#took me long enough with this starter oops

[phantomrose96]

Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 2

(Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 1)

Chapter 2, because @ciestess voiced an idea that absolutely consumed my entire mind and I could not rest until I made this

...

Danny’s eyes tracked the swing of gunfire raining bullets across the horizon. Tucker reloaded, crouched, dodged left and pivoted, another blast of bullet confetti launched through a gaggle of zombie heads. He tossed the magazine and reloaded. Click. Ching. Danny flinched when a zombie smashed a hammer clean through Tucker’s head.

 “God. Fucking…” Tucker pulled out of his hunch. He unclamped his fingers from his controller like bug legs unfurling. He extended the controller to Danny, bouncing it in his grip. “Your turn.”

“Huh?” Danny asked, as if he hadn’t been watching Tucker’s game the whole time.

“You. You’re up. I died.”

Danny accepted the controller, reloaded the screen, and jogged about a hundred feet forward before the first horde of zombies took him out football-style from the left. The death screen rolled.

“Oops,” Danny said.

“Not your best work.” And Tucker took the controller back. Tucker shot a few spare glances to Danny while the level restart loaded in. “Is it Vlad?”

“No. Well, yes,” Danny answered, flopping back into his normal position on the Foley attic armchair. Tucker’s mom had planned to toss it ages ago, before it became Danny’s chair. “But at least he left when my parents went all zombie mode into the basement.” Danny picked absently at the scabs of leather flaking from the armrest. “It was just weird.”

“I don’t mean this as an insult, but it’s definitely not the first time your dad’s gotten some math wrong,” Tucker said. “He blows up like three things a week doesn’t he?”

“He does. But he doesn’t care when he gets that math wrong. This one was like I broke something important.” Danny’s expression soured, and he picked a leather flake clean off the chair. “Vlad did, I mean.”

“Does any of the math actually work?” Sam offered from Tucker’s desk. She leaned an elbow around the back of his chair, head tilted to Danny. A pencil dangled from her loose fingers, nib-half worn to the History of an Invention report she was actually working on. Tucker had half-assed his earlier in the day about the palm pilot. Danny had not done his. “Like, it’s all crackpot theory, right? Do ghosts even follow math?”

“I think they follow some math. It’s not magic that makes the ecto-bazookas work, or the Fenton-phones work, or—well the thermos DIDN’T work—until I made it work.”

The unspoken thing Danny had been not-quite-saying hung in the air. He said it this time.

“So I’m wondering if I did it. Like the Fenton thermos. And now maybe they’re gonna do the math all over and realize the missing piece of the equation is one half-ghost son.”

“Well the order is backwards, for starters,” Sam said. “Thermos worked because you pumped ghost-energy into it. How would you have done that to the portal? You were human when you walked in.”

“Sam’s right. What do you think you brought to the table exactly? Button-slapping abilities?” Tucker loaded up the next level. “It was their portal, and their math, and it worked. There’s a million-billion kinds of math and they probably just forgot one thing.”

Tucker took a headshot and died. Mechanically, he handed the controller back to Danny.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Ask Vlad. He’s got a portal.”

“Like Vlad’s gonna tell me.”

“Just promise to be his diligent little son minion or whatever. He’s easy. Wait, let me do the next level. You know I like the cyberpunk levels.”

“It’s not your turn,” Danny said, reeling the controller just out of Tucker’s wiggling grasp.

“I’ll let you do two in a row for your next turn.”

Danny knocked Tucker away, distracted just long enough for a zombie cyberbeam to launch from the horizon and take him out through the head.

The screen washed sepia. Danny stared at it. You died.

…

Danny hadn’t really meant to stay the night at Tucker’s place. They’d just gotten really far in Man vs. Zombie, and Sam had gone home, and Danny was just resting his eyes between his turns with the controller.

So when he woke to the bright strip of sunlight beaming into his eyes through the attic skylight, his first thought was Fuck.

He was awake, here, morning, school. Fuck he had not actually done his History of Invention report, despite the stupid amount of grief it had already caused him this weekend. He pulled his face out of the armrest, now pineapple-patterned from the decaying leather, and pawed for his phone fallen on the floor. If it was still early enough, he could maybe still afford to desperately half-ass something before sixth period science.

He flipped his phone open. A text from Jazz. “Don’t come home. Make up an excuse.”

“…Fuck,” Danny whispered, through the sensation of his heart launching itself into his throat.

He scrambled upright, whole body shaking at the mercy of adrenaline shock so soon after being pulled from dead sleep. His mouth was dry, teeth unbrushed, wearing his old clothes from yesterday, report not done, Don’t come home, Don’t come home, Don’t come home.

They knew. He’d fucked it up. Somehow they knew. The math. Something. And it had to be with guns blazing, because Jazz would not send that text if they’d taken the “We accept you” angle.

Were they coming for him? On their way here? Tracking by his phone? Did they like Mrs. Foley enough to not SWAT-slam her against the wall when she opened the door for them so they could come capture the ghost pretending to be their son?

Fuck.

Danny was upright. Danny was standing. Danny was shaking. Danny wasn’t actually sure what the next thing was he was supposed to do.

Tucker’s ball of blankets rustled from the couch. “Mmph?” he asked, articulately.

“I have to. Go deal with my parents, I think,” Danny said, because any plan felt a little better than no plan. “I think they know.”  

Danny was a ghost. Danny was gone. Tucker sat upright, alone, blinking himself awake. He was staring at the You Died sepia screen still displayed on monitor, now burnt into the plasma of the tv.

…

Danny paused with his human hand slick on the Fenton front door. The gears in his mind turned as his plan quickly unraveled into no-plan. He had no plan, right? What was his plan? Handle this Man vs Zombie style—open the front door ready to dodge wide, because both zombies and parents liked to camp behind closed doors with bazookas at the ready?

“—absolutely absurd, and entirely unscientific, with no probability of being true. It goes against everything we know about neurology.”

Oh, Jazz. Was Jazz enough of a bazooka-deterrent? Probably not. Knowing his parents.

Danny turned the knob. His heart hammered. If bazookas, dodge left.

The first thing he noticed was in fact the no-bazookas. It was what he was most looking for. And so it was Jazz’s expression he did not notice until second—whites of her eyes wide, snapped to Danny, with a look that would be accusatory if worry hadn’t won that battle. Her cheeks were pale. Her hair was unbrushed.

He noticed his parents third. Compulsively, he rocked back onto his right foot, still outside the doorway, still outside the threshold of the Fenton family household.

Seeing his parents tired was of absolutely no shock-value to Danny. It was at least a twice-per-month tradition to see them haul themselves up from the basement sweaty and glaze-eyed at 7am, babbling excitement about some new ecto-spectral-hoozy-whatsits whose concept had shimmed into their minds at 8pm and now existed, fully operational, 11 nonstop hours later.

So it wasn’t the exhaustion on their face. It wasn’t the stagnant smell of sweat or the paleness of their faces or the stains on their clothes.

It was the way they looked at him. Like their whole world had fallen apart with his foot passing over the doorstep.

“Danny,” Jazz said, choked, a break in the silence. “Things are…! A little weird here. So maybe, if you wanna just get to school, I’ll finish clearing up—there’s a misunderstanding Mom and Dad have with their math. I am state finalist in Math League and have been studying college-level calculus in preparation for school applications so I’ve offered to help them fix their math, or prove to them—”

“Danny,” Maddie said, an echo of Jazz, but it felt worse. Danny scanned her hands for anything pointed enough to be a weapon. They were empty. “Danny can I just ask you something honestly, just quickly? Jazz is right. I’m just trying to clear up an issue with our math. And I won’t be mad. Whatever the answer is, I won’t be mad. I just want an honest answer.”

She stepped closer. Danny fought the urge to match her with a step backwards. Her eyes roved over him in a starved way, looking for something.

“Were you there when the portal turned on?” she asked.

“No, I wasn’t,” Danny answered. He wasn’t sure what to do with his face to make it look convincing. “It just. It needed some time to boot up, or something, right? That’s what you two said.”

“That was our guess ,but we don’t really know. The security tapes are wiped. We tried to make them EMF-resilient but a very, very strong blast of EMF could still corrupt them.”

“Yeah. I mean the portal’s gonna do that, right? When it turned on? Ripping open the Ghost Zone that’s—gotta be huge EMF.” Danny’s focus bounced between his mother’s eyes. “Just a guess. I really don’t know. I was in bed, already, whenever the portal started working.”

Left eye. Right eye. Why was she looking at him like that? Like she was sad. Was this part a trick? Make Danny let his guard down, go hey Mom need a hug? and that’s when the bazooka-whipping starts? It made his ribs feel scratchy. Stop looking at me like that.

“Have you felt anything weird at all, since the portal started working? Any gaps in your memory? Any parts of you that don’t feel right? Is there any part of you that feels like it’s changed in a way you can’t explain?”

She reached a hand out. Danny instinctively recoiled.

“Uh, yeah. They taught us about this in health class. They call it ‘puberty’ there.”

“Danny,” Jack said, and his voice was scratchy from disuse, from a long and uncharacteristic amount of time spent not speaking. “Did you die in the machine?”

A beat. A moment. Like when the zombie sends a hammer through your head.

“I’M alive!” Danny declared with a crack in his voice, with hands slammed to his chest. “Look at me. What are you talking about?”

“It’s the only math that works,” Jack continued, his words like chalk, his voice too dead. He looked too much at Danny. “If one of you two walked into the portal, and died in it. And I don’t think it was Jazz.”

This was bad. This was weird. Danny had ghost powers, sure. ‘They can’t kill me I’m already dead,’ was a funny joke sometimes. But it was funny as a joke. He was a ghost sham, really. A faker, a LARPer, whatever Tucker had called it. He was a human who was just kind of a freak now. More of a freak than he already was. He looked dead, for someone who was super-duper still alive.

He’d buried that worry, already. They weren’t allowed to bring it back.

“Look… at me!” Danny continued, mouth dry. He threw his arms wide. “Look how super alive I am! I’m awake! Using energy! Eating food and sleeping with my human body. I’ve got flesh and blood and bones and stuff! I’m not a ghost-expert but ghosts don’t have that.”

This was weird. This made Danny feel like something was scratching to get free from inside his rib cage. It twisted his entrails. Sure Tucker and Sam had thought he was dead, for those first horrible few minutes, but then he changed back to a human and the nightmare ended there. Jazz never called him dead. The ghosts called him freak and halfa and whelp, but never ‘one of them.’ That was his whole thing: being different from the ghosts who became ghosts by something so normal as dying.

He was not dead.

“If you died in the portal, your ghost wouldn’t have been ripped out of your body. It would have been allowed to stay, and then you’d be…” Jack hesitated. “I don’t know what you’d be, but you wouldn’t be alive.”

“Dad,” Jazz said, and she stood herself bodily between Danny and Jack. “What an absolutely messed up out-of-line thing to say to your son! You don’t know that! Dad you’re tired, and just because you weren’t able to solve your math problem in one night doesn’t mean you get to treat Danny like this! I said I’d help you with your math! Now apologize to Danny.”

Jazz looked over her shoulder to Danny, her expression falling at the sight of Danny’s face.

Danny backed up over the door threshold. He shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with this. This is weird. I’m gonna go to school now.”

“Danny, I promise they’re just—”

Danny turned on heel. No backpack, no change of clothes. He took to the street without a single school supply and moved, and moved.

It was supposed to be guns-blazing. Molecule by molecule. Headshot you died. He’d prepared for that this whole time, in the shower, in his dreams, in his daydreams in class. He’d duck and dodge and explain himself over and over until they understood him.

Danny wasn’t sure he was capable of explaining himself anymore.

…

Danny knocked the heavy iron knocker. He was in ghost form, as a threat. He wondered if he still smelled like yesterday’s sweat now that he wasn’t wearing yesterday’s clothes. Now he was wearing the clothes he died in.

No one answered the door. Danny phased himself in.

“Vlad!” he called, and his words echoed along the slope of the two elaborate winding staircases that twirled and met at the top like caduceus. Gold-plated banisters. A security camera buried somewhere in the ceiling, no doubt.

Danny phased into the library. His eyes roved the three stories of bookshelves wrapping the perimeter like a sheath. Gaudy. Audacious. Like Vlad would ever read that much. Danny racked his brain because some something in here was the secret to opening Vlad’s laboratory. Jazz had told him. Some gold something to be touched, and pressed down, or pushed up? Or it opened to a button. Or a keypad, maybe.

Danny spat a curse. He was being stupid. He was frazzled. He wasn’t thinking straight.

He dove into the floor below. Intangibility was the only key he needed.

The sheetrock was cold, even when he wasn’t touching it. The darkness was so piercing it made static jump in his vision, some weird trick of the brain Jazz had explained where, in the absence of all light, the brain hallucinates its own. It came with a sensation of pressure against his eyeballs, and a complete disorientation of direction, and he simply just kept going down.

Danny emerged into a wash of cold air. Cold like metal was cold. The low lights of dials and clicking machines were bright to his eyes previously dunked into the pitchest nothing. He drank it in, eyes grateful for light no matter how little, inner ear grateful for orientation that had left his head swimming and his stomach tight.

His feet tapped down to the stone ground, and the air that breezed past him was chilled.

“Vlad!” Danny called again.

Nothing.

He moved by the floor lighting, which ran in trim along the perimeter of the laboratory rooms. It lit things from beneath, made machines gaunt and specimens into sharp geometries of darkness and flesh. It made the Fenton lab feel warm in a way Danny had never considered it warm.

His feet clacked. His breath puffed.

“Vlad!”

He followed light, followed a wash of green miasma percolating from some far room and catching on the particulate of water and dust that disturbed with the air currents. Danny disturbed it too, walking through, wearing its shade of green which his shadow robbed from the wall behind him.

“Vlad. I swear to god Vlad.”

He crossed the threshold of the portal room, where the dusting of green ambience became a medallion wash of golden-green coating, painting every surface of the room. The Fenton lab was one single expansive room, portal anchored into the far wall and facing all the dead and empty air in front of it. This was different. A much smaller room, walled on all sides save for the simple doorway, and each surface reflected the color back deeper and heavier. It was like a fishtank in the wall of an aquarium lit radiant aqua-blue by all the lights within, but green instead, pure ecto-green.

Danny approached the open portal. He stared into its placid swirls, mesmerized, and scared of it, in a way he hadn’t previously felt about the portal in the Fenton basement.

“Ah, seems the cat is a good mouser after all, it dragged you in my boy.” The words came sing-song. They came spine-shivering for Danny, who felt them like hot breath on his shoulder and reeled back, pivoted, fire crackling to life in his palms.

Vlad stood at the doorway, a solid 20 steps from Danny.

“Vlad.”

“So I’ve been hearing.”

“I need you to explain the portal.”

“Ah, I see you’ve spoken to your parents.” Vlad stepped in, washed in the ecto-green which muddied his ruby red eyes. He held his hands behind his back, cape trailing, a smirk on his fanged face. “Last I heard they weren’t taking the news very well.”

“What news. What did you tell them?”

“Me? Nothing. In fact, very kindly for your sake I even tried to drive them away from the answer but… We know how stubborn your parents can be.”

“What answer?”

“That you’re dead, Daniel.”

Shock washed like ice down Danny’s spine. It sent prickles like spider legs across his skin.

“Well, I suppose there’s still chance for some doubt. It could be Jazz. She could take the fall for you, if there’s any benefit to that at all.”

“I’m a halfa. We are halfas,” Danny said.

“A silly made up word by a silly child,” Vlad mused, and the light smile left his lips. “We are dead.”

“I’m not dead,” and Danny’s words were small, and they were childish.

“You are. I am. Embrace it. It’s nicer this way.” Vlad took a few steps closer, lionously tall in his saunter, feet clacking the ground. “It’s very freeing. After you’ve died already what is there left to fear?”

“I’m alive.”

“You’re a dead body with its soul still stuffed inside it like a Christmas goose. A lot of things in your body don’t work anymore, but ghosts don’t work right anyway and it is, for all its defiance of nature, a perfectly symbiotic relationship.” Vlad’s smile brushed his lips again, warm. “It’s nice to share this with you. Isn’t it nice to share things with people?”

Danny’s heart was beating too fast in his chest, and it was a human heart, a human beat. “I’m not dead,” he declared.

“Your wounds heal quickly because the ghost piloting you only needs to remember form. It stacks cells back into place and calls it good. You’ll endure fatal injuries as you no doubt have many times in your fights, but they’re trivial because physical trauma is not what kills a ghost. It’s what creates one. You’ll necrotize in places but it’s okay, because you’ll carry on, and it will bother you only if you let it bother you, if you’re too sentimental about the puppet you’re still inside.” Vlad closed in closer, neck craning to appraise Danny. “Ghosts love a facsimile of life so you will keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing. You’ll eat and you’ll sleep but you’ll find you won’t perish if you don’t. It just won’t be a good time if you want to keep occupying your flesh form. Take better care of it. You won’t get another.”

“You’re psychotic. And you’re wrong.”

“I have all the math to prove it.” Vlad leered from over Danny’s shoulder. He circled the boy, knocking Danny’s balance, who still on a hair trigger stood ready to fight. The light from the ghost portal painted Vlad’s face like the phases of the moon as he moved. “Did your parents explain that part to you properly?”

“No, because they didn’t get the math right.”

“Oh they’ve gotten it right. This time. It only took them two decades longer than it took me.” The portal rolled like static, and its fizzling pattern crashed like an ocean wave across Vlad’s cape. “No amount of man-made power is sufficient to drag the entire fabric of the Ghost Zone up against our own, tear a hole through it, and anchor it to a stable frame. It requires something with a pull on the Ghost Zone, a strong pull, and that thing is a human life at the moment of an extraordinarily violent death.”

Danny backed a step away from the portal, from Vlad, but the walls boxed him in. He swam in its green light.

“You stepped in and you turned the portal on, that’s what you thought, right, Daniel? Pressed a careless button on the inside and now here we are. Silly parents for not finding that button first.” Vlad’s face hardened. “No. Jack and Maddie knew about the button. Maddie explained it to me over the phone. What engineer designing and building their own portal would forget the location of the on button? They’d pressed it from the outside. It didn’t work. And so you pressing the button was not the important part. It was you dying to the electrocution that clicked everything right into place. And while your ghost should have been torn from your lifeless corpse and pulled to the Ghost Zone you instead pulled the Ghost Zone here. Your ghost got to stay put. You opened the portal. You became the undead freak you are. And now we’re here.”

Danny’s eyes bounced between Vlad’s. His cheeks felt hot, like he was enduring an accusation of wrongdoing. And he had none of the knowledge to refute what was being said.

“You’re messing with me. You’re wrong,” Danny shot back. He thrust an arm out, drenched in the fog of the portal. “If the portal needs a person to die in it then explain your portal! Are you so casual about it? You killed someone? You’re admitting to murder and you think I won’t do anything about it?”

Anger flashed like a storm across Vlad’s face. His aura swelled, pressing down with a pressure on Danny as Vlad halted and cast his shadow clear across Danny, coating the back wall. “The killing of other people with the wanton carelessness of half-baked machines is the domain of Jack and Jack alone. I’ve brought no such harm onto anyone else.”

“Then how do you have this portal?”

“This portal? This portal that I’ve had for 20 years? Which I opened when I solved the piece of Jack’s broken math that he was never able to solve until this morning?” Vlad stalked closer, hunched, imposing. Danny stepped back. “My boy Daniel you’ve had it so easy. You had it so simple. A truly clean break. So clean so lucky. A single lethal dose of electricity and it was already over. I’m jealous. You never even suffered.”

Vlad stepped closer, striking distance, arm extended. Danny flinched, but Vlad only swept his cape around, clenched in his fist, and pivoted to approach the portal.

“Put out of your misery before it even started.” Vlad slammed his fist against the portal rim, and the explosive metallic clang bounced through the rooms. His laugh belted out. “I should have been so lucky.”

19. Vlad Masters was 19. A sophomore in college. A man actively in the midst of sabotaging his social life to chase a woman who was already deeply in love with Vlad’s best friend who he hated more every day. He wasn’t sure what he ever enjoyed about Jack’s bumbling ineptitude, or his loudness, his brashness, his poor social skills, his bad breath, his mullet. Maybe Vlad had gravitated to Jack because deep down he loved how superior it made him feel to surround himself with the likes of Jack Fenton… And now, he hated how enraged it made him to watch Maddie’s eyes skip past his to focus on Jack Fucking Fenton again and again and again and again.

But surely there was hope still. Surely it was a matter of time before the rose-tinted glasses fell away and Maddie saw bumbling and inept and every such word in the basket when she looked at Jack. There’d come the day she tested the waters with Vlad to complain about one of Jack’s little quirks, and they’d find solace together in all the things Vlad was that Jack wasn’t, and all the things Vlad had that Jack didn’t. And he’d be gone, back to bumble elsewhere, and it would be just them.

The day didn’t come. It wouldn’t come. And maybe Vlad needed to change himself for Maddie. If he listened to her and Jack’s ghost ramblings, if he could put Jack in his place and solve the things Maddie couldn’t, it would show her. She’d understand.

Because that was the thing about Jack. His math was never right. Enduring Calculus 1 with Jack was all it took to prove this to Vlad. How many times he’d caught a single error on a single line for Jack, like a dropped stitch that would unravel the whole sweater. Every problem, without exception. Jack only passed on his homework grade with Vlad’s help. On his tests, he failed.

So Vlad was staring at Jack’s equation, full of bogus math, which Vlad knew was wrong because Jack had penned it, and Vlad had not yet fixed it himself.

“I’m telling you Jack, it won’t work.”

“Bogus V-man it totally will!”

It wouldn’t. But Vlad wouldn’t fix it for him. Not yet. Vlad would let Jack embarrass himself first, fully in front of Maddie, watching on, judging. Vlad would solve it for her. After. Once Jack had made a fool of himself for the hundredth time since college began.

He leaned in to study the portal frame. The gears were turning in his head already. He didn’t hear the whir of the power source catch.

…

19. Vlad Masters was 19. A tube ran down his nose and into his lungs, supplying oxygen for lungs which were failed by a diaphragm sloughing itself away. He was poisoned from the outside-in. Irradiated by ecto-energy none of the nurses or doctors could fully understand. It damaged his DNA. First obvious in the skin of his face where the blisters of his ecto-acne drained and sloughed. “Acne” was the wrong word. An unkind word. They were boils where the blast had cooked his skin, microwaved his cells. The skin on his body blackened over time. Organs decayed. Vlad Master read a lot about radiation sickness. He knew everything he had to expect.

Jack and Maddie had stopped visiting. They were dating now. It was on their last visit they’d told him, and Vlad hadn’t taken it well, and he’d perhaps burned a few bridges with the words he chose. It was deserved. Considering what Jack did to him.

He’d found the error in Jack’s math, by the way. Errors, but all the rest paled in impact compared to the lambda. The ecto-energy. The necessary ecto-potential to pull the Ghost Zone here. How stupid. How idiotic. For Vlad to die to a machine so botched in its construction.

When Vlad was released from the hospital, it was not because they’d cured him. It had been because there is a certain cruelty in making a 19-year-old live the last of his days bedded down in a white-walled room with just his books, his equations, and no one coming to visit anymore.

He was released with bedrest instructions. Vlad did not heed them. In his beater car, every cell of his body aching, he drove. At the materials lab, he disconnected his oxygen tank and moved through the lab space with the tube dangling loose from his nostril. No one was Vlad Masters’ friend. No one cared to stare long at his ugly boil-ridden face. No one stopped him as he hauled sheet metal, and supports, and bolts and wiring and resistors and power tools, checked out with a valid student ID, from the lab. The lab inventory room would not be seeing these back.

It was a prep bunker, buried beneath a vast lot of empty Wisconsin land, that Vlad hauled his materials. He and Jack had discovered it as freshmen. Poked through its bowels with flashlights and quipped and laughed over how eerie it was. Deep beneath the sheetrock, boxy rooms carved out of walls of stone. Shelf upon shelf of dusty canned foods, and shotguns sealed in cases fastened to the walls. The locks had rusted with water damage.

His arms ached until they throbbed, dragging beams of metal across the stone floor, scratching chalk-mark stains into the ground. His skin sloughed, inflamed, burning to the touch. Vlad didn’t bother to rest, because these injuries would never heal anyway. He hauled, and welded, and wired up his circuitry and resistors with a care and caution Jack would never have bothered to practice. He checked it against his math by flashlight. He took naps on the cold stone floor and woke with deep purple bruises on every part of his body that had pressed against the ground.

His appetite left him. His lungs filled with mucus. The boils on his face had spread down to his chest, his shoulders. The touch of his shirt chafed them, so he worked without one, a figure of skeletal rib ridges jutting from tight skin that bloomed with the projection of his shadow against stone walls.

He knew why Jack’s math was wrong.

A silly mistake. A stupid mistake. Anyone with half a mind for the paranormal should have realized the Ghost Zone was not so easily at your beck and call. Not without chumming the water with something it would rise to feast on.

And in that violent death, what would happen to the ghost? It would stay, wouldn’t it? If it successfully anchored the Ghost Zone to the portal it stood inside, then by definition the ghost would stay?

And was that death? Yes, in a way. But it was a death one would get to keep living. As opposed to the death Vlad was headed for, whose coldness and finality scared Vlad more than anything he could put to words.

He’d fixed the oxygen tank back to himself. He couldn’t work without it, hauling it about on a little dolly with him, back and forth, while he fetched and affixed the last of the plating he needed to craft the frame of his silent soulless portal.

He’d stolen a generator from the sports storage shed. It was meant to be enough to power the portable stadium lights they hauled onto the fields for late games, an absolute obelisk meant to cast light across an entire football field.

Surely, it contained enough power to kill one simple human.

Vlad fixed the last bolt in place. Jumper cables clamped generator to portal wiring. It was a pure skeleton. A paltry thing, like the bones of something already picked clean. Built in haste, sloppy, by a 19-year-old whose fingers were too inflamed to clutch a wrench any longer.

He could have asked Jack for help. Maddie. But he wouldn’t let them have this. They had to solve the portal on their own. They didn’t get to know his hard work. They did not get to save him.

Vlad would save himself.

A ghost anchored to a body. What was that? What monster was that?

Vlad moved. He coughed mucus from his lungs. It made it hard to breathe. So he moved slowly, and crouched, bony jutting angles, painted blotchy purple, all bruises and skin, sloughing away.

He crouched, because the portal he’d constructed was not large enough to hold him standing up. He bowed inside it, a small thing, a pathetic man of little life. He wheezed. He hurt. His eyes burned.

And he held in his hands the remote to flip the generator switch, and connect the circuit, and bring to life the math Vlad had so kindly corrected out from under Jack’s grip.

Vlad did not. Because throwing the switch would kill him.

Deep in his animal brain, his dying brain, he knew this intimately. It filled him with a drowning fear like paralysis. He did not want to die.

He would die if he did nothing.

It would be this one throwing of the switch which could save him. Which would burst the portal to life right through his heart. Electrocute it out of its rhythm, slaughter him like a pig on spot and… maybe… hopefully… drag the Ghost Zone here. And whatever he was, dead, would stay.

And whatever he was, dead, would be better than this.

Vlad held the remote in his clammy hands.

And from within the humming skeleton of his portal, his fingers caressed the on button.

…

The portal sung its happy contentment, mused in its healthy green aura, staining all the slabs of rock wall. Danny swiveled his head, recognizing now the bunker this had been before it had been a laboratory.

“I’ve harmed no one, Daniel,” Vlad concluded, his voice too measured for the horrors it had spilled forth. Too calm against the blossoming terror its words had wrought across Danny’s face. “I opened the portal to save myself. You’re lucky, Daniel. It was because of my fast thinking that your father is not a murderer. I took that honor from him.” Vlad’s head tilted to the side, suddenly sympathetic. “Although, you’ve maybe made the title whole for him.”

Vlad reached out, Danny shot away.

“Dad didn’t kill me,” he choked. “I did this to myself.”

“How lucky Jack is, to always dodge responsibility for his actions.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Of course you don’t. If you believed me, you’d have to accept you’re not wriggling out of this. There’s no denial you can bring home to your parents. If you believe me, then this is reality.” Vlad smiled, a playful glint to his fangs. “I suppose I should have more sympathy. I quite like being this way. It is so much nicer than wasting away to death, like I was. But you. You were healthy before this. This killed you, and it didn’t save you from anything.” Vlad cocked his head. “Such tragic fates, both of us, due to the carelessness of Jack Fenton.”

Danny shook his head. His heart beat—his human heart beat—all too fast in his throat. It made him sick. It made him feel like the walls were closing in around him. This was Vlad’s doing. Vlad’s trap. Vlad’s prison he’d been forced to join.

"That's not true. I'm not like you."

“Of course not,” Vlad said, sweetly. “How sweet denial is. Deny it if you like. Call me a liar. But if you ever want to come to terms with what your father did to you, consider coming to me. I understand you in a way no one else will.”

Danny gave no response. He gave no acknowledgement of Vlad’s words. He took to the air, phased himself up through the sheetrock that had been packed atop the doomsday prepper bunker. Up through the mansion, which had been built atop the portal beneath it, and not the other way around. Into the open sky, he breathed fresh air not stagnant and damp beneath the ground, bathed in light pure white from the sun and not tainted green like the bowels underneath him.

And he flew back toward the portal that made him, leaving Vlad with the portal from which he’d made himself.

...

(inspiration post from @ciestess)

[acescavern]

SAN, WHERE ARE YOU? — CHOI SAN X FEM! READER

Paring: San x Fem!Reader

Genre: Pure smut. No plot whatsoever. There is a sprinkling of fluff if you squint?

wc: 4,825

Synopsis: Your boyfriend invites you to the fancy dress party his frat is holding to celebrate the frats birthday. Only, nobody will tell you what he's dressed as. When you spend half of the party searching for him, Jongho gives away his location.. you're in for a night of fun. One question though, Do you like scary movies?

warnings: smut, smut,smut. Ghostface!San, Velma!reader. Rough sex, unprotected sex, Knife play ( WITHOUT cutting reader. The knife isn't sharp enough for skin), praise, degradation, manhandling, sex in a treehouse, reader's hands get tied, Reader has her view restricted, everything is consented, established relationship, light choking from behind?, reader gets carpet burn. I'm not sure if I've missed something.

note: Hey! it's been a long while. oops. anyway. here, enjoy this badly written San fic! please remember that this is all fiction. This is a little darker than what i've written previously but it's more my vibe ;)

Reblogs are kinder than likes, if you can. Likes can shadowban creators. Any feedback is welcome

You didn't know what you were thinking. For starters, your costume was tight and short. You were sure the Velma outfit looked different online, instead, the material was like a tight second skin that stretched across your chest and the skirt was much shorter than the picture. You were surely careful not to bend or move too much. Your long orange socks weren't meant to be thigh-highs at all. Overall, you'd come to the conclusion that the outfit was more on the verge of a more adult theme that would pass for a party.

You still looked good. In fact, your legs looked amazing in the platform heels Mingi's girlfriend persuaded you into. She claimed that if you'd already gone this far, you may as well go all out. What sold you on the whole outfit was her mentioning that San would go insane and you'd had a knack for winding each other up lately.

So, here you were, at the KQ Frat like every other Friday night. Only this time, it was a special party. The KQ Frat as a whole was turning 5 and they'd let their dearest Song Mingi choose the theme. Okay, maybe he was put on the spot and said 'uhhhm' a lot when he was asked but he eventually stumbled out with the theme of fancy dress.

You pushed the fake glasses up your nose, swearing to yourself at the realization that you could have used your own glasses for this instead of messing around for half an hour trying to put contacts in with shaky hands. You opted to just take them off all together, setting them down on a ledge in the hall. If you had your way, you'd be at home.

Honestly, since you moved in with San things have been a lot better for you both, other than his inability to do the laundry. However, tonight you'd gotten ready at a friend's house and with him being so secretive with his costume, you hadn't a clue what to look for.

The first person you came across was your boyfriend's best friend, Wooyoung. You stifled a laugh, raising your eyebrow at him. “A vampire?” Your fingers ruffled his black and red cape, the material cheap and wrinkled. Wooyoung only rolled his eyes in annoyance.

“It was rushed! San took my costume idea!” He snapped, crossing his arms over his chest. Woo’s words came out in a slight lisp, the terrible plastic fangs moving around in his mouth so much that he just ripped them out.

What he said piqued your interest though, an overly friendly smile plastering on your face. “And..what were you going to be, Wooyoungie?” The raised eyebrow look the man gave you had you almost ashamed that you were trying to butter him up to tell you San’s costume. A girl had to do what a girl had to do.

“Don’t ‘Wooyoungie’ me!” His voice raised a pitch as he mocked you, his eyelids rapidly moving to fan his lashes in an imitation of you. “I’m not stupid, ____. San would never let me live it down if I ruined the surprise.”

That was true, Woo was already the brunt of most of the group's jokes. Though lately, they’d dwindled down in public. Anything to help save a crumb of his image in attempts to woo the library girl. You rolled your eyes and lightly whacked his arm, pushing past him with a grumbled goodbye.

The next familiar face you came across nearly took you off your feet, if only it weren't for the person behind you steadying your form. Spiderman and..Chucky? Something about the spiderman felt familiar and as your eyes lit up with hope… they soon dullened when the voice spoke. Yunho. Not San.

“Woah, careful there.” He patted the top of your head in a friendly gesture. Yunho was the most big brother friend you’d ever met and he was the one you went to for comfort whenever you and San fought. He offered the best advice sometimes. It wasn't surprising.

“I’m sorry, ____.” Chucky spoke, adjusting his cap. Except it wasn't Chucky really, it was just Hongjoong, shooting you an apologetic grin. “Have you seen my girl? She’s dressed as the bride of Chucky.” The obvious reveal that he succumbed to the couple's costume agenda had a light blush blossoming at the tips of his ears.

You shook your head, an apologetic smile tugging at your lips. "Sorry, Joong. Have you seen San?" His reply was the same as yours.

So, you kept moving, pushing through the sweaty bodies grinding together in time with the heavy thudding of music. Eventually, you managed to push through to the kitchen. Huffing out a breath, you leant against the counter. Where was San? There were so many people here, it was more packed than last year especially with the frat's growing reputation. You glanced around the space from the doorway of the kitchen once more, spotting Yeosang, dressed as Link from the zelda games, talking very animatedly with Seonghwa, who you weren't sure of his character but he looked striking in a white ruffled blouse and half corset. You suspected he was some kind of vampire, judging by the vibe.

“You’re looking for San, I take it.” A casual voice piped up from behind you, startling you to whirl around. There stood Jongho, his face half covered by a cut off white mask. He wore a suit, without the jacket. Instead, a long cape with hand painted gold swirls on the inside. He had obviously done it himself. It was certainly the best effort of Phantom of The Opera you'd seen.

“You know where he is?” Desperation laced your tone, you just wanted to see your boyfriend at this point. San had been teasing you all day over text, telling you that you’d love his outfit. That you would go crazy. He told you that he chose it with you in mind.

Jongho gave a nonchalant shrug, his eyes looking toward the back patio door. “Maybe, try looking out there.” Your shoulders relaxed, a grin overtaking your painted lips. You were about to set off in that direction when he held up a gloved hand. “You didn’t hear it from me, ____. Okay?”

With an endearing eye roll, you brought your fingers across your mouth in a zipping motion that earned you an approving nod. Now, you set off outside carefully, being mindful of the shoes you were wearing. They were practically stilts to you. Your fingers held down the ends of your skirt, worried it might blow up in the breeze. Even though ninety percent of the party goers were indoors out of the cold. Speaking of cold, goosebumps rose against your exposed skin as you squinted through the darkness.

“San?” You called, rounding the pool to the concrete slabs that paved the way to the tree at the bottom of the yard. “Sannie?”

You hated it down here. The frat house was a huge place. You often wondered how on earth the guys managed to score it. But with eighteen people living there, it was much needed. The thing was, with the big house came the big garden. The bottom of the garden, whilst still kept mowed, was mostly unused. Save for a few sheds.. But it was creepy and always sent a chill up your spine. Though that could be the cemetery on the other side of the fence. All in all, with the massive house the guys were sure was haunted and the cemetery backing onto the place.. It was just spooky all around.

You stood for a moment, a shiver running down your spine as a whisper of wind rushed by your ear. “San, come on.. this isn’t funny..” Silence. “I’m cold..” A rustle sounded to your left, your head snapping in that direction.

You began to tentatively approach, trying to make sure your heels don’t sink into the grass. You bit back a scream at the sudden animal sprinting out from behind the shrubbery, your palm pressed against your heart as it pounded in your chest. Your breath left you as a sharp exhale of relief. You chuckled at yourself, shaking your head as you turned.. Though you didn’t get far.

You turned straight into a broad, hard chest. A small scream left you, the masked man's hands reaching out to grip your hips. The figure was wearing a ghostface mask, something sheathed in his belt glinting in the moonlight. Although, the familiarity in the way his strong hand splayed on your body as he held you, you knew it was him.

San’s Ghostface robe was open, revealing his black jeans and a shirt that stretched across his torso. Your eyes once more caught the glint at his waist. “A real knife? San, are you craz-” He said nothing, only span you around with your back to his chest. One of his hands drifted up your body to cover your mouth, it was then that you noticed the leather gloves as you felt them against your skin.

“You look like a treat, ____.” He hushed in your ear, the plastic of his mask bumping against the side of your face with how close his head was to you. “Now, Velma, you think you can climb that ladder?” he pointed a gloved hand to the tree, the stepped ladder made up of wooden slats fixed together. At least it was sturdy.

You nodded mutedly against his hand, resisting the urge to turn to face him when he let you go completely with a part pat to your behind. “Good girl.” His voice was smooth to the ear, “Off you go.” With a nudge to the small of your back, he urged you on.

It was a slight struggle to climb the ladder with the way you were dressed, but San was close behind you. When you made it to the doorway of the treehouse, you waited for him as you stood on the ladder. San slotted his feet either side of yours on the same ladder rung, his body caging you against it as he produced the keys for the door. The tree house was in regular use by the frat, mostly so the house didn’t smell of weed whenever the landlord decided to randomly drop by for house inspections.

The treehouse itself was very sturdily built, with an old bedroom door that was previously Mingi’s and the hole in the middle fixed over with planks of wood screwed in place. The floor was covered in carpet that used to be in Hongjoong’s room. A few beanbags dotted around the place and for lighting there were battery operated fairy lights strung around the square perimeter. It was a cute little hangout that San had quite literally banished everybody from for tonight.

With the door now open, you were about to climb in when San’s hands landed on your waist again. His strong grip practically hauled you up and into the treehouse. With a noise of surprise, you landed on your stomach, scrambling up on your hands and knees to crawl to one of the beanbags. The door shut behind you, you noted San didn’t bother to lock it.

San was silent. You almost wondered if he even came here with you but when his leather clad fingers curled around your ankle and a low chuckle rumbled in the back of his throat. “Where are you going, Baby?” His voice was a mocking coo as he pulled you toward him, your body dragging across the carpet causing your skirt to drift up to your waist. “Didn’t you miss me?” His voice sounded close to your ear again now and you felt his presence close to your back but he wasn’t actually touching you.

“Sa-” He interrupted you, his voice completely dropping his act to murmur to you softly. “Do you trust me?” He stayed poised above you, his body weight on his arms so he’s not touching you.

You twisted underneath him, rolling onto your back to stare up at him. Although, you only saw his mask. Your hands reached out, fingers delicately lifting his mask up for you to see his eyes. His lips quirked at the corners when you cupped his cheeks. “I trust you with my life, Sannie.” You arched your neck up your lips pressing the lightest of kisses to his jaw. “You’re doing good. We spoke about this, remember?” Your thumbs grazed small circles on the apples of his cheeks, San’s brown eyes closing as he leaned into your touch.

It was true. You both had spoken about this forever ago, You’d established the limits and words to use if either of you were uncomfortable. The only thing you both hadn’t settled on was when. You both agreed to keep that a surprise and to San, today was perfect. So, with a sure nod, he lightly battered your hands away from his face to pull the mask back down and sink back into character.

You instead began to let your hands wander over his back, the muscles prominent from holding himself up. When they drifted down to his behind, the intent to give him a playful squeeze, your hands froze. San grinned behind the mask, seeing your eyes light up in surprise. He could see the excitement swimming in them and he knew you’d just encountered the feel of the rope tucked into his back pocket beneath the robe. Perfect opportunity. Your boyfriend rose himself to his knees, his right hand disappearing beneath the black material to pull the soft rope from his pocket. It wasn’t too heavy duty. Actually… it was just the craft string that was tied around his christmas present from you.

San was quick and efficient with the way he pinned your hands to the carpet above your head. He paused, his eyes darting around to search for something to fix them to. His gaze landed on the small table next to one of the beanbags, a grin overtaking his features behind the mask once more. Instead of dragging your body across the carpet again, San pulled the table closer threading the twine string around the leg before fastening both of your wrists against it.

You watched him obediently, pretending to struggle at least a little bit. It added to the excitement after all. San let his eyes properly travel over your body and your outfit in the soft glow of the fairy lights. You couldn’t see his facial reactions but it excited you all the more. The adrenaline of the situation had you panting in anticipation. You felt his fingers brush over your ankle once more, ghosting up, up, up… his hand now cupping over your thigh, leathered index finger brushing the edge of your panties. He was taking his sweet time but his other hand was hovering over the handle of the knife at his waistband. Not yet.

The first thing to go was your tight orange shirt. It was roughly pulled over your head just to expose your torso. With your hands tied there was no way to fully remove it but San liked the way it restricted your arms above your head even further.

“Hm,” he made a sound in the back of his throat. “I think we’ll keep this, what do you think?” Even though he had asked you.. his tone suggested there was no room for negotiation, his fingers tugging at the hem of your skirt just once.

You felt him push the material higher to pool at your waist once more. San’s touch was feather light, teasing as he circled it around your navel and down to your waistline. Now was when his free hand curled around the handle of the knife in his belt. Your breathing hitched, body completely still as you felt the cold metal against your collarbone. Your eyes were staring at the ceiling, lips parted. A sound caught in your throat as he dragged it down your body, you could feel that the blade was dull and not sharp enough to actually cut your skin… it was either that or San was pressing very lightly.

“Shh,” He hushed, letting the point of the blade drag across your hardened nipple over the sheer fabric of your bra. “I’ve got you, now.” The point broke through the fabric, San lifting it away from you to slice your bra cup straight through the middle.

His face appeared in your vision and you could only imagine him looking absolutely elated with how glassy your eyes looked. He tutted, “You’ve seen enough, I think.” He set the knife on your sternum as he pulled your shirt down your arms enough to cover the top half of your head, blanking out your vision.

Your body squirmed between his thighs, small sounds of struggle leaving your parted lips. “San, I wanna see you.” You whined, wrists twisting in their binds before you'd remembered they were currently immobile.

“Keep still.” San warned, his tone was far from the soft and loving boyfriend you usually encountered. San was rarely dominant in bed with you, he preferred to lovingly worship your body and praise you with sweet nothings.

This was pleasantly different. His touch was firmer, his grip harsher and his demands had arousal shooting straight through your body. Like the good girlfriend you were, you stilled. San lifted the Ghostface mask up to uncover his mouth, not that you could even see.

Your body flinched in surprise when you felt cool air blow across your exposed nipple. San could only nod to himself in satisfaction. He loved the reactions he could draw from your body without even touching you. He lowered his mouth further, plush lips enveloping the peaked flesh into his warm mouth.

Your hands clenched into fists, longing to dive themselves into his hair. You were totally restricted, completely at San's mercy. The thought alone had a soft moan drifting into the silence. You felt his touch leave you again, the knife's weight leaving your sternum. You felt the material of your bra pull away from you in the middle, the sound of tearing fabric mixing with your breathing.

Your bra was now loose, the cups falling completely to the sides to expose you further. “Hey.” You protested weakly. That bra was expensive.

San could only laugh softly as he dropped a kiss between your breasts. “She finally talks.” He drawled, the feeling of the cold blade starting back at your collarbone once more.

The sharpness of the thin coldness trailed down your middle, a circle made around your belly button before it lifted from your exposed skin only briefly. You felt it again on your waistline, right where your panties sat. San made an appreciative sound in the back of his throat, flattening the blade to firmly tap it against your clothed center.

The feeling had you mewling beneath him, struggling to stay still. The panties were the next thing to go, San pulling the torn fabric from under you after he had successfully cut it away from your body only to drop the arousal coated garment on your chest.

“Please..” Your beg came as a desperate cry, you needed some sort of relief. The wait was killing you.

You were rewarded with San shushing you yet again. “If you're looking for any mercy here, ____, you're out of luck.”

San's left hand pinned your hips down, his other manning the knife. The knife where he had used the flat of the blade to press it to your, now bare, core. You knew you were wet, you could feel it. Hell, you could hear it when the metal was tapped against you again. Your moan raised a pitch, the hand holding your hips moving and allowing your hips to rock dangerously against the flat of the knife.

“I wish you could see yourself, baby.” San's voice deepened, sounding huskier as he watched you. “My girl. So needy to get off, you're rubbing yourself on a kitchen knife.” He tutted. “Pathetic, don't you think?”

You could think of a single coherent thought. Gasps drawing from you as all you could do was nod and cry out when the surface your hips were working against was removed.

You were sure you would remember this night forever… The thrill rushing through your veins. You thought San had gotten up. You thought he left you there for a moment until his fingers dug into your cheeks, palm holding your jaw tight. He squeezed, forcing your mouth to open. “Tongue.”

It was a one-word demand and yet you knew the instruction, your mouth opening wide to poke out your flattened tongue. San's harsh breathing was heard as he very carefully let the knife rest on the pink muscle. More specifically, the side he coated with yourself. You whined once more.

“Clean it.” San encouraged, watching with interest as you followed his every command and collected your own taste. He was so hard it was painful but he wanted to drag this night out… He thought his decision over, curious, lust blown eyes taking in the sight of you.

You, with your skirt bunched at your waist. You, with your orange thigh high socks, your ridiculous shoes, your arms trussed up above your head, your shirt covering half of your face, your ruined bra exposing your chest, your chest where your ripped panties lie. You, with your trust in him to carry out such fantasies. San was done waiting. He wanted you and he wanted you now.

The loud clang of an object being thrown away was harsh to your ears, the object thudding against the carpet. San had thrown the knife far away from you both, his fingers frantically fumbling with his belt buckle and zipper. “I'm done fucking waiting.” He panted sharply, shoving his jeans and boxers down just enough to let his cock free.

You wished you could see him, you wished you could see how red the swollen tip of his cock was. You wished you could watch the thick vein along his shaft throb before your eyes… the bead of precum smeared across the head. The image had a zing of pleasure pulsing through your clit.

“San, please.” You begged, “Please. I've been good, right?” You hadn't a clue what you were babbling. Your words tumbled out of your mouth quickly before your brain could filter.

San groaned, “Yes, Baby.” You felt him brush against your entrance. “You have.” In one sharp snap forward of his hips, San sheathed himself into your warm, wet pussy. “F-Fuck..” His grip was back on your body again, maneuvering your legs back by your thighs as he gave you time to adjust to the sheer stretch his cock gave you.

San's big palms spread over the backs of your thighs, opting to just gather your ankles in one hand to push your legs back against your torso. You felt the burn of your thigh muscles at your body being bent this way but your main focus was still trying to relax your tight grip around his cock.

“Relax for me.” San murmured, his free hand settling on your pubic area.. you wondered what the purpose of the hand placement was until his leather-gloved thumb made contact with your clit.

San stayed perfectly still as his thumb moved in slow circles, your body eventually relaxing to the pleasure coursing through you. Your chest rose and fell harshly the faster his thumb moved. San watched you through the mask intently, how your facial features slackened. Small moans of his name bounced off the wooden walls of the treehouse, the fairy lights casting a beautiful glow across your skin that San could look at forever.

San knew you were getting close, he knew your body. He knew that when your teeth sunk into your bottom lip it meant you were on the edge of an orgasm and for a moment he felt bad to rip your peak right away from you by stopping his thumb.

“No, no! San, that's not fair!” Your eyes fluttered harshly to adjust as he lifted the shirt from your eyes. Your legs were let go, dropping each side of his body.

San's fingers skillfully untied the knots of your binds, rubbing at the marks on your wrists for a mere moment. He pulled completely from you, your expression frowning in confusion.

“What are yo–” You were roughly rolled onto your stomach, your body manhandled so you were on your knees and your naked torso was flush to the carpet. “Fuck!” Your curse abruptly escaped you as he entered you once more without warning, San's pelvis flush to your behind.

Your fingers grip on the carpet was torn away when San gathered your arms behind your back, wrists tethered together once more with the twine. “Stay fucking still.” He grunted, a harsh swat of his hand smacking your ass cheek eliciting a long moan from you.

He gave another swat to the other cheek. Matching red hand prints on display. Punishment for trying to lift your head. It didn't matter anymore, San fixed that problem by keeping a hand closed around the back of your neck, the side of your face roughly rubbing against the carpet with each hard thrust of his hips.

San fucked you like a man possessed, not a single break between thrusts. His belt jingled with his rapid movements. “See what you get when you do as you're told for once, hmm?” His voice was broken with his own noises of pleasure.

You weren't much better, your mouth permanently open with screams of his name and the word ‘yes’ repeating on loop. Your brain felt hazy, pleasantly so. You weren't even aware of your volume or even the patch of drool soaking the floor under your mouth. San had never fucked you like this before.

“You're so fucked out you haven't even noticed you're being fucked raw.” The pressure on your neck increased, a garbled noise from you being muffled by the floor.

You barely registered San's free hand fumbling around for something until the light of his phone screen was shoved in front of your face. The camera app. The idea had your thighs trembling. Your face had a far away look to it, one you hardly recognized as yourself. You watched pliantly as San propped the device against the table leg that your hands were previously tied to before hitting the capture a few times.

San could feel you shaking against him, his hips stuttering a moment when you clenched around him. The arm that wasn't holding you down snaked around you, his fingers finding your clit to rub fast, tight circles.

He'd never heard you scream so loud when the orgasm wracked through your body. Toes curling in your heels, nails digging into your palms. The feeling slammed into you abruptly, rippling through your pussy. Anyone outside would think you were being murdered.

San tore the mask off his face, his head tipping back on a long guttural moan. You knew he'd just come inside you, you'd know what that sound meant anywhere. Even if you didn't feel the slow softening of his cock, or the excess come smear on your skin as his thrusts slowed to a stop.

The both of you were panting harshly. San gently patted your waist, letting go of your neck to work on untying your wrists again. “Wow.” You huffed, arms falling limply to the floor with exhaustion. The cool breeze felt nice against your heated, sweat sheened skin.

He hummed in light agreement, his palms coasting up and down your back and sides for a moment before he withdrew from you. San was quick to reach up to the small table for the box of tissues he had brought up here when he prepared the treehouse that morning.

Your boyfriend always prided himself with being gentle with your aftercare. San made sure to clean your abused pussy as best he could in that moment before he gathered your limp body in his arms. “My limbs don't work.” You mumbled, your head resting on his shoulder as San brought you both to one of the big bean bags. His touch was the most gentle it had been all evening, palms trying to rub some warmth and life back into your body.

“Mmh, That was definitely something..” San agreed, draping a blanket over you both.

The two of you sat there in the blissful afterglow for a while. Bodies tangled together, your head against San's shoulder and your fingers playing with the hair at the back of his neck and San's own hands lovingly rubbing over your body to soothe you.

After a few minutes, your fingers stopped and San was sure you'd fallen asleep until–

“I have carpet burn on my cheek.”

©️acescavern, I do not give permission for my work to be reposted or translated and reposted. reblogs are accepted.

[fullstcp]

"Glory Days" by Little Mix Sentence Starters

SHOUT OUT TO MY EX

"This is a shout out to my ex."

"Heard he's/she's/they're in love with some other chick/guy."

"That hurt me, I'll admit."

"Forget that, boy/girl, I'm over it."

"I hope he's/she's/they're getting better sex."

"I hope she/he/they ain't faking it like I did, babe."

"Took four long years to call it quits."

"Guess I should say thank you for the 'hate yous' and the tattoos."

"Ain't sure I loved you, anyway."

"You're really quite the man/woman."

"You made my heartbreak and that made me who I am."

"Hey, look at me now!"

"I'm all the way up, I swear you'll never bring me down."

"I deleted all your pics."

"I blocked your number from my phone."

"You took all you could get, but you ain't getting this love no more."

"I snapped right back, I'm so brand new."

"Read my lips, I'm over you."

TOUCH

"You and I and nobody else."

"I'm feeling feelings I've never felt."

"It's the way you got me under your spell."

"Don't you keep it all to yourself."

"Just a touch of your love is enough."

"I promise to keep this a secret, I'll never tell."

"And now my whole week is golden."

"I'm not afraid to fade into emotions."

"I know that this could be something real."

REGGAETÓN LENTO

"I know it's crazy."

"I feel like you could be the one that I've been chasing in my dreams."

"There's nobody in here that comes close to you."

"I wish that this could last forever."

"Every second by your side is heaven."

"Don't you know you're playing with fire tonight?"

F.U.

"All damn night, I was here waiting."

"I know you were with her/him/them."

"I know that you kissed her/him/them."

"Had my breakup speech ready, then you kiss my face."

"It's the way you persuade me."

"I hate you, really hate you."

"My momma said I shouldn't date you."

"I don't wanna be friends."

"Why am I such a fool when it comes to you?"

"All my friends say I'm a sucker."

"Can't explain, it's complicated."

"I wish you were dead till you take me to bed."

"I'll get my revenge, take my key to your Benz."

"Right before I say that it's the end, you sweet talk me again."

"I wanna say 'screw you'."

"I practice my lines in the mirror."

"Then you smile, that's my killer."

"So I say 'love you'."

"Cause you're drop dead gorgeous."

"Cupid ain't coming to warn us."

POWER

"You should know, I'm the one who's in control."

"I got the power."

"Hold up, my turn."

"Got you thinking that I'm all innocent."

"Just wait till I get you home."

NO MORE SAD SONGS

"I keep trying, nothing's working."

"I still wanna know if you're alone."

"I keep trying to put this behind me."

"I still wanna know who's taking you home."

"For tonight, I'm gonna get my mind off it."

"Don't care where I go."

"Just can't be alone."

"They'll never know me like you used to know me."

"I still got you on my mind."

"I will only hurt myself trying to hurt you."

OOPS

"You woke up in my bed."

"We broke up, we're better off as friends."

"Now I accidentally need you."

"I don't know what to do."

"Oops, baby, I love you."

"I messed around and got caught up with you."

"I've got these feelings like there's nothing new."

"Now I can't get enough of you."

"I don't know how long I can wait."

"This could be my greatest mistake."

"We had a good run."

"We messed around and had some good fun."

"Guess it turns out I lost a good one."

"Now I'm wishing every morning would come with you next to me."

"If it was up to me, I would take a time machine to the day I said goodbye."

"So can we try again?"

"No, don't you tell me goodbye."

YOU GOTTA NOT

"Is that what you call flirting?"

"I don't get paid to babysit no one."

"I'm out here looking for the one to love."

"And everybody warned me."

"But you're kinda hot, so I thought 'why not'?"

DOWN & DIRTY

"If we only got one night, forget about the world outside."

"I don't ask the mirror, I know I'm the fairest."

"I'm bringing the fire so call me Daenerys."

"They wanna know who I'm sneaking into my place."

"They don't need to know."

"No one's business how I play."

"I know you heard me."

"Everybody get down."

YOUR LOVE

"If I ain't got nothing, least I got you."

"Come and kiss me for the first time."

"That's what your love makes me feel like."

"Let's pack up and run away, just me and you."

"There ain't no heartache you can't undo."

"Take my hand, baby, please."

NOBODY LIKE YOU

"I'm alive, if living's just a beating heart."

"We won't admit we've taken it too far."

"I know it's love."

"I will always be the first to start making up excuses when it hurts."

"I'm alone again."

"All I want is to feel again."

"There's nobody like you."

"I've tried 'goodbye' a hundred times, not one of them true."

"I'm screaming 'i don't want you,' but you know that I do."

"You only see me when my guard is down."

"It's wrong, and I hate that it's the truth."

"I only like myself when I'm with you."

"All you left me with was scars."

"And that's the hardest part."

PRIVATE SHOW

"You got my adrenaline pumping when you stand so close."

"We don't need a reason."

"I got a feeling, that soon we'll be leaving."

"You had me at hello."

"You're the only one that's taking me home."

"Put your kisses on my lips."

"We ain't here for playing these games."

NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

"Sometimes, we take it too far going at the deep end."

"No matter what the deal, babe, you know that I'll be there."

"Can't let nobody's words be the why we ain't speaking."

"Too much is not enough."

"Nothing else matters like us."

"Nothing else matters like love."

"I don't wanna fight, not tonight."

"You just gotta believe if it leaves that it's coming back around."

"Look at us now, still you and me."

"We've come so far."

"So when you coming around?"

"I don't want nobody else."

"I got you all to myself."

IF I GET MY WAY

"I don't wanna talk about her/him/them."

"Tonight, I really wanna fix your heart."

"I can see it in your face, your heart is breaking."

"I don't wanna play her/his/their games."

"I really wanna be the one to take you home."

"Fed up of being the shoulder you cry on."

"I want to be the shoulder you lie on."

"I'll be fine, if you're mine."

"I want to be the one that you dream of."

"If I get my way, I'ma take care of you."

"I can take her/his/their place, let me get my way."

"I'm never letting go of you."

"I'ma put an end to all the waiting."

"Don't you know I try to forget about you at night?"

IS YOUR LOVE ENOUGH?

"Is your love enough?"

"It's getting late, but you don't mind it."

"One kiss, you're falling in love."

"Too much is never too much."

"Is it enough? I wanna know."

"Come on, make me believe it."

DEAR LOVER

"You look like home tonight."

"All you need is my love."

"That's all I'm asking of ya."

"I'm incapable of saving your heart this time."

"But if you wanna, I'll pretend to be you hero for just tonight."

"You've been believing there's more to this feeling. I swear, I wish there was."

"When the moment is over, we'll walk away closer."

"Maybe that's good enough."

FREAK

"You don't get these kisses for free."

"I can tell you think there's nothing wrong."

"Lipstick on your shirt, so don't make it worse lying to me."

"Now watch me set the tone."

"You'll be sleeping in the bed alone."

"You ain't making a fool of me."

"I got two sides of me."

"I ain't playing games no more."

"Listen to me, now it's critical."

"Get your story straight."

"I can wait all night for sure."

"I won't forgive you for your mistakes."

"Don't try to turn this around."

"It's too late."

"There's emotions you ain't seen."

"I can be your nightmare or your queen."

"Go ahead, bad boy, live your dream."

"Don't come crawling back to me."

[cheswirls]

actually gonna ramble abt tetherverse + sequel below w/o tagging so it can be buried. if anyone remembers this when the sequel gets posted to ao3 then uh oops sry. don't read if you want a blind surprise ig

I PULLED UP THE OUTLINE DOC that's kinda partially backwards-outline and other part extensive notes on everything ever. descriptions of clothing for disguises, pkmn team lists, short descriptors for the main and supporting cast, all the 'clues' scattered thru the story to solving ace's murder, EXTENSIVE notes on each of the sevii islands and what gets changed for tetherverse, and 'past' notes that detail ace and sabo's travels around the globe.

law and luffy's side of the story still only takes place on the sevii islands bc they're exploring luffy's home region. sabo on the other hand gets worked to the bone all over kanto.

took inspo from pkmn ranger SoA and the mind-control soundwaves they produce from machines. in tether it was v impt to me to not put anyone in a position of power bc i wanted to separate the plot and cast from having that kind of notoriety and also didn't think it necessary - it was basically a travelog that branched into breaking up a trafficking ring. in the sequel it doesn't work like that, because the point is that this whole conspiracy is being orchestrated by ppl with power. of course the e4 are the enemy. of course they're the admirals. the only surprise pick is vp.

also vp!!!!!! still a scientist with seven personal assistants for seven different areas of study. goes missing at the start and sabo has to corroborate with all six to get anything done and push closer to the truth. interpol gets involved. sabo becomes interpol at the very end and finally finds what he wants to do with his life.

also poor sabo :( he's in the hospital for long enough that he convinces ace to continue their 2nd circuit thru kanto without him, and that he would catch up later. gets outta the hospital just as ace leaves cinnabar bound for viridian, and then ace's body is found on the far side of mt. silver, so very, very far from his destination. found decaying at the base with striker's mega stone smashed to smithereens and the only reasonable conclusion the authorities can drive is that he tumbled down while scaling the mountain. sabo blaming himself so much because he wasn't there to keep ace out of trouble.

before they travel around kanto for ace's second try at the indigo league, they're both in galar for a hot minute after ace gets invited to participate in the league challenge. this is where sabo's starter, his venusaur, ends up getting sick and dying. he spends a lot of time out in the wild area, absolutely heartbroken w/o a cure to fix him. captures his first non-dragon type that happens to be a volcarona. also captures a bagon that becomes his mental support buddy while the pair are in galar - something he can focus on, someone he has to take care of bc the pkmn rarely cares for itself. it's cathartic.

when ace dies sabo leaves for kalos because he views it as the last region he and ace journeyed through where everything was okay. before galar and venusaur. before kanto and striker and ace. sabo doesn't know how to exist without ace. dragon finds him and harbors him for a week and then kicks him out to travel the region on his own with only a single fennekin on his team. this is sabo's start at forming a fire-type team and also his first venture to learning to survive without ace.

thats it thats all i got i aint revealing my whole hand jus yet. exciting stuff i absolutely LOVE working w/ pkmn aus.

[weaselin-g]

𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚: School Grounds 𝙒𝙝𝙤: @regallionheart​

As much as Arthur loved his muggle things-- sometimes the department got overwhelming, even for him. The shocking way that back to school events had ended a couple of days ago had sent shockwaves throughout the university, especially in Arthur’s little muggle studies department. Needing some fresh air to clear his mind, he had stepped out for a short walk around the early fall campus. His walk seemed to be going just fine and proper, until the unusual smell of smoke hit his nose. While he wanted to forget about it, that surely wouldn’t look great on his staff record.

Following the smell, Arthur soon found the culprit, his eyes widening as he recognized the bright front page of ❛The Herald❜. ❝Pardon! Pardon,❞ he called out, still unable to recognize just who he was talking to from behind, ❝that could be a future artefact you’re holding there, don’t put it to waste like that!❞ 

[dameronology]

i have never sent an ask so i'm not sure how this works

'honey, i'm home' starter for din djarin

maybe him coming home after a particularly hard mission seeing his s/o and grogu cuddled up together in the cockpit just waiting. maybe he decides he also needs some tlc to forget the hard mission 🤺

domestic din is the air i breathe <3

obligitory "sorry this took me fifty years to write" message and SAME bc those few domestic scenes we got in s2 fuckin got me mate i need more. also i changed honey to cyar'ika because it felt more din-like oops

You hated waiting for Din to come home.

His missions could last anywhere from two days to week three weeks and it was hell not knowing. It meant that you never wanted to stray too far from the Razor Crest, just because the idea of Din returning to an empty ship hurt your heart. You knew that the only thing getting him through the longer bounty hunts was having his family to return to. It had been a loose term at first - family, clan, whatever - but he knew now in his heart that the three of you belonged together. The urge to protect you and the kid was the driving force behind everything he did. In return, you felt the innate need to look after the Mandalorian whenever he would let you. Love went both ways and it took him a little while to accept that. He did now though, and with open arms.

It was early in the morning when Din finally came back from a two week hunt. Moving silently as always, he entered the hull and ditched his armour in a pile - the need for a helmet was long gone now. The kid had seen his face and so had you. You'd never broached the subject of whether that meant you were married now. It was kind of a grey area. You both knew this was a long-term thing, so what difference would it make?

He came through the hull and up to the cockpit. It was barely 7AM, so you were still asleep. You'd pushed the pilot's seat back as far as it would go - it didn't feel right to sleep in your makeshift bed without Din. Grogu was dead to the world on your chest. He was still wearing his towel - a little poncho style one with a hood - which told Din you must have both accidentally passed out the night before after bath time. He couldn't blame you: spending time with the kid was draining as it was, let alone when he screamed and cried in objection to his nightly wash. You'd both told him a thousand times that covering himself in frog slime would only result in needing to be bathed. Did he listen? Like fuck did he listen. He took after his father in that sense.

"Cyar'ika, I'm home."

Din's voice roused you. The kid was moved aside in seconds - gently enough so that he didn't wake - so that you could hug your Mandalorian. His arms wrapped gently around your waist, lifting you ever so slightly off the ground as he took you in his embrace. He smelt of blaster fire and smoke - it must have been a rough few days.

"Hey," you breathed, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. "Din - what the hell happened to your face?"

It was littered with scratches: nothing major, but any injury was enough to freak you out. Din had come home with broken limbs and busted ribs before, so really, this was nothing. It still made you sad to see him injured though.

"There was a fight," he murmured. "I got off lightly."

"Is that your way of saying you should see the other guy?" you teased.

He smiled. "I suppose so."

"C'mon, let's head downstairs. I'll clean you up."

Picking up the kid in one hand and taking yours in the other, Din followed you down the ladder and into the hull. He placed Grogu in his little hammock and quietly shut the door - he'd be out of it for a few more hours if you were lucky.

Din sat down, arms flopping to his side as you pulled out some bacta wipes and stood between his legs. When he had the energy, he would always insist that he did it himself; you figured that some part of him always assumed that needing your help equated to asking too much. However much you insisted that wasn't the case, he was stubborn about it. It was different when he was tired - he'd spent so long looking after himself that sometimes, it was nice to have someone else do it. It was also a symbol of how much Din cared about you and trusted you, because this was the same man that would hide a fucking stab wound from a medical professional in fear of being vulnerable.

"There we go," you muttered a few moments later. Pressing a soft kiss to his forehead, you tossed aside the medkit.

Din reached out his arms, wrapping them around your waist and pulling you closer. He buried his head in your stomach - instinctively, your hands came up to hold him, one tangling in his hair whilst the other rubbed soft circles on the back of his neck. It was clear that the mission had been a difficult one, but you knew he would only talk about it if he wanted to.

"I love you," Din murmured.

You gave him a soft smile. "I love you too."

[somerpmemes]

The Owl House Starters

Change as needed

“No! My only weakness! Dying!”

“That doesn’t count, right?”

“Do you have any friends? Real ones?”

“Tiny trash thief!”

“Oops, that happens sometimes.”

“I’m a squirmy little fella.”

“I like food, I like love, just let me write about it!”

“Oh, he gets so cute when he’s thirsty for power.”

“I’ve never actually broken any of your stupid laws… in front of you.”

“I hate everything you’re saying right now.”

“We’d be the strongest power couple ever.”

“Self-doubt is a prison you can never escape from.”

“Anyways, let’s bounce before any more monsters fall in love with me.”

“I am not your cutie pie!”

“No one wants an un-oiled snake.”

“Remember, never befriend a man in sandals and always measure twice, cut once.”

“Be back by nightfall or risk mortal peril!”

“I know I’ve had enough delight for one day.”

“Sorry to break it to you, ___, but no one here is that well-dressed.”

“This has been a rough day.”

“Big houses always belong to big whack jobs.”

“Today just got good.”

“Wizards are just old people with glitter in their pockets.”

“Anyways, your food is gone and we are too.”

“Never trust a man in casual drapery.”

“All that mean-spirited laughter made me sleepy.”

“I don’t like this. I really don’t like this.”

“All your food was so tiny and cute.”

“If you can think of a better plan I’d love to hear it.”

“Betrayed by my own cool accessories.”

“I didn’t have to be part of this!”

“I… don’t like this.”

“I think I’ll head home and look at pictures of animals that are still… alive.”

“Wow, you’re so unnoticeable I almost rolled into you.”

“It’s okay, the thorns only went through a few layers of skin.”

“Alright, into the darkness you go.”

“Oh my god, I haven’t eaten real food in so long please give me some.”

“You can’t just cut open a human, can you?”

“Keeping junk in my pocket saved my life!”

“Ahh, baby’s first wanted poster.”

“Even demons have inner demons.”

“This is my paying attention face.”

“Look, now we’re boo boo buddies.”

“It’s like a rainbow, but looking at it turns you inside out.”

“I respect your cunning but I also hate you for it.”

“Oh, gross. Can I keep that?”

“This is terrifying, so why do you look so happy?”

“Oh no, a twist!”

“I’m kind of over that nickname, but okay.”

“Oh, what lovely thing do we have here? It’s just so dang shiny, oh my.”

“And look, I drew flip book.”

“I will literally do anything to stop this.”

“If I’m seen, I could go to jail… again.”

“Alright, let’s see this mess.”

“That’s probably fine.”

“Time to prepare for bloodshed.”

“Welcome down to my level!”

“I know I should be repulsed but that look is fierce.”

“I’m gonna steal everything that’s not nailed down!”

“I was up all night poison tasting and, for some reason, I don’t feel great.”

“I need an extra pair of eyes looking out for pickpockets. And an extra pair of hands in case I want to pickpocket.”

“I got leaves in my pants. And I like it.”

“I was a strange child.”

“You think this can stop me? I can still bite your ankles.”

“If you’re gonna eat me, just do it now!”

“___, you’re getting all swoony again.”

“Rivals are meant to be annihilated, not befriended.”

“Witches eating babies is so 1693.”

“Ugh, you.”

“I thought we were as cool as cucumbers but we’re as sour as pickles.”

“Whoa, I almost passed out.”

“It’s been hours, how can it keep screaming!?”

“Say that again and I steal your tongue.”

“Keep going, this is fun to watch.”

“Isn’t that taking it a bit too far?”

“Just go away before things somehow get worse!”

“This never happened.”

“And who doesn’t like their name in lights?”

“That’s the incorrect reaction!”

“I smell an easy mark.”

“Well, I hate her.”

“It’s like demonic possession with the ones you love.”

“This is just like my favorite early 2000’s movie!”

“I’m so old… and pointy.”

“I’ve got some very confusing emotions right now.”

“My life’s not a joke! But yours is!”

“Novelty costumes are where I draw the line.”

“I am not above disrespecting my elders.”

“This vacation just took an alarming, back-alley turn.”

“Geez, I thought I’d like being babied. But I feel small and helpless, like some sort of baby.”

“Hey, take this, society!”

“I didn’t like her telling me what to do before, but now I love it!”

“Let’s go let out some teen angst!”

“This is how the cool kids ride. Super backwards, on purpose.”

“Your life is pretty terrible. But, hey, it’ll probably be over soon.”

“This is some of my best work, really captures the shame.”

“That’s sweet, kid. Now let’s never speak of this again.”

“Show, don’t tell, man.”

“Oh, look what you did. I’m gonna go rub it in.”

“That seems like a potential problem to me.”

“You being the razzle, I’ll bring the dazzle.”

“Do you always have confetti on you or—?”

“You’re just gonna be unhelpful, huh?”

“Okay, time to run for no particular reason!”

“Oof, I’ve had this nightmare before.”

“Like I’d actually apologize.”

“I want power, and I want drama.”

“Are you ready to give up?”

“I was afraid, I acted stupid.”

“I just wish you told me the truth.”

“You know, it didn’t taste as bad as I thought I would.”

“Impressive, still alive.”

“This is a throne worthy of a tyrant!”

“No, no, keep those sticky hands away.”

“No one wants to see that.”

“Since when are you into sports?”

“Gross, sympathy.”

“Don’t spend all night plotting revenge.”

“Oh, this is an interesting development.”

“I’ll take that weird grumble as a yes.”

“I’m feeling confident about this plan.”

“Trust must be earned.”

“If you run, you’ll just make it harder for yourself!”

“Your pride has destroyed you.”

“So tiny, so angry.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be clean again.”

“If you ever want to search for the truth, I’ll help you.”

“Aww, that’s a horrible lie.”

“Partake of my free snack samples!”

“Why isn’t anyone paying attention to me?”

“A, eww. B, I’m bored. C, I feel like pickpocketing some dork while they browse.”

“I know my good angle.”

“Ugh, what are the basement dwellers doing out in natural sunlight?’

“Hey, there’s more to life than shipping.”

“___, I know you’re trying to help, but I think you’re crossing a line.”

“Ooh, I love punching.”

“You’re ominous, and I like it.”

“And of course you would be here just to be a nuisance.”

“I wanted to compare sunglasses.”

“Fame can really box you in, you know?”

“Besides, if anyone’s putting you down it’s gonna be me.”

“If it’s disappointing in any way I’ll spend the rest of my life trashing it.”

“He scammed us. Can you believe he scammed us?”

“Good entrance. But that outfit? Hah!”

“I’ve got a new crush and her name is education!”

“Ahh, fresh garbage.”

“I have never seen such an extravagant earring.”

“Wow, a surprisingly peaceful domestic moment. When will it be ruined?”

“Weaponizing my pride, well played.”

“Sorry, whoever’s over there!”

“Well, go on. Eat the snow.”

“Huh, it’s no fun if they don’t tremble.”

“Oh, okay, alright. Yup, an idea’s happening.”

“Shh! I don’t need your validation!”

“Get back here before that thing bites you!”

“No, we’re gonna die.”

“Cool. I didn’t actually think you could do it.”

“It’s not a secret.”

“Alright, your adorable banter is literally making me sick.”

“Believe it or not, I’ve seen worse.”

“Aww. I won’t be doing that, but thanks.”

“Quitting: it’s like trying, but easier.”

“You humans are filled with liquids, right?”

“I guess I have always liked pouring things into other things.”

“Time to scrounge through the trash.”

“I ain’t no desk jockey.”

“You don’t know diddly dang about squiddly squat!”

“I love secret rooms!”

“You have an aura of lies.”

“Also, you can eat trash.”

“Do the right thing, you dingus!”

“It just goes on like this for an hour.”

“Carnivals bring crowds and crowds bring suckers.”

“We’ve got scams to run.”

“I know poison when I see it.”

“You can’t scam a scammer.”

“You should really put a lock on your closet.”

“I love crimes!”

“Now this is my kind of weird.”

“That’s way safer than becoming blood brothers.”

“Beat up the man and steal his things for me.”

“This mama is ready for trauma.”

“All right. Approval!”

“Curse these stubby legs!”

“Sketchy carnival rides are not to blame this time.”

“___, you’re lucky I can’t be mad at your adorable antics.”

“Just when I thought I couldn’t respect the law any less…”

“Aww, what a supportive sign.”

“Yep, I just counted to one million.”

“Looks like we ruined his life for a second time.”

“I’ve always wanted to own a jagged piece of cheap metal.”

“Yes! Bread puns, bread puns forever!”

“Now I know what friendship tastes like.”

“I think today is a talons day.”

“It’s fun because it’s stupid.”

“I’ll admit, I was adorable.”

“Be careful with my brain.”

“Wouldn’t you rather talk about it?”

“That’s my motto after all, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’”

“No schemes, no plots, no ruses. None.”

“I can’t believe I made him cry.”

“Are you solving a crime or about to commit one?”

“Sadly this is one problem crime can’t solve.”

“I’m supposed to choose someone interesting, accomplished, and noteworthy. People aren’t meant to be all those things!”

“Yup, her brain’s burned up real good.”

“Be still my fantasy-loving heart.”

“I’m pretty good at getting stuck inside people’s heads.”

“Hey, I found something magical.”

“I’ma put my face in it.”

“It’s like a little doghouse for angels.”

“If you’re handing out attention, I deserve it.”

“Eww, I mean, aww.”

“I really messed things up.”

“It’s eggs, it’s full of eggs.”

“No one turns down an interview with someone this pretty.”

“Me? Avoid? What? No. But let’s skip it.”

“There’s levels to me, kid. Levels I say!”

“Oh, right, I put people in there.”

“I’m gonna hug you so hard you’ll never forget me again!”

“I regret teaching you about the internet.”

“Ah, a severed hand. Perfect response.”

“Hmm, the demon at my shoulder makes a good point.”

“Always trust a shoulder demon.”

“The more I look at him, the more uncomfortable I get.”

“Man, you’ve got some quick grabbers.”

“I can’t wait to get overdressed, take awkward photos, push all the buttons!”

“We’re gonna turn this bloodbath into a fun bath.”

“Do you think I could pull off red eyeshadow?”

“Girl, you could pull off anything.”

“We’re style geniuses!”

“Ominous footsteps, creepy woods, this is no problem.”

“Dang, I look great.”

“___, you always go overboard and I end up bailing you out.”

“Now, what’s the fun in watching a kid get eaten by a monster if it’s my kid?”

“___, I don’t think you’re ready but we’re literally out of time.”

“Why so twitchy, witchy?”

“Teenagers are brutal. They’ll boo anyone and that kind of public humiliation will stick with you for life.”

“You look nice. Strange, but nice.”

“Honestly, I’m kind of amazed with how fearless you are.”

“You’ve done things I could never do.”

“Thing is, you’re sitting in my personal chitchat zone, which means you gotta talk.”

“I am a little weirdo.”

“You gotta pander.”

“Cheating a isn’t anything to brag about.”

“Well, can’t reason with crazy!”

“I’ve been talking for too long.”

“Feeling sentimental?”

“I love water.”

“I don’t know much about sports but I do know about sports movies.”

“What happens in the montage stays in the montage.”

“Not everything can be solved with a good attitude and a dope movie soundtrack.”

“Sorry, I just really love backstories.”

“You just destroyed your social life.”

“That’s such a stupid rule!”

“You’re not gonna show this to anyone, right?”

“I haven’t forgotten what you promised me.”

“Ahh, you’re a thorn in my side but you always dig your way into my heart.”

“Jeez, you’re morbid.”

“Ahh, it’s a fate much worse than death if you think about it.”

“Please don’t make me regret taking you here.”

“Love me a properly ventilated castle.”

“I spy with my little eye something coming this way!”

“I’m going away and I don’t know if I can come back this time.”

“And  ___, thank you, for being in my life.”

“I want her back as much as you do.”

“Don’t look at me like that, this is for your own good.”

“Ah farts, I got caught.”

“You understand, don’t you?”

“Please tell me that’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“To be great, you have to make sacrifices.”

“Ahh, ___, you chose the wrong side.”

“I like your spirit, but try that again and things won’t end well for you.”

“Go on, then. Go be a hero.”

“I may have lost but so have you.”

“I can teach you what I know, and what we don’t know we can learn together.”

[whomst-art-thou-whomst-whomst]

Texts from the Lost Tomb part 6.1

🎶 Back on the bullshit I never got off🎶

Is this another unnecessary story arc?? With three sections??

Yes.

Wushanju Crew Chat

Wang Meng: You know, I’m someone who appreciates consistency in my day. My life is pleasant, very few issues indeed if you ignore the big ones. And yet. Yet here we are. With unresolved messes at the end of a day.

Wang Pangzi: SOMETHIN YOU NEED TO SAY MARY POPPINS

Wang Meng: We need to talk about Huo Daofu and the glittery bead curtain.

Wang Pangzi: MY FAVE TEEN WIZARD SERIES

Wu Xie: did you turn on that suggested word thingy lol

What glittery bead curtain

Wang Meng: I closed the shop at 6:00pm this evening on the dot. I locked all of the doors in and out of the shop very carefully, especially in light of recent events. The hall leading to the back office was empty. I filed the day’s paperwork, updated and sent emails, and then spent an extra hour organizing receipts and dusting. When I came back out, there were glittery iridescent bead curtains over the front entrance to the shop.

What could this mean?

Wu Xie: uh that you need to spend less time at work?

Wang Pangzi: LOOKS LIKE WE GOT ONE FOR THE DETECTIVES. THE MYSTERY OF THE BEDAZZLED THRESHOLD COMMENCES

Wu Xie: I think we can be relatively secure in thinking a glittery bead curtain isn’t a hostile threat

Wang Pangzi: SAYS YOU

I REMEMBER YE OLDE EXPLORATION TIMES HOW FAST THINGS GOT FURIOUS

BEANBAG CHAIRS SET AFLAME AND LEFT ON DOORSTEPS AS A WARNING

GLITTERBOMBS FOR DAYS

PANIC AT THE DISCO

Wang Meng: Ugh, forget it. I should have just taken them down, regardless of who they belong to.

Zhang Qiling: They are not mine.

Wang Pangzi: A BOLD STATEMENT COMING FROM OUR PRIME SUSPECT

SOMEONE QUICK GO DRAW CHALK AROUND THE DOORWAY TO MARK THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Wang Meng: Do we know anyone who *would* sneak in and put those up? For whatever reason, legal or not? Even as a joke?

Wang Pangzi: ARE YOU SERIOUSLY ASKING WHETHER WE KNOW ANYONE WHO IS CHAOTIC, AN OUTLAW, A PRANKSTER AND/OR SNEAKS INTO PLACES

BECAUSE THAT WOULD MEAN OUR SUSPECT LIST IS LITERALLY EVERYONE WE KNOW EXCEPT FOR YOU.

Wu Xie: okay let’s think about this; for starters, I didn’t break into my own shop

Wang Meng: You would be in danger of doing some work in the process, that’s true.

Wang Pangzi: LOL

Wu Xie: ANYWAY let’s keep going. For example, Xiao Ge would only break in somewhere for a good reason. Xiao Ge, did you do this?

Zhang Qiling: No.

Wu Xie: okay who’s next

Wang Pangzi: YOU REALLY MISSED YOUR CALLING IN INTERROGATION TIANZHEN

REALLY PUT THE SCREWS TO HIM

IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE;)

Zhang Qiling: How can we be certain *you* didn’t do it?

Wang Meng: Admittedly that was my guess, too.

Wang Pangzi: WOW I SEE HOW IT IS

BLAME PANGZI AS USUAL

ANYWAY HOW DOES HUO DAOFU FIT INTO THIS

Wu Xie: Oh yeah him! Oops I got distracted

Wang Pangzi: UR ENTIRE HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL

Wu Xie: Ugh fuck off

Wang Meng what abt Huo Daofu??

Zhang Qiling: ?

Wu Xie: oh sorry xiaoge I didn’t realize you wouldn’t have spent much time around him last year

He and I go way back

Zhang Qiling: Way back where?

Babysitters Club Chat

Wang Pangzi: I CANNOT BELIEVE HE IS BUYING YOUR INNOCENT ACT

IF YOU EVER TURN TO EVIL WE ARE FUCKED

Zhang Qiling: ?

Wang Pangzi: YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHO HUO DAOFU IS

YOU WERE EXTREMELY POLITE AND BORDERLINE FRIENDLY TOWARDS HIM

Zhang Qiling: I wanted him to feel welcome. I wanted to be sure he understands he has a place here. A specific place.

Wang Pangzi: FOR A SILENT GUY YOU ARE A MASTER AT SUBTLE POWER PLAYS IM ALL TINGLY

LMAO THE IDEA OF WU XIE LEAVING YOU FOR HUO DAOFU IS HILARIOUS AND ALSO NOPE

Zhang Qiling: Rationally, I understand that.

Main Chat

Wang Meng: Huo Daofu is coming for the weekend—didn’t Wu Xie tell you? Wu Xie asked me to check in a week ahead so we could start getting ready for his arrival

Wu Xie: oh yeah I did do that

Wang Meng: Fortunately I know you and so I already went ahead and took care of everything.

Re: the trip

He made a deal with Wu Xie’s doctor that he would do periodic checkups on him here at Wushanju

Bc Wu Xie hates being in the hospital

And frankly the hospital hates him too

Wang Pangzi: FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT LOL

I FORGOT HUO DAOFU WAS DOING THAT

A VERY CHIVALROUS GESTURE

WOULDNT YOU SAY

XIOAGE

Zhang Qiling: Is it safe for him to be here with a criminal loose on the premises?

Wu Xie: Right, back to the curtain! Let’s focus on the curtain, hmm?

Wang Pangzi: I AM SO LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS WEEKEND.

ALSO WE CAN RULE OUT XIAO BAI FOR THE CURTAIN SHE JUST SENT A SELFIE FROM NORWAY COVERED IN GREEN SLIME WITH ZERO CONTEXT, UR PROTEGE INDEED

Wu Xie: okay but who else would do something so oddly charming yet illegal and—wait.

Snake Eyes Chat

Wu Xie: hey, Glasses hasn’t been in touch lately right?

Li Cu: uh nope

Unless u count the outdated memes

Why, is money or Xie Yuchen missing

Or is this curtain related, I saw Wang Meng’s tweet

Wu Xie: haha no nothing to worry about really

(I mean maybe? but who knows)

Wang Meng is probably just getting a little paranoid in his old age

Li Cu: better than getting reckless and stupid as hell in ur old age

Wu Xie: …hey:(

Unknown Number: Li Cu, we discussed this.

Wu Xie: ????????

Li Cu: *sigh* fine, reckless and stupid as heck

Unknown Number: …close enough.

Wu Xie: EXCUSE who is that

Madame, Sir, Non-Binary Tree Spirit, etc—whomst the fuck

Are you

Li Cu is underage FYI

So Im staying on this chat

Li Cu: okay first of all, it’s not like that

Second of all I’m literally not underage I s2g

u threw the embarrassing surprise bday party, okay so u should remember

And C, that’s my counselor and I invited her. She wanted to meet u and I knew u wouldn’t agree to a visit so I added her to our chat

we have been discussing u

Wu Xie: Oh wow!!!!!!!

What a surprise:)

hi so nice to meet you:)

Main Chat:

Wu Xie: RED FUCKING ALERT

FUCK THE CURTAIN FUCK THE VISIT

IVE BEEN TRICKED INTO FAMILY THERAPY BY A SMUG TEENAGER WHO TEXTS UNKNOWN NUMBERS

Wang Meng: I assume that means something to someone here?

Not my problem? Good.

Wang Pangzi: AHAHAHA GOD I LOVE LI CU

HES LIKE ADORABLE KARMA FOR ALL THE SHIT YOUVE PUT ME THROUGH

IM RAISING HIS ALLOWANCE

Wu Xie: wait i give him an allowance

has he been collecting on two allowances??

Zhang Qiling: Three. I knew about both of yours.

Snake Eyes Chat

Wu Xie: so uh may I ask your name?

Unknown Number: you can call me Ms. Lee.

Now, if you’re comfortable talking in this format, why don’t you tell me how things have been going?

Wu Xie: oh everything is normal and fine and safe as usual, why do you ask:)

Li Cu: I heard about ur necklace thing. nice of you to NOT mention it.

another dangerous adventure. again. prick.

Ur lucky your cool boyfriend cares about you so much or you’d have already died like ten years ago

Wu Xie: lol try twenty years ago

Li Cu: That isn’t funny.

Unknown Number: …What?

Wu Xie: shit ur right, okay that was a bit glib, my apologies.

…I use humor as a coping mechanism?

Unknown Number: and Li Cu, how do you feel about that?

Li Cu: he doesn’t even know what that phrase means

He doesn’t cope, like ever

In fact

It’s kind of why we met

Which is a funny story in retrospect tbh

Wu Xie: haha what are you talking about sweetie hahaha need I remind you of certain anecdotes that could idk send me to jail maybe lmao

Unknown Number: …You know, perhaps an in-person meeting might be more effective?

Wu Xie: haha such a nice idea but why

Main Chat

Wu Xie: If I go to jail, I’ll have to create alliances for protection, right, that’s how it works on tv

Who do we know who spends time in jail

Other than Hei Yangjing, he’s only ever there for like 12 hours and i suspect he just gets himself arrested bc he enjoys the breaking out process

Also how’s the curtain case coming along

Zhang Qiling: Has someone threatened you?

Wu Xie: well not yet but soon I’m sure

Wang Pangzi: WHERE WAS THIS PARANOIA WHEN WE GOT TAKEN TO THE TEA HOUSE HUH

Snake Eyes Minus Your Fucking Therapist Chat

Li Cu: okay how tf did u pull off spy and undercover shit

u are sus as hell

Wu Xie: damn son is it pick on Wu Xie night

I missed the flyers or I would’ve invited my uncles

Also re: the curtain it’s been mostly solved

Li Cu: I’m not your son, idiot.

Wu Xie: …oh. Sorry, sorry, you’re right, bad choice of words, haha

Forget i said anything

Delete this chat even

Li Cu: shit I meant

Legally, biologically, I meant—

shit

…I turn into an asshole as a coping mechanism?

Wu Xie: oh that’s all okay! I have to go do something else now let me know if you need anything okay kid thanks!

Li Cu: goddamn it calm down who’s the kid here

lemme organize my thoughts so I can articulate my emotions fuckin healthily or w/e

Ugh maybe for like one afternoon we could go to Ms. Lee together? She knows how to word stuff

Wu Xie: uh…okay.

Li Cu: Anyway you don’t need to worry abt jail

As if you would survive prison for one day you’d piss off half the place in like an hour or less

I gave Ms. Lee the heavily edited version of the desert highway to hell roadtrip and i discussed it more in terms of like “nightmarish but still wouldn’t take any of it back”

Well maybe the sand

that shit was everywhere

Wu Xie: oh kiddo. It’s fine, really…You don’t have to explain yourself to me.

Li Cu: no, no it’s just

I do technically have a dad

who is an asshole. Being a son doesn’t really mean shit to me bc it sucked.

So you need to stop backing down just cuz ur guilty abt stuff. I’m really really glad ur not my dad in a good way. Do u get what I mean there

Where’s the mafia widower I followed into hell, huh

Wu Xie: Ur a good kid, despite my influence. I’m really glad you have someone to talk to after everything I…after everything. Wow this talking through feelings thing is kind of weird but nice ur right

Jfc no wonder it took me and xiaoge so long to—you know what, we won’t get into that

Li Cu: ew tmi

Also re: this week’s recent necklace fuckery

I moved my stuff here, I live here now

So you can’t die anymore

Or else…Idk I don’t have a threat planned

anyways abt the curtain

Wu Xie: oh my god, kid…kid you have no idea

I am in tears.

Li Cu: see this is why I can’t be nice to you I can sense the hallmark channel from here

Ugh don’t be sad in ur room that’s dumb

Go hug Pangzi or something

Maybe delete this chat

Or the curtain thing

Focus on the curtain thing

Just stfu and go away

Wu Xie: <3 screenshotting this <3

Li Cu: I take back everything I said. This is why Xiao Ge sleeps on the roof. I hope the ghosts of the Wangs put up that curtain to strangle you somehow. Go die in a stupid way, it’ll suit you.

Wu Xie: lol don’t worry I’m not gonna embarrass you with it or anything

Main Chat

Wu Xie: omg guys look how cute my kid is *sending screenshot*

Wang Pangzi: I MEAN

HE IS WISHING YOU DEATH

BUT SURE

CUTE I GUESS

Wu Xie: no but read the whole thing:):):)

Zhang Qiling: It is indeed very hard to remain angry with you. And you are welcome to join me on the roof.

Wang Pangzi: UH NOPE

NOT WHENI HAD TO BLEACH THE COUNTER IN THE KITCHEN

DONT TRAUMATIZE THE EARLY BIRDS THEYRE ALREADY FREAKED OUT BY U YA HOODIE CRYPTID

Wu Xie: ok true but babe ur like a sexy cryptid

Wang Meng: so, are we just accepting that there is a glittery curtain of unknown origin, and Huo Daofu is going to have to see it while he’s waiting for you at Wushanju bc you’re going to family therapy?

Wu Xie: right

Wang Pangzi: SHOULDA TAKEN EARLY RETIREMENT HUH

Wang Meng: I’m going to go dust something.

Unnamed Chat:

Unknown number: so the curtain…

Unknown number 2: yep, not my best work but I kinda panicked last minute u know

Unknown number: what is in the water at Wushanju that makes everyone dumb and attractive

Unknown number 2: relax they’ll figure it out

[tsarisfanfiction]

Sentence Starters:

Can we stop for a moment? I think I need a break.

Coz I don’t think Scott’s ever uttered those words in his life!

Water Rescue

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Gen Genre: Family/Hurt/Comfort Characters: Gordon, Scott, Virgil

Ahaha, probably not something he’d say if he had any choice in the matter, no!  That being said, five months after you sent this and I’m finally prodding this far back in my inbox (see, I get around to prompts eventually!).  I might even have some idea why he might be saying it.  Maybe.

Now... can I even find the original prompt list for this...  Oop, apparently it was on the wrong blog, but found it eventually!

Injured Sentence Starters

“Can we stop for a moment?  I think I need a break.”

Gordon hit the edge of the pool and caught the side of it, pulling himself vertical and looking over at his eldest brother, who was clinging to the side and looking absolutely exhausted.  It wasn’t an admittance Scott ever made lightly, but while he had his pride - especially in front of younger brothers - he did have some level of common sense.

The tongue-lashings Gordon had delivered in the past when he’d pushed himself beyond his limits in the pool and ended up cramping and in need of rescue himself might have also, finally, sunk in.  You couldn’t save someone else if you were in trouble yourself.

He eyed Scott anyway, because he was looking a little pale and he suspected he’d still pushed further than he should have done with their water training, but didn’t hesitate to agree.

“We can take a break,” he agreed.  “Get up on the poolside and take a breather.”

Chlorinated water plastering his hair down even more effectively than the handfuls of hair gel employed every morning, Scott nodded.  He really was looking pale, now Gordon was looking at him properly, and he lingered back in the water as Scott turned and grasped the edge of the pool with a white-knuckled grip.  Biceps rippled, Scott’s arms tensing in preparation of the pull, and then Gordon was surging the foot or so between them and catching his brother as his grip failed and he vanished beneath the surface.

Yanking Scott back up, Gordon trod water as he patted his brother’s cheek.  His eyes were closed, face drained of all colour, and in the back of his mind Gordon retracted anything he’d thought about Scott learning not to overdo it.  Then again, he should not have been exhausted to the point of fainting from what they’d done so far.

He frowned.

“C’mon, Scott,” he urged, fingers slipping down to press against the pulse point beneath his brother’s jaw.  It was still there, slightly thready but not enough to be a concern.  Wet fingers in front of a partially open mouth registered steady breathing, so with a scowl he returned to tapping Scott’s cheek insistently.  “Wake up.”

There was a cough and a splutter, and he grasped at the side of the pool again, allowing his own legs a respite from treading water as Scott blinked his way back into consciousness.

“Gords?”  His name was a little quiet and unsteady, confusion lacing though in the background.

“You fainted,” Gordon told him bluntly.  Scott blanched, as though he wasn’t already pale enough, and Gordon’s suspicions rose.  There was something his brother wasn’t telling him.  “Training is over.”

The sigh he got in response wasn’t surprised, rather resigned.  Gordon tightened his grip as Scott reached for the side of the pool again.

“You’ve been dunked enough,” he said a little sharply.  “I’m going to swim you back to the shallow end and we’ll get out there.”

“I can-”

“Absolutely not.”  Sometimes, Gordon couldn’t believe his brother’s stupidity.  “Come on.”  He kicked away from the side, bringing Scott with him; despite his words, his brother didn’t fight his hold.  It didn’t take long to get them back to the shallows, where both of them could stand easily on the bottom.  “Out.”

Scott grasped the side again, muscles rippling as he pulled himself up.  Gordon took no chances, boosting him from the side until he was clear before bringing himself out alongside.

Any attempts his brother might have made to escape were scuppered by a hand on his wrist, keeping him by the poolside.

“Do I need to give you the water safety lecture again?” he demanded.  “You do not push yourself to the point of collapse in the pool.  Ever.”

“I know.”  Scott looked slightly unsure, and Gordon paused.  “I was fine, Gordon, I promise.  I don’t know what happened.”

Gordon didn’t like the sound of that at all; it made sense insofar as the fact that he also hadn’t noticed anything was wrong until immediately before, but if Scott was fainting for no apparent reason, then that was potentially something a lot more serious.

“You didn’t forget to eat earlier, did you?”  Scott shook his head.  “Sleepless night?”  That headshake was less certain, but knowing his brother’s sleeping habits, that didn’t unduly surprise Gordon.  Still, it was concerning.  He reached out for Scott’s pulse point again.

Scott didn’t pull back.

“How are you feeling now?” he asked, feeling the thrumming pulse under his fingers.  It was stronger than when he’d been unconscious, but still wasn’t quite right.

“I’m fine,” Scott promised.  “Whatever it was has passed.”

“I’ll be more convinced once I’ve got a scan on you,” Gordon muttered.  Scott baulked at the idea, but he held firm.  “Scott, if you’re ill, we need to know.”  Just the idea of his brother having another fainting spell in the air, at the controls of Thunderbird One, or even in a danger zone...

No, Gordon couldn’t let that happen.

“I’m not ill.”  On the plus side, Scott clearly felt fine enough to be a terrible patient.  That being said, it wasn’t a particularly high bar; keeping him pinned down if he was coherent was always a challenge.

“If you can stand up without a headrush or fainting again, I’ll consider believing you,” Gordon pointed out, bringing his hand back from Scott’s throat and making his way to his feet.  “Think you can?”  He held out his hands for Scott to take.  His stubborn brother didn’t accept the help, so Gordon snatched his wrists anyway.

It turned out to be a good move, because Scott swayed slightly - not much, but more than he’d ever do if he was completely healthy - as he reached his full height.  Gordon narrowed his eyes.

“Infirmary or den?” he asked, less because he wanted to give Scott an out and more because the den was closer.

“Den is fine,” Scott replied, predictably.  Well, if he wanted to play it that way.

“Den it is,” Gordon agreed, and raised an eyebrow at Scott’s suspicious look.  “What?  I gave you the choice, didn’t I?”

The noise Scott made in his throat was just as suspicious as the look, but his brother didn’t reply.  Gordon grinned at him and led the way, not letting go.  Scott stumbled after him until Gordon ducked underneath his arm.  The stairs were, in Gordon’s opinion, too much of a risk, so he dragged his brother towards the elevator and tried not to think about the trail of water they were traipsing all through the house.

Hopefully Grandma would understand.

Still, he snagged a towel in passing and slung it around his neck until the elevator spat them out upstairs.  It was deployed on Scott upon arrival in the den, because the sofa cushions were only water resistant and Grandma got very upset if wet bodies sat on them for any length of time.

Scott grumbled protests that he was capable of drying himself, which Gordon ignored entirely, before sinking down entirely too gratefully onto the nearest sofa.  Gordon hurriedly got rid of the worst of the water from his own body before he threw himself onto the sofa next to Scott.

“Virgil,” he called, prodding at his wrist comm and leaning sharply out of Scott’s reach as his brother reacted.  “Could you bring a medscanner to the den?”

“What happened?”  A grease-covered Virgil appeared in miniature, scowling up at him in concern.  “Weren’t you and Scott doing water training?”

“Until Scott fainted,” Gordon agreed, ignoring the hiss of his name from said older brother and extending his arm so that it was out of Scott’s reach.  “As you can see, he’s lively again now, but-”

“You have no idea why?”  Whether Virgil was finishing his sentence or just guessing, he wasn’t sure, but either way it was correct.

“Yup,” he agreed.  “So if you could..?”

“I’m on my way.”

The call cut out just as Scott managed to grab his wrist.

“Gordon.”

“What?” he asked.  “You thought I was going to just leave you here while I fetched it so you could escape?”  From the frustrated look on his brother’s face, that was exactly what big brother had been hoping for.  “If you didn’t want Virgil involved, you should have picked the infirmary, bro.”

He was fairly sure the growled words under Scott’s breath were ones from the military-dictionary, and not the Grandma-approved one.

“Love you, too, bro.”  He pushed himself upright again and gave his brother another once-over.  Scott really did look fine, and the chances were high that it was a random one-off - probably his sleep schedule catching up with him at last - but Gordon couldn’t shake the unease.  “Look, Scott.  Just humour me, okay?  If the scan doesn’t show anything then that’s fine.  I just want to be sure.”

Scott sighed, reluctance oozing from every pore, but he didn’t argue.

“I’m fine.”

Well, he didn’t argue much.

“That’s for the scanner to decide.”

Booted feet all but running across the floor cut off any retort Scott might have been building, and Virgil appeared.  Somehow he looked even more grease-stained than his hologram had, but Gordon was more interested in the medscanner he was clutching.

Scott endured it with bad grace.

“How long was he out?” Virgil demanded.  Gordon shrugged.

“A few seconds,” he said.  “Thirty, tops.”  It wasn’t long, but it was long enough.

Virgil’s hum seemed to agree with him as the scanner beeped.  Three pairs of eyes focused on it.

Nothing wrong.

Well, technically it was flagging up some minor exhaustion - no doubt from the training - and an advisory about sleep and electrolytes flashed up, but there was nothing dramatic.

Virgil scowled at Scott.  “Electrolytes,” he said.  “And sleep.  I’m grounding you for twelve hours, and it’ll be longer if you don’t spend at least half of them in bed.”  He brandished the scanner when Scott’s mouth opened.  “Preferably all of them.”

Brown eyes glanced to Gordon, ignoring the protests coming from their big brother.  “Get him to his room while I fix something up.”

“F.A.B.  Come on, Scotty.  Bed time.”  He slipped off the sofa and grabbed Scott’s arms.  “Up you get.”  Blue eyes glowered at him in frustration, but with the dreaded g-word hanging over him, Scott was reluctantly compliant.  Already he was steadier on his feet, to the point that Gordon was happy to risk the stairs up to the bedrooms.

There were, thankfully, no more incidents, and Scott sank down onto his bed with another glare.  Gordon joined him, uninvited but equally not dismissed, and they sat shoulder to shoulder as they waited for Virgil.

The family medic didn’t take long, appearing with a sports bottle in one hand and a glass of water in the other.

“Drink all of it,” he instructed, pressing the bottle into Scott’s hand.  Big brother made a face but obediently took a few gulps.  “Once you’re done, get into pyjamas and go to bed.”  The water was placed on the bedside table, alongside a pill.  “If you can’t sleep, take that.”

Scott’s shoulders slumped but there was no protest.  Then again, Gordon probably wasn’t the only one who had thought about the what-ifs of a repeat on a rescue.  Scott was many things, but sometimes he could see the same dangers the rest of them were scared of.  Not always, but sometimes.

“Gordon Cooper Tracy!”

Oops.  Grandma must have found the trail of water.  He glanced at his older brothers, who both looked vaguely sympathetic - a first, but then he’d had good reason this time - but offered no support.

“I’d say that’s my cue to leave,” he said, dragging himself to his feet.  He pressed a hand to Scott’s shoulder.  “See you in twelve hours, Scotty.”

There was no agreement - then again, Scott staying in bed for twelve hours seemed less likely than John willingly going to a party - but there was a small quirk of his lips into what could be a smile.

“Thanks, Gordon.”

Gordon huffed.  “No more fainting during water training.  I’m getting fed up of having to drag you out at the end.”

“This was the first time!” Scott protested, but Gordon didn’t bother answering that; the other occasions might have seen him still conscious, but they’d otherwise been no better.  Instead, he gave a jaunty wave to his eldest brother, and offered Virgil a sloppy handover salute - big brother was his responsibility now - before slipping out of the room to face Grandma.

Scott was in good hands.

[moldisgoodforyou]

YES THEM REMINISCING ON THEIR “hatred” and how far they came would just be chefs kiss

you got it 😌

warning: cursing, underage drinking, mentions of a fight

wordcount 2.7k

_____

Over Christmas break, after another high school reunion party, Rafe and Sophie were both tipsy and giggly as they made their way up to Rafe’s room. It was already made pretty clear at Sophie’s house that ‘sleepovers’ of any kind with Rafe weren’t allowed, so she had to lie and tell her parents she was staying with a friend. “Soph, shh!” He admonished, practically dragging her upstairs as she tripped over her feet.  

“S’not my fault!” She argued, pushing his hands away again as he tried to help. Finally they made it up to his room and both fell onto the bed, curling up into each other. “Hey, Rafe.” She whispered, grinning. 

“Hey what.” He pulled her close, hands automatically going to play with her hair. “I like you.” She hummed, pressing her head into his touch. He laughed and leaned forward, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “I like you too. Hey, the boys and I were talking tonight, about us in high school, and they reminded me of something.” 

Sophie scowled. “Probably not a good thing then.” 

“No, no. Remember when you got in that fight in high school?” She paused, turning to face him. “Wasn’t really a fight, but yeah.” He glanced over her to gauge her expression. “That wasn’t over me. Right?”

She shrugged, trying to stay casual even though a blush betrayed her. “No? I mean, I wouldn’t say it was over you, technically.”

He grinned. “Soph, you didn’t.”

“Hm. Might have.”

“Tell me.”

______

“He’s a fucking idiot. Too easy.” Alexandra giggled in the locker room to her friends, applying lip gloss after their gym class. It was senior year and there was a big party planned at the Cameron’s house for the weekend. She had been discussing her plans to hook up with Rafe and then ditch him for the past fifteen minutes, and Sophie had had enough.

A strange feeling bubbled up inside her and Sophie swung open her locker with more force than necessary, the clang echoing around the room. “He’s not.” 

Alexandra raised a cool eyebrow, glancing her way. “Did you say something, Flint?”

“He’s not an idiot.”  Sophie repeated, a little clearer. 

“Oh, honey. He’s not here to hear you standing up for him, you know that? Even Cameron wouldn’t sleep with you.” Alexandra taunted, rolling her eyes. 

Sophie certainly didn’t like Rafe, but she didn’t mind him. And he wasn’t an idiot by any means - he held his own against her fairly well, and she respected the hell out of that. (Although she’d never, ever, admit it to his face.) 

“I’ve never considered that, but thanks for the heads up.” She retorted dryly. 

That was a lie. She’d considered it far too many times. Thought about what his lips might feel like against hers, his big hands gripping her hips, his -

“Earth to Sophie.” Alexandra rudely interrupted her thoughts, laughing when Sophie glanced over with a mildly confused expression. “Why do you care, anyways?” 

“He has feelings too, y’know. Would you like it if someone said use ‘em and lose ‘em about you?” Sophie frowned, lacing up her tennis shoes. 

“No one would ever say that about me.” Alexandra replied with a smug smile, then stepped into her heels that were about two inches too tall for the dress code. She couldn’t walk straight in them, and looked ridiculous, especially given the fact that it was an all-girls school and the only male she had to impress was the 28-year-old history teacher. (On second thought, maybe that did make sense.)

As she walked past, Sophie made a split-second decision and stuck her toe out just so, making Alexandra trip and fall to the concrete floor with a thud, her now-shattered cell phone clattering across the tile along with a couple broken nails. The two stared each other down for a second until Sophie smirked. “Oops.”  

Alexandra lunged first, yanking at Sophie’s ponytail. “You bitch!”  

It didn’t take long before the gym teacher came running out of her office, breaking the two girls up. Sophie had taken the brunt of it, a slap to the face and a few scratches down the arm, while she acted mainly in self-defense. (Mainly.)

The two were escorted to the office straight away, in silence. The principal was shocked to see Sophie in there, almost disbelieving of Alexandra’s sob story. “Miss Flint? Do you have anything to say for yourself?” 

“She deserved it.” Sophie muttered, clear as day. 

“Oh my god, she’s not even sorry!” Alexandra cried out, wiping away a few false tears.  

“Have you thought about joining theater, Alex? You seem to have a knack for  it.” Sophie shot her a faux-sweet smile, sarcasm dripping from her tone. 

“Girls.” The principal warned, shaking her head. “I have to say, I’m surprised...Sophie, I’ll have to give you a week’s worth of detention. Alexandra...” She sighed. “One day -”

“But she started it -”  

“One day.” She repeated firmly, and Sophie held back a smug look. “Violence at Greenville Academy, honestly. You two know better. Both of you, out.”  

Two days later, at the party, Sophie wore the bruise of Alexandra’s handprint with pride. She hadn’t bothered to cover the ugly purple mark with concealer, considering it a conversation starter instead. “Heard you got in a fight this week, Flint.” Rafe greeted her, reaching out to grip her chin lightly and get a better view. Sophie yanked her head back out of his touch. “Might have, what’s it to you?”  

He just grinned, smug as ever. “Didn’t think you were the type.” 

“Yeah, well, let it serve as a reminder of what I can do if you really piss me off.” She quipped, trying - and failing - to hide a shudder as she took a long sip of her mostly vodka-lemonade. 

“What happened?” 

“None of your business, asshole.” She tacked on the last word more out of nerves than anything, not wanting to be caught in a lie.

“M’ just asking, chill.” He raised his hands in defense, tone turning a little more sincere. “Just ‘cause - y’know. I heard I was involved.”  

Sophie took another long sip of her drink, cursing under her breath. Sarah. Of course she should have known, his little sister was in Sophie’s gym class and had the biggest mouth of anyone she knew. “You heard wrong, Cameron.” 

“Alright. Hey, Alexandra’s been flirting with me the whole party.” He changed the subject, testing her. “Think I should go for it?” 

“I’d rather not hear about your lackluster sex life in the locker room next week, so no, for my sake.” She retorted coolly, though her shoulders tensed up and jaw set a little at the thought of him in bed with Alexandra. 

He nodded, suspicions confirmed, then smirked. “I can prove to you it’s not lackluster, you know.” 

“I’d like to see you try.” She shot back, regretting it the second the words came out of her mouth. “Not like - I didn’t mean -” 

“Relax, Soph.” He grinned and reached out, gently tracing his thumb along her bruised cheek. “How about another time when you’re not hurting?”

She froze, resisting every single urge she had to lean into his touch or just take a tiny step forward and plant one on him. “Do you ever shut up?”

“I would if you’d make me.”

“Oh, fuck off.” She replied lamely, rolling her eyes and walking away.

_______

“I can’t believe you fought for my honor.” Rafe grinned, teasing her. Sophie was bright red now and shoved on his chest. “It was years ago, get over it. I wouldn’t do it now.” He gaped. “Soph! You would too!” 

“I wouldn’t! I’m not dumb enough to get in a fight, I’m 21.” She told him pointedly, knowing full well that Rafe would absolutely get in a fight at that age. He scowled. “I’d fight for you.” 

“You shouldn’t, I can’t see any good reason for you to.” She paused. “Besides, I stopped standing up for you after that.” 

He furrowed his brow. “Why?” 

“Because you made me cry after winter formal.” 

He tilted his head, confused. “Is that what Carter was talking about at Thanksgiving? I really don’t remember that.” 

“Yeah, ‘cause I didn’t want you to know.” She grinned, ultra-dramatic. “I was heartbroken.” 

He rolled his eyes and kissed her. “Remind me?”

_______

“Taking anyone to winter formal, Rafe?” Kelce asked him as they were out on the driving range at the golf course, a usual pastime for them. 

Sophie was two tees away, practicing hitting on her own - she didn’t miss the fact that Rafe positioned himself close enough to watch her, but enjoyed the attention and the low whistles almost every time she leaned over to hit the ball. She hated the actual sport of golf, and only played to spend time with her dad, but she found solace in the stress relief of just hitting 100 balls in a row.

“Not yet.” The dance was two weeks away, and Rafe had been teasing Sophie about coming with him for a month now. “Hey, Soph!” 

She ignored him, pulling back for a swing until she felt him grab the end of her club in mid-air. She cursed under her breath and turned on her heel, indignant. “Jesus, Rafe, I could have knocked you out cold.”  

“Doubt it, your swing’s not strong enough.” 

She huffed and stepped closer, toe-to-toe with him - responding just as he’d hoped she would. “Would you like me to test that theory?”

“Leave her alone, Rafe!” Kelce called out, annoyed the two had found a way to fight again. 

He grinned. “Just thought I’d stop by and ask about your plans for the winter formal. You’d look pretty on my arm, you know.” 

"Do you get off on being rejected, Rafe?” She questioned dryly. 

“You’re gonna entertain the thought one day. Mark my words.” He let go of her club and stepped back, giving her room to hit again. 

Sophie rolled her eyes and extended her club just enough to poke him in the ass as he walked away. “In your dreams, Cameron.”

That banter continued right up until three days before formal. Sophie had rejected two invitations, one from a friend and one from a boy who actually showed interest in her. Secretly, she was hoping Rafe might come around and ask her for real - because the last ten times were just teasing, right? 

She was sorely mistaken when her friend on the track team at the time, Ashley, called her eagerly that night. “Sophie you’ll never guess who just asked me to the dance!” Ashley squealed into the phone.

“Landon finally worked up the nerve?” Sophie asked. 

“What? No. Rafe asked me! Rafe Cameron!”

Sophie’s mouth went dry and she was thankful she was receiving the news on the phone, not in person where she’d have to hide her reaction. “Oh. That’s, um, that’s awesome, Ash.” 

Ashley launched into a dreamy speech about how excited she was and Rafe said he’d match his tie to her dress and Sophie wouldn’t start anything when they went to dinner, right, and - “Sophie.” 

“What? Oh, sorry, my dad was calling my name.” She lied quickly, forcing a smile so it’d come through in her tone. 

“Who are you bringing?” 

“Ah...Ben.” Sophie decided quickly, and hoped to god Ben was still available. He was Rafe’s basketball teammate, and practically his sworn enemy, and fine, maybe that was exactly the reason she chose Ben. 

“Seriously?” The puzzlement was obvious in Ashley’s tone. “Have you two been talking?” 

“Here and there.” Sophie confirmed vaguely, already regretting her lie. “So Rafe’s coming to the whole thing, then? Pictures and dinner before, the afterparty at yours?” 

“Yeah, of course!” Ashley gushed. 

Sophie tried to ignore the knot forming in her stomach. “Awesome. Hey, I gotta knock out my math homework, but we can talk about it at school tomorrow?” 

“Oh yeah, for sure. Talk later!”  

As soon as the phone clicked off, Sophie fell back onto her bed with a groan. “Fucking hell.” She gave herself a solid two minutes of wallowing before calling Ben, putting on her flirtiest voice, and asking him to formal. He accepted right away. God, men are so fucking easy, she thought to herself. Except when they aren’t. 

The look on Rafe’s face was absolutely priceless when she strolled into the country club, head held high, hand-in-hand with Ben. “Surprised he didn’t ask you.” Ben murmured into Sophie’s ear, making a show of it just to piss Rafe off. “What do you mean?” She whispered back, stomach turning in knots at his proximity. “Kinda figured you two were a thing, given how often he talks about you in the locker room.” Ben shrugged. “But I’m glad you’re here with me instead.” 

“Yeah. Me too.” Sophie replied weakly, giving Rafe an overly polite nod of acknowledgment. Rafe nodded back, and that was the extent of their communication for the night. 

Until the party. 

Sophie was four drinks in, way too much for her low tolerance, when she found Rafe alone in the kitchen. “What the fuck, Rafe?” 

He turned around, amused. “Hello to you too, Soph.” 

“You brought Ashley to the dance?” She accused, foot slipping on a spilled drink as she strode closer. He caught her by the waist, then quickly moved his hand to her arm instead as he steadied her. “Yeah. What’s it to you?” 

“Thought you were going to ask me.” She wasn’t nearly drunk enough to be making such brazen statements, but figured if he called her out, she could pretend to be hammered.  

He raised his eyebrows, caught off guard as he pulled her a little closer. “Never thought that was an option.”

“Maybe if you actually tried to be sincere for once, it could be.” They were way too close to be comfortable, but everything felt overwhelmingly right, Sophie decided. He leaned in an inch more so their foreheads touched, breath intermingling. She tilted her head up - just slightly - until - 

“Sophie!” Ben called out and the two sprang apart like the same poles on a magnet. Ben wandered into the kitchen, grinning, two shots in hand. “There you are - oh.” His voice instantly fell flat as he took in the situation, Sophie’s flushed face and Rafe’s angry expression at the interruption. “Were you two...?” He gestured sloppily with the shots, tequila spilling to the floor. 

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Sophie snapped without a second thought. “I was just grabbing another drink.” She lifted her near-empty beer, and Rafe bit hard on the inside of his cheek to stay impassive. “Watch your hands around my girl, Cameron.” Ben joked, still wary of what he had walked in on. 

Sophie wrinkled her nose. “I’m not your girl, Ben, this was just a one-time thing.” She informed him, strolling past him and out of the kitchen with a huff. Ben watched with a slack jaw, completely confused, and set the shots on the counter. “What just...”

Rafe smirked. “She does that. Kinda her thing.”

“Sure you two didn’t..?” Ben asked. Rafe just shrugged. 

Once Ben left, going after Sophie, Rafe cursed and slammed his palm to the countertop. Sophie’s instant dismissal of the situation stung him more than he expected. Then he did what any rational seventeen-year-old boy would do - he took the two tequila shots, no chaser, and immediately set out to go make out with Ashley - right in Sophie’s line of sight. 

She retaliated, of course, by getting more drunk and making out with Ben on the opposite side of the party, willing herself to ignore the sloppy way his tongue tried to force its way down her throat. After a few minutes, she pushed away from Ben. “I’m gonna go - I need some air.” 

“I’ll come.” Ben volunteered. She shook her head quickly, pushing him away with a hand on his face. “No, it’s fine, I’m fine. Um, I’ll see you later.” He frowned, confused, but let her go. She passed by Rafe as she went, texting her brother Carter a very poorly-written drunk message to come pick her up. “Real classy, Soph.” 

“Fuck you, Cameron.” She shot back, doing her best not to cry as she made her way to the front. 

___ 

Rafe frowned, returning to play with her hair as she finished the story from her perspective. “I don’t remember that. I made out with your friend? You’re sure?” 

Sophie rolled her eyes. “I’m sure. And then I swore to myself I’d never give you the time of day.” 

He grinned. “But I’m just too irresistible, right?” 

“Oh, yeah, that’s totally it.”

[princessjungeun]

Hi! I hope you're doing well :) Can I request a Heejin x Reader scenario where reader spends the New Year celebration with LOONA and everyone knows they both have a crush on each other so they try to set them together for a new year's kiss?❤️

Cherry Chapstick: Heejin x Reader

when heejin invited you to celebrate new year’s eve with her at the loona dorm you lowkey panicked. you’ve been there before on multiple occasions and you happened to be friends with some of the girls as well. the problem was that it was new years. any other holiday would have been fine but new years....everyone knows about the infamous new years kiss. and that kiss was the only thing that was bugging you.

see, you liked heejin a lot, you have for a long time but you’re very convinced it’s unrequited. despite the fact that hyunjin told you that heejin liked you too, it was still hard for you to believe. you had even tried to make yourself un-like her by distancing yourself from her.

but that fell through last night when she told you to your face that she knew you were trying to push her away. heejin was the first for you made since you moved from north carolina to south korea for your mother’s job. she was close to you and she didn’t want to lose that. but since heejin wasn’t one to force you to explain yourself, only asking a simple yes or no question:

do you hate me or something?

you were quick to tell her no which prompted her to invite you to the dorm so you could celebrate new year’s with the girls.

all of that leading up to now. you paced around your bedroom trying to figure out what to do. heejin told you to be there at 8 and it was already 6. most people would think that’s plenty of time but they couldn’t be more wrong.

styling your hair alone would take an hour, then picking out your outfit, eating before you go, walking there, and probably getting distracted on the way. all of those leave you with 10 more minutes of standing around before you’d be late.

without wanting to waste too much time you scrolled through your phone looking for a hairstyle. it didn’t take long to find a simple yet cute one, two braids into a high puff. simple enough.

like you expected doing your hair took an hour, although yes the styling part was quick. you somehow allowed yourself to not comb your hair for four days, which lead to a very not fun detangling process. all is well now though because you looked fantastic, the curls are all types of popping.

you got overwhelmed choosing an outfit and ultimately decided on a sweatshirt and black jeans. just as you were putting on your coat your grandmother stopped you, “where you goin lookin all prettied up pum’kin?”

you replied “heejin’s. remember i told you about it last night...you said yes.”

your grandmother onced you over “put on anotha’ layer, you finna get a cold baby cakes...n change ya shoes too.”

checking your phone you saw it was already 7:45 heejin’s dorm is a 20 minute walk away, 15 if you’re fast.

you whined “momma i’m gonna be late, i’ll only be outside for 15 minutes i won’t get sick.”

she came back from around the corner, a scarf, ear muffs, gloves, and your pair of tims in her hand. “see dats what ya ancestors said bout dem diseases n look what happened.”

you sighed deeply “momma-“ she narrowed her eyes at you and just like that you were on the floor changing your shoes.

when you were done you stood up and asked “alright can i go now?”

the older woman asked playfully “tryna leave me so soon?”

you quickly replied “n-no of course not momma i just-“

she laughed and told you “i’m just messin’ wit ya baby doll, go on now. have fun for me aight?”

you hugged her and placed a kiss on her cheek before running out the door.

it started snowing right as you were approaching the dorm building, you thanked lord that it didn’t happen sooner or your hair would have gotten messed up.

you texted heejin that you were outside and she quickly came and got you, leading you up to their dorm.

when you got upstairs the girls were all scattered around the dorm. haseul and kahei were still hanging decorations while gowon was playing on her switch. hyejoo and hyunjin were arguing over some game that they were playing on a laptop. yerim and yeojin were singing their hearts out in karaoke while jungeun was literally rolling on the floor laughing with jiwoo about god knows what. jinsoul was spaced out staring at a wall while sooyoung went to find her headphones to tune out everyone else.

heejin didn’t even get a chance to ask what you wanted to do because yeojin immediately grabbed you to sing a song on the karaoke machine.

the one perk about you being an american was the fact that you were quick to school the girls on all of the classic movies. from mean girls to clueless to white chicks, they’d seen them all. which is exactly why yeojin had no problem singing A Thousand Miles with you in english.

heejin could only laugh from the side as the two of you intentionally butchered the song. she watched as you went by each member to check out what they were doing as well. her heart eyes didn’t go unnoticed either, especially by hyunjin and haseul.

you’d excused yourself to the restroom and that was the time for all of the girls to grill heejin. each of them admitted they saw the way she watched you, they knew she liked you. heejin caved and admitted it to them all, but quickly following up with “but don’t do anything to embarrass me...please. i don’t want to mess up what we have.”

the girls all agreed, but because all they promised was to not embarrass her, they still managed to devise a plan to get you two together.

you returned from the bathroom, all of their eyes went to you and the room fell silent. your furrowed your brow “w-what? did i do something?”

yerim replied quickly “no no of course not! you just...uh”

jiwoo jumped in “you just look so gorgeous! all of us were stunned by your beautiful.”

you felt your cheeks heat up as your ears felt like they were burning red. hyunjin laughed “awwww she’s bLUSHINGGGG!”

heejin slapped her arm and hissed, “stop that!” before pulling you off to the side, back so the two of you were watching the television.

the two of you stayed side by side for the entire night, her arm looped in yours. by now it was 11:30 and the countdown was nearing.

you personally noticed how all the girls would start to mumble, then suddenly stop when you looked at them. not wanting to assume you just brushed it off, telling yourself it was “work stuff” even though you knew damn well it wasn’t anything work related.

both you and heejin were mindlessly scrolling through your phones, she was sitting next to you, half of her body already on your lap with your arm wrapped around her shoulder, holding her close to you.

“i’m bored let’s play a game!” haseul got everyone’s attention from the middle of the room. the rest of the girls agreed, you and heejin included.

“let’s do truth or dare.” hyunjin stated with a small smirk. everyone nodded immediately agreeing with her on the game.

you already knew it was a set up, but you also wanted to see how it played out so you didn’t say anything.

the the time fifteen minutes had passed, hyejoo danced all of Kiss Later, jinsoul ran down the street in her infamous lemon pants, sooyoung and jiwoo swapped clothes, and chaewon successfully made microwave popcorn (it was sooyoung’s dare to allow her to do it without supervision).

it was now your turn and you were starting to regret not telling the girls that you were onto them.

“alright...y/n truth or dare.” sooyoung asked with a smile.

you replied “truth.”

sooyoung laughed and said “is it true that you have a giant crush on heejin?”

your eyes widened and you switched to english quickly, hoping the foreigner card will get you out of this one, “i don’t understand the question...sorry.”

all of the girls excluding heejin and haseul booed you playfully, teasing you lightly sue to the blush on your face.

“alright that’s enough.” haseul quieted her members down so heejin could go next. the leader also got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

“heejinnie truth or dare?” hyunjin wiggled her eyebrows dramatically.

“truth.” heejin answered without hesitation.

“oop sorry nope that’s not an option. you close dare by default settings.” hyunjin smiled.

heejin quickly whined “wha- she cant do that can she do that? haseul unnie! she cheated.”

haseul came back with her glass of water, a fake confused look on her face “sorry i wasn’t here i can’t do anything about it. sorry heekie.”

heejin mumbled “you all suck...” she took a deep breath before asking “fine what do you want me to do?”

hyunjin along with everyone else looked at each other before saying in unison, “kiss y/n at midnight.”

the two of you immediately froze in place, your face went pale as panic coursed through your veins. did she actually find out? who told? maybe hyunjin was right?

before you could decline you felt heejin dragging you to her bedroom, all of the girls giggling and squealing as you left.

you say on her bed, your feet dangling off the edge as heejin laid on her back, her head in your lap.

“sorry...they can be a little- you know how they are.” she spoke softly as she reached for your hand, playing with your fingers as she talked.

you replied “it’s cool...my friends back home were the same way- really i’m not upset or anything.”

a thick silence fell over the two of you as you stared blankly at the window and heejin looked up at you.

she asked “so...?”

you replied “so what?” you laughed a little at the end, humming a second of the song before focusing back on the conversation.

heejin responded “d-do you actually...like me?”

you looked at your feet, “yeah...i do. but it doesn’t matter.”

heejin sat up “why?”

you replied “for starters i cant really speak korean, your job wouldn’t allow me to even be with you, and even if we did the media would tear me apart for being black and you for being queer, you’re busy and i’d just hold you down. i don’t wanna do that to you...”

heejin frowned and opened her arms for you, “why would you say that?”

you mumbled into her chest “cause it’s true.”

heejin pulled you closer and said “you’re wrong...all of it. you’re wrong. your korean improves every single day. my dating ban ended three months ago, i’d protect you from anyone and you know that. plus i couldn’t care less about what they think, half of the group is queer too. if anything you push me to do better.”

you mumbled “really?”

she hummed “mhm”

you brought your hand up to heejin’s running your finger over the prominent tendons in her hand. softly you asked her “do you like me though?”

she let her voice deepen, “of course” she rasped out gently with a smirk creeping onto her face.

pushing her gently you mumbled “you’re such a tease, stop it.”

she lifted your chin with her finger and asked “what if i don’t hmm?”

your breath hitched in your chest for a minute before you replied “then i’ll have to....”

your eyes flickered to the digital clock across the room, 11:55:00 it read.

“you’ll have to what? hmm? cat got your tongue?” she pushed her face closer to yours, biting her lip lightly as her gaze narrowed, her eyes crawling up and down your body.

you let her push you back against the wall behind you gently. her face was centimeters from yours, you stuttered “h-heekie”

heejin ran her pointer finger underneath your chin lightly, “yes princess?”

your mind was cloudy, your couldn’t think about anything but the girl in front of you. words simply were not coming out of your mouth no matter how hard you tried. the best you were able to get out was, “i-”

she asked gently “is this okay baby?”

you resorted to body language instead, snaking and arm around her waist and holding her hand.

heejin held your face in one hand, her thumb tracing your jawline, “tell me yes or no pretty girl.”

you nodded and choked out “y-yes. yes.”

her eyes looked at the clock once more, only two seconds to midnight. she smiled as lifted your chin so her lips met yours.

the second you two pulled away she told you, “happy new year y/n.”

you were still thinking about the feeling of her lips on yours, the way she held you close, and how all of her emo were put into one simple kiss. without thinking you mumbled “your lips taste like cherry chapstick....”

[tsukishimacanrailme]

Don’t be so sour, dough

part one part two part three (you are here)

notes: ahh part three is here!11!11 i don’t have a normal posting schedule so i apologize but here we are 

pairing: osamu x baker!reader

warnings: reader gets hit on by a drunk man and some cursing oops

words: 1.8k

“Here you are,” You spoke, handing a customer a piece of freshly baked melonpan. The bread was still warm as you placed it in her palms. She nodded politely at you, handing over the correct amount of money before sliding out of the door with a content smile. 

Your mom grumbled from next to you, “I still don’t see why you couldn’t use the train this morning.” She huffed as she shuffled back into the kitchen, pushing the door open easily. You laughed at her before turning back to the door which rang as a customer walked in.

“Bokuto-san! How are you?” You smiled as he walked in grinning brightly.

He took a moment to ponder over his choice of bread before looking back at you. “I’m wonderful per usual.” He hummed as he pointed over to the milk bread. “May I have two slices of that please?”

“Of course,” You said as you reached into the glass display to grab the bread. “Anything else?”

He shook his head no.

“Alright then. That would be $4.29.” 

Bokuto shoved his credit card into the machine mumbling, “I don’t know how this taxes thing works.” He seemed to be thinking for a moment before shouting “Oh!”

You flinched in shock, placing a hand over your chest to settle your breathing. 

“Atsumu-san said that Osamu-san would be coming over sometime today! I kinda forgot the rest of what he said but it was something like uh-” He placed his card back into his jacket pocket, “Uh, shoot I forgot. I knew I should’ve been paying attention. Something like a favor?” Bokuto groaned in despair, placing his hands in his hair. “I’m bad at remembering stuff! I was too focused on Sho-chan speaking Portuguese! I want to know another language but Akaashi said he would teach me English sometime.”

You laughed as you handed him the bag of bread, “Thanks for warning me about Osamu, Bokuto. I’m sure you’ll be able to learn a new language in no time.” 

Bokuto beamed at you, shuffling the bad to sit comfortably on his wrist, “Thank you!”

As you waved goodbye, several more customers walked in. It was going to be a long day.

                                                       ~~~~~~~

You slammed the door open to the kitchen when it was your break. Some old lady had just yelled at you for not placing what she asked for in separate bags even though she never specified for it. She then demanded for a discount price due to your impotence. 

When you refused, she chucked the money onto the counter rudely, coins spilling onto the floor, before sauntering out of the door, purposefully knocking over one of the signs at the front and giving you a smirk as the bell rang. 

Previous to her a group of teenagers walked in, settling down at one of the tables after ordering. They left wrappers on the table and on the floor and spilled a steaming cup of hot coffee before walking out giggling. 

You, of course, were left to clean up the mess since your mom was taking a nap in the back. 

Your break could only last so long. You were back behind the counter after 15 minutes before another man walked in. His hat was placed over his eyes and his scruffy beard was on display. 

“Hello sir, what can I do for you today?” You smiled politely as you put a pair of plastic gloves on. 

He smirked at you, his teeth yellow and his breath reeked of alcohol. “Well for starters you can give me your number.” 

“I’m sorry sir, I’m afraid I can’t do that for you.” You grimaced stepping back a bit. You were obviously uncomfortable but you highly doubted that was the first thing that was on this drunk man's mind. In fact, he seemed more into your chest then he was the bread.

He hummed, “C’mon it’s not that big of a deal. It’s just a number, sweetcheeks.” He laughed, lifting his hat up a bit to stare up at you. His eyes were slightly red and his cheeks were flushed as well.  

“Don’t call me that,” You retorted glaring at him. “I’m afraid if you aren’t going to buy anything I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” You spoke, crossing your arms. This man was probably not going to leave without force. 

You were so caught up in thinking you didn’t even notice the bell above the door ringing. Neither did the drunk man. “Just give me the number, sweetcheeks.” He demanded.

A hand placed itself on his shoulder before the man stumbled back in surprise.

“She said no. Get that through your thick skull ya’ asshole.” Osamu spat, his eyebrows furrowed angrily. His eyes were fixated in a glare, dark and frightening. 

To be honest you kind of forgot that he was coming over. 

The man shoved Osamu roughly but he didn’t move an inch. He let his hand fall from the man's shoulder before speaking, “Get out you drunk piece of shit.” Osamu seethed. “And go take a shower.” 

The man shuffled backwards again. He rolled his eyes before walking out, grumbling underneath his breath.

You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding and Osamu’s moved his hands to cup your face. It would have been nice if your mom didn’t storm out from behind the kitchen holding a broom.

“Where is he?” she glanced around the room. She settled her eyes on Osamu. “Get away from my daughter!” She yelled, swinging the broom from behind her shoulder.

“Uh, he just left.” You spoke, cheeks reddening with embarrassment. You placed your hands over Osamu’s and pulled them off your burning cheeks. 

“Are you okay?” They both spoke at the same time. Both of their eyes were widened as they peered upon you.

“Yes, I’m fine. Nothing happened anyways. He was drunk.” You said taking a step back. They both gave you a quizzical look. “Really.” 

“Why that guy is drunk before 2:00pm is beyond me.” Your mother sighed. “Go in the back and settle down. You’re shaking.”

You looked down at your palms and realized she was right. You didn’t really notice before; the adrenaline still running from the panic. Osamu wrapped an arm around your shoulder and led you toward the kitchen, gently pushing open the door with his other arm. His hand was rubbing your shoulder consolingly and he guided you toward the small mustard yellow couch in the back of the room. 

As he helped you sit down, he kneeled in front of you, “You alright, sweetcheeks?” He spoke, gently clutching your hands with his own. “Take some deep breaths. I’m going to get you a cup of water, okay?” 

You shook your head, “No thank you. It’s fine.” You gripped his hands, “Can you just stay like this?” You asked, blinking up at him from where you sat. 

He nodded, “Of course, sweetcheeks.” He pulled you into a hug.

“He called me that.” 

Osamu hummed in recognition, his chest vibrating. “Do you want me to stop calling you that?”

You shook your head, “I just didn’t want him calling me that.”

Osamu pulled you tighter against him, “Do ya’ need anything?” he asked, running one of his hands up and down your spine gently. When you shook your head once more he sighed. “C’mon sweetcheeks. Work with me here.” You laughed against his chest.

“I’m not that worked up about it. If anything it was just really creepy. Worst case scenario I  would’ve just called the police. It’s good you were there though. Bokuto-san told me you were    coming and I honestly forgot.” You shrugged, voice muffled against his chest.

Osamu pulled away from you for a moment to look at you. His grey eyes bore into your own as you blinked innocently at him. “Speaking of which you still owe me some bread.” 

You knew he was trying to distract you. It worked. “Ah,” You stood up, you headed toward the warming rack where a new batch of freshly baked strudel lay. You gently placed it on a napkin and handed it to Osamu. He looked as if he were drooling. Maybe he was.

“Here,” You grinned as you took in the hungry look in his eye, “Eat up.”

Osamu took one of the biggest bites you’ve ever seen. His eyes widened comically and he threw his head back in surprise.

 “Holy shit,” He blanked after he finished chewing. “This is probably the best thing I’ve put in my mouth.” He claimed after practically inhaling the rest of the pastry. 

“Well that was the point.” You shrugged looking over at him. He has crumbs all around his mouth and even on his cheeks. Before you even knew it you were in front of him, clearing the stray specks of bread off his face.

“You’re so messy,” You complained after brushing the crumb residing in the corner of his mouth. If you were paying enough attention you would see Osamu’s cheeks burning red. “It’s like giving food to a child.” You laughed.

Osamu surged forward, claiming your lips with his own. You blinked with surprise, your spine straightening out but you soon relaxed. His mouth was warm and his lips were chapped but you didn’t care. All you could taste was the fresh strudel. 

You broke apart for a moment to catch your breath and Osamu licked his lips. He bent his neck downward to reconnect your lips just as soon as you exhaled. You parted your mouth and his tongue brushed with yours. Your lips were probably swollen with the intensity he was kissing you with. 

When you broke apart for the final time, Osamu cupped your cheeks. “Jesus, next time warn a man when you’re gonna get all up in his face. It does things.” He joked, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. 

“It’s not my fault you don’t know how to eat properly,” You scoffed, brushing the remaining crumbs off his cheek, “You’re supposed to be a grown man.” 

Osamu gasped offendedly, “Oh please. You practically inhaled the onigiri I made.” 

You hummed, “At least I can wipe my own face.”

“And look where not wiping my face got me. I think I’ll do it again.” Osamu chortled as you rolled your eyes.

“Well don’t expect it to happen again.” 

“Wait wha-” Osamu breathed shakily.

“Unless you take me out.” You grinned cheekily as Osamu let out a sigh of relief. He let go of you to rest against one of the counters. His lips were red and his hair was slightly messy from when you unwittingly ran your hands through it. The dark gray stands were sticking out in all directions but to you he’s never looked better.

Osamu smirked, “Now that, I can do.”

[happikattwuzheere]

was gonna try and do multiple characters in one post but nope! i have too much to say. also the pictures are all different sizes so its rly hard to get the photoset to look appealing, so we’re starting w/ blue. and also a colored pic of what adam looks like when he’s not a deer. boy’s tryin not to stand out. which goes great up for him right up until it doesn’t. lmao. i’ll talk a bit about him too w/ stuff that didnt get mentioned in the starter post about him and gansey, but this is mostly gonna be about blue. 

SO. 

there’s this fey entity, right? i don’t have a name for them, but they’re not...they didnt START the fey/human conflict, but they are benefiting from it, politically speaking? and when maura was younger, despite other witches being like “girl dont choose sides, we’re witches, we guard boundaries but we don’t choose sides,” was hotheaded and brash and went “ok but fuck that though” and one thing led to another and she ended up getting a curse on her firstborn. Oops. that’s where the kissing curse comes from, here; i’ll get into that much later in a text post probably but gansey’s survivor’s guilt thing doesnt come from him actually dying in this au it’s from something Else, but blue will still kill him if she kisses him, just, for different reasons, it’s an actual curse this time and not something to do with the nature of who they both are. 

her father’s still a tree light, but like, she actually knows that from the outset? because. they live in cabeswater. the tree lights are all around and accept her as one of their own even if she can’t turn into a tree, and as a result of that, she’s got some cool perks. 

a) extremely resistant and/or outright immune to a Lot of fey bullshit 

b) still boosts psychic energies and magical powers like in canon

c) the absolute safest person to be traveling in cabeswater ever, because the forest itself loves her, and also if you mess with her within the borders of cabeswater a bunch of tree lights will physically manifest and be like “hey buddy wanna think twice about that”

but she can’t use magic herself, still, which actually works in the favor of herself and the coven--witchcraft is in a sort of weird spot, culturally, where it’s both feared and often hated, but also understood to at times be necessary, especially by rural peoples like those of the village. im taking a very discworld spin on the witchcraft, because i love discworld and you can’t stop me, and so the attitude is, like. its frightening ancient magic and the church hates it but when there’s an emergency and someone’s on the border between life and death, or something is trying to pass into this world from another, etc etc etc, then you gotta suck it up and call on a witch because they’re the only ones who can deal with those things. so. the coven is tolerated, both because it’s too big and powerful to actually fight but also because it’s extremely needed when you live in a village right next door to fey lands. you NEED someone watching the border. however that doesn’t mean anyone wants to be seen publicly talking to a witch--but blue’s not a witch. she’s a witch’s daughter, but she’s not a witch herself, which is a step removed enough that she can go into town and run errands and also people will maybe pull her discretely aside and tell her if something’s coming up that the coven should know about, and it all works very neatly with her acting as a sort of liaison. very important role she plays, which is why gansey tries talking to her after his initial attempt to speak with the coven directly fails. 

speaking of the coven itself: i’ve been calling it the fox way coven, even tho it probably wouldn’t be called that because there’s no road called fox way that the coven is built on, it’s a big magic house out in the fairy forest, BUT they do have a fox theme because i love foxes and this is a gift i have been given. if people have familiars in this coven, they’re foxes rather than cats, because as wonderful as cats are u cant have them and foxes in the same house that will go bad. but also there’s a v small number of them, like maybe three or four total out of the much higher number of women living there, who are fey blooded like adam, but who become foxes rather than adam’s deer. persephone is one of these! (it’s worth noting the reason why they become the same animal is because of a combination of coincidence, intentional theming, and mostly just because like, virtually all of the residents there aside from persephone are related to either maura or calla) 

anyway the point is, because of this, blue’d seen enough feyblood transformations that when, one day when she was 9 or 10, on a visit to town, she saw the most distressed, disoriented fawn wobbling around frantically and was able to very quickly recognize that that was, in fact, a person who had probably turned into a deer for the first time, and responded by very calmly informing him that she knew who could help and leading him home. this is where those last two pictures come from, and how adam’s apprenticeship started. 

like, there was a lot of arguing from the witches immediately--of course we’re going to teach him how to become human again but we aren’t really going to take him on in the coven are we? he’s a boy, he’s some local kid we know nothing about, what happened to keeping it in the family, he’s the wrong animal and we’ve got a whole thing going on--at which point persephone parted everyone like the red sea, took one look at adam, went “mine now” and despite a lot of grumbling that was the end of it. she took him on a bit of a tour of cabeswater a few days later, after he’d had time to think it over, and he felt so drawn to the forest that he agreed to the apprenticeship.

so he’s technically persephone’s apprentice but like in actual practice he’s being taught by the entire coven lmao, ANYWAY

adam being adam also had a backup plan for trying to get out of the village--even at ten he figured witchcraft might be a first way out of there, he was already thinking about it, but by thirteen when the good ole abuse started (and at which point the last whispers of dissent died out very quickly amongst the coven, nope, adam is one of us now, do you want us to very threateningly hang out in your front yard sometime because we can do that--what do you mean no, let us do this,) he was also like. i dont think this is a guarantee of getting out of here i need a second job. and the thing is, as was mentioned in the original post, the fey blood also means adam’s got issues with iron; it’ll poison him if he’s stabbed with it but it also reacts to his skin touching it like a hot stove. he’s fine if there’s a layer between his skin and the iron, but if he touches it directly, it’s Bad. so ofc this headstrong idiot takes an open spot a t a metalworker’s in the village because adam is the king of making bad decisions. the witches have a betting pool on how long it’ll take him to out himself. “its fine i’ll wear gloves,” he says. “it’s the perfect disguise no one will expect someone with fey connections to work near so much iron,” he says. “i have everything perfectly under control,” he says.

anyway he totally forgets to wear gloves before grabbing an iron tool while his dad and his boss are both in the store and in clear view of him and that’s why he was getting chased by hunters when gansey rescued him 

also he and blue tried dating when they were like 13-14 and it ended about as badly as in canon and they made up later and by the time the story starts they’ve settled into very much being weird siblings. adam starts hanging out with gansey initially to try and basically spy on him, figure out why he’s here, but ends up rly liking the guy and deciding his reasons are sincerely to try and help people, and he tells this to blue who starts immediately accusing him of having a crush on the lordling and being a class traitor, because she does NOT like gansey at this point and really the nobility all prefer wizards to witches which is a stupid idiot decision and frankly the fact that this lordling is apparently enamored by some random deer is hilarious to her, but even moreso is the fact that adam actually defends the lordling to her, like, “wow adam its hilarious that the lordling’s friend thinks that you have charmed the lordling because from my perspective it looks the other way around” “shut uuuup you’re not listening im serious, like, yeah ok he put his foot in his mouth really hard when he talked to you but im telling you i dont think the whole i-wanna-understand thing is an act” “idk if i can trust you through those rose tinted glasses buddy. tell me again about that time he called you princely?” “oh my god” 

this is turning into rambling but. thats the gist of the witches and blue esp thank u for coming if u made it this far here’s a bonus persephone fox 

[chiaki-translation]

4th Anniversary Quiz Voiceline Answer Translation

My bad, I actually missed the hint, oops... I think someone else out there posted the hint though, so if you’re really interested, do look at them. But I missed the lines so I can only post the answers for now, enjoy~

Disclaimer:

A3! is owned by Liber’s Entertainment

Sakuya: A quiz for Director! In the upcoming guest performance, I will be playing as a part of a certain family. What position will I have in that family?

Answer: 

The correct answer is... The middle of the 4 siblings! Speaking of brothers, you’ll end up remembering Tsuzuru-kun right, I’ll do my best in the upcoming performance!

Masumi: When I have free time between my lectures in university, I’ll try to do something to kill time... I want you to get it right, what is it.

Answer:

The answer is to find a place to nap. I used to sleep at the terrace bench, but I started to feel annoyed by people’s gaze, so I started looking for other places.

Tsuzuru: Then, it’s time for a question from me. When I went home at the beginning of the year and met my younger brothers, I was asked something... Do you know what it is?

Answer:

Something that my little brother ask from me... The correct answer is, Shounen Manga. Even if it’s not much, I did give them New Year’s money then, so he said that he will save up and buy them next time.

Itaru: Director-san, good work~ Sorry to make you come all the way here, I’ll give you my questions immediately. What was my average ranking on the social game event from last year?

Answer:

The correct answer is... 52nd place~ I’ll do my best for my Oshi event, otherwise I’ll use it as practice and balance it steadily, that’s my style.

Citron: Tadaah! It’s Citron Quiz dayo~! Do you know what game I’ve been into lately? If it’s Director, I’m sure you’ll get the correct answer in one try.

Answer:

The corrrect answer is... ‘Harabanjo Game’ dayo! It’s the best board game that doesn’t cost any money~ Of course, the banker’s role goes to Sakyo!

Chikage: Director-san, sorry to call you out when you’re busy, but can I get your answer for my quiz. I travelled to a lot of places for work, but even then, there are a lot of places that I haven’t visited. A place that I want to visit... Then, where will it be?

Answer:

The answer is ‘Space’. I have been admiring it since a long time ago. Speaking of which, I think I told you that I wanted to be an astronaut when I was little... Do you think I was lying?

T.N. WTH CHIKAGE HAHAHA, HOW WHY WHAT HUH HAHAHAHA

Tenma: When I went back home last time, my Dad gave me something else instead of a New Year’s Gift... Director, what do you think it is?

Answer:

The correct answer is, my Father’s car. There are a few left in Japan. It seems to be a rare car too. He said that he will pass me the key when I got my Driver License. I guess, I’ll go and get a Driver License this year.

Yuki: Then, a question from me. What’s the latest photo I have in my smartphone. For starters, try to guess it without any hint.

Answer:

The answer is... ‘A Picture of Kazunari and Taichi’. They managed to get hold of my smartphone before I knew it and it seems that they took some selfies without permission. Geez, what a nuisance right.

Muku: Actually recently, there’s a shoujo manga that has been very popular in shoujo manga club. It’s a hot topic that’s even adapted to anime and dramas... Do you know about it, Director-san?

Answer:

The answer is ’Kimi Koi Rhapsody’! Recently, there has been more media coverage about it, it even become a small boom when we read it again at the Shoujo Manga Club.

Misumi: A question for Director-san! I recently exchanged the points that I have accumulated with ‘Onigiri Pay’. So, what is it!

Answer:

The answer is... a mug cup! A present for Madoka! I’m sure there’s nothing but teacup at home, that’s why I want to give a fashionable one for him~

Kazunari: Director-chan, get ready for your question~! I have something that I have to bring with my when I go to my university’s atelier, what is it~ Let’s see you guess without any hint for now~

Answer:

Correct answer is, Summer Troupe’s commemoration photo~! Everyone’s smile and the memories contained within it become my strength. As I thought, Summer Troupe’s the best!

Kumon: Question! I recently remember a 4 words idiom that’s so cool! Can you guess what is it! Hehe, maybe it’s a little bit too hard~

Answer:

Then, time to announce the answer! The answer is ‘Ryuujoukoshi’~! I don’t really understand the meaning, but don’t the Dragon and Tiger look cool together!?

T.N. I don’t know what’s the meaning of the phrase either. But the phrase uses the Kanji of both Dragon and Tiger on it, which is the reason why Kumon said that.

Banri: Then, I’ll give Director-chan my question promptly. What home appliances did I buy recently. It’s a very simple question right?

Answer:

Then, time to reveal the answer. The home appliance that I bought recently is... ‘Humidifier’. It’s going to be dry season soon, have to take care of your throat right.

Juza: A quiz for director?... How about this. What’s the new menu available in Yosei university that I go to... A quiz is something like this right?

Answer:

The answer is ‘Mille Crepe’. It’s not as sweet as I thought, so I ate it with additional whipped cream. The other stalls seem to be thinking of new menus as well.

Taichi: A quiz for Director-sensei! I saw a news recently, I’m happy but I also have a complicated feelings about it. So, what kind of news is that.

Answer:

The news that gave me a complicated feeling is... the announcement of Akapoyo-kun FPS game project! I like games, but... I don’t want to see Akapoyo-kun shot or get shot~

Omi: A quiz huh. Let’s see, previously, I went to a futsal match with the Soccer Club, it was interrupted halfway due to something. What happened, do you know about it, Director?

Answer:

The answer is, a cat and its kittens entered the premise. That day was a hot one, and they ended up rolling and purring on the field for about 10 minutes.

Sakyo: In the last few months, which room has the highest power consumption in the dorm... Do you know? For your information, I don’t include the shared spaces.

Answer:

The answer is Room 205. Kotatsu, electric blanket, and air con... Furthermore, it seems that he turned on the ‘Nabe Pot’ every night. I understand how he feels, but he needs to be more conscious of saving.

Azami: Ah, Director, it’s a bit sudden, but won’t you answer my quiz. There’s a place that me, Kumon, and Shifuto have been into these days, do you know where it is.

Answer:

The answer is... Escape game. When we did it by chance that one time, the two of them got hooked into it. But, the two of them couldn’t clear it at all, and I ended up coming to help them.

Tsumugi: Director, good afternoon. It’s a bit sudden, but a question from me. Recently, I was told something by my favourite flower shop that I frequent, what is it.

Answer:

The correct answer is ‘Won’t you do part time in my place?’. It was quite fascinating, but I’m satisfied with the dormitory’s garden. I will gladly welcome a role as a florist though.

Tasuku: When you go to a guest performance, there’s something that they will ask the guest to be in charge of. It seems that you’ll be able to get it right away... Do you know the answer?

Answer:

I was told, ‘Your body grows thicker again’. Was that too easy...? If that’s the case, my bad. I thought of other stuffs too, I thought this one is the easiest to understand.

T.N. Huh, wait, my bad, I misinterpreted the question? Apparently, he refers to himself, oops.

Hisoka: Quiz... Ah. I was recommended to do a part time job recently, what is it, is this good enough?

Answer:

Then, I’ll reveal the answer. The part time that was recommended to me is... Detective’s assistant. I never thought that this kind of part time job exist. Whether to do it or not, I’m still thinking about it. Rather than me, I think Kumon fits the role more though.

Homare: It’s been decided that they will publish my column in a certain magazine collaboration project. I thought of a title for that column, but what do you think is it?

Answer:

The correct answer is... ‘Battle in the Fine Deep Snow’. It’s about the snowball fight that we have with everyone the other day. You can clearly see the different vibes of each troupes, it’s really interesting.

Azuma: When I went to buy sake last time, I came across one with a beautiful floral design for the packaging. Then, what kind of flower do you think it is?

Answer:

The correct answer is... ‘Tsubaki’ (Camellia). It seems that I’ve given you an easy question, how was it? By the way, I haven’t opened that sake, let’s drink it together next time.

Guy: I’m sure Director knows who frequently visit my store among the troupe members, but who came the most recent... How’s that question for you?

Answer:

The members who come the store recently is Arisugawa and Fushimi. Fushimi was about to be late for work and he met Arisugawa when he was telling the Director to take charge for dinner.

[greenninjagal-blog]

Sentence starters: 14, with Roman & Deceit??

Haha, long time, no write! We’re having a pretty poor time right now so I figured a little bit of Roceit would be in Order! Warning: I did not edit this in the slightest. 

Summary: Roman has always been a little curious, but the pastry chef definitely takes the cake on this one. 

Words: 3007

Quick Taglist:  @chelsvans @dwbh888 @glitchybina @faithfulcat111 @felicianoromano @harrypotternerdprincess @holliberries @jemthebookworm @killerfangirl3  @musical-nerd18 @never-end1ng-suffering @nonasficcollection @silverflame-wc @stricken-with-clairvoyancy @the-sunshine-dims @themagicheartmailman @themultishipperchild @thenaiads @treasureofpriam @vianadraws  

Read on Ao3 || My General Writing List || Prompt Page (it should also be stated that you don’t need to pick from this prompt page if you don’t want to. Just send me an idea and I’ll do my best :D)

The Point of This is....

“Here, Bite Down on this.” 

Roman has had a lot of weird first meetings. As a kid he liked to wander around the town meeting knew people, which, of course, drove his mother up a wall the first ninety or so times that she had glanced away from him for a second and he had disappeared completely on her. Roman was just a curious type of kid. The first time he had been confused by a couple of workers who were fixing an outlet behind one of the counters at his mothers favorite little shop, and he had just wanted to know what they were doing.

They had told him! Which had been cool. Did you know there were wires all in the walls?! He hadn’t even realized that his mom had been frantically looking for him until she had grabbed his arm in a frantic panic and asked if he was alright, and then don’t you dare wander off again! What if something had happened?! Roman! 

It had happened again anyway, the store clerk had been redressing a mannequin and it had been neat! Then window cleaner, then flower arranger from the flower shop, then the busker outside the Irish themed pub he wasn’t allowed to be near, then the sign flipper at the street corner who taught him to spin one of the smaller signs--

The point was that by the time Roman hit middle school he knew most of the “little people” by name, and they of course knew his. Roman knew that a lot of them called him by his full name because his mother used to scream it when he went missing,-- Roman Alexander Prince, if you don’t get back here right this instant-- but he learned a lot of cool things! 

He could arrange flowers, knew when and where the most dense foot traffic was, knew how to flip signs and draw attention. He could Macgyver his way through most electrical circuits, had the sewers under his town fully mentally mapped out, and knew that if you hit the vending machine behind the laundromat just right, you could get a free snickers bar. 

He liked learning knew things. And for the most part? People liked to teach him.

As he got older, he noticed just how heartbreaking that sort of thing was. When he held the ladder steady for the owner of the Mom-and-Pop grocer while the old man replaced the “N” of the sign, the man had casually mentioned that the last person who asked him how he was doing had been a family man who had stopped coming months ago.

Then the more he looked, the more he had seen it: the when he waved to the woman who worked the bakery her whole face had lit up like he had gifted her the world, when he bought the street performer a water they had almost broken down to tears right there on the street, when he had offered the man sitting alone at the park with his head in his hands a chance to pet his dog, the man had called him a “generous kid” and tossed him five dollars before he left considerably happier than he was when he arrived.

The point-- and yes, Roman did have a point-- the point of all of this, was that Roman liked people. He liked learning things, and he liked hearing the stories that people had to share.

He liked telling those stories.

Which would probably explain how he got here: Mindscape, the ever prestigious school for the gifted. Although “gifted” tended to be a relative term. Roman had met a lot more people here, all his age, who eyed him warily like his smile was something to be scared of.

(”It is!” Remus, his twin had cackled from across the table in the dining hall, as if they didn’t have the same exact face.)

Roman and Remus had gotten in together, both on accident: Remus had crafted an application for Roman, sent it in without Roman’s knowledge, and then hacked the School’s Admissions database and marked the application for acceptance. 

Things should have gone really bad, because Remus hadn’t known that the School President, Thomas Sanders, checks each and every application and when he noticed an application had skipped most of acceptance process he started digging.

Things should have gone really bad then. Like really bad. Like Remus ends up in jail and Roman has to change his name and move countries, really bad.

Instead Thomas Sanders, had sent them both acceptance letters, and Remus was required to work in the IT department without pay and take all the computer application classes. Somewhere in the middle of that Remus had struck up some sort of deal with the cyber defense team where the Mindscape’s tech department spent all school year building their best unhackable code, and in the summer Remus got to take anything and everything he learned that year and try to break it. 

Remus had been winning for two years now. Roman had seen the grown men reduced to tears the moment that Remus’s hands had started flying over the keyboard. 

Again, the point to this-- Roman had been at this boarding school for two years now, barreling his way through the journalism and creative writing classes like they were tissue paper walls. He’s met a lot of people his age, and he’s witnessed a lot of weird quirks about them.

Like how that kid in the library who likes to sleep on top of the bookcases, and Roman had witnessed getting swatted with a broom so many times. He was a gymnast and an acrobat and really freaking flexible-- and he had told Roman to fuck off when he had tried to learn anything more than that. 

Or like that artist who ran the yearbook club took pictures of everything. It had been pretty cute the way the puffball had insisted on taking pictures of the cracks on the side walk, the clouds in the sky, the rainbow made from the refraction of the light through the glass windows. They had called it “catching little pieces of happiness in everyday!” Which was much sweeter than Roman had been anticipating. “Oops! Sorry gotta go, kiddo!” They had said and then they had been gone taking more pictures before Roman could ask anything about them.

Or like that guy from his Civics class who had gotten way too competitive about the trivia game they had played in class. It wasn’t just trivia though: Roman had learned later that he apparently Logan Ackroyd, the Logan Ackroyd, who had won the American chess tournament for three year in a row now. Any game that Logan touched, reportedly, he won. Chess, Checkers, Othello, Jenga, even Tic-Tac-Toe, and he treated them each like a life or death situation.

The point is of this is everyone had a weird quirk about them.

Roman knew that, knows that.

Heck, even Roman had a weird quirk, which apparently was wandering the school halls after classes. And now that includes being dragged into one of those classrooms by the hoodie of his sweatshirt and then immediately having a fork of something shoved in his mouth.

“VIRGIL!” Another voice squawks, followed by a telltale click of a camera taking a photo, but okay, Roman is a little too busy choking on a fork to take in everything.

There is a hand on his back, and one on his chest, holding him surprisingly steady, while he basically dies-- and man, he did not think that he’d be dying at seventeen years old. Who knew that his mother would be right all those times she insisted that his habit of walking around aimlessly was gonna be the death of him? 

There are tears in his eyes by the time he manages an inhale, and someone takes the fork back out of his mouth. The hand on his back is rubbing soothing circles and his lungs flutter weakly, like a butterflies wings.

“Dude,” A voice says boredly. Roman squints up at his attacker-- because yes this was an attack and Roman will forever be scarred by it-- and vaguely recognizes the purple patched up hoodie for the library acrobat. “I said “Bite down on this”, not choke and die on the floor.”

Roman coughs to dislodge the last bit of whatever food just got shoved down his throat.

“Please ignore him,” A smooth voice says, a new voice, and one that sounds exactly like silk on Roman’s ears. “Are you okay?”

The new person, the man who is holding Roman, is, in a word, pretty. Actually, no wait, not pretty; he’s gorgeous. He’s beautiful. He’s Michelangelo’s David come to life, an angel straight from heaven, the God Apollo himself taking a quick break from driving his sun chariot to walk among the mortals--

“Virgil, what did you do!” The breathtaking stranger yelps.

“I didn’t do anything!” The acrobat shoots back, although he looks worried, “I just put the fork in his mouth! Oh shit, dude come on, please don’t tell me you’re allergic to something-- Dee what was in that? I can’t go to jail for killing someone! I just got here!”

There’s another click and a giggle and Roman blinks himself to enough awareness to realize that beside the three of them, there’s also that photography artist and the Logan Ackroyd in the room, also what looks like a cake with three slices cut out of it.

“You aren’t going to jail,” Logan says, although he’s playing on a Nintendo Switch and isn’t paying all that much attention to what’s going on.

“It just a cake,” Dee adds, almost desperately and Roman’s knees really do go weak at that. A pretty man? Using that tone to address Roman? Roman’s surprised he’s still conscious at all. “Are you allergic to eggs? What about Wheat? Milk?”

“Deep breath, kiddos!” The person with the camera suggests, and Roman knows immediately that they are 100% aware that his flushed cheeks and lack of breath are not from an allergy. They take another picture and Roman dies a little more on the inside. 

“Please...don’t let... my brother see that,” Roman coughs one more time, “I’m begging.” 

The artist just laughs and takes another picture.

“No allergies?” The god beside him says and Roman finds him looking absolutely anywhere but at him. 

“No allergies,” Roman confirms, “None at all. It’s all good. And you know I should be--”

“What did you think of it?” The acrobat interrupts. And when Roman just blinks he snaps, “The cake, Princey! Tell Dee that the cake was fine and he can stop banging his head on the table now.”

Roman chances a glance at the man holding him up, and yeah, he could see the faint red marks were he had obviously been hitting his head on something. Unfortunately, said man was also looking at Roman, looking for his answer to the question that was just asked of him and Roman has already forgotten what it was again. 

His eyes were different colors, and that totally reminded Roman of that week in the summer when he hung around the ophthalmologist just outside of town. Roman had looked at a lot of eyes, learned a lot about eyes in that time, but really there was something different about those ones. One was a brilliant bright brown, like hickory and the other was glistening gold. He looked like something straight from a fantasy. 

Roman’s fantasy.

“Hey,” The stranger says softly, “Are you okay, darling?”

And that’s the last thing Roman remembers. 

Because he fainted.

Because the gorgeous, beautiful, ethereal stranger called him “darling” and Roman’s weak gay heart promptly shut off.

He comes to again, just a few minutes later-- long enough that his head is throbbing and his lungs hurt a bit and mere idea of moving sounds exhausting. He’s comfortable just fine where he is.

On the floor.

With his head in the perfect strangers lap.

“There you are,” The man gives him a nervous smile that makes Roman’s mouth dry out. “Do you remember where you are?”

“Heaven?”

Roman has many regrets in his life. Like that time he thought that crawling down the manhole would be fun. Or the weekend he spent hanging out in the courthouse, which had turned out to be incredibly boring. Or that time he brought dog treats to the dog park and ended up get ambushed by like seven dogs at once and broke his arm.

But this....answering that, and immediately hearing that all too familiar cackle that can only belong to Remus? Yeah Roman rates that at the top of Roman’s Regrets.

The stranger bites his lip but he’s grinning all the same. “Apologies. When you fainted we, called the emergency contact on your phone.”

“Remus is not my emergency contact,” Roman grumbles and weakly shuffles his limbs to sit up.

Remus wheezes, from where he’s situated with an arm over the artist and the acrobat respectively. “Like-- Hell! I changed that months ago!” Remus grins, “I wasn’t gonna miss a chance to laugh at you while you get carted away in an ambulance! You only die once Ro! I wanna be there for it!”

“I should have consumed you in the womb.”

“Butcha didn’t!”

“The intention was there.” Roman sways, and he really doesn’t like the way the floor shifts like waves of an ocean.

“Pussy,” Remus tosses out, just for the sake of having the last word. He pulls his arms back from around the other two and fusses with the little artist’s hair. “Alright, brats! That’s my cue to drag my dumbass gay twin away before he faints again. But this was fun! Lets do it again! This time Dee can even let Roman actually fall and crack his head on the floor instead of catching him!”

Roman’s ears burn, and he peeks at Dee with a morbid mortification, “You caught me?”

“Well I was already, holding you up so it wasn’t as much as caught you as you...ah,” there’s a twitch of his lips, “as you fell for me.”

The noise Roman makes is not in any way, shape, or form flattering. 

Remus cackles again.

There’s a click and a giggle, “Sorry kiddo! That was just too good to pass up!” The artist bounces slightly. “You both should definitely come back though! We’d love to have the company!”

“No, we wouldn’t,” the acrobat interjects, and lets out a heavy breath when he’s elbowed by his friend. 

“Yes, we would!” The artist says. “And next time you can even have some of Dee’s pastries!”

“That’s not necessary,” The stranger says quickly, “They aren’t that good--”

“Will you stop lying!” the acrobat says, “You literally got into this prestigious ass school for your pastries, dumbass. They’re good. Accept it already! Geez!”

The stranger rubs his neck and then his cheek, before turning back to Roman. “Perhaps you can be the judge of that then? Darling?” 

Yeah, Roman’s knees are weak again, but he’s stubborn enough that he keeps standing. “I think I’d like that. Although, I can’t say I’m any kind of pastry expert.” 

“We all have our faults, I presume.”

Roman’s heart beats a little faster. “And admittedly I will be a little bit bias.”

“A little bit?”

“Only a smidge,” Roman reports, “I’ve heard that good company can affect the taste of food.”

“You intend to be in good company?”

“If it’s yours I’m sure it will be.”

“Who knew there was a smooth talker under that blush of yours?”

“If you think this was smooth you should see--

Remus claps his hands loudly enough to make the acrobat flinch and Logan in the corner curse in Korean. “Okay yes we get it: You both are gayyyyyy!” Remus exclaims, drawing it out just enough that Roman feels a bit of the Cain Instinct(tm) in him rise up. “But if neither of you are going to start undressing to give the rest of us a show, then we need to go!”

“Remus!” 

“I’m just saying!” Remus shrugs and then hooks an arm around Roman’s neck and pulls him towards the door, “Its not fair to the rest of us, if you keep being a tease!”

“I hope you step on a lego and fall into a pit of sharks.”

Remus messes with his hair, which seems to be his thing right now.

The others in the room call out their goodbyes, and Remus drags Roman away before he can get more than a sloppy wave. Its still embarrassing.

Actually everything that happened was embarrassing, from top to bottom, and there was absolutely no moment were it wasn’t completely mortifying. Not only did he choke on a piece of cake he didn’t even get to taste, but he gay panicked, and then gay fainted, and every second of it was recorded via camera snapshots. And late at night, when Roman is turning it over in his head and screaming into a pillow, he barely notices his phone flashing.

He’s already miserable, because they probably just invited him back to be nice, and he didn’t even know their names. And Remus was still laughing at him for everything, and everything just really sucked. He opens up his phone to check the message, ignoring the way the his screen burns his eyes.

There’s a text message. 

An actual text message.

Stole your number hope you dont mind

Roman can’t breath. The phone in his hand vibrates again.

Oh and your heart. I stole that too. this is a ransom demand.

$40,000 in cash. Or a date to the coffee shop in town.

pls?

this is Dee Ekans btw

The baker?

oh fuck pls tell me this is the right number

roman?

And Roman rolls over and presses his face into a pillow and screams. 

But really the point of all this is that Roman got the number of the cute guy. And maybe a date.

[hella1975]

Tom Nook joined the Gaang and I'm so so happy about that but like. Sokka is sixteen, but he acts so much older. That's the thing about Sokka--his only company was young children, his kid sister, and middle aged--elderly women. He didnt get to have that goofing off with other teenagers experience, didnt get to have his first kiss or coming of age traditions until a war sent him away from his home. And even then, those experiences were rushed, overshadowed by the looming threat of disaster and destruction. One of the reasons Suki is such an important character (by far this is not the only reason, her worth is not measured by her role in his character arc. I'm just talking about her importance to Sokka rn) is that she is able to give him that camaraderie and belonging that comes from butterflies in your stomach, jokes shared with a friend who gets you and your experiences. He gets this later with Yue too--they get to forget things, just for a while, and be kids, but that's also overshadowed by her internal struggles and the war (I could write a whole ask about this honestly, Yue deserved so, so much better). It ends in tragedy. Hes constantly protecting the gaang. Canonically getting very little sleep so he can watch over them, etc. He only leaves with Aang to protect Katara (and gains a little brother, oops). And Katara!! Katara is four-fucking-teen. She's gone through all the trauma of losing her mother, presumably seeing the body, the guilt of being one of the only people who could've prevented it, and then assuming the role of mother. Her only remaining parent left her alone to fight in the war that took her mother away. She deserved to be a kid too. And it's not like they realize what a toll this has all truly taken on the other? Both siblings had to grow up way too fast, and they adapted in pretty much the same way--by attempting to fill the gaps left by their parents, only neither really knows what to do or what the other is trying to accomplish. What I'm getting at is that Tom Nook, both on a ship, at war, had more of a childhood (not that their childhoods werent also incredibly sad and stained by war) than Sokka and Katara and that's so fucking sad. Now I'm imagining the complete surprise Tom nook will feel when they begin to really realize? Ugh?

Idk if this makes sense I haven't reread it at all but I have FEELINGS

I’m gonna fucking scream i typed out such a long response and it just deleted itself i don’t understand???? god has forsaken me i hate it here. anyway it was a rant about my boys tom nook and i love them enough to try re-type it so here i go but know i’m PISSED about this.

okay for starters anon, yes this did make sense and it made me SAD i hope you’re happy. I also love how you talked about Suki, just because a few people tend to forget that she’s, you know, an actual person and not just a plot point for Sokka’s narrative. 

My addition to this; tom nook are in a very similar boat. I know you said it’s different for them because they got more of a childhood, but i’m not so sure. It is different, but it isn’t better. Nanook is twenty and he’s had to spend two years away from home. From the snippets we see of the South Pole chapters, we can tell he really gets on with his family, so to leave them behind to go fight in a war is devastating for him. Now add on the fact that Nanook takes personal responsibility for his friends. It’s been mentioned once or twice that he’s really protective of the people he cares about, and ever since Uki, he sees it as his duty to keep them safe no matter how out of his hands the situation is. So Nanook then has to watch Tomkin, who is such a little brother figure for him, go into battles at his side, he has to watch Sokka shoulder these burdens, he has to watch Katara be far stronger than her age ought to require. He has to watch and he so desperately wants to protect them all from that, but he can’t. And then he lost Zuko. He lost Zuko in a very similar way to how he lost Uki. Uki disappeared in a snowstorm and there was no body to provide closure, and Zuko was kidnapped with zero certainty of what happened. Despite him having no control over either of these situations, Nanook blames himself. We see more of it when he’s with the gaang, but it’s one of the main reasons he personally struggles to talk about Zuko. Nanook as a character doesn’t actually get much introspection in taob (though he probably will with the gaang like i said before) and that’s solely because he’s so complex and i know i’d go feral if i started looking too deep. Nanook angst is a whole new kettle of fish.

Then we have Tomkin. Tomkin by definition is still a teenager. Tomkin is ‘Little Tom’ to the crew and, despite his teasing, he’s actually the kind of character who enjoys being treated like he’s his age or younger. When his parents died, it took a lot for him to stay kind, stay innocent, stay fun. He really fought hard for it. And now him and Nanook are being given responsibility of all these kids, and it’s not fair for anyone. Nanook would have taken a parental role even if Hakoda hadn’t asked, because he can’t not. But Tomkin, while he loves kids, has never assumed an adult role before. He’s being forced to grow up despite how hard he tried to stay young, if that makes sense.

To summarise: kids should not have to fight wars and all these motherfuckers deserve to be happy (and when all this is over, they will be)