman snapped her silver spoon in half bellowing a obnoxious, 'Oh dear!'

You swallowed shallowly as you watched a servant immediately present her a new fork. You came to a decided conclusion that this woman was off her rocker. You opened your mouth to speak again before a quick sharp pain spread up your leg piercing through all the layers of your kimono. Tensed you pluck some beef into your mouth at the same time you plucked the object out of your flesh. Based on the thin length leading to a round end you shuddered glacing at Illumi who was now missing one of his needless from his vest. This was obviously a warning to stay quiet.

After the meal Illumi ushered you down the hall and up many stairs before shoving you into a dark room causing you to trip and almost fall. You huff angrily turning to your captor, "What is this about Illumi?" You ask flicking his needle towards his face marveling at how easily he caught it gently between his long slender fingers returning it to his place above his heart. "It was only to get you to stop speaking. It wouldn't have been long before my mother threw a fit and that would be rather annoying." He replied nonchalantly his dark eyes staring into yours before promptly turning and walking towards a linen closet.

You combed your hand through your disheveled afro that you were unable to fix after Illumi had made you open his heavy ass 'front door' you personally called bullshit on that one. But had no choice since you were immediately threatened if you refused.

"If you are unable to open at least one of the doors then you are not worth my time and will be disposed of."

Plopping down on the plush bed you gasp as you sank down a few inches grasping at the silk sheets. "What could I have possibly done to upset your mama? I opened 2 of your stupid doors and I put on this kimono just like you asked!" You asked exasperated as you tugged on the kimono that had clung to your round figure no matter how much you loosened the sash. Illumi closed the closet turning with two stacks of purple linen in his hands perfectly folded. "That is true. Infact she was estatic at your efforts at first. But that all changed of course when I told her that I was open to marrying you."

Your heart sunk into your stomach like your body in the bed at those words. You shuttered at the thought of marrying this deranged man and bearing his fish eyed offspring. His monotone voice and blank face only fueled your reasoning as he spoke about marriage as though he was shopping for bread. "What the hell do you mean marriage!?" The only reaction you received was a show blink, "You managed to intrigue me, anyone capable of that needs to be monitored closely and what better way to do that than marriage?" You roll your eyes and gestured universally, "How about, I don't know, literally ANYTHING! Be roommates you know, like normal people!" Illumi looked almost as though he was pondering on the idea before shaking his head

"No, besides it's about time I've settled down don't you think." You dead panned absolutely positive that your ideas of settling down where vastly different. "I'm sure your mother does not approve of you marrying someone you just met." Illumi's mouth twitched up hinting at a smirk, "No, things like that are common around here, her problem is about how weak you are." He paused for a moment waking towards making you mean away as he sets his long arms on either side of you, caging you between the bed and himself examining your features before continuing, "And she's not too keen on mixing different backgrounds into our pure Japanese heritage." Your blink slowly trying to calm your heart beat at the proximity before scoffing looking towards the window to your left so you wouldn't cry in fear, "Offend me why don't you?"

He leaned away plopping one of the purple stacks into your lap, "Let's go shower." He says heading to the bathroom stopping when he realized you weren't following. "Well, come along." You looked at him like he'd lost his damn mind, which he had apparently. "You got me messed up if you think I'm getting in the shower with you Playboy continue your journey and leave me alone." You say rolling into your side facing away from him in order for you not to go back on your choice in fear only to relax at the sound of the bathroom door opening and closing.

FLASHBACK

You gasped in exhaustion as you ran as far as your legs would take you. Flying through the dense forest trying to keep a close ear on the sounds of twigs snapping at your right. 'I'm totally fucked' you thought as the sound easily caught up to you.

You didn't understand how you got into this situation. You were simply visiting your uncle at his new estate. You knew he got his wealth in greasy ways but not enough to put a hit on himself.

You propel yourself off of a branch trying to get higher into the trees. You wondered if your uncle was still alive. He was a more advanced nen user so if he doesn't survive you surely won't. You pushed yourself harder through the trees thinking back to seconds before the ambush.

Your uncle was giving you a saphire necklace that he had aquired through questionable means. The only thing that gave away something was wrong was the fact that the estate was completely silent with no sound of his rowdy partners celebrating through booze and marijuana. At that realization, he ushered you though the bedroom window just as his room door slammed open. All you saw before you jumped was long ebony hair and dull black eyes. You landed on the ground in a awkward way, spraining your ankle but wasted no time pushing through the pain; breifly recalling what your mother said when she sent you here.

"You just learned nen basics so you're not adept to protecting yourself. Your uncle Ricky messes around with dirty folk so if he tells you to run then run baby and don't look back."

So here you were, flying through the air just 2 months after your first nen training, putting everything you knew to the test. After long last, you burst through the trees finally able to see your surroundings illuminated with the moonlight.

You began bounding across the tops before something sharp stabbed through your sprained tendon, causing you to fall far and hard back into the forest.

You groaned, sitting up and blinking rapidly, you try to adjust your eyes to the change in scenery. Standing up shakily, you take a step forward before you feel a large weight land on your back, pushing you face down into dirt and dried leaves.

"There is no use resisting child. Stay still and I will consider making your death quick~" Came a silky voice above you. "Such wasted potential~" Before you could respond, everything went black signalling that your clone had met it's demise. You blinked yourself bringing your consiousness back into your real body. "Wow that nen trick really did work, maybe that old lady wasn't crazy." You mutter wincing at the ghost of pain you felt drumming through your ankle. Once you casted your nen on a pile of twigs, you quickly ran in the opposite direction. Only watching from it's own eyes so the movements would seem fluid.

"I should hurry it won't be long till they realise they were tricked."

You quickly ran into a small tourist town and headed to the nearest bar so you could ease your pain. Sliding onto the stool you wave over the bar keep. "A shot of vodka for the road!" You call out, already grimacing at the taste you'd have to force yourself through. The bartender looked at you and smirked before sliding you a root beer float.

You stared at the ice cream floating in your glass before looking at him like he was crazy. "Sorry sweety but your babysitter said to give you something light."

He gestures behind you, and you turn to look choking sightly as breath catches in your throat.

Right behind you were familiar dull black eyes pearing down at you. This man was tall, at least 6 feet plus with pale white skin, and long hair. He was dressed like a Christmas tree with gold bulbs adorning his green top. "Can I help you?" You ask trying to feign innocence. The man stiffly sat down in the stool next to you ignoring you for the time being. "Barkeep please give me what you gave her." He said point to your float. Once he received his, he looked at it for a while as the ice cream sunk into the root beer. The silence was terrifying but you found yourself getting lost in his sharp features and his calculating hands as they wrapped around the tall glass.

"How did you do your little trick?" He asked pulling you out of your trance. You blink slowly, "What trick?" You ask tensing as his head turns towards you looking into your eyes almost daring you to lie

"I told my colleague to rid the area of any strays in the area. He informed me that he was persueing the 'cute Cocoa girl with the curly hair." He faced his drink swiping the dripping cream and slowly licking it off his finger never breaking eye contact. "So you can imagine my surprise when I find my self persueing the same girl. So I want to know how you did it."

You fold your arms and began drinking your float indignant to the situation. "Sorry, family secret, I can't tell you." You suddenly feel something thin yet sharp pressing into yout neck as a sultry voice chuckled from behind you. "How sneaky of you my dear, tricking me into following a ploy."

The ebony haired man watched your face looking for a reaction and you looked back the best you could without provoking your neck being slit. With a sigh the man drunk some of his float licking the ice cream from his lips, "Stand down Hisoka, we don't want a repeat of last time." And you could only imagine what that meant. There was a chuckle, "Oh Illumi my dear your no fun~" the mystery person replied. But the force was removed from your neck.

[jokertrap-ran]

(未定事件簿) 莫弈 SR [松雪童话] [Tears of Themis] Mo Yi SR [Snowy Pine Fairytales] Card Story Translations (Part 1)

*Tears of Themis Masterlist / Mo Yi’s Masterlist / Mobile Masterlist *Spoiler free: Translations will remain under cut *Check out Chapter 1 of Mo Yi’s Private Story here!

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / SMS 

Location: Country Villa

MC: It nothing but snow as far as the eye could see the entire way here. This place’s snow really does make it live up to its name. It looks very simple and minimalistic, but it really brings out the vibe of the place.

MC: And this villa’s been completely furnished with wooden furniture.

Mo Yi and I were currently stood inside a magnificent villa. I surveyed the furnishings around us, unconsciously breathing out a sigh of appreciation.

MC: This is all thanks to you, Dr. Mo! And of course, your generous friend who was willing to lend us his villa!

Mo Yi: It’s great that you like it. I’ll pass your gratitude on to him.

MC: Yeah! It’s brilliant that we can spend Christmas here!

Mo Yi: Let’s go look around later and pick up a suitable Christmas tree along the way.

MC: Sure, sure! I can’t wait!!

The place we are in right now isn’t Stellis City, but the outskirts of another City, located a couple hundred kilometers away from it.

Mo Yi was here to attend a seminar on Child Psychology, and had invited me to come along with him.

And as to the reason why, well, we’ll have to go back to a month prior.

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MC: Looks like the snow has already stopped, Dr. Mo.

Mo Yi: You don’t sound very happy about that. Do you find it sad that it has?

MC: Quite. Stellis City doesn’t see much snow and we’ve only gotten some light snowfall this time too.

MC: I want to see a heavier snowfall. Better yet, one so heavy that I can build a snowman.

Mo Yi: Judging from this year’s weather forecast, it’ll be quite hard to make snowmen in Stellis City.

Mo Yi: But perhaps it may be possible somewhere else.

MC: Where?

Mo Yi: I will be out of town next month for a seminar. That place has snow all-year-round regardless of winter hits; I’m sure it’ll be to your liking.

Mo Yi: The date where the seminar’s taking place happens to be close to Christmas, so you can spend it over there. Just treat it as a short vacation.

Mo Yi: How about it? Interested to check it out?

MC: A white Christmas sounds pretty nice!

MC: Let’s go check it out together, Dr. Mo!

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And that was how I came here together with him.

After the seminar, he had enlisted the help of his friend, who had managed to provide us with an unused villa where we could spend Christmas at.

After putting my luggage aside, I hurried out the door to see the snow.

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Location: Country Woods

MC: So, there's actually this big of a pine forest near the villa!

Mo Yi: From what I know of it, there are many different species of pine growing here, and it's very famous for how scenic the snow-capped pine trees are.

Mo Yi pointed to one of the big trees to the side. I looked all around, only to see trees with ramrod straight trunks and layered canopy of leaves, stacking atop one another like layers of a pyramid.

Pure white snow was dusted in between the green of the leaves, making it an absolutely beautiful sight to behold.

Mo Yi: Of course, the same species of pine that's often used as Christmas trees are also among these trees here.

I raised my eyes. The spectacular sea of trees before me was all I could see. The many different varieties of pine were all shaped differently, each standing tall and unique, making them an absolutely breath-taking sight to behold.

However, As someone who doesn't research much into Christmas trees, I didn't actually know where I should even start looking…

MC: Dr. Mo? Um, are there any conditions when it comes to choosing a Christmas tree? Like, how big or small it should be? It's color? Or maybe something related to its shape and the like?

MC: All these trees look almost the same in my eyes...

Mo Yi: There aren't any particular conditions to speak of, but generally speaking, the larger the base of the tree and the lusher its leaves, the better it'll look once it's decorated.

Mo Yi: But this is merely a suggestion. It’s a Christmas tree especially for you after all, so you can just choose whichever one that catches your fancy.

Heeding his words, I walked into the Forest, closely surveying the trees it had to offer.

MC: Hmm, this one’s way too big and this one’s still not green enough...

MC: Ah, ahh―! What is that!?

Suddenly, something flashed before my eyes; it kind of looked like a shadow,  zipping through the line of trees.

The next moment, I felt a weight land atop my head.

???: Squeak, squeaaak―—

Mo Yi: ……

I tried reaching up to touch whatever it was, only for my hand to brush against something small, furry and so very warm...

Mo Yi: There’s no need to be afraid. It’s just a squirrel.

MC: A… A squirrel?

As if answering Mo Yi, the squirrel jumped a couple of times on my head, as if trying to prove its presence there.

Mo Yi: Don't move; I'll get it down for you.

Mo Yi: Come, slowly. Come here.

Those words of his weren’t directed at me, but to the squirrel on my head.

There seemed to be some sort of magical property to his voice, for I felt the weight lift off my head, as if something had just jumped down from it right after.

He carefully ran his hands through my hair. It was only after he had ascertained that I was unharmed, that his countenance returned back to his usual self.

Mo Yi: Great, looks like you’re not injured either.

I heaved a sigh of relief before I finally had the mind to look at the little "culprit". Turns out, it really was a squirrel; a tan-colored one.

It was currently perched atop Mo Yi's palm, it's sparkling black eyes glancing left and right, sizing us, strangers, up.

MC: It’s really a squirrel… It really scared me when it leapt out like that earlier.

MC: But it's actually pretty cute, now that I’ve gotten a closer look at it.

Mo Yi: Look, it's wearing a ribbon on its neck. Seems like it’s a pet.

Mo Yi: Maybe it ran off?

MC: You're right… The owner of this squirrel must be quite worried upon finding it gone. Dr. Mo, let's bring it with us and search for its owner as soon as possible.

Mo Yi: Yes, it hasn't gotten much snow onto it's pelt, so it probably hasn't been long since it ran out on its owner. The owner might be nearby, for all we know.

Thus, we proceeded to try finding its owner nearby. However, we didn't manage more than a couple of steps before a voice yelled at us to halt.

???: Stop right there, both of you! Return Demon King back to me.

I curiously turned my head to see a little boy around the age of 10 vehemently glaring at us.

His round face was flushed from the cold, and even though he still possessed the innocence of childhood, it was tinged with the indifference and annoyance he expressed.

Little Boy: Hey, did you not hear me? Hurry and return Demon King to me.

MC: D-Demon King?

Mo Yi: Is Demon King it’s name, little buddy?

Mo Yi smiled, pointing towards the squirrel on his shoulder.

MC: (It's obviously a squirrel, yet it's called "Demon King"; is this what they call gap moe…?)

Demon King: Squeak, squeak―—

Upon seeing the little boy, the docile squirrel suddenly bounded down as quick as lightning, burrowing itself into the gap of his coat.

The boy reached out to pat the squirrel on its head, his eyes softening as he did.

Little Boy: Demon King's answering you; it says yes.

MC: (He’s… Translating what the squirrel’s saying?)

I pondered over it as I surveyed the area, yet I didn't see any adults that might be his parents around the premises.

MC: (Appearing in the snowy mountains with only a squirrel in tow? He's really no ordinary kid.)

MC: What’s your name, little buddy? Can you tell us where your home is? We’ll send you back.

Little Boy: ……

He shot me a look before turning and running off without even so much as a reply.

MC: ...Dr. Mo, there’s nothing but snow everywhere, and I’m kind of worried about him being all alone out here, so let’s follow him.

Mo Yi: Okay, let’s follow his footsteps so that we don’t lose him.

We headed in the same direction that the boy fled, chasing after him; but he was too fast for us, so all we could do was to resign ourselves to watch his retreating back.

The squirrel named "Demon King" perched upon his shoulder, occasionally turning back to look at us, seemingly watching this "race" with great interest.

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We took a good many turns before a small village appeared before our eyes.

The houses of the village were scattered throughout the snowy grounds of the pine forest, but the little boy had disappeared without a trace.

Mo Yi: He might be a villager from here.

Mo Yi: I've previously heard my friend mention that there was a village called "Snowy Pine" near the snowy mountains. Looks like this is the place.

MC: Snowy Pine Village? So it really does exist.

Just as he had said that, I spotted a road sign that stated "Snowy Pine Village"; I suppose it also served as a nameplate for the entrance of the village.

MC: Logically speaking, that kid won't be facing any danger now that he's back in the village...

MC: But we should still go into the village and check for ourselves, just to be safe.

I looked around inside of the village. It seemed very quiet, with not many people pedestrians out on the streets.

MC: We don't know which house he went into, and it's not like we can just go around house-to-house knocking on their doors either…

Mo Yi: This village isn't big, so the villagers should probably know each other quite well. So, you don't really have to be worrying his safety.

Mo Yi: But since we're already here, how about we do some stuff you want to do and go back a little later?

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Location: Country Woods

Mo Yi: But since we're already here, how about we do some stuff you want to do and go back a little later?

MC: Huh?

Mo Yi: While chasing after the child earlier, I saw that there was a small open-space area by the road which should be very suitable for building snowmen.

Mo Yi: Haven't you always wanted to build a snowman?

Just now? I was completely focused on the little boy earlier that I didn't pay any attention to my surroundings at all…

MC: I won't forgive myself if I miss out on an opportunity to build a snowman! Let's head over there and take a look!

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We followed the path we took to come here and backtracked until we arrived at the location where Mo Yi was talking about.

It was an open space where the snow had piled on thick, the pure white snow sparkling brightly under the sun's rays.

MC: Awesome! I want to build a gigantic snowman!!

Stepping into the soft snow, my mood immediately shifted into one of giddy excitement.

I rubbed my palms together in anticipation, only to see that Mo Yi had already gotten a step ahead of me. He reached out, grabbed a handful of snow, and lifted it up.

Mo Yi: It's such a rare opportunity, so let's build one together.

I saw him undo the buttons on his windbreaker, letting it hang to the ground as he started to shape a ball of snow in his hands rather seriously.

His expression was one of utter focus. He was so intent on what he was doing that he failed to notice that the hem of his clothes was dragging on the snow.

MC: Dr. Mo, your clothes—!

Mo Yi: It's fine. You'll lose the fun of playing in the snow if you're too conscious about whether or not you're getting your clothes dirty.

Saying so, he patted a complete snowball into shape.

Mo Yi: We should pile the base on like this first, add another freshly rolled ball up on it… And it’ll slowly start taking shape.

Mo Yi: Hurry and come on here, (Y/n).

MC: Dr. Mo...

Mo Yi: What? You aren't coming?

MC: I suddenly feel like you're not really being your usual self, but when I think more about it, I realize that you aren't actually all that different from before.

Mo Yi: Hm? And how am I to understand that?

MC: Building a snowman doesn’t look like an activity you’d participate in, but if you think of it as creating a work of art...

MC: Then, building a snowman suits someone like you to a T!

Mo Yi: How about you, then? Are you willing to make a "work of art" together with me?

MC: It would be my pleasure!

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After working on it in full swing for a while, all the snowman was missing was a nose “to dot the eyes of a painted dragon in”, as the saying goes.

I found a pinecone in the pine forest nearby and brought it back while Mo Yi worked on placing the finishing touches onto the snowman.

MC: Dr. Mo...

His pale forehead was slightly beaded with sweat, his usually neat and untouched hair hanging in slight disarray.

A stray strand fell in front of his forehead, but he was so fixated on fixing up the snowman’s facial features that he appeared to have not noticed it at all.

MC: (He's really quite different from his usual self when he's like this…)

MC: (But it must be rather uncomfortable, since it's rather easy for the stray strand of hair to get in the way of his sight.)

With that in mind, I instinctively reached out towards him, helping him push the stray strand of hair, tucking it back to the side.

Mo Yi: …….!

Mo Yi's hand froze in its movements upon feeling my touch.

MC: Okay, it won't be getting into your eyes anymore now.

Mo Yi: You...

Faced with his warm, gentle gaze, I suddenly realized what I had just done.

MC: Sorry, Dr. Mo, I just—

Just, what? It was as if I was tongue-tied, unable to continue the rest of my sentence no matter much time passed.

Mo Yi: Thank you, I never noticed that my hair had mussed itself up.

MC: You're welcome...

I had thought that I'd tide over the embarrassment of what had just transpired with that, but never would I have thought...

Mo Yi: Still, why is your face so red?

MC: !!!

▷Choice: It's because I was active

MC: It’s probably because I was running around quite a bit searching for the pinecone just now, so my temperature shot up...

Mo Yi: Tie your scarf tighter around your neck, least you catch a cold after sweating and being exposed to the cold winds.

MC: Y-Yes, it's a little cold...

Mo Yi: Pass me the pinecone, I'll put it on the snowman.

Mo Yi had finally stopped “digging” into the matter, and I inwardly heaved a sigh of relief.

But his earlier question, paired with that look he gave me had deeply imprinted itself in my mind, and I... Pretty much knew what he was hoping for. But, it's just that…

I just didn’t know how to answer him.

Mo Yi: Some things are just like building a snowman; do it one step at a time, there's no need to rush.

Mo Yi: I'll patiently wait for you, until you find the right pinecone that best fits this snowman.

MC: Yeah, okay.

▷Choice: It’s just the different lighting

The gears in my head started turning at breakneck speed, finally coming up with an answer that even I thought flawless.

MC: My face is red? ...Actually, your face is actually a little red too.

MC: I think it’s because the light reflects off a snowy ground differently, so our skin tones appear different from usual.

Mo Yi: The lighting? That sounds reasonable enough, but I’ve never witnessed anything like this happening before.

MC: It’s probably because...

MC: (I can’t keep up this lie anymore no matter how I try to fib...)

I lowered my eyes, avoiding those golden eyes of his that one would easily find themselves absorbed by.

The hope within those eyes of his… I saw it; I did, but I haven't yet thought about how I should go around answering it…

Mo Yi: I’m guessing that your temperature increased because you were running around looking for pinecones back in the forest just now.

Mo Yi: Tie your scarf tighter around your neck, least you catch a cold after sweating and being exposed to the cold winds.

In my panic, Mo Yi had found the most appropriate explanation for me. I inwardly let out a sigh of relief.

MC: Yeah, that seems to be the case.

Mo Yi: Pass me the pinecone, I'll put it on the snowman.

After “settling” the pinecones on the snowman’s round head, our creation was finally brought to a successful completion.

MC: It’s finished! You have most of the credit for this snowman!

Mo Yi: Rather than comparing who contributed more to it, I’d rather call it a collective masterpiece.

MC: I honestly never thought that you’d be willing to play around with me like that. I thought you’d think me childish for wanting to do that.

Mo Yi: I don’t think it’s childish at all. Plus… I’m not just playing along with you, I’m also very happy about this, personally.

Mo Yi’s expression turned serious.

Mo Yi: We also had heavy snowfall back in my country, and building snowmen was one of the things that children enjoyed.

MC: So… Did you build them with your little friends back then too?

Mo Yi: Yes, I suppose I have.

MC: You suppose?

Mo Yi: I didn’t have many friends of the same age who were able to play with me when I was young.

Mo Yi: Laughing from the bottom of my heart while building a snowman, that was also a somewhat rare luxury for me back then.

Mo Yi: Hence, every chance I get to enjoy the simple things, like building a snowman, is a precious and treasured experience of mine.

MC: Is that so...

MC: Then let’s retain this snowman forever!

Saying so, I took out my phone and sought for the right angle, snapping a photo of our “collective masterpiece”, I immediately sent him a copy.

MC: I’ve sent it to you, Dr. Mo. I’ve snapped quite a few pictures of it, so you can pick and see which one is to your liking.

He looked at the picture, laughing lightly.

Mo Yi: Thank you, I’ll treasure it.

After that, we ended up building many other things aside from the snowman. For example, small houses, little animals, and the like…

The snow completely relieved me of the stress that I had in my life.  This was also a very precious experience to me, just like how it was to him.

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It was only until we got closer to the villa that we saw the little boy from before again.

The only difference was that he appeared very frantic, as if he’d just met some trouble.

MC: What’s wrong, little buddy? Did something happen again?

Little Boy: Demon King! I can't find Demon King! Can you guys help me find him?

MC: Demon King… Did it run off again?

Little Boy: Yeah, but it’s not the same this time! It's never disappeared for so long, and I’ve looked everywhere, but I can’t find him...

Little Boy: Demon King doesn’t hate you guys, so could you help me find it?

Mo Yi bent down to meet the boy’s eye-level.

Mo Yi: First, don’t panic. You’re much more familiar with it than us, so could you bring us to the places it always goes off to play?

Little Boy: No, I can’t go.

Little Boy: My granny has a bad leg, so I can’t go too far…

The little boy hung his head, his voice so filed with grief that he looked was on the verge of tears.

Little Boy: Demon King can’t be without me, else it’d get itself hurt...

MC: ...Don’t cry, little buddy. We’ll agree to help you find it.

The boy appeared to have grasped onto a glimmer of hope after hearing what I’d said.

He reached into his pocket and produced an old wooden whistle, hoarsely passing it to me.

Little Boy: Blow on this whistle and call Demon King by it’s name; he’ll come then. 

I took the whistle from him, nodding my head in attention. Mo Yi stood at one side, patiently asking the boy questions.

Mo Yi: Then, do you know where it likes to go? For example, where should we go, so that we can meet it?

The boy thought for a while before pointing behind our villa.

Little Boy: Demon King and I often go behind this big house to play.

Little Boy: Just bring it to Snowy Pine Village when you find it! Gran and I live right there!

Mo Yi gently patted his head.

Mo Yi: Got it. We’ll help you look for Demon King, so hurry on back and look after your grandmother.

Little Boy: Okay, it’s a promise then! My house is the one right in front; I’ll be waiting for you!

The boy pointed to us where his house was located before hurriedly running back. However, he hadn’t taken more than two steps before he turned back again and shouted.

Little Boy: You must bring Demon King back, okay?

MC: Got it!

The boy finally left for real this time after receiving affirmation from me. Watching his retreating figure, I still felt a little worried.

MC: Dr. Mo, he said that he had to take care of his grandmother...

Mo Yi: Are you trying to say that he’s a child that’s been left behind?

MC: Yes. Based on what he said, it’s possible that there’s only him and an elderly member of the family back home.

Mo Yi: Let’s go look for Demon King first. We’ll still have to go to his house and have a look after we’ve found it.

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Location: Country Woods

After parting with the boy, the both of us headed into the forest to look for Demon King. This particular forest was very dense, and adding on the fact that it was snowing, it made it very hard for us to distinguish one thing from another.

In the end, as unfamiliar with the forest as we were, we spent half the day searching, yet we didn’t see so much as a squirrel’s shadow.

MC: Demon King―— Demon King―—

I held the small whistle tightly in my grip, blowing and yelling out its name at the same time; but no matter how many times I tried, there wasn’t a single response.

MC: We’ve already searched everywhere; just where has it gone…

Mo Yi: Pass it to me, let me try.

Saying so, Mo Yi smoothly took the whistle from my hands and gently blew on it.

And with this, that was how the melodious, yet crisp sound of a whistle reverberated through the snowy pine forest at a pace that was neither too fast, nor too slow.

Once, twice… Another moment passed, but Demon King never appeared, making me feel even more worried.

MC: Dr. Mo, is Demon King… not here yet?

Mo Yi: Let’s wait for a little while more. I believe he’ll come.

After another whistle, I noticed a cluster of pine branches shaking, and part of the snow that had rested on the branches falling along with it.

MC: Doc…

Mo Yi placed his index finger in front of his lips, signaling for me to not make a sound, probably so that I wouldn’t spook our little visitor.

I waited with bated breath. A few seconds later, a small figure emerged from among the trees, only to disappear just as quickly a split-second later.

MC: ……

I was attempting to look for it when Mo Yi’s voice sounded by my ear right at the same time.

Mo Yi: Look, (Y/n)——

☆⋅⋆…⋅─────────── ⋆⋅✾⋅⋆ ───────────⋅…⋆⋅☆

I turned around at the sound, only to see a small squirrel squatted on his hand, boldly looking back and forth.

Said squirrel wore a familiar-looking red ribbon around its neck. No way, isn’t that Demon King!?

MC: Oh! Demon King! That's great—

Demon King: Squeak, squeak, squeak!

Before the sound of my words had faded away, a small clump of snow suddenly fell from the pine branches that it had disturbed earlier with a muffled “thump”.

Demon King immediately stood up, ever-so vigilantly, as if it was going to flee yet again.

MC: Don't—

Just as I was stuck as to what the best course of action would be, Mo Yi acted quickly, swiftly calming Demon King down.

Mo Yi: It's okay, don't be scared. It's me, I won't hurt you.

Mo Yi: You friend has waited very long for you; he told us to come bring you back home in his stead.

Mo Yi: How about coming back together with us if you've had your share of fun, hm?

MC: (He's… Talking to the squirrel?)

───⋅𝕿𝖎𝖑𝖑 𝖓𝖊𝖝𝖙 𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖊…⋆⋅☆

[lost-in-zembla]

On Metamodernism

It’s tough to grasp metamodernism as an artistic movement but most of us live lives strongly affected by the concepts of metamodernism every day. You’re having a serious conversation with your friend about her mental health; simultaneously, you and your friend are part of a groupchat where you are currently making fun of the very friend you are supporting. This isn’t necessarily disingenuous; you are witnessing two different instances of a person and those two instantiations of you happen to be different depending on context and medium. In part, metamodernism is a kind of acceptance of our multiple selves, our tendency to oscillate between states or even inhabit both in a sort of human superposition.

I taught my friends about metamodernism in our groupchat as my friend Jarett consoled me via one-on-one text after the sudden implosion of my five-year long relationship and the fact that my life is generally unbearable—a fact that is more embarrassing when one considers how easy I have it. It’s sort of a shame feedback loop. 

As I was explaining metamodernism for my own satisfaction, I thought that I might actually make an okay professor. I could teach American literature. Maybe. 

So I get a job teaching at the local community college and my life slowly comes back together like a cut that heals. I am relatively respected by my students and I have some abstract sense purpose, the cracks in the surface of which are only visible if one spends a long, existential period of time contemplating the practical or, god-forbid, spiritual uses of an education in American literature what with the reality of a global climate catastrophe and the approaching drumbeats of right-wing strongmen leaders reaching positions of power all around the world.

But things are pretty good.

I get a parking space. I get an apartment that looks bad, then looks better. I start to open the curtains. I don’t want to hide so much. A year or two down the line I lease a practical car and people treat me with a bit more respect when they see me step out of it. I smile at people in the grocery store. At this point I can see peoples’ mouths when I go outside. When I see their mouths, they’re smiling. They can see my mouth. I’m smiling.

I get to know people and people think I’m lovely. The faculty all look up to me. How young and handsome and intelligent he is! He’ll sure go places, they say. And I do. I quickly earn a raise and then I’m head of the department. And so young! When I’m not inspiring awe I inspire smoldering jealousy. Women? Naturally. And I treat each of them with utmost respect. I value these women for more than the thousands of hours of hot naked ecstasy they provide me. I buy more fresh produce. I throw none of it out.

I single-handedly save the English department at the community college. Funding comes pouring in. Eventually, it becomes one of the premier colleges for literary studies in the Midwest. They rename a building after me. I just turned thirty. Before long, I’m offered a job at the prestigious private university in town, with nods toward a proverbial shoe in the door when it comes to tenure. Unheard of! But he’s just that good. My wrists and forearms become perceptibly thicker. People cross the street in front of traffic to shake my hand. I learn what the fuck “ketosis” is.

Then there I am one day in my cushy office. Rows of leather-bound books fill the shelves around the ample perimeter of the room. I’ve read them all, naturally. My hair has started to grey in places but damn if it’s not as thick and lush as the heart of the Amazon. A knock on the door. My office hours ended at one. I answer and it’s, oh, Claire from this semester’s modern American literature course. Of course I’ve noticed her in class. How could I not? But I’d always maintained a professional and appropriately avuncular demeanor in front of her. She’s twenty-eight, French, gorgeous. Naturally.

We discuss her essay on Light in August and I say to her, you know, Claire, it was the French who were among the first to notice Faulkner’s genius. She puts her hand on my thigh. In her accent that itself somehow resembles a beautiful naked body she says, The French notice lots of things. I slide my attractively thick forearm over the crowded desk space and knock the books and pens and everything onto the floor and—well, let’s just say that my life of success and talent has enhanced me in other ways. And it’s hot and insane and weird and papers fly everywhere. And it sort of just goes on like that for weeks and then months—the relationship, not that particular sexual event. At my age, after all the sex and drugs and joy and tragedy, sometimes I think that it’s the clandestine nature of the thing that really gets me off. Like I need more and more secret or shameful shit to fire off those tired old neurons. I start to become cavalier in front of the students. I begin to, perhaps, show my hand. 

I get another knock on my office, sometime in the Spring. Bill, I say. Come in. He sits down and we engage in a tense discussion where every syllable is laced with a double entendre because he can’t just say it out loud, for Christ’s sake. That’s just not how these things are done. He’s old school, but firm, Bill. She’s graduating anyway, and something tells me when we can finally be together publicly then the thrill will already be gone. 

The students already know. I’ve seen the screenshots. I’ve been memed. Things are tense in class and they can tell that I’ve given up. The fire in my eye that led to my meteoric rise has dimmed to a pathetic ember. Sometimes I take my Audi out on a dark highway outside of town and I press on the accelerator until I can’t go any faster. I have to stop myself from shutting my eyes.

One day in class, I look up from my papers and all the students are out of their desks, standing over me. They’re holding pencils and yardsticks that have been modified into edged weapons. What’s the meaning of this? They use my Tom Ford tie to tie my arms behind me and to my chair. They put me in the center of the room. I knew they would betray me. I’d always known. For years this notion has haunted the deepest recesses of my mind: these people, these kids, are going to be the ones to put this old dog down. Is this because of Claire, I ask. They laugh. They laugh because they think I’m an old fool. I am an old fool.

No, professor, Shellie says. She seems to be the leader. It’s much more serious than that, she says. O life! Everything I’ve ever done. I’ve stomped on people all the way to the top and now it’s all coming back to me, some sort of holdup in the karmic clerical system that led to forty years of consequences all delivered at once. Things were so easy for so long, so fun, that I forgot what it was like to live a life with consequences.

Shut up, she says. You’re here for a reason. What could she know? How did she mobilize all of these students? When did they make the weapons? How many questions could I possibly pose in sequence?

Professor, she says, we have one question for you. Anything, I say. And answer truthfully, she says. And I say of course, of course I’ll be completely honest. Okay, professor, she says, do you consider yourself… a historicist? At this very moment I know it’s over for me. Well, I say, it’s not so simple, Shellie. The mob is in an uproar. A fair bit of verbal sparring ensues. Shellie and the other students in favor of the transcendent nature of literature—whatever that means—and me in favor of a more context-based approach. Sure, if I thought that novels were a good way to learn about history then I’d deserve this. I’d deserve all of this.

How can you read these works outside of their historical context? What about Light in August for God’s sake?  The mob lashes out again—not Faulkner fans, go figure—but Shellie shushes them until the classroom is as silent as the dusty hills of Jerusalem. Literature, she says, is timeless. And this essentially breaks me. I begin weeping openly. You might as well kill me, then, I say. They set upon me like a pack of hyenas. 

A moment or an eternity after my head is pulled off my body like the Bacchae in that Euripides tragedy, I hear waves lap against the rocks. I feel in my face the salty breeze of the ocean. I open my eyes to find a beautiful Mediterranean island. It feels neither hot nor cold. The breeze from the ocean feels perfect, as though there were no storms to be found in any corner of the Earth.

Behind me, inland, I hear the sound of approaching footsteps. I turn around to find Vladimir goddamn Nabokov of all people. It’s perfect. So I tell him the story, how I was murdered by my students over two reductive and non-mutually exclusive schools of thought in literature—two schools of thought that are both perfect lenses through which to view Nabokov’s work. When I tell him he laughs his big Russian laugh and slaps me on the shoulder, and I laugh. Then he hands me a butterfly net and we skip through pleasant hills in that vast and timeless place forever and ever.

No. What’s happening? It’s all slipping away from me now. All the memories, the moments, the time, leaking out of my mind to become something ghostly, an image half-developed, a thought unspoken. I lift my head and look at my hands and there I am, lying on a couch in a high school faculty lounge. My hands are unwrinkled. My body is young. There is no Humanities Wing in my name, no tenure, no Audi. No Claire. Was it all just a dream? Could it all have been just a dream? Is it within the realm of possibility that such an absurdly bad trope could have manifested into my life naturally? Or am I the subject of a cruel and untalented god who simply bats me about and writes hack narratives for me to tumble through like some Sisyphean Rube Goldberg machine? Coffee. Need Coffee.

It’s all silly, anyway. Nabokov and myself cavorting through some weird Elysium? Ridiculous. If that was what the afterlife had in store for me, then Nabokov would probably be hanging out with Pushkin and Tolstoy while maybe Dostoevsky and I build a sandcastle. Maybe. But then, in all likelihood, Nabokov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the other cool kids would kick sand in my face and walk off with whatever beautiful ladies happen to inhabit this weird Russian-literary Elysium that I’ve somehow ended up in. I haven’t thought this out very well.

What was this all about, again? Metamodernism. Easy. Let’s think.

Okay.

As I write this now, behind my computer, watching Youtube videos about sushi, wondering how the sushi will make its way into my writing through mental osmosis (not subtly, it turns out), I look at these instances of me, with the meteoric success or the banal day-to-day life, and I wonder who exactly I am. I am a thousand selves. I am nothing. I am trying to remember into the future who I am. I am a metamodernist—no, I’m not.

[cvltists-blog]

introducing . . . TAMSIN ROMANO !

( amanda arcuri + cisfemale + she/her ) / who’s that rustling through the trees ? oh, it’s just you, THOMASINA ‘TAMSIN’ ROMANO. i happen to know that you’re a TWENTY-ONE year old MAID at the LAKE CRESCENT CAMPGROUNDS. while you’re from CRESCENT LAKE, you’re currently living in the LAKELAND MOBILE HOME PARK. i think that you’re ARDENT & MAVERICK but my mama says you’re SLY & CASUISTIC. is that KILL OF THE NIGHT by GIN WIGMORE currently playing on your spotify ? well, turn it down please, you’re disrupting the peace. ( mads + 19 + she/her + est )

ABOUT. tw: death, cult.

if you’re from crescent lake then odds are you’ve heard of the odd romano twins: thomas & thomasina. their lives were, & forever would be, bound to an inescapable cult they never asked for any part in.

their father, sebastian, had the misfortune of being alma & mabel thomas’s nephew. not long after the sisters’ demise he made his way to the quaint town to make a weak attempt at cleansing the family name.

the trip wasn’t a total failure, though. crescent lake was where he met greta. it was love at first sight... or so he thought. they jumped into the relationship a little too fast & within months learned she was pregnant with twins. this is when things grew hairy. 

seb began to notice things in greta that love had previously clouded. with very little investigation he learned that she was just another ‘thomian’ cult loon, using him in hopes of giving birth to a 'pure being’ of thomas blood. disgusted, seb left without a trace, never to be heard from again.

the twins, thomas ‘tome’ & thomasina ‘tamsin’, grew up in the south crescent neighborhood, the family riding off of an unemployed greta’s trust-fund. it didn’t take long for the trust fund to run dry, &, when the kids were nearly six, they were left with little choice but to take haven in the lakeland mobile home park.

she tried her hardest to brainwash them into a ‘thomian’ way of thinking, but tamsin’s mind was far less malleable than her brother’s. to her mother’s dismay she questioned & argued far too much. as much as tamsin tried to cleanse tome’s mind of their mother’s poison words, he could never break free of her spell. this would ultimately lead to his doom. 

when the twins were fifteen, tamsin got a sinking feeling in the put of her stomach whilst at school. she rushed home to find it empty. following the gps tracker on her twin’s phone, she found herself at the edge of the crescent lake. by then it was too late.

paramedics & emergency services arrived, dragging two cold bodies out of the lake. greta had finally convinced tome to make the ultimate sacrifice to god. they were able to revive tamsin’s mother, but her brother wasn’t so lucky.

the lack of oxygen damaged her mother’s brain & now tamsin is burdened with taking care of the witch. getting a job at the campground, where she always feels closest to tome’s spirit, she’s been working as a maid for years.

TID-BITS.

her blood-affiliation to the thomas sisters’, as well as the tragic death of her brother, has made her a bit of a celebrity to the tourists in town & campground guests. it isn’t uncommon of them to ask for her photo or berate her with questions. she usually just flashes them the bird.

her surname ( romano ) is actually her mother’s maiden name. ‘thomasina thomas’ just didn’t have the right ring to it.

just because she’s been working as a maid for years doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a good one. the girl has developed some very sticky fingers; it isn’t uncommon for guests to notice a trinket or two missing from their luggage. her kleptomania helps her keep a little bit of pocket cash to spend on things other than rent, food, & medication for mother-dearest.

tamsin doesn’t think of herself as a medium, but she doesn’t still feel a connection to her late-brother. some people think she’s crazy when they see her chattering to herself, but she’s actually just chit-chatting to his spirit. he never responds, but she likes to think he’s listening.

she had dreams of ditching the small town to attend a prestigious art school. unfortunately, she was trapped to her hell-hole of a trailer to care for a devil-woman. she still paints & draws whenever she gets a chance, usually as an escape.

she has a cat named jitters. he acts more like a canine than feline & is known to follow at her heels almost everywhere she goes.

she almost always has something in her mouth, usually hubba-bubba gum or a cigarette... sometimes both. she’s practically addicted to the two.

CONNECTIONS.

tome’s best friend: this person was best friend’s with tammo before he died. tamsin always tagged along on their adventures. they were the three musketeers that spent nearly everyday together. whether this muse & tamsin drifted ways or grew closer after tome’s death is totally open.

on / off: tamsin has major commitment issues AND daddy issues... never a good pairing. she cares about this person a lot, but can’t help but abruptly pull away anytime they get too close.

fwb: noncommittal with no strings attached. sure she probably daydreams ‘what if we were something more’, but is determined not to catch feelings. how they feel about each other outside the bedroom ( annoyance, enemies, friends, etc. ) can be discusses.

worker bestie: tamsin works on the campgrounds as a maid. it’s not the most desirable job &, oh boy, she has seen some crazy shit in those rooms. she & this person love to complain about their jobs, share horror stories, & make their jobs just a teensy bit more bearable.

paranormal club ( 0 / 2 ): ghosts, ghoulies, aliens... you name it, she’s hunted for it. blame it on her brother’s death, but she’s obsessed with the paranormal. tamsin & these two think of themselves as ‘hunters of the unordinary’. they have a corny blog, but it has a small following. their foolery is mostly for their OWN entertainment.

I’M HONESTLY OPEN TO ANYTHING ! PLZ HMU !

[memoirsofratasum]

Protector Tarnn: Long Live the Lich

We had been deep in the hidden library of the Astralarium when we received word that war had begun. Khalida had penned the message herself in code so Sahil had to be the one to read it out to the rest of us.

Joko had struck. And he struck hard. His so called invasion on Tyria must not have been getting the response his wanted. Massive coordinated attacks to different regions may have seemed impressive to the lich, but to Tyrians it was just another Tuesday. So he went with a much more direct approach.

A Pact aid ship bound for Amnoon had been infected on route with the scarab plague, timed perfectly to swarm the city as they disembarked. Thank the Alchemy that the Commander had been at the docks and had managed to hold back the scarabs from infecting the rest of Amnoon. But even if the invasion had failed, it still sent a clear message: Joko was back for good.

But, as the letter went onto explain, the rest of the world wasn’t going to allow the lich king to walk all over it. I felt a swell of Tyrian pride hearing that the Commander had carved out a foothold in Kourna. As if there was ever any doubt. When it comes to global catastrophes you can always count on a Tyrian to be the first in the fight.

The Sunspears and their Tyrian and Olmakhan allies would mobilize and join the rest of the war effort in Kourna as soon as possible. Dorne immediately sent a message back to the Sandswept Isles for reinforcements and the rest of us tightened up our gear. You could almost taste the nervous energy in the air. This is what the Sunspears had been fighting hundreds of years for and this seemed like the first real chance at Joko they ever had. What that chance entailed we weren’t sure of yet, that would come with the briefing in Kourna, but as I told Sahil, this time the Sunspears wouldn’t be alone. He seemed to relax, though only a little.

The way to Kourna wasn’t short despite the province being across the strait from Istan. Gandara, also known at the Moon Fortress, guarded the waters. There would be no assault from the sea. Instead the Commander had found a more round about way into Kourna, by way of a portal just outside the Tomb of the Primeval Kings. I’m not sure if I want to know how that came about.

It was so nice to be back in the Highlands. By all logic this region should not be a place one looks forward to. The Brand looms large, the Salt Flats are difficult to live in, and the death-energy from Vlast can still be felt as a woven undercurrent in the air. And yet the area feels refreshing. I can only imagine it’s due to being so far from Joko’s influence. Or maybe it’s just the mountain air.  

We arrived at the portal alongside a supply caravan. The branded may seem tame compared to a threat like Joko, but it’s still a threat. Getting supplies through the region, even with the assistance of the local ogre tribes, is a nightmare. Despite a dedicated escort one of the pack bulls got maimed and some of the supplies were lost under the talons of a branded griffon. It’s almost as if we’re fighting on two fronts, and if the supplies fail Joko has as good as won.

The portal itself wasn’t what I was expecting. It was less like an asura gate and more like a tear in the fabric of space-time. A stable tear that hopefully won’t cause a problem down the road. But right now it’s able to get us into Kourna. The tear was too small to take all of us at once, so we had to go through in waves. And we weren’t the only ones in line for the front. It seemed like half of Tyria had heard the call to arms and the wait for our turn for the portal took hours.

The air was the first thing I noticed about Kourna. While the Highlands had been refreshing, the air in Kourna was heavy, hot, and infused with an unclean greasy magic from Joko’s influence. I wouldn’t say it’s as bad as Orr but it was still pretty bad. The second thing I noticed was the Allied Encampment on the rise. The abandoned village had been turned into a boisterous staging camp. Medic tents, cook fires, repair anvils, training stations, if it wasn’t for the lack of trees you’d think you were back in Dragon Stand. Except for one detail. I didn’t notice it at first, but as we walked through the town to report in and receive our assignments it suddenly struck me. Everyone working inside the village was human. Every supply runner, medic, blacksmith, lookout...all human. The most I saw of any other race at that time was a squad of saluting sylvari before they rode out on their raptors, presumably to the front lines.

It wasn’t until we got a briefing from Spearmarshal Zaeim that we learned why. The scarab plague only affects humans, all other races native to Tyria are immune. That means any human members of the offensive now have to play defense. All other races had to go to the front lines. But even we aren’t any safer as the threat of awakening is very real.

Because of this unique consideration all assignments had to be divvied up differently. Sahil and and his Sunspears, despite all their years of training, had to stay behind in the village to see to the logistics. At least Sahil was important enough to be at the command table and assist in devising plans and seeing them carried out. Sanna and Dorne were assigned to the vine wall at the front lines to help keep the wall in one piece and see to any wounded that came through the gates. Sanna was ordered get as many as she could back on their feet and back into the fight, saving the rear medic tents for those worse off.

As for me, Zaeim was very interested in hearing that I was a blacksmith and had gone toe-to-toe with the Inquest more so than my experience in Orr or Dragon Stand. Supplies are at a premium out here and there is never enough to go around. But we can’t fight a war without the metal for armor and weapons, not at the rate they are trickling in. So we had to make do with what we had. And what we had was an old inquest lab in the Dabiji Hollows. There were no living inquest in the lab, they were all Awakened so there would be no food to find. But there would be equipment that could be salvaged into usable metal and magical components. My orders were to take a squad and raid the research vaults, identify good materials, steal anything we could carry, and getting out before the Awakened could retaliate. If we managed to snag some information then fine, but it was better to free any prisoners. Apparently the local hylek tribe were a regular victim and we needed them as allies.

I gathered a small squad from the allies that came with us from the Astralarium, both Priory and Olmakhan members with swift mounts and keen eyes. The goal was to get in, grab what we could, and get out. We didn’t need to get caught in any protracted fights were we could easily get outnumbered and lose precious materials. I only had a day to memorize the information Zaeim had gathered and to touch base with Quartermaster Yohana. The smiths were in dire need of not only metal but also arcane crystals for artificing repairs. Doable. If there is anything the Inquest would have in spades, aside from suffering and a superiority complex, it’s arcane crystals.

We set out early in the morning before the desert heat really set in. The mount of choice was either a raptor or a jackal. From what I overheard many of the raptors were turning their snouts up at the ibogas that were being hunted for their feed. Made me glad I didn’t have to worry about feeding my jackal.

The Inquest research vaults were in a cave system within the Hollows. The rock formations glowed with a red light that told us we were on the right track. There were a few Awakened patrols but not as many as I had anticipated. Most of them must be working on plague research. We snuck in as far as I dared before giving the signal. In a split second over a dozen mounts leapt into the heart of the Inquest lab, trampling Awakened under claw as axes cleaved into console banks. I was pocketing as many arcane crystals I could stuff into Spirit’s saddlebags when I heard the sound of someone yelling, but it wasn’t the angry shouts of formerly alive Inquest, it sounded more like someone was trying to get our attention.

In a row of electrified cages was a one of the smallest hylek I had ever seen. At first she was wary me, she probably didn’t know what an alive non-Inquest asura looked like. But taking my axe to her cage controls was a quick way to prove myself and she was now eager to cooperate. She introduced herself as Milin from Apizmic Grounds and in turn I asked if there were any others of her tribe imprisoned that she knew about. Milin believed she was the only one currently captured. That was good enough for me. I ordered Milin to mount up on Spirit and I blew a warhorn to signal to my squad that we were leaving.

As quickly as we had arrived my squad streamed out of the caverns. The whole operation had happened in under ten minutes and from the bulging saddlebags we had made off decent haul, plus rescued a prisoner. Not bad for a first time raid.

I left the delivery to Quartermaster Yohana to the squad, my first priority was to see to Milin. Sanna gave her a clean bill of health and what food and water we could spare while Zaeim interviewed her on any information she might have. She didn’t know much, but had overheard that the Inquest were breeding scarabs to infect the nearby village of Palawa’s Benevolence. By this point the operation was probably already underway. What a plan that was, release the plague behind our lines where it could infect our human troops while punishing his people at the same time. A win-win in Joko’s twisted mind.

Zaeim immediately called for the sunpears to send assistance to the village and to call on the Commander about the plague. I offered to see to the village myself since I had completed the raid, but Zaeim denied that request. They had bodies to see to a village, but knowledge of metallurgy was a rarer skill currently at hand and I was to assist the smiths in smelting what we stole and form it into usable ingots and then to prepare for the next raid. No matter how much we took it would never be enough for the war effort. Meanwhile Milin would be escorted back to the Apizmic Grounds once she regained her strength.

And that was the only the first morning of our tour in Kourna. When I wasn’t raiding the Inquest base at odd hours, I was preparing for the next or salvaging what we stole into usable components. In all my years of battle I’ve never had such an assignment. I can only assume I did a good enough job as I wasn’t replaced. Sanna and Dorne for their part stayed with the vine walls and Sahil assisted Zaeim with the battle plans.

It was weeks later when everything abruptly changed. The Commander was making the long anticipated assault on the Moon Fortress. Joko must have been inside. The orders had been for all non-human allies to join the Commander at the front, but at the last second Sahil pulled Sanna, myself, Dorne, and the rest from the Astralarium back from the line and assigned us to the vine walls. He said it was to keep the way open in case of retreat and to prevent the encampment to be overrun while the rest of the forces knocked on the Joko’s door. A tactically wise decision left to those he trusted, but I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to protect us. No way to prove it and he’d deny it if asked, but in the months I’ve known him Sahil has never been much of a risk taker, and this assault was risky. He wouldn’t put his people’s lives on the line just on some Tyrian commander’s say so.

So we hung back, taking potshots at the few Awakened that stayed to test the wall’s defenses. I have no idea of knowing what happened at the fortress, but we all clearly saw what happened outside of it. Aurene flew overhead, heading straight for the fortress like a blue crystalline arrow. It was almost like seeing Vlast fly again. Minutes later there was a surge of magic from the top level of the fortress and then the Awakened just...stopped.

Some threw down their weapons, some ran away, others fell to knees weeping. Not a single one of them kept fighting, not even when a couple Olmakhan risked approaching a crying undead and poking it with their staff. Something clearly had happened, but it wasn’t until the Commander returned that we heard the story.

Joko had been defeated, for good this time. Aurene had seen to that. What can you expect, she’s a dragon after all. Their teeth are one of their finer features. I’m sure the now late Joko had time to appreciate them as he was turned into her early dinner.

As for what happens now, there will be a lot of work for the Sunspears. How to do you replace hundreds of years of absolute rule? And what of the Awakened that remain? What of any loyalists that are still out there? I suppose we will all find out soon enough. But for right now Sanna and I have been relieved of our tour in Kourna and the Priory has given us leave to recuperate. We are free to return to Tyria and do whatever we want.

Maybe it’s time to see what has changed at the Labyrinthine Cliffs.

[ellay-gee]

The Important Things

Ayy check it out, I’m figuring Tumblr out.  What a way to spend a sick day.  It was weirdly ominous that i got very ill the night I posted a sickfic. o.O

also, apologies to mobile readers, as the ‘keep reading’ thing apparently does not transfer over, and I just don’t have the energy to mess with it at this time.  damn fever.

Prompto should probably not be left on his own ever, but especially not when he's running a fever and can barely form coherent speech.

Ignis sighed in frustration as he pinched the bridge of his nose, nudging his glasses up a little as he did.  “Prompto, ginger ale is not medication.”

The voice on the other end of the line was closer to gravel than sunshine, and Ignis winced in sympathy for how painful it must’ve been for the blond to speak.  “Sure id is, Ig.  S’tha cure-all fer what ails you.”

Ignis tapped his foot on the marble floor as he checked his watch. It was difficult to tell if Prompto was just laying it on thick, or if he’d actually somehow gotten worse in the two hours since Ignis left that morning.  “I’ll be home in about six hours.  Do you think you’ll be alright till then?  I can probably send Gladio or Iris over—“

A harsh cough interrupted him before his boyfriend’s voice came back, weaker and a little wheezier.  “Dodo, s’ok.  I probbiss. I got…gidger ale. Add oj with the pulp, so, y’dow…healthy.  And that coddedsed soup; also healthy. I’m juss gonda sleep, Ig.  Just.  I’ll be ok, kay?”

“Condensed soup.” Ignis scoffed, but couldn’t keep the soft smile from his voice. “How you ever made it to nineteen is a mystery.”

“I’b tellig you, s’tha gidger ale. Goddds, Iggy. Feels like I’b swallowig glass.  This is not gonda be good for our sex life.”

Ignis clucked his tongue affectionately. “As if I’d touch you in your current state.”

Prompto let out something between a hack and a laugh.  “Y’dow you cad’t resist me. Lubb you, hab a good daaaay.”

Ignis returned the sentiment and hung up.  He had a feeling that he’d have his work cut out for him when he got home.

Somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to mind.

When Ignis next found himself with an extra moment, it was two hours and eleven texts later.

Prompto →  hey wheres canpoter?

Prompto →  canopner*

Prompto →  the thing that opens cans

Prompto →  im hungry and everything is working abaingst me.

Prompto →  nm its a poptop

Prompto →  stove hates me. Everything hates me. All but you ig. U r bust.

Prompto →  best*

Prompto →  fuck it going back to bed.

Prompto →  shit ur at ur meetings. Sorry.  Gods hope ur shit is on slient.

Prompto →  forvige me?

Prompto →  fuuuck. FORGIVE* me???

Me  → Always

Me  → Please do get some rest.  I will be home as soon as I am able

Me  → And the can opener is in the drawer to the left of the sink

Me  → Where it always is

Noctis groaned next to him, rolling his eyes as he read the messages over his adviser’s shoulder.  “Prom’s sick, huh? He’s the living worst when he’s sick.”

Ignis frowned down his charge. “Yes, he can be a bit much.”

Noctis laughed at that, “Yeah, that’s how you know he’s really ok.  It’s when he starts lying and getting quiet that you have to be worried.

“One time he got the flu and refused to admit he was feeling bad. Kept himself going with energy drinks and cough syrup.  He was loopy as hell and fucking bit it on the track during gym; completely blacked out while running pretty fast and basically ended up with road-rash and a concussion.”

Ignis winced in sympathy. “Hmm, yes. I thought I was successfully keeping him under wraps, but yesterday he slipped out before I woke and went to training.  Cor had to call me to come collect him from the men’s room floor.  Apparently he didn’t make formation and the marshal found him ‘vomiting up everything he’d ever eaten’.  He’s been mewling in bed ever since.”

Noctis gave Ignis a sympathetic expression.  “Poor dude.  Just make sure you don’t get it and give it to me.”

“Of course, Highness.  I wouldn’t dream of getting you ill.  You’re a thousand times worse than Prompto.”

The adviser chuckled as the prince seemed to consider this, finally nodding in agreement. “You’re right. I’m definitely worse.”

The second time Ignis was able to pull away from the meeting long enough to glance at his phone, another hour had gone by. In that time, Prompto had managed to send him seven links to songs he’d apparently listened to and wished to share, a rambling text about how much he ‘lurvd’ the adviser, and an article about how ginger ale could, in fact, settle one’s stomach.

Rolling his eyes, Ignis sent off a sweet text, wishing his boyfriend well and promising he’d be home as soon as possible. With real medicine.

By the time Ignis was finally able to go home, it was three hours and zero texts later.  This was a little disconcerting, so he placed a call to Prompto’s phone as he headed for the garage.  Receiving no answer, he waited for the cheery greeting to end and left a message.

“Darling, I am on my way home.  I need to stop by the pharmacy to collect your medications.  I’ll be there soon, though.  Love you.”

He slipped his phone back in his pocket and hurried his step. He didn’t like being away from Prompto for this long when the freckled youth was sick or otherwise incapacitated.  Ignis learned early on in their relationship that Prompto never wanted to ‘be a bother’, and would instead try to soldier on as if nothing were wrong. He could have a high fever and a sprained ankle, and he’d still insist on going on his morning run and completing his chores around their small house.

Ignis loved him endlessly, but there were times in which he would like to throttle the boy. Prompto’s self-deprecating/self-destructive streak could be rather irksome at times.

He stopped at the usual pharmacy and picked up cold medicine and a few other necessities, doing his best not to tap his foot impatiently as he stood in line. It would still be at least thirty minutes before he’d actually get home.

Though he’d been the one to insist that they get a place near the outskirts of the city, he did find himself regretting it from time to time, if only in instances such as this. But, he’d wanted to give Prompto something beautiful. The boy had been raised in the city, and though they could not move outside the Wall due to Ignis’ duties, the adviser could give him new scenery to explore. So, he’d found a small rental property situated on its own acre of land, nestled in among the rolling hills near the wall. Sure, it was a longer commute, but they spent it together most days which made it bearable.

He enjoyed their late afternoons in their little home; Prompto would wander the hills and the thicket of woods at the back of the property, taking photos while Ignis prepared dinner. They were even considering getting a dog, though Ignis himself would prefer a cat.

He was not going for Prompto’s ‘compromise’ of getting both.

As he turned onto the three mile stretch of gravel road that led to their little home, Ignis pressed the button on his dash to connect the Bluetooth, hoping Prompto would pick up this time. He had several bags and was hoping the other man could unlock the door for him.

He breathed a quiet relieved sigh when the phone was answered.  Prompto sounded awful, not even able to make intelligible sounds on his end.

“I’m almost home, darling.” He said when Prompto gave up talking in favor of hacking up a lung.  “I know you’re not feeling well, but could you—“

Prompto gasped into the phone, his voice ragged. “Iggy.  Ig. S’hot.  I dunno—“

Ignis swallowed hard. It sounded like Prompto had only gotten worse in their hours apart. “I know, darling, I know. It’s probably just because of your fever—“’

Prompto hissed through the line, whining little when he couldn’t stop another string of coughs.  “Nooo Iggyyy.  S’hot. I…the sto..the soup…” he trailed off as he wheezed desperately. “S..ss..smoke.”

With that last sibilant word, Ignis pressed his foot firmly on the gas pedal, his tires spinning in the gravel before gaining purchase, spitting rocks as he sped down the road. “Are you saying there’s a fire, Prompto?  Prom? Can you get out of the house?”

But there’s only coughing and a small thump quickly followed by a larger one from the other end, and Ignis’ stomach tightens considerably.  He brakes only slightly when their driveway comes into sight, the end of his town car fishtailing as he swerved into it. He shut the engine off and snatched the keys from the ignition before stumbling from the car and bounding up the porch stairs.

Smoke was indeed beginning to rise from the small building, and his hands shook as he shoved his key into the door, unlocking it and rushing inside.

Luckily for him, the living room was mostly clear of smoke, though it was heavy in the hall leading to the kitchen. Ignis called Prompto’s name before covering his mouth with his shirt and plunging into the haze.

He tried calling Prompto’s name, but quickly gave up as the smoke penetrated his lungs. His first stop was the kitchen, where he could barely make out the fire was licking up the cabinets above the stove and across the counter for all the smoke. Luckily he was able to spot a flash of Prompto’s bright blue pajama pants on the floor behind the dining table before he moved on in his search.  

Of course he would be as close to the fire as he could possibly get. He would not be Prompto, otherwise.

Ignis shoved this thought aside as he lept into action, kicking a flaming chair out of his way as he rushed towards Prompto. He crouched down, gripped Prompto under his arms and dragged him from the room.

Once far enough from the flames, Ignis scooped the boy up in his trembling arms and strode back out into the early evening air.  He laid Prompto in the grass and crouched down again, this time checking his breathing and pulse.

Thankfully, both were there and at near-normal levels, all things considered. He quickly checked the blond over for more injuries, finding some small burns on his arms and hands and a growing lump on his head where it had presumably struck the floor when he fell. The adviser fished his phone from his pocket and quickly dialed for emergency services before planting himself down on the ground next to his lover, pulling the other’s small frame into his lap.

His throat tightened as he gazed up at their perfect little house while it spat flames into the darkening sky. Ignis swallowed down his panic as he pressed gentle kisses to Prompto’s slack brow, running his free hand in circles on the smaller man’s chest as he rocked them both.

“Just stay out of the kitchen, Prompto.” Ignis said from the doorway as the freckled youth headed inside.  It had been three days since the fire, and they were just now being allowed to come back in and collect anything that may be salvageable.

“I know, I know.” Prompto’s voice was still rough; not only from the cold, but also from the smoke inhalation. He stepped lightly through the living room, heading for the hall.

Ignis followed, taking the same path; both men giving the kitchen a wide berth. Prompto was heading towards their bedroom, finding it mostly intact; just light soot stains covering everything. The adviser pulled out a notebook and began making a list of everything they would need to have packed up and delivered to their storage unit while Prompto began gathering the things they needed right then.

It was a short trip; they collected a few bags of clothing and some of Ignis’ important files. Most of the trunk was filled with Prompto’s camera equipment and various other electronics. While the blond carried the last of their things out to the car, Ignis found himself wandering towards the kitchen, though he was careful to remain outside the room.

He couldn’t help the sadness that swept over him. They’d spent so many mornings in this room, talking softly over breakfast. This was actually the first room they’d made love in when they had moved in. Now, the room was riddled with half-burnt debris and there was a clear spot outlined in soot where Prompto had been laying while fire raged all around him.

What remained of the interior was mostly black, but great chunks of the outside wall were missing and daylight shone through in cheerful juxtaposition to the destruction it illuminated. The fire had began due to a faulty light on the stove; it had not come on to indicate that it was heating when Prompto had put the soup on, and in his sickly stupor, he simply gave up--leaving it on as he went back to bed, believing the stove to be broken. After a few hours, the soup had cooked down and began to burn; the inspector reasoned that the curtains above the stove had probably been the first thing to actually catch fire and it had quickly spread from there.

He supposed he’d been lost in his melancholy longer than necessary, for he was startled out of his thoughts by a hesitant arm encircling his waist.

He wrapped his own arm around Prompto’s shoulders, pulling him closer, smiling a little at the warmth that rose in his chest when the smaller man leaned bodily into him.  

“I’m so sorry, Iggy.” Prompto ground out, rubbing his face into Ignis’ side. “Looks like all your stuff is ruined. Kinda unfair that my stuff’s ok, but you couldn’t save anything of yours.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Ignis squeezed Prompto’s shoulder and dropped a kiss into his hair.  “I saved you, didn’t I? You’re all the ‘stuff’ I need.”

Prompto chuckled, poking Ignis in the side playfully. “The only kind of ‘stuff’ I am is hot stuff.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively at the adviser, who groaned and rolled his eyes in response.

“I love you dearly, but please save the puns for me.” He laughed a little louder, a little more freely, as Prompto pulled him towards the door.

“Nuh-uh, you don’t own puns, Igs.” Prompto quelled any further argument by pulling Ignis down into a passionate kiss.

It was a cheap way to win the impending playful exchange, but Ignis couldn’t bring himself to mind.

[ohgoddard]

Fist of Fire: Omega.  1.3.

“Now then, Ms. Kiara”

“Please, call me Omega man.”

The exasperated sigh she gave filled me with a small glee I don’t get often due to my incarceration.  “Ms. Kiara, I will refer to you by your full name and nothing more. Now then, will we be getting to the murders today?”

Oh she wishes.

“You know I met The Query? Strange man, I say. Why, it was a cold day in Mobile..”

The frustrated noise in her throat almost made me stop due to laughter, but I was too committed  (heh, committed) to stop telling the story.

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

Alabama wasn’t a very forgiving place for someone like me. You know, someone with powers. Thought I was going somewhere else with that, didn’t ya? Ha, no. I don’t have to state the obvious. Alabama was still the only state in the country that forbid use of superpowers. Hence, it was a hotbed of amazing hide-outs and vigilantes who were really good at not getting caught. I’m not gonna go into my political views on it, but I really think they should open the state up. Would kick the likes of Pharaoh and The Anti-American out of the country, y’know? Really, just the entire state is a -

Excuse me. Sorry I didn’t mean to go off like that. I'm sounding like a member of the Powers Committee, heh. Anyways, I was in Alabama hiding after the warehouse incident. During the night, some heroes almost saw me and it nearly blew my cover. I was still trying to be Omegaman, remember. They couldn’t see the ‘man of justice’ throwing fire hydrants into kidnappers, can they? Nor can they see me, er, him punch a drug dealer into mist. It would really ruin my image, y’know?

I don’t know why you’re giving me that look. I can hear your heartbeat too, doc. Yeah, I killed them. I killed a couple dozen that night. A few every other night. The criminals just keep coming, the voices got to me, I couldn’t stop it anymore. Being a hero in the day didn’t make them stop. Only getting rid of what caused them did. So yeah, I killed them. The drug deals who delt to kids who OD’s then died in their crying mother’s hands. The kidnappers who’d ransom their prized woman into sex-slavery and the whole ring of sickos who bid on em. The pimps, the movers, the shakers. If they made a voice, I stopped it. Not like there was lost to society anyways. If they had families, they’re better off without the likes of them.  Now please slow your heartbeat, its annoying me.

Anyways, where was I? Right, so after I went on a justice spree throughout the city I had to leave. See I… I awoke from that face I slid into. The one that killed the White-whatisitname and all those others. And I felt all that I did. I went into the bathroom of my shitty apartment and just threw up. The entire time I still heard the voices. Different voices now, caused by different people. It didn’t matter what I did, which I think only made me sicker. After going to those lengths, again not my first time doing this mind you, and still not hearing a even the smallest dip in terror? Why I went ballistic on my poor apartment after I was done in the bathroom. I even destroyed that. Kinda wish I didn’t, really wanted that 

Which led me to my escape to Alabama. Yeah, it wasn’t really because of the warehouse or what I did that night, but it was related. So I was Alabama. Mobile, to be specific. I don’t why I went to a big city, i’ll be completely honest. Well, I do. See, the voices were awful in any city. But in any Alabama city? Thirty times worse. But I stuck it out. 

There was never a quiet moment in the city. Constant gun fire, laser fire, explosions. I would question why anyone would ever live in the city, but then my rent was $200 a month so I shut my mouth. You would see, well I guess not  you, but you would see people flying then helicopters that follow them then a loud explosion shortly after. Heroes were fighting a double front war down there. Alabama is home to the real heroes. They do it for the right reasons down there. They fight the government and, ugh I hate using this word but, evil too. Sometimes they’re the same. What am I kidding? Most of the time.

I met The Query during my fourth night there. And coincidentally, my first time being Omega Man in Alabama. I tried to keep that… that itch from being scratched for so long. But the voices got to me. Most nights I didn’t even need superhearing, they screamed right outside my window. I tried for so long to keep my head down, but it got bad. I would rock myself to sleep, clawing at my ears. I tore the drywall down in fits of panic, the noises in my head never stopping. I screamed, joining them in an immaculate chorus of suffering. The fourth night I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to feel secure, I wanted to feel safe. When I am Kiara, I am nothing but a target for those disgusting hyenas that roam the streets. When I am Kiara, I am at my weakest, despite not really being. 

The voices don’t hurt me when I wear the helmet. The stares from the predators are averted when I wear his shirt. My shirt. Omega Man protects people like Kiara. 

Like my dad did.

I jumped out my window and flew high into the sky, where the voices almost drowned out. I could see the entire city, and a good bit of it was on fire. Like usual. The entire state was an economic drain, I don’t know why they keep the power ban. See like, the federal government doesn’t even ban the use of them its like -

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

“Ms.Kiara.”

She cut me off? Wow, she’s feeling brave today. Especially after the whole terror thing she experienced.

I turned my restrained head to look at her, being sure to flex my neck muscle to do it. I broke one of the straps and she jumped, but quickly tried to regain her composure in that way people who are not composed do. She cleared her throat in a very panicked and lady-like manner.

“Please keep on topic.”

I flash her a smile. 

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

I met The Query at the end of the night. I stopped several robberies, thew some cops and their cars into the water, and tusseled with The Anti-American. He can throw a good punch, especially given the current political climate. I was sitting on the roof of a building, holding my ribs because damn The AA can hurt, when I heard his footsteps approach from behind.

“Well well, I haven’t seen your shiny bronze head in this part in a while. What brings the law into the realm of the lawless?”

I turned to see a..normal man. He was by all accounts completely passable. He wore a long yellow trenchcoat adorned with a silver question mark on his shoulder, a scarf that obscured his face up to his nose, and a curious george man in the yellow hat...hat. I could tell he had a gun in his pocket, but it wasn’t pointed at me. But his eyes definitely were. And they were looking me over. Hard. I felt like Kiara and not Omega Man in that moment, underneath those bright yellow spotlights of eyes. I wondered if my collar was dipping, if my padding was too form fitting, if my hair was sticking out from underneath my helmet. 

“Why, you haven’t changed a single bit!”

I breathed a sigh of relief. His voice was  a ‘high class’ southern one, sounding like someone’s grandpa. And with the salt and pepper hair I saw under his hat, he probably was. 

I said, “Who are you again? My memory evades me.”

The man smiled underneath his scarf and chuckled. “Why, then I must be doing my job well. I’m The Query, hero of the streets and the common man. When the police cannot, and often can’t, find out who killed your husband or stole your car, I am there. I investigate big gang bosses, snoop in on the Lords of the Underground, and even deliver justice of my own. Of course I don’t expect you to remember me, It's a trick I use. No one ever does.”

I just nodded my head in the way you do when you think the other person is spouting nonsense.

“But, I cannot say the same for you, Omega Man. The entire city knows you’re here. And if I can find you, others are not too far behind. But its good I’m here, I have something to tell you.”

I need to add that he was mere inches away from my face the entire time. I was glad that my mask obscured my face, and his breath. I don’t imagine it smelled nice. I was happy when he stepped away and struck a dramatic pose on the edge of the building, with a sudden wind coming over the city.

“There are murmurs in the underground. Someone close to you is out to get you. Be safe.”

With that he jumped off the side of the building. I rushed to the side, but he was gone! I all but thought he disappeared into nothingness until I saw a bright yellow coat walking briskly the following day. But by then, I was Kiara again. Doesn’t matter what he said though. He was too late.

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

The doors shut behind me to my room and I tore off my bounds once again. Another day of them thinking they’re getting somewhere in my psyche, and another day of me completely fuckign with them. I have to change it up a bit every day. Throw in a new personality, be sad one day then be quirky and quick to violence the next. I have to keep my crazy persona for just a bit longer. 

I listen for the TV. For the news station down the hall, past the screams of the deranged.

They’re talking about a parade for the local town here, planned for next month.

Whirlwind’s parade.

[jessknightintrouble-blog]

Captives Of The Cartel (4)

Chapter Four: ‘Mighty’ Megan Woods

  The hours went by; two miserable, bound up bodies shrugged and wriggled to get free. Between them, all they managed to move was their heads and fingers; to little or no positive effect. Hannah had fancied herself as an escape artist ever since her previous boyfriend had tied her up one night for a bet they’d made after a few two many glasses of Shiraz. He was no boy scout though, and within minutes she had successfully managed to free herself from his amateurish knots.

 Alas, the experience had given Hannah such a thrill that subsequently, at random intervals, she had tied herself up and tried to get free. She’d ordered all manner of bondage gear from a rather discreet website online and took no shortage of glee from the experimentation. Most times, she managed to free herself very quickly. However, this current situation was somewhat different. As much as she used her tried and tested techniques, as much as she writhed and twisted and turned her hands every which way, she always found tight rope holding them firmly together. There was no slack in the ropes at all and the tight gag filling her mouth made Hannah desperately short of breath almost the whole time.

Hannah looked over at Jordan but she had – for some time – given up the fight to get free and was now merely hunched uncomfortably in her bonds, sobbing uncontrollably. She was a year or so younger than Hannah, and the slightly elder sleuth suspected that Jordan had joined for the romantic side rather than the hard slog. Their current predicament of calculated peril was quite the wake up call.

  Still, Hannah had faith. Megan was still on the outside; she knew the basic whereabouts of both her Agents, and surely next on the agenda would be a call to the police. Even a basic search of the house would be enough to find the young pair of captives. Surely, justice would prevail; and Lady McCrystal and her rotten henchwoman would get their just desserts in jail, and Hannah and Jordan would be freed.

*

  Back at the ‘Woods Detective Agency’ Office in downtown Eschar City, Megan Woods paced the floor, mobile phone in hand. “Why the hell have I not heard anything back from either Hannah or Jordan?” She cursed to herself.

 Megan: the founder of the Agency was a stunning blonde in her early thirties with piercing blue eyes that could usually get answers out of even the most unwilling of sources. She had an attractively svelte and athletic figure which usually was – as was the case today – poured into a fitted business skirt-suit and heels. Her multiple tattoos – she had an uncommon love of animated ‘villainess’ characters – were usually hidden under such formal, day-to-day attire but occasionally, and enticingly, were exposed to the public. She’d formed the ‘Woods Detective Agency’ after a few unhappy years in the Eschar City Police Department, primarily to counter specific crimes against women in the City and its outlying district; issues which she didn’t think were being dealt with by the official authorities. Her maverick techniques – while grabbing some headlines and getting much positive notice from feminist activists - didn’t always sit too well with the (predominantly male) powers that be in the city.

 Megan had a small, close-knit squad, and was beginning to fear the worst for her two missing operatives; her newest recruits. She was savvy enough to realise the worst-case-scenario had happened: both of them had been caught by her nemesis and whatever goons she had working for her. But what the hell was she going to do about it? With what she’d uncovered on the Lady over the years, Megan severely doubted McCrystal would contact the Police. That was most certainly not in her M.O. Her investigations showed that the Lady worked in the grey, shadowy land between the criminal and legal, never too far over the boundaries on either side.

  “I will have to go in myself, and rescue them.” Megan played the scenario out in her head, and kept coming to the same worrying conclusion. “The Police won’t do anything with the evidence I’ve got. Besides, the EPD aren’t exactly best buddies with me and Lady McBitchall still holds a hell of a lot of sway with them. No, I’ve got to go it alone. I had better wait until dark, though. I’ve got that heads-up that she is having a sick soiree tonight with a bunch of dubious business visitors from all over the place. The commotion could make it slightly easier and they may be off their guard a bit. I’m pretty sure I can blag my way in as an uninvited guest.”

  Megan sighed heavily, still looking at her phone, which still wouldn’t humour her. She wished Jenny Masters was still in town; the pair of them together could’ve handled this problem. Meg immediately cursed the thought. When did she become so reliant on Jenny? True, Miss Masters was as good as a partner for her in the agency these days, but Meg rankled at the thought that her friend was establishing herself as the brains of the operation. The trip to Hawaii was Jen’s first vacation for years, and in the two weeks she’d gone, Meg had managed to let things slide, not to mention go too far in her McCrystal investigation and endanger her two youngest agents.

  Still, Jenny was due back in a couple of days, and Meg – however it stung – was very glad of that particular fact.

  She sat down at her cluttered desk amongst screeds of unfiled paperwork and at least three half-drunk cups of coffee. Phone still in hand, she bit the bullet and composed a message to Jenny.

  “Jenny… I know I said I wouldn’t bother you in Hawaii but we’ve got a problem back at the ranch. I think McCrystal has kidnapped Hannah and Jordan. I don’t know what else to do. Going in solo, hopefully see you on the other side. Meg x”

  Megan silently cursed herself again. She eventually closed and locked up the office and went home to change and prepare for the evening.

At least she had the jump on McCrystal with the insider knowledge of this elite party. The files provided by Jenny’s contacts at the clandestine SOLARIS organization had been typically thorough; she knew many of the guests names and their backgrounds. She had no doubt that if she dressed up to the nines, she could get in as a girlfriend of one of the guests. She knew it would be that kind of party; no wives allowed. The kind of debauched scene disgusted Megan almost as much as the thought of Jordan and Hannah held captive in that den of inequity.

  Megan looked at herself in the mirror. She looked tired, true, but she was still pretty. Indeed, she knew that pretty women at these grotesque shindigs would be duly provided for the guests who did not have ‘friends’. Tonight, as much as she hated the idea, Megan Woods would be one of those girls.

*

  At the McCrystal Mansion, preparations were getting underway for the evening’s events. Elliott had moved both Hannah and Jordan upstairs to a seldom-used spare bedroom on the top floor of the West Wing. Formerly, the room used to be the servant's quarters, Sophia mused. Appropriate for these two young beauties. In time, they themselves would make lovely servants. Slaves, even.

  The room had a large, old style mahogany bed with thick wooden ends high off the ground and strong carved legs. As the girls would now be closer together, Elliott tied them back to the bed legs. She smiled as she did so, observing that they looked like wonderful figure heads at the each end of the bed. She used metres and metres of rope around their bodies to almost weld them to the wood. Finally, cruelly, Elliott strung out a length of tape over both of their foreheads and round the wood. They were each joined in uncomfortable silence to the bed, and there was no way they could ever get enough movement to actually move such a monumentally heavy object around and create any unwelcome noise.

  Elliott also knew that the room was remote enough, so that no-one would accidentally stumble upon it whilst the party was in full flow. If any bedroom action was going to happen, and it would,  the guests would use the myriad bedrooms already made up on the lower floors.

  Soon after securing her captives once more, the caterers began arriving, and Sophia went into hyperdrive; rushing and fussing around, making sure everything at the mansion was perfect. In her flurry of activity, she almost bumped into Lady McCrystal rushing down the hall.

  “Careful, Ms. Elliott! You’ll do one of us some damage...”

  “Sorry, Ma’am. It’s just, you know, zero hour.”

  “Quite. But everything is going swimmingly as usual. Just one thing; Are you aware of what Ms. Megan Woods looks like?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Mmm. I wasn’t certain either but I have been able to get this from a ‘friend’ in the Eschar Police Force.” Elliott was drawn to an A4 sized sheet of paper the Lady was holding in her right hand. “She has to give her photo in to get an investigators license to use electronic spy tools. Our friend faxed this down, this afternoon. Do keep your eyes peeled for me, there’s a good girl. This meddling vixen is bound to try and get in somehow. And I suspect it will be tonight.”

The Lady passed over the thin slip of paper, which was emblazoned with a fuzzy black and white photograph of what was, despite the lack of quality in the picture, an undeniably sexy woman; blonde, and possibly early-thirties.

  “Very good my Lady. If she shows up, I am certain I will find her. I took the liberty of getting in my friend, Mr. Shields, to keep a close check on the back doors of the West Wing, where that Masters kid got in. I suggested you would be happy to compensate him for his time. I trust this will not cause a problem.”

  “Ah, Ross Shields. A grand idea, Ms. Elliott. No problem at all. Make certain he has some refreshments whilst he is there, but perhaps no alcohol. I do recall an unsavoury incident a couple of years back.” The Lady smiled and made to leave. “Very good, Ms. Elliott. I can see you’re on top form as always.” Lady Clara grinned again and headed off to ready herself for the evening.

  Elliott took another long, lingering look at the picture of Megan Woods to fix that lovely face firmly in her mind, then moved back through to the kitchen. She gave the picture to Shields, who was by now lounging on a chair by the main kitchen table, gurning and joshing with the two young waitresses who were working in there.

  “Whoah, who’s the hottie?” Shields said, admiring the lacklustre photo.

  “Ross, no pissing about. This is serious.” Elliott gripped him firmly by the arm and took him to one side, out of earshot of the workers. “This woman must be caught if she tries to get in, and there’s a good chance that she will, tonight. Not sent back or refused entry, you understand. I want her in and kept safe: out of sight and sound – get the picture? It might not be easy. She’s good. Real good, my Lady says. I know you’re as good as it gets too, when you’re on your game. So don’t mess this up or its shit creek for you. Got it?”

  “Okay Soph. No problem. For the money your Lady is paying I’d lock up my own granny.”

  “Good. And no booze tonight, at least not until later. We don’t want a repeat of the Golf Club incident.”

  Shields held out his hands in front of him and smiled up at Sophia.

  “Clean as a whistle.” He said cheerfully.

*

  Seven Thirty duly arrived at the McCrystal mansion, and sure enough, the guests began to make their way up the driveway.

  Up in their eyrie,  Hannah Masters and Jordan Nerlinger heard little of the gathering and were merely left in their painful cocoons as the sweat trickled down their young bodies. Downstairs, the smart and tuxedo-clad Sophia Elliott was in her element as she greeted and welcomed a constant flow of people in through the front double-doors. Loud, large Texans in expensive suits with glamorous, loud girls hanging giggling on their arms. Some selected girls came along separately and were able to choose their partner for the night from the throng of millionaires and billionaires.

  On the street outside, in a car under the cover of overhanging foliage from the adjacent park, Megan Woods bided her time. She knew the guest of honour would arrive bang on eight o’clock with his entourage, and she hoped to sneak in then with the inevitable rush. Ortega’s crew was generally on a par with a Hip-Hop superstar, and there would no doubt be plenty of cover in amongst the minders, officials, girls and hangers-on.

  Sure enough, As Meg’s digital car clock clicked over to 8.00, a large, silver limousine drew up followed by two Mercedes saloons and headed through the opening gates, stopping just in front of the mansion itself. Quickly, Megan was out and sauntering down the road to mix seamlessly with the small crowd of people extrapolating themselves from the cars. The doors of the limo stayed closed until five large, suited men had got out of both Mercedes’ and fanned out across the pavement, looking intently at all the passers by, some of whom stopped to watch the spectacle.

  Also getting out were four elaborately dressed young women who chattered loudly, giggling to each other as they waited. Megan moved up to stand behind them as the door to the Rolls was eventually opened and out stepped a stocky latino in an expensive, shiny double-breasted suit.

  “Emiliano Ortega.” Megan mused to herself. “And, of course, his extensive entourage.” Two more gorgeous girls – a blonde and a brunette – clambered out of the limo followed by a thin, rather weedy looking man in a pricey but ill-fitting suit who clasped a black leather briefcase tight under his arm.

  Ortega marched up to the double-doors of the McCrystal Mansion, which Sophia Elliott held open in greeting as the gaggle of girls followed, covered by the bodyguards. Megan was glad she had correctly overdressed for the occasion to suitably change her appearance; a slinky tight black Lycra micro dress, black hold-up stockings and four inch black patent heels. She had blown her jet-black wig into a halo around her face with ringlets cascading over her tattooed shoulders.

  Megan went with the flow. As she passed Elliott she giggled, grinned and nodded in greeting, sensing ignoring her would leave her suspicious. For now, Meg’s tried-and-tested bimbo act seemed to be working. Soon enough, the entourage were congregated in the hall as Lady McCrystal, drawing gasps in a spectacular caramel-coloured ballgown, paraded down the stairs to meet Ortega.

  “Mr. Ortega. Welcome to my humble dwelling. I am so glad you accepted my invitation and were able to attend tonight. My home is yours for the evening.”

  “How nice to see you Lady Clara. And looking so utterly radiant.” Ortega spoke not as he looked; but in the strangely clipped accent of the British Public school system with only a hint of his Hispanic roots. “I was truly honoured to receive your invitation, and to be here tonight. I trust you have met my associate, Mr. Morley.” Ortega gestured to the thin man, who bobbed his head in acknowledgement and clutched his briefcase tighter to his arm. Truly, Morley didn’t look the partying type. “Not to mix business with pleasure, but Morley has some papers that we need to run through sometime this evening.”

  “Of course, Sir. That will be duly taken care of. But a surely little pleasure before business?” Lady Clara smiled winningly, her immaculate white teeth in full view. “Come and have a drink first; meet the others and then we can move off to my study to be in peace before dinner. I see, Mr. Ortega, that you have brought some friends as well.” Lady Clara performed a strange, theatrical curtsy on the stairs to the gathered women. “Welcome, Ladies. Come on through to the main rooms of my mansion and enjoy yourselves. Copious drinks await you. Elliott, please do see to my guests. Make sure they are well looked after.”

  “At once, my Lady.” Elliott chirped, the cheeriness sitting somewhat incorrectly with her. “Please follow me, Mr. Ortega. And would you care for your usual aperitif?”

*

  The party moved on, chattering away, to the spectacular, gold hued, high-ceilinged drawing room where the other guests were already enjoying the luxurious hospitality of Lady Clara. Megan followed suit for a while, but eventually dawdled in the corridor to try and sneak away. She was caught by a firm arm around her waist and Lady McCrystal’s voice close at her side. The incognito detective froze on the spot.

  “Come my dear.” The lush voice whispered in her ear, making the hairs on Megan’s neck stand up and take notice. “I shall take you on a guided tour later, and you can see all my treasures. But first, do come and meet the others. I haven’t seen you before. You are…?”

  “Oh... Catriona Archer, my Lady.” Megan recovered quickly. “You do have an extremely beautiful home. I was just admiring that watercolour over there. Sisley, isn’t it?”

  Lady McCrystal smiled, at once admiring the painting and her newfound favourite guest. Megan saw the lust on the Lady’s face, and in her voice, realising it was something she could play on. All she had to do was resist driving a fist into that pretty face.

  “Indeed, my dear.” Lady McCrystal grinned, impressed. “You certainly seem to know your art. Yes, I acquired that piece instead of a business debt just after the Gulf War; the first one, that is. Some of my Arab partners were having understandable trouble with their cash flow and I had always admired it. There are four pieces in all; the others are spread around upstairs. I would be happy to reveal them to you later, if it would please you?”

  “Sure!”

  Skilfully, the Lady steered the smiling Megan into the main, bustling room of the function, after the other guests. Elliott appeared shortly afterwards with a huge silver tray bearing multiple flutes of champagne; and Megan gladly took one and looked around, tentatively as the Lady Clara reluctantly excused herself to wander off to mingle with the retinue. Fortunately, Megan spotted no-one she knew that could feasibly reveal her, but she realised the clock was ticking. She had to get out of the main throb of the party and into the darker reaches of the mansion very soon, to find Hannah and Jordan. In her heart, she knew they had to be here somewhere.

    In the kitchen, Sophia Elliott deposited the now empty silver tray into a dishwasher rack; all the while browbeating various members of the catering staff about ‘speed of service’ and ‘pride and efficiency’.

  Instead of moving back to the drawing room and the main party, she took a detour; heading to the back door of the west wing.

  Looking out the door, she could see that Ross Shields was pacing the back patio, smoking a cigarette but remaining impressively true to his promise of sobriety. He looked elegant in his well-fitted suit, which complemented his lithe but muscled frame. His blonde hair was well-coiffed for the occasion and his trim beard was evidently recently groomed. He nodded as he spotted Elliott coming through the door.

  “Any joy?” Sophia said, slightly red cheeked and with hints of fluster in her words.

  “Nada.”

  Sophia sighed, the stress of the evening starting to show itself on her face.

  “She’ll be here, I know it. Just keep your eyes peeled, okay?” She said.

  “My eyes are peeled, Ms. Elliott.” Shields said, firmly. “Not to say anything out of place, but I think you should be more concerned with what’s going on at your end.”

  “What?! How dare you! I...”

  “The chick in black with the tats and the too-pasty-skin to have jet black hair?”

  “Uh?”

  “Came in with – but not quite with – Ortega’s party? I got a squizz at her on the CCTV unit back there. She’s not kosher, Soph, I can tell. You should definitely trail that one.”

  Sophia relented, closing her eyes as she recalled the girl at the door that Shields was describing. She tried to build a photofit in her mind combining that image and the fuzzy photograph of Megan Woods. A possibility. A definite possibility.

  “I… I will. Thanks Ross.” She said softly, almost drifting back inside towards the escalating noise of chatter and laughter.

  “De Nada...” Shields said smiling, taking another puff of his cigarette and going back to his vigil.

*

  The minutes rolled by in the lavishly furnished drawing room – each one feeling like an eternity for Megan and making her feel more edgy. She was locked in conversation with an idiotic Texan in a beige suit and Stetson who was boasting that everything in Dallas was bigger and better than anywhere else. Whilst trying not to act too bored or to arouse any suspicion, Megan noticed Lady McCrystal and Emiliano Ortega move from the throng towards the door.

  “Now’s my chance.” Megan thought, excusing herself, moving after the dubious pair and leaving the Texan mid-boast. She was so fixed on following the pair quietly out of the room she didn’t notice Elliott watching her from the corner; a concentrated yet puzzled expression forming on her face. Out of the main room of the function and into the hallway corridor, Ortega and McCrystal went left, arm-in-arm in deep conversation, presumably to the study and to go forth with their planned business meeting. Megan saw no-one else around and decided to go for broke. She went the opposite way, at pace, towards the main staircase. Elliott sneered, watching intently from a guarded position in the doorway. The bodyguard crept from the drawing room behind her, and made to follow her upstairs.

[ultradisplacement-blog]

Failed Dates Plunge Me Deeper Into Limerence—A World of Perpetual Fantasy That May Just Border on Psychosis

I mean it. I really do. I’d rather spend a lifetime of limerence over someone so unattainable that barely knows I exist than go on another date with a blockhead who didn’t know that mayo is made of egg yolks, has never heard of Lykke Li (or any decent indie artist, at that), mistakes gender equality for feminism, and jumps back into my Taxify after he got off ‘cause he remembers he had some groceries to do—at 1 am, mind you. The Taxify that I had ordered and paid for, by the way, because he had no mobile data on his phone to order an Uber, nor could he connect to the Koton wifi (the McDonald’s one had for some reason vanished into thin air that night) or walk three fucking blocks back to his place.

He calls himself a world traveler but would’ve rather taken the subway to the old town instead of walking with me thirty minutes by the city lights, doused in the intertwining smells of shawarma, molten asphalt, and summer heat. Funny, because my definition of ‘world traveler’ is based on my friend George—who quit his office job in the name of freedom, motorbiked his way through (and came down with malaria in) Africa, had to apply for a new passport because the old one, though not expired yet, was full of stamps, and is currently driving a 1984 Skoda that crashed and burned a million times already somewhere in the heaths of Russia, bound for Mongolia—and this fellow couldn’t be further from that level of  “world traveling.” He brags about doing the same thing every day— jumping on a subway train to bypass the unbridgeable half-mile walk between point x and point y. That was the very first red flag that came into view. ‘I’d rather spend those 30 minutes in the old town than... walk,’ he said.  ‘Why? Do you have a curfew or something? It’s only 8:20 pm.’ ‘Nah, I just like luxury.’ Weird statement, coming from someone who backpacks through southeastern Europe and has no Internet on his phone. Means that actually, he’s probably cheaper than a dollar store. I used to be broke AF back when I first started traveling—which didn’t stop me from traveling anyway— but at least I was foresightful enough to download some offline maps so I wouldn’t end up sleeping in a bush in case I lost my way back to the hostel at night. There was also a hint of paranoia which I didn’t fail to take into account when he seemed leery of my Google maps directions and asked some passersby how to get to the old town instead. I was floored, and knew the date was meant to be a failure to remember, but I went for it anyway (if anything, perhaps so I could amass some writing inspiration).

He wouldn’t tell me much about himself except he spent the whole day at Mcdonald's, working his ass off. ‘Are you working at...McDonald’s?’, I managed to ask, trying to hold on to my wig for dear life. ‘Not that I find that a bad thing at all. I used to scrub toilets in a hotel—which is way worse than flipping burgers, some would argue. But it just struck me that you smell quite… fresh. Not like stir-fry oil, mayo, and pickles.’ ‘Nah, I just work from there,’ he retorted. ‘On my laptop, that is. I like to work from different places, like restaurants and cafés. I taught myself Russian and I move from one country to another, doing my thing; translating articles and stuff for some guys.’ To which I asked him whether he was one of those digital nomads or freelancers or whatever, but he didn’t seem acquainted with these terms.

We kept walking side by side, but with a considerable gap between us, I trying to avoid his hand to the utmost of my strength. He said he wants to go back to the States and enroll in Law school next year. ‘Why? Why would anyone wanna do any of that? You have all that we European millennials crave, pray for, and dream of at night—a job that allows you to work even from a McDonald’s lounge in a shithole in Eastern Europe and a passport that gives you the freedom to go wherever the hell your nomadic instinct dictates. Why would you loan your way into Law school and cram the whole constitution of the United States into your head when you could have… this, what you’re having right now?’

‘For the power,’ he answered simply. ‘And because I’m into politics. I don’t like to talk about it, but I am.’ (I failed to mention that when he first called me, he asked me how much money I’ll make as a doctor—a lot less than American doctors do, that’s for sure, but that was none of his business—huge red flag again. I told him, half-jokingly, half-seriously, ‘If you’re a gold-digger, I’m the last person you’d wanna hang out with.’ But he still did want to hang out with me, which I found nice at the time; now, I’m no longer sure.)

‘Well, if you wanna pave your way into the Oval Office and the ridiculous Twitter account with unnecessary capitalization that comes with it, why don’t you just buy a hotel and screw a porn star in one of its luxurious suites? I bet it must be easier and way more satisfying than Law school on the long run.’ Clutch your pearls, I may have just dated (and mocked) the next president of the United States; I sure as hell kick ass.

I hadn’t answered his calls and texts for almost a week. I was still grieving over my missed flight to Milan and the Nick Murphy show I had been looking forward to for so long as though it were my wedding day. I had been vivisected by the pain and the absurdity of the whole situation: a ramshackle, diminutive aircraft which triggered in my mind’s eye the depiction of my being sliced in a zillion pieces following its potential crash as soon as I set  foot onto it; loss of cabin pressure twenty minutes after landing—which was real; and an  emergency landing back to the airport we’d just departed from—realer than Kanye West’s tweets, too—only one hour before the connecting flight. It was lost, so irretrievably lost, and so was I—semi-catatonic in the departures terminal of the airport for the better part of the day, sleep-deprived for thirty hours, looking for solutions where there were none. My hair was blue, and so were my shoulders, the tip of my ears,  the tears trickling down on my cheeks, and my whole doubtful state of rejected aliveness. So blue for nothing. Pathetic and outrageous. I went back home and ran myself a bath—the longest and the most revealing one as yet; it felt more like a rite of passage than a basic body hygiene ritual It took half a bottle of shampoo to take off all that dye, and my hair was so stiff that it looked more like a worn-out broom abandoned in a country backyard than a bundle of human keratin that was supposed to be somehow alive. It took half a bottle of shampoo, but in the end, the whole tubful of blue water went down the drain. As soon as there was no more blue left in me, I got out of the tub and crashed into the bed that I had left unmade, crying myself to sleep.

And for some reason, exactly a week later, I was rehashing my predicament in front of this not-too-tall, not-too-fit, average-looking-and-talking American, who didn’t seem to grasp that I was into writing and I had a special way with words, and took all of my Facebook and Medium posts for mere yacking. He didn’t even ask whose concert I was pining for so badly (not that the name Nick Murphy—or even Chet Faker, his former moniker—would’ve rung any bell; he hadn’t even heard of Lykke Li, for fuck’s sake, though he pretended he was somewhat familiar with Lana Del Rey; that’d better be true). He said that something like this had never happened to him, and he’d been on at least fifty-something flights (which is not a lot, by the way; I didn’t keep track of them, but I think I’ve been on fifty-something flights, too, and I’m not the one who calls herself a world traveler). ‘But I’m glad that at least you’re alive; God must have taught you this lesson so you could be more appreciative of life,’ he reckoned, after I explained to him that loss of cabin pressure basically meant a death sentence because of the hypoxia that ensued—lack of oxygen, in layman’s terms.

‘Oh, really? Exactly on that day, on that special occasion that was so important to me? Why then? Why not on any other fucking city break flight to Brussels or Berlin? Your God is a big-ass jerk sometimes, and his workings lack logic, reason, and mercy. I cannot decipher his hidden motivations, nor do I think that’s of any use to anyone,’ I blurted out without too much consideration or piosity, almost oblivious of the fact that I had spent most of my childhood’s Sunday mornings trying to find the most spine-friendly positions in the pews of my local church (which was quite a fool’s errand, to be honest, but perhaps that was exactly the point— to engage yourself in an act of self-flagellation at least once a week, for three hours, during the Mass).  He seemed quite triggered, because he didn’t believe in what I  believed—namely,  an unfathomable higher power, a spiritual force that had taken the wheel of the universe before it had even been created, whose whims and fancies could at times torpedo all your plans, hopes, and dreams; he believed in a specific celestial entity, in a Christian god who was always righteous and whose decisions we weren’t entitled to question or frown upon. And there I was, an obnoxious little European brat calling his supreme lodestar—the one  in whom each and every American dollar bill ever put into circulation expressed its unflinching belief—“a big-ass jerk.” Yet we somehow managed to dodge an endless religious argument—spoiler alert, for then—and kept walking towards the old town—or so I thought, for at some point, he took a sharp left turn, urging me to follow him: ‘I wanna show you a place.’

The street was impenetrably dark, and my mind should’ve probably started coming up with all sorts of scenarios involving rape, murder, and identity theft—but it didn’t; there was utterly nothing there, and you can’t be afraid of nothing — or can you?  ‘What the hell do you wanna show me? There’s nothing here; not even rats or stray dogs.’ ‘Wait  a little and you’ll see.’ Cool. This is how you roll in life, I told myself. You keep walking and you wait, although nothing might ever come your way. So we kept walking two or three more blocks and then, bam! there we were. Apparently. In front of an old building that reeked of fried fish and garlic sauce. ‘This is where I stayed for two weeks when I first arrived here,’ he enthused, big grin on his face—and due to the neon lights that had wondrously cropped up out of the blue, I was no longer in the dark, and could clearly make out that his dental arches were covered in a yellowish stratum of grim, indicating the fact that mouthwash was probably not at the top of his shopping list (or even at the bottom). That Christian god, or that unfathomable universal force making the world go round, or Satan’s offspring, or Ellen DeGeneres, or whoever rules this fucking world must be a great prankster, I thought to myself, while my musical memory was reproducing the first two lines of the sexiest song I’ve ever heard—Chet Faker’s Melt: ‘Help me breathe, you’re breaking up my speech/While you smile at me, you got the whitest teeth.’ That very same god could’ve been able to crash a plane and kill a hundred people in the process so I’d miss Nick’s concert; so I couldn’t bask in the endorphins milked from my brain by his balmy—yet rabid—voice and the dazzling white of his teeth that would light up the whole venue every time he opened his mouth to set free into the world the most otherworldly sounds I’ve ever got to hear; but he couldn’t, it seems, make me cross paths with a guy that gave a shit about his dental hygiene (and he didn’t even smoke, like Nick does). I had every reason to be pissed off with this god and his sick sense of humor, and I still am; I’ll probably be for a long, long time.

So he’d made such a tremendous (judging by his standards) detour only  to show me the building where he’d been a roomer for a fortnight—a plain, old, decaying house reeking of fried fish and garlic sauce, which would, for reasons known only to him, put that indecorous smile on his filmy teeth. Truth be told, there’s a lot of emotional baggage attached to a rental apartment one uses as a storage room for two weeks until one figures out where to go next. ‘Let’s get the fuck outta here,’ I said, ‘until a hobo doesn’t jump from a bush and screws us in the ass or steals or wallets; or both.’ I may be wrong, but I had an intimation that he meant to show me something else, something he couldn’t find—since he was no longer in the comfy subway that told him precisely when to get off and which exit to take.

‘Are you into museums?’ he asked, as we were making our way out of an underground pass, finally approaching the old town that seemed to have replaced the Sydney Opera House on the world map that evening.

‘Wow. Could you ask me something any vaguer?’ I replied, without trying to conceal my irritation. ‘I mean, I had the time of my life at the Museum of Chocolate in Bayonne, but I think the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart would bore me to death. Seriously now; but if I had a broader choice, between a bar and a museum—whatever museum—I’d probably choose the former.’

‘Right, right,’ he approved. ‘You’re totally right. I, for one, don’t really like art museums; I prefer archeology.’ Hm. So very interesting. I don’t know why, but the fact that someone is into archeology doesn’t tell me anything about them except that… they’re into archeology. If he had told me that broccoli triggers flashbacks of his childhood trauma, I think I would’ve been more impressed—at least that would’ve given me on a platter some food for thought, be it—as most likely would’ve been the case—watered-down pabulum. Maybe if he had elaborated on that a little bit, if he had explained his drive for archeology, why it was so important to him to bring it up on a first date, I would’ve cut him some slack; but no, he just randomly dropped the word ‘archeology’ into the conversation, perhaps to appear more cultured than he really was.  But wait—it can always get worse.

‘Oh, but what about music? What kind of music do you listen to?’

I wish I could’ve buried my face in my hands and cried a lifetime’s worth of frustration away.

‘That’s even vaguer than the museum thing, honestly. The music I listen to is genreless and so eclectic, and there are so many factors into play that prompt me to listen to a certain song at a specific moment in time. But if you want me to reel off a few descriptive words of my bar of choice, here’s my best shot: I listen to a lot of alternative, indie artists; I’m into electronica, downtempo, trip-hop, but also into soul, blues, and jazz; when I write, I’d rather listen to some ambient stuff, some lofi hip-hop, or even dream pop on rainy days. I’m into shoegaze and garage, swing and old R&B, grunge and funk. I like film scores and some Super Bowl halftime playlists. And I worship Lana Del Rey; have you heard of her?’

‘Yes, yes, I have,’ he rushed to reassure me.

‘Good. Or else I would’ve had to kill you.’

‘Why don’t you play me something on your phone? Like, the last song you listened to?’

‘What?! Do you want me to blast it right now, in the middle of the street, without headphones?!’

‘Yeah, why not? I wanna get to know you better.’

‘You must be off your rocker,’ I said, but I did open my Spotify app anyway and played the last song in my library, amid the clanks, whirrs, and honks of the hectic nightlife. What difference did it make? He had no more awareness of my music than I had of the intimate structure of that experimental particle collider at CERN in Switzerland. It was The Cactus Channel’s Wooden Boy, an admirable rendition of a neo-soul song by a much-underrated—yet hugely talented—group from Melbourne. He confesses he’s a metal fan—not a die-hard one, but still. I asked him what was the last live concert he attended and he couldn’t remember, though he said he wanted to go to a Korn show once, but it would’ve cost him about 400 bucks, which he couldn’t afford.

‘What the hell? Who asks that much for a C category ticket? Not even the VIP ones are that much! You must have been on some scalper’s website or something.’

‘No, it was a festival and you had to pay for the whole thing.’

‘You could’ve bought a day ticket, though. One hundred bucks or less. Or you could’ve gone to one of their headlining tours; you know, touring to promote an album all by yourself (plus maybe an opener) is one thing, whereas festivals are another. All you have to do is go to Facebook and type ‘korn’ in the search box, then you’re on their profile; once you’re there, check out the events and see when you can catch them in the closest town; easy as that.’

‘Yeah, you’re right; maybe next time.’

Right; I couldn’t say the same things about us, though. I knew for sure there wouldn’t be a next time.

I digress, but I have to say about this one thing about metalheads (though he obviously wasn’t one; he just feigned a mild interest in a metal band so he could have a musical conversation with me). In my scarce and sparse dating history, he’d be the third metal element, which is way over the top; it’s like thirty percent of all guys I’ve ever dated had something to do with metal one way or another. What is it about my hipsterish, indie, unpigeonholeable ways that seems to attract metalheads like bees to a honeypot? Why, for heaven’s sake; why? For all I know, I’m no more metal than Coldplay or helium; the only metal I transpire is the aluminum in my deodorant (and probably some iron, but I’m not sure; as far as I remember, most of it is eliminated through feces and urine). All three metalheads in my life were made from the same mold, one that I never had a particular affinity for: massive, but not exceedingly tall individuals, with puffy cheeks and some sort of ugly beard, a more or less overflowing beer belly, donned in capris and extra-large T-shirts, nice but insipid, with an average/average-to-high QI. He’d be, however, the first one to believe in a Christian god (the other two were, quite predictably, atheists; but then again, he wasn’t that much of a metalhead anyway). I’d like to believe that I look nothing like a metalhead, at least physically; I look more like a perpetual thirteen-year-old, searching frantically and fruitlessly for an extra-small size and ending up with some polka dot or floral pattern tank top from kid’s section instead, with thready arms, spidery fingers,  and strikingly bulky calves. My face screams that one could beat the crap out of me, so probably that’s why the metalheads may be drawn to me—to fulfill their protective instincts and to keep me safe inside their towering, hairy, fatty, tattoo-adorned arms.  Unfortunately, my helpless ass suffering from severe abandonment issues seeks protection in a different type of arms: more indie and rejective, less fatty and welcoming; I don’t mind the hair and the tattoos, though. What the metalheads and I had never resembled romance—or even dalliance—in a million years; whatever that thing was, it would smother by itself by the second or the third date (I let it go that far only once), and it was for the better. None of them had the guts or the occasion to kiss me, which means that I’d been spared a good deal of embarrassment and social awkwardness; I could only hope the history would repeat itself tonight as well.

He wanted us to go smoke some hookah, proposition which I kindly—but firmly—declined. I explained that I steer clear of any source of smoke whatsoever, because back when I was a three-year-old, my mother— a voracious chainsmoker—put a lighted cigarette in my mouth so I’d stop pestering her with my asking what it was like to smoke. ‘This is what it’s like to smoke!’ she said, transplanting the cigarette from her mouth to mine, and causing me to choke so badly that I swore never to touch such a damn thing again. And it worked, because my mother is the smartest person I know. She was all too aware that interdiction would’ve only whetted my curiosity, so she shot the vice into my lungs like a vaccine instead; as a result, I gained a—it would seem—lifelong immunity to the “disease.”  My sharp refusal lowered his spirits instantly, so he took an intellectual approach in his attempt to talk me into it:

‘But do you at least know what it is?’

‘Of course I do; I’m not an idiot. I clearly specified—any source of smoke whatsoever is a no-go for me. ’

‘I didn’t say you were an idiot; I was just hoping I’d deprive you of your better judgment.’

‘You wouldn’t be the first one to try; or to fail, at that.’

‘Oh, man. Then maybe a beer or two will do the trick.’

‘Bad news—lately I’ve been drinking only Coke zero; and tonight will be no exception.’

‘There’s no way out with you,’ he conceded, before asking me one more time if I was totally sure I didn’t wanna try the hookah. I was.

I wish there had been a way out of that date, though. Particularly so when he felt that I wouldn’t mind him holding my hand on the street.

‘My hand is okay without being held,’ I said, ‘with all this heat and everything. My sweat glands have always been hyperactive and it’s a bit disgusting.’

‘It’s okay, I don’t mind holding it.’

I did, which is why I liberated myself from his grip as best I could; to which he responded by grabbing me by the shoulders. That is when I knew that I hands down loathed him, and that was the long and the short of it.

We stopped for a drink at a street bar. I was quite taken aback when I saw that he ordered the exact same thing as I had—a Coke zero, that is. I looked at him in sheer perplexity.

‘I guess you were saying something about some beers?!’  

‘Yeah, but I’m not drinking on my own. Drinking is an experience that needs to be shared. If you’re not having alcohol, then I’m not having alcohol either.’

‘What the hell. If I feel like having a beer in my dorm room—alone, with Lana Del Rey singing in the background Pretty When You Cry—I’ll have a fucking beer, alone in my room; or with Lana Del Rey;  or in a restaurant at a table for one (is that even a thing?), or with the devil himself, or under any given circumstances I feel like having a beer. I don’t need anyone to hold it for me.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t do that; besides, I drink a lot of Coke zero anyway, so that’s why I had a Coke zero tonight instead of a beer.’

‘Weird; you didn’t mention a word about your love for Coke zero ten minutes ago, when I told you this is the only beverage I’ve been binging on lately.’

‘Why do you think I should’ve?’

‘I don’t know; maybe because I would’ve?! Maybe because it makes sense?!’

‘It makes sense only because you want it to.’

‘Right. So very pseudo-philosophical and Coelho-lite. Or -like. Or whatever.’

‘How often do you actually drink?’

‘Wait, what? Are you trying to assess whether I might use a stint of drying up in a rehab? Because I’m having a Coke zero and not a beer? Do you think I’m trying to conceal my forbidden cravings or something?’

‘No, it was just an innocent question; I totally understand if you don’t feel comfortable answering it.’

‘There’s nothing uncomfortable about my relationship with booze, except I don’t have any estimates in terms of consumption. I drink whenever I feel like it. I don’t need an occasion or company. I don’t drink every day, but I don’t drink once a year either. I don’t fucking know how much I drink. I can do with one pint of Guinness and stay highly functional and mentally aware, but I can also binge-drink, blackout, and puke in a plastic bucket, if you want to know the minutiae behind how alcohol gets in and out of my system.’

‘Wow. Cool. Okay. And how often do you read?’

‘That’s easy. I have an answer, and that is every day. But what does reading have to do with getting liquored up? Am I missing something? Or are you particularly fond of numbers and statistics?’

‘No, but I just figured that the more you read, the less you drink, and the other way around. That’s the way I see it, at least.’

‘’the hell?! So you think my brain must be so tiny that it can’t imbibe both booze and knowledge at once, right? You sure as hell haven’t heard of Bukowski, my friend.’

We had our Cokes zero anyway and he pretended to be examining my rings in order to hold my hand again. And again he feigned interest, inquiring me about their signification.

‘Well, I wear them because of the sense of unity they provide; and because I believe everything comes full circle sooner or later. And also because I need to have something to do with my fingers when I can’t sit still; otherwise, I’d have to run my fingers through my hair or do other weird stuff that would come off as inappropriate in public.’

‘I see,’ he said. Truth is, you do look like that kind of person who’s into astrology, crystals, bio-energy, spirituality, and the like,’ he said, pouring his Coke zero in a glass (I hadn’t asked for one, so I just sipped it intermittently straight from the can, in my usual, not very ladylike manner).

I almost choked on my Coke. It’s true I check my horoscope on Elle.com for fun every now and then, but that’s quite a far cry from incarnating all that plethora of esotericism and bullshit he had so casually churned out at my face.

‘And truth is, you do look like that kind of person who likes to make all the wrong assumptions about people they’ve known for a minute. You see me wearing a shirt that reads ‘Gender Equality’ and you automatically assume that I’m a feminist, which fills you with dread and disgust; you leaf through my Facebook posts and automatically assume that I’m a yacker, though you have no idea that I’ve been writing longer than I’ve been menstruating, that writing is my whole life and the only thing that I feel I can actually do—little does it matter that it’s writing, not talking; you say that the average female uses 7k words a day, whereas I do 147k; you hear me dropping some indie artists’ names and you automatically assume that I must be into celebrities and Gossip Girls, though those people are so famous that you’ve never even heard of them; you notice a bunch of rings on my fingers and you automatically assume that I’m some sort of transcendental mystic, brewing tadpoles alive in a cauldron in her bathroom and hoarding crystals for the sake of her chakras’ balance. You’re so wrong you can’t even imagine. Shall I go on, shall we call it a night, or would you rather tell me something factual about yourself, like, I don’t know, how was your life back in America?’

Oh, my, that escalated quickly; so quickly that it caught him off-guard, which means things could get even worse from that point of no return. Nevertheless, I must admit that it surprised me to hear that his life in America is not something he likes to discuss on a date; he’d rather change the topic or start making some more wrong assumptions—that, at least, he didn’t seem to mind.

‘I don’t want you to be that girl I’m discussing my life in America with; it’s just something I don’t do. Not with girls, not on a date.’

I can’t tell for sure, but I must have choked on my Coke again. Why wouldn’t he want to talk about his life back in America “with girls, on a date?” Had I been a boy, would that have changed things in any way? What was there to hide? Was he smuggling keys on a schooner in the Caribbean or shoplifting from Walmart and TJ Max? Did he have a criminal record for driving without a license? Did he attempt to cut his wrists in a friend’s beach house in San Diego because he couldn’t stifle his pedophilic urges? Mind you, I can make a bumper crop of wrong assumptions, too; just try me.

‘Why is America a taboo subject? I thought we weren’t talking about your foot fetish or the fact that you love the smell of your navel lint. I’m a European girl, and you’re an American out on a date with me. Do you think I’m here in the hope that I might wanna wheedle a green card out of you someday?’

‘Nope, it’s not that. I mean, I could help you with the green card anyway when I become a lawyer.’

‘How considerate. Thanks, but I don’t think it will ever be the case. I mean, my needing your legal assistance, not your becoming a lawyer.’

Then he suggested we get going, even though we hadn’t finished our drinks. We can walk with them, he said, but before paying the bill, he chugged his down in a gulp. I looked at him, baffled and reduced to silence. I got mine and took a few more sips, and we resumed our walking,  but then he insisted to hold the can for me, which made me realize that what he actually meant was that he wanted to drink the soda he had paid for, so I handed it straight away to its rightful owner. Quite predictably, he wasn’t late to do what I had anticipated he would, and then asked me whether I still wanted to drink that thing. Nosir, it’s all yours—do with it whatever the hell you want; I don’t want your saliva anywhere near my inexhaustible mouthpiece that spits out 147k words a day.

At some point, we found ourselves in front of a Christian-Orthodox church—a church that, goodness only knows why,  was open at 10 or 11 pm, and a priest was firing off a raucous sermon on why adultery and greed will drag us to hell. The doors were wide open because it was sweltering hot, so we could see and hear the whole thing from outside. A handful of people were listening meekly to the sermon, eyelids heavy with sleep and boredom, while others were moving about to and fro, lighting candles for the living and for the dead or groping for the best angle that would do justice best to their  Instastories. He wanted us to go in, which I found ridiculous.

‘An hour ago I called God a big-ass jerk, and now you want me to step inside his home as though nothing had happened?! Why would I do that? Why would I do that even if I hadn’t called God a big-ass jerk? I know by heart these chestnuts that are supposed to scare the shit out of our straying souls and guide us to the right path. I’ve made it through six years of med school; hell is the last thing that can frighten me. Besides, it’s ridiculous; I never imagined that I’d be taken to church on a first date. You must have taken Hozier literally, but that song is so 2013, though; it’s 2018 now.’

‘Why? We’ll just go in a couple minutes, take a peek, do that sign, and that’s it. The architecture is beautiful.’

‘Do that sign? You mean, the cross? You’re not even an Orthodox; that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. There are people out there, something is happening—something that is none of our business; this isn’t the right time to play tourist.’

‘Oh, come on, it’ll only take a minute!’

And, believe it or not, I consented. ‘At least I can write about it,’ I told myself after the smell of incense, burned wax, and human sweat kicked us out of God’s Home in thirty seconds, just like Adam and Eve had been banished from the Garden of Eden at the dawn of time (except we hadn’t thankfully spawned the whole of mankind in the process). Deep down into the bottomless pit of the old town nightlife, though, his appetite for hookah was suddenly revived, and he asked me once again whether I was sure I didn’t wanna sample a puff with him. For the third and last time, I was; I didn’t want to. If there’s one thing that I deserve credit for, it’s that I have a knack for holding my ground under the direst and the most overpowering of circumstances. Back in LA, perhaps the most handsome guy I’ve ever made out with poured gallons of Bourbon down my throat—and even though I was dead-drunk, I could still say no when he undid my bra and unzipped his fly. It was hard (the situation, that is), but I had to; I didn’t wanna sleep with him because I didn’t wanna sleep with him; I didn’t wanna sleep with him because I was drunk. I’d had some minor blackouts, and I wanted to avoid a huge one that could explain a potential HIV contraction or a cocaine overdose (I was also on my period, but that’s just a piddling detail; or is it?). So, yeah; I’d rather sleep with someone when I’m 100% aware that this is what is about to happen—so I can blame it solely on temptation and my poor decision-making skills when I end up emotionally attached and they sleep around like normal people do, without giving a fuck about me and my attachment issues.

He wanted us to sit on a bench in front of the church—one that was circled by bums resting their bodies on newspapers and asking for alms—which I found a rather uninspired idea, so we just kept walking until we found a bench that was slightly less parasitized by unwelcome human presence and the odors thereof—which the crisp night air would only enhance. Out of the blue, he started talking about evolution; he told me that some scientists keep some secret genes in the lab, and that someday, maybe in thirty years from now, dinosaurs may be brought back to life. Birds are the closest thing there is to them, he said scholastically, and they might find a way to suppress some of their genes so that their eggs would hatch baby dinosaurs instead of chickens. Right, I said. And that wasn’t all: some people are born with tails (which some of them can move) due to pretty much the same reason—those atavistic genes undergo some mutations and aren’t silenced properly. I’d never heard of people being born with tails, but that sounded more like spina bifida to me; but from that to being born as a dinosaur instead of a chicken (or a human?), there’s a long way to go. That was nothing new under the sun to me; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that’s one of the few things I remember from my embryology lectures. In utero, at the outset, the embryo looks more like a worm or a reptile before gaining human features. It takes time for that amorphous cellular slime to morph into a functional human body. Anyway, why the fuck was I having a conversation about evolution close to midnight, in front of a church, with an American guy that believed in a Christian god? What was he trying to prove to me? That deep down, he knew there was more to it than what the Genesis pretends there is? The Bible is a metaphor anyway, but I should’ve expected him to take it literally, as he did Hozier’s song.

‘I can see that you’re a skeptic, but you have to admit that believing in a Christian god helps you be of better use to your fellow human beings. That priest in the church in front of us didn’t preach theft or murder; he preached kindness and decency instead.’

‘Why would I need a priest to teach me kindness and decency? Why can’t I be kind and decent on my own? Look, for example, a lot of people I look up to, who’ve made tremendous contributions to the world—they’re doctors, writers, psychologists, musicians— don’t buy into that shit. They’re atheists or Jews. They didn’t need a Christian god or a Christian priest to be of use to their fellow humans in need.’

At that point, though the lights were dim,  I could see him turn green in the face.

‘Are YOU a Jew?’ he asked, with panic in his voice.

‘There we go again,  Mr. I-can-make-a-wrong-assumption-about-you-in-the-wink-of-an-eye. I am not a Jew; and even if I were, that was not the point. Do you want me to remind you what’s going on right now in the Catholic church in terms of pedophilia and sex abuse? You must be familiar with Pennsylvania. Do you want me to remind you that the Pope recommends psychiatric intervention for children with homosexual tendencies instead of love and acceptance? What’s next on their to-do list for the sinful, a lobotomy? Would you want to have your appendix removed by a surgeon who has homicidal propensities? I bet not, so let’s change the subject or get the hell out of here.’

‘Yeah, sure; getting jammed in a religious argument is not how I wanna spend my time with you,’ he agreed complacently. ‘Why don’t we go play some arcade games instead? Oh, man, I love arcade so much!’

‘I don’t. And it’s almost midnight. Where do you think we could play arcade games right now?’

‘Oh, come on, let’s look it up on Google maps. On your phone, I mean, ‘cuz mine, you know.’

Yeah. I knew. I also knew I’d be mad as a hatter if I played arcade games with him when all I wanted was a reason to put an end to that stupid date as soon as possible. But I was so sure that I’d come away empty-handed that I agreed to look up “arcade” on Google maps, only to find this place called Arcade Café, 1.6 miles away—which turned out to be just a regular café with a misleading name; no arcade or any other type of video games whatsoever. I shoved the phone in his face triumphantly, and then we got going—again.

‘Would you like us to go someplace else?’ he asked.

Yeah, at our place, I thought. I mean, me—at mine, you—at yours. I regret I didn’t verbalize that thought, and instead I heard myself saying, ‘No. I don’t care where we’re going. This is also how I roll in life by and large.’ (The second part of that statement is, however, true.)

When we were in front of an ancient building (it was the old town, so we basically were in front of an ancient building at all times), he asked me whether I’m interested in history. ‘I used to be,’ I replied, ‘back when I was in secondary school, because I had this huge crush on my history teacher. I’ve had it for years,’ to which he interrupted me, grabbing himself by the ears jestingly, bringing to my attention that I had pronounced the word “years” as if I’d failed to notice that it started with a “y.”

‘Great. Thanks for the correction. This is my flawed Eastern-European pronunciation. You see, when I was born, I wasn’t swaddled in an American flag. Also, I read and write more than I listen and speak, which is detrimental to face-to-face dates with native English speakers. We should’ve done this whole thing on Facebook instead.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, it was just a gentle correction. But carry on with your story, I wanna hear it.’

‘Yeah. A gentle correction and a huge turn-off. You know, like farting during sex. You can keep going, but it’s not gonna be the same.’

So we walked some more; until he said he needed to pee and wanted to go to McDonald’s to use the restroom. Must be a special bond between McDonald’s and him, I thought. Maybe he’s actually living in a McDonald’s, after all; maybe he doesn’t live in a rental apartment in the old town, as he had claimed. But now it was way past midnight—was it still open? Of course, only Google Maps and my phone had the answer, and like most answers that night, this one was negative, too. There was a park on our way to McDonald’s, so I just suggested he relieve himself behind a bush. ‘Not too classy,’ he said, ‘but if you have nothing against it...fine.’

‘Why would I have anything against it?! I’m not the one with a full bladder. Just go for it, release your problems, and be a happy man again.’ (And don’t dare touch me, my real self whispered in my mind’s ear; without a “y” this time around.)

‘Oh, look, problem solved!’ he jubilated, pointing towards a row of composting toilets—probably the most disgusting thing ever created by man, which filled the nightly atmosphere with their unmistakable whiff of ammonia and vagrancy until the memory of what must have been the scent of last morning’s freshly-cut grass was completely annihilated.

I sat down on a bench and waited for him to get out of that temple of piss and loafing, although deep down I wished a supermassive black hole would yawn out of that toilet bowl and swallow him out of my life. I could’ve walked out on him, but I knew he wouldn’t find his way back home if I did that. He depended on my phone to order an Uber and make it back to his place safe and sound. I was the man in this, not him; gender equality my ass. Or maybe that’s exactly what gender equality is about—a girl may just as well order a taxi for the guy who asked her out on a date and see to it that no one rapes him on his way home. Or not? He said he had a problem with feminists and was glad that I wasn’t one,  but what I did for him that night was the epitome of feminism—but more on that, later.  

At long last, there he was again, in front of me, with an empty bladder and a right—or left?—hand  brimming with bacteria from his groin, and probably from the groins of all the wastrels that had ever taken a whizz in that composting toilet. ‘What if we go to this other park,’ he suggested, and indicated the name of a park that was like a million miles away. We sure as hell couldn’t walk there, and I’d had enough of parks—at least when it comes to dating. I don’t wanna date in parks ever again. All the guys I’ve ever dated were so cheap that would rather take me to a park than a café or a restaurant, because it was open to the public for free; they didn’t risk having to pay a bill that would’ve probably caused an aneurysm to burst in their brains. I’d always offer to go Dutch, but better safe than sorry—in parks, you don’t have to go Dutch at all. In parks, you don’t risk spending your entire weekly allowance that mom and pop slipped into your pocket because you were a good boy who did well in school and didn’t come home with the clap. So we went to parks; a lot of ‘em, goddamit. Ugh! Those memories of making out on the benches and being made fun of by kids playing badminton or riding their bikes make me sick to my stomach. I had my first date ever in a park in my hometown, in late November. It was freezing cold and my poor, sickly beau subsequently came down with a cold that took weeks to heal. Nothing of the sort befell me, like,  ever. I also had my first kiss ever on a bench, in the same park, though with a different date. We broke up two months later because I loved dogs more than human beings, and he got married to the next girl he started dating after me, on the same day that the high tide wiped the hiking trail that would take me to the shore on an Irish island in the middle of the Atlantic. And once, I went to a park, determined to break up with this guy, but I ended up staying in that toxic relationship almost another year because of his cajoling and other dirty schemes. In a nutshell, I have no fond memories of parks; and the fact that someone takes me there in the middle of the night to pee (hoping to take a shot at romance after that) is not gonna make me change my mind; if anything, it’s only gonna make my nausea more difficult to internalize—which is a bad thing in itself, to begin with.

‘Do you like long walks?’ he asked me, when we were doing the exact same thing—walking for hours on end, heading to the middle of nowhere, because I didn’t care where I was going as long as it wasn’t home, and he was still hoping to get laid that night to let me slip through his fingers so easily.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to thwart again your attempt to pigeonhole me in any possible way. What are you gonna ask me next, if I like my fries with ketchup or mayo, what’s my favorite color, the subject I struggled the most with in school, or the name of my first pet? You sound like Gmail asking security questions when you forget your password.’

‘Yeah, I know it sounds stupid sometimes, but… I’m just trying to get to know you. I know people who’d easily do that—the long walks, that is—whereas others are simply couch potatoes. Only Netflix and chill for them. I was just wondering where you belong.’

‘Nowhere. I belong nowhere.  I walked thirty kilometers in two days in Nice and Monaco, plunged sixteen kilometers into the depths of a forest in the French countryside in full hunting season, but I also had a two-month spell when I didn’t get up from bed, lying there all day long, writing my book (he totally ignored the fact that I had brought up the words “my book” into the conversation; must have misheard it or blamed it on my Balkan pronunciation).  Nothing I do makes sense or is interconnected with another thing I do; it doesn’t even have to. It’s just who I am.’

‘I see. That’s why I wanna spend time with you. Given that there’s nothing much to do in town, I’d normally say we go to my place and watch a TV show or something, but…’

‘But you know that “at my place” are not the three words you wanna say on a first date; not with me, at least.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know; I didn’t suggest anything, I just thought it’d be nice.’

‘I didn’t say you suggested anything; it’s just something I don’t do on a first date. You have a self-imposed America-related omerta; I don’t drink alcohol and sleep around.’

‘Fair enough. Well, then, I’d like to hang around some more, but I have stuff to do, so maybe we should order a taxi and go back to our places.’

How very odd. A minute ago, he was inviting me at his place because he wanted to “spend time” with me, and now, after he realized he’s not gonna get what he wants, he says he’s gotta go back home because he has stuff to do. How the hell did that stuff materialize into his living room in his absence, in the span of one or two minutes? Hm. Maybe he’s the mystic in this story, not I. If anything, I am the man. The man who orders a taxi, drops him at his place, at which point he gets back into the car, claiming he had forgotten he had to go buy something from a convenience store on the main avenue. His paranoia kicked in again when he wasn’t sure that the driver had started the GPS—does this guy even know where we’re going? And do I have to pay him or you? It’s a Taxify, you idiot; all the fares are deducted from my bank account. He handed me a bill, which I obviously turned down, hugged me twice (because he didn’t like the pat on the back—I patted him anyway the second time, too), and off he went. Finally. Thank God. The Christian god, the Jewish, the Muslim, or the Buddhist one, or whatever god had effected the long-awaited demise of my worst date ever.

Two days later, he texted me, saying that he wants to hang out again soon, but unfortunately, he still has a lot of work to do. Nevermind, darling! I’m far from being a time-sucking vampire. I like garlic and solitude too much, that’s why.  ‘Sorry, but I’m not exactly vibing it, and I don’t wanna waste your time (or mine). We belong in different worlds (literally and non-literally), so we’d better leave it at that. Best of luck.’ And I pressed “send.” The reply came back instantly, and it was monosyllabic—‘Weird.’ And I’ve never heard from him again.  

Man. That text felt so liberating I could almost cry for joy. It felt ecstatic to be able to fantasize again with Nick Murphy, to plunge into the same old endless spiral of limerence in the peace and quiet of my room, smelling of coffee, dark chocolate, old books, and isolation. No more piss in the park and platitudes on Christianity and evolution; no more answering security questions and avoiding hands caked in groin bacteria and molecules of urine; no more getting back home late enough to shower with cold water and watch the cockroaches crawl all over the dishes in my kitchen. Dating is a pain in the ass unless you do it with someone you’re smitten with—and the modern society doesn’t quite give you permission to be smitten with someone you could actually date. Here’s the thing—I’d been late twenty minutes that evening because I’d gotten lost in a Youtube loop, crying and grieving over my missed flight and Nick’s show in Milan, and telling myself that I can’t do this. I don’t wanna do this. I can’t do this. I won’t do this. I’ll cancel last minute, although I’ll come across as a bitch. I don’t want the universe’s leftovers on my table; I’d rather starve myself to death. I know that never in a million years could I have my limerent object, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be happy with the dollar store version of it. Matter of fact, I won’t. I may be trying to punch above my weight, but then again—who isn’t? I don’t have perfect teeth; I’m far from having a Baywatch body; hell, my jokes aren’t even that good sometimes, and I can’t even pronounce “years” correctly in English—why wasn’t this guy good enough for me then? Because nothing and no one ever is; because we only want what we can’t have. Because that evening, I was hoping for a refreshing conversation on the duality of the self, on the body-mind conflict, on how art in general (and music in particular) is a lifeline for lost souls like me; but instead I got caught in the trammel of a religious argument, with baby dinosaurs lurking around the corner, threatening to hatch from the potentially fertilizable eggs in my pelvis under the auspices of the right genetic mutation. Because only average guys can be stubbornly interested in me, so much so that they keep texting me although I hadn’t answered their calls or their texts for a week; average guys who probably hadn’t gotten laid in a while; average guys to whom I seemed reachable, who didn’t have to punch above their weight to go on a date with me.  I’ll never be interesting, multihyphenate, mysterious, or good enough for the likes of Nick Murphy or any other unattainable person that could be limerence material for me, no matter how hard I try; I’d probably have a shot if I stopped trying altogether (but I can’t, because I’m me).

And it’s sad, but I know the drill all too well, ‘cause I’ve been there so many times—basically my whole life: “Limerence is a state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one's feelings reciprocated, ” says the Holy Wikipedia. We owe this concept to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who coined it in her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Look it up on Wikipedia; it expatiates on all its aspects amazingly well,  and it might just let you know that you have a new disease. In my case, reciprocity never came into question, and in spite of starvation and adversity,  I’ve always managed to stay limerent until I found another person to transfer my limerence to. The more impossible it is, the more drugged up it makes me feel; the more rejected I am, the needier I get. And I believe it’s essential that it stay that way; a healthy relationship pattern just wouldn’t do for me. I have yet to discover whether therapy would be of any help, though, but I’m not that willing to try, to be honest. I feed on my limerence, and my limerence feeds on me. We need limerence, at least in art; studies say that limerence is experienced by about 5% of the population; I bet that the bulk of it are artists (or at least artists at heart). I wonder how many of the great songs put out into the world would have been written had it not been for limerence; same goes for books, paintings, sculptures, and whatever involves a muse. Not all limerent objects are muses, but all muses are limerent objects, in a way or another. I know it, and you know it; everybody knows it, and in case you didn’t, now you do. While therapy —or even medication— may help limerence to some extent, the one thing that does not help are failed dates, with people you’re just not vibing that much (if at all). And of course, you can’t vibe somebody else when your whole being vibes that unattainable, volatile, celestial presence that will never be within reach like Tash Sultana’s mad guitar riffs.

And it’s okay; just don’t rush it. Don’t go for the leftovers. Don’t go for the dollar store hoops when you’ve been coveting the Gucci ones forever; otherwise, you’ll end up with a fallacy and a lifetime of bitterness and second-guessing your own worth.  Are you truly dollar store material, too? Are you willing to work till you’re dog-tired, day in and day out, to afford something that might be stolen from your purse on your bus ride back home? But what if it’s something money can’t buy? What if it’s something not even wits or looks can buy, because it’s not yours to keep in the first place?

Well, that sucks; but I won’t go for the dollar store version ever again. I wanna bathe in the glory of a life with no one else, as the song goes. I’d rather die surrounded by dogs and books without having procreated, have no one come to my funeral, and give away my whole fortune—whatever’s left of it after decades of concerts, festivals and trips to Melbourne, New York, and LA—to charity. But until I die, I’ll keep on falling back upon the same pattern of limerence, hoping for the best; after all, hope is an important part of the definition of this whole concept.  And I’ll make art out of it to stay alive—and because it’s fun, even when it makes me weep. If I were to believe Lana, at least I’m pretty when I cry.

[celticnoise]

After tonight, Chris Jack might as well take up a permanent PR role at ibrox. He is doing the job already, and being paid by The Evening Times, which means he’s doing it for free right now, albeit someone is paying him a salary. Maybe they should consider their own position relative to him; who is this guy really writing for? He’s not even in the service of two masters; he is in the service of one and it is not the one which is paying his wages.

Stewart Robertson spoke to Club 1872 recently, and he laid out the path for the future. The news was not good, but thank God for Jack because it has been spun nicely into a positive news story. It’s unclear if the Sevco fans will see it the way Jack wants them to, but give him his due; he was given a task to complete and he’s done it.

The upshot of the article is that Sevco has a plan to close the gap. Unfortunately, when you look at it dispassionately the plan is not dissimilar to one where an average guy walks into a casino with the money he’s just got from re-mortgaging his house, determined to roll his way to an early retirement. An early grave is much more likely, as is the case here.

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The strategy will depend on three central planks, and all of them sound shakier than a house built by Frank Spencer.

The first depends on European football. I’ll cover all these one at a time, in some detail, but I’ll save this one for last because it contains a number of brazen assumptions which are wholly ridiculous.

The second depends on them successfully realising a favourable “player trading” policy; this is the Holy Grail of every club in Europe. None but a handful have made it work without spending tens of millions on hit and miss options first.

The third plank is them getting a positive retail deal and major increases in sponsorship. You wonder how dumb their fans can be not to see the obvious holes in this one.

Let’s start with that; no club I’ve ever heard of has so thoroughly poisoned its relationship with sponsors, kit manufacturers and even their distributors. The best they can hope for – if nothing else goes wrong that toxifies the brand further – would be that their current partners in those areas stick with them on something like the current terms.

They will not beat their current offers, not when the kit people and the sponsors got such a thoroughly lousy return on their investment this time around. Puma are still fuming at the way they were denied a kit launch and the shirt sponsors are no happier.

Sevco continues to hid behind the veil of “commercial confidentiality” when asked about their arrangement with Sports Direct; we can assume there’s much more to find buried in the agreement. When King was spinning the narrative – partly through Jack – that he had secured a major “triumph” over Ashley the truth was that the club had paid the sportswear magnate £3 million to drop legal proceedings against them.

A deal was done on the merchandising, but I’ve never thought it sounded like Sevco got much out of it. Ashley’s people still hold all the cards; the deal, which we’re told runs out at the end of the season, still obliges the club to pay for unsold stock, it includes warehouse rental costs, distribution costs and a host of other similar complications. And anyone who believes it will expire when this campaign closes out is a mug.

Sevco has no retail outlets of its own. It has no infrastructure. The costs of setting that stuff up would run into the tens of millions and any shirt sponsor or manufacturer would want to know definitively how the sales and marketing would be handled before parting with a bean, especially in light of this season’s fiasco.

Sports Direct are the only show in town, and Sevco will have to work with them if it means they go crawling on bended knees. If the deal hasn’t already been negotiated the club might be in for an even bigger shock; what’s to stop Sports Direct from dragging the matter out until the other commercial deals need to be signed and then springing an offer on the club which binds them more tightly than before? Sevco has no choice but to go with Ashley; the only question is whether they are lying to their fans about “wait and see” or if they are stupid enough to actually be waiting to see … that would be bound to end in tears.

I think the deal is already done. The documents are probably signed and the whole thing sealed already. Sevco is counting on their fans never finding that out, but I’d bet against it remaining the secret they hope for. Everything outs, and that place leaks like a sieve.

This idea of them turning the trick with “player trading” is nonsense, as the last few years have ably proved. Celtic had a very specific plan when it came to going out and getting good players and the scouting networks which were required are significant. Sevco is trying to shoulder its way onto a very crowded field. If you’re not already scouting some of these markets already your chances of successfully finding a Van Dijk or Wanyama are pretty slim.

The costs associated with the scouting networks are, in the first place, enormous. But we paid big bucks for Van Dijk and the likes of Ki when we purchased them. Our January window signing from last season – and he’s barely kicked a ball – was a £3 million purchase. Our young French midfielder Ntcham cost us £4.5 million. We may well have a view to selling them on for big money at a later date, but until that’s realised there’s £7.5 million there often on the bench.

Sevco fans seem to think this stuff is easy. To get players to a place where top clubs want to buy them they have to be showcased to a wider audience in the first place; anyone could tell that Dembele was going to be a big player – except their fans haha who’s shock at the impact he made in the Massacre of Celtic Park last season has to be read to be believed – but it took the storming display against City to send his value soaring.

These guys also have to be good, and for every hit there is a miss. We could tell stories of the Pukki’s and Balde’s and Derk Boerrigter’s, but that would go in one ear and out the other with these Peepul. They don’t want to hear anything that distracts them from their bubble. They ought to know this by the way; their forays into a similar strategy have been disastrous.

Look at the assorted garbage they’ve bought in recent years. Not one of those signings was the sort who is likely to go on to bigger things. The media talked up guys like Waghorn because he had a number of England Under 21 caps, but the number of times that guy had been allowed out on loan, and the number of clubs he’d been at, didn’t suggest that there was a major talent just waiting to be discovered. It doesn’t work like that. If it was there one of those other clubs would have found it long before Sevco lumbered onto the scene.

The only way their club gets the platform needed for this stuff is, as I said, by playing in Europe. I do not expect them to do as badly next time around as they did when Progres knocked them out this year, but nor do I see them reaching the Groups of the Europa League, which is vital to their five year projections, as I pointed out in an earlier piece.

Robertson isn’t shooting for that though; he has pinned his, and the club’s hopes, on the utterly unrealistic goal of reaching the Champions League. No other CEO in Scotland would talk like this, as if there were no obstacles in their way, and especially not eleven other clubs. They talk as if it’s a foregone conclusion that they’ll hit that mark.

“The majority of the deficit is accounted for through qualification for the Champions’ League group stages,” he said; the deficit in question being the financial gulf that exists between us and them. The trouble is, it’s absolute nonsense as I’m sure he knows.

Their turnover hit “record” heights of £29.2 million last year. Ours was £90.

Even if we had bagged half of it from the Champions League our turnover would still dwarf theirs. On top of that, we are not dependent on Champions League income for our survival; they are betting everything on that target and reaching it isn’t simply a matter of overhauling us, of course. If they were somehow able to pull off the one-shot miracle of winning the title, they would have to navigate a perilous series of qualifiers and a slip in any one would be fatal.

This is nothing less than a banquet of bullshit, with Chris Jack playing the role of server and waiter. Their fans may or may not swallow it, but the Scottish media continues to disgrace itself in the way it simply prints this nonsense without asking series questions of the people dishing it up.

Long may it continue as far as I’m concerned.

  http://ift.tt/2Buzyu1

[guttercleanersraleigh]

Don’t Buy a House in 2018 UNTIL You Read This

It’s 2017 and that means it’s a GREAT time to start preparing yourself for buying a house in 2018

A lot of the people who are currently reaching out to us about buying a home, in our local market of Raleigh, are preparing themselves for a purchase in 2018. These folks are the inspiration for this article and my hope is you will be well prepared by the end of it.

In Real Estate it’s not uncommon for people to keep their eye on the market long before they become serious buyers and thus we are writing a how to guide for buying a home in 2018.

Buying a house requires preparation and the more prepared you are the more confident you will be heading in. Real Estate is one of the safest investments you can make, especially if you’re buying in a great location.

The biggest mistake people make is they buy nothing at all. They renew their leases and push home buying off for another year. If you ask the clients we work with ‘what is one thing you wish you did differently’ their answer would be ‘buy sooner.’

This guide has been prepared after consulting real estate experts and mortgage professionals. Their thoughts on what prospective home buyers need to do are discussed below in detail. Without wasting any more time, let’s get right into it

How to Prepare to Buy a House in 2018

Step 1: Check your Credit Score

This step is important if you are planning to take a mortgage or home loan. To qualify for a mortgage and get the best terms possible, you need to have a good credit score.

There are a lot of great websites online that can help you understand where your credit score is at, I personally use CreditKarma.com. The scores aren’t always 100 accurate so take them with a grain of salt. Using the mobile app on my phone I’m able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of why my score is the way it is. Try not to close your older credit accounts because these give you a good average length of credit history. 

A credit score is simply a representation of your credit worthiness. FICO credit scores range from 300 – 850. A higher credit score is always better when taking out a mortgage. You are bound to get the best interest rate (lowest interest rate possible) and best loan terms if your credit score is 740 or more. The interest you pay for your loan is important because it dictates the entire cost of the loan. Furthermore, getting a rate that is .25 lower can translate to thousands of dollars in savings every year for the entire term of your mortgage. 

I’ve seen people with a credit score in the high 500s turn it into a high 600s in just a few months. So if you need help improving your credit score, check out some resources online.

Step 2: No New Credit Cards

When preparing to buy a house, you should also stay away from new credit cards even if they come with irresistible benefits. This is highly recommended since opening new credit lines can hurt your chances of qualifying for a mortgage, and if by any chance you are eligible for a mortgage, you won’t get the best rate. New credit lines usually change mortgage loan application numbers. To make sure your mortgage loan application numbers stay the same, avoid new credit lines by all means. You should also avoid overusing existing credit going forward to avoid getting bad terms in the future. 

What are the benefits of the credit card? Can you call your bank and see if there is any way to get around using a credit card until you have purchased the new home? This will allow you to have the highest credit score possible when it comes time to get a mortgage.

Step 3: Find a Mortgage Lender

Before you start looking for a home to buy, you need to get a mortgage lender first. This step is critical because it lets you know the kind of home you can afford to buy. It saves you the time, money and headaches during the home buying process. It also makes sense to start a conversation with a mortgage lender well in advance of you buying a home because they can help prepare you for the actual application process.

Finding a good mortgage lender is easy, though it requires a lot of effort and that’s the hard part. You can start by asking your bank if you have established a good relationship with them what are the best steps you can take for a mortgage approval? Next, you will want to compare products. Each lender and bank will have different products they can offer certain types of people so don’t settle for the first one. Look at all of your options and choose the one that makes the most sense for you

Step 4: Get Preapproved

Serious buyers make a pre approval their first step when buying a home. This is because they are serious and know that if they are going to buy a house they will need it. As with most markets, if you try to buy a house in our market you’re going to compete with a lot of other buyers. Even in smaller towns like Clayton, which was once considered farm land people are having to raise their offers to a few thousand over asking

Before you can approach potential home sellers, you have to get pre approved which simply tells the seller you are capable of buying the home in question. Getting preapproved is easy. You just need several documents. Typically, you will require your tax returns and W-2 forms for the past year or two. You’ll also need your current paycheck stubs for three or more months as well as a list of your debts and assets. You also require other documents such as proof of mortgage/rent payments. Once you get pre approved, it’s important to avoid making big purchases, missing debt payments and changing jobs as you wait to get a mortgage to avoid altering information in your mortgage application. 

Step 5: Find A Great Real Estate Agent

Before you find the house you need to find a great real estate agent and this is more important now than in previous years. With so much information online it’s hard to believe what’s real and what isn’t. A great Realtor will help you navigate the world of real estate. Often people will be willing to see a house with anyone who will show it to them. Strong Agents are going to have tougher barriers that you need to break through because they are in high demand.

Often people will be willing to see a house with anyone who will show it to them. Strong Agents are going to have tougher barriers that you need to break through because they are in high demand. It’s worth working with someone who is good, that has good reviews, then it is working with someone random. Do your research.

When someone asks to see a home for sale in a competitive market like Cary, we typically require a phone call or in-person meeting beforehand to help learn if we are the right fit for that client. This is a benefit to the client as it is to us. We make a commitment to our clients not to work with too many clients at once because that would jeopardize our ability to work for them.

There are certain questions you should ask when interviewing Real Estate Agents and these will help you determine if you’re working with the right person. A home is a large investment after all.

Once you are pre-approved, you can get yourself a good real estate agent to help you find the perfect home for you. Real estate agents are easy to find today regardless of your location. You can use referrals, relatives or the internet to get the best real estate agent in your area. This step is important since real estate agents are knowledgeable about real estate. They offer useful support on all matters relating to real estate from finding the right house to negotiating and closing. 

Step 6: Find a Great House

Start with the location you want.

A lot of folks in our area are basing their home purchase in 2018 on school districts. Towns like Apex and Holly Springs are growing so fast that they are either capped or are constantly being rezoned for their school districts. Finding a great house doesn’t necessarily make you dependent on a school district, though it does make sense for families who make it a priority.

Determining your priorities is going to help you find a great house. Have a list of ‘must haves’ and stick to it while being reasonable. Understand that most homes are not going to have everything you want and if it does then you should act quickly. When you find a great house, don’t wait, make an offer on it because if you don’t, someone else will.

Step 7: Don’t Forget about the Closing Costs

Even if you are a first time home buyer with a 0 down payment loan you need to remember that bringing money to closing is often required. Most people don’t realize that closing costs can be around $5,000 when you include the attorney, lender, inspection, and other fees. Remember, as the buyer you don’t pay any Realtor fees.

If you’re buying a home in 2018 you should start the conversation now. Begin saving up for your down payment, your closing costs, and have a cash reserve for a rainy day

It’s also important to discuss with your agent on ways of reducing closing costs. However, if you hire a reputable real estate agent, you have nothing to worry about. 

Summary

Buying a house is challenging if you don’t understand the process. The above steps give a great overview to how best prepare when buying a house in 2018. The information may vary slightly depending on location as well as the mortgage lender you choose.

If you’re buying a home with a significant other you will want to start preparing for that as well. There are a lot of additional steps to take and the laws will vary by state on how it works. Consult with a Real Estate attorney if you have any questions on how to take title.

If you have any questions for us, drop us a note in the comments section below