#trying to fight my intense art block by going back to my roots

[tumblezwei-art]

Long time no Ruby Rose

[akookminsupporter]

Namjoon gave an interview to El Pais in Spain and I wanted to share the translation of the interview for those who may not understand Spanish.

Question. The track opens with the lines: "Fuck the trendsetter / I'm going back to the age of 9 / when I was more human". Does the stratospheric success of K-pop dehumanise the artist? Answer. You start your career very early and as part of a group. There's not a lot of time to be an individual, but that's what makes K-pop shine: very young people, trying very hard at the same time…. You generate energy that you only have in your twenties. You fight day and night to perfect the choreography, the videos, the music, and there's an explosion, a big bang. From 20 to 30, we put all the energy and time we had into BTS. You get success, love, influence, power, and after that? The root of it all remains: the music… What was the question?

Q. Does the system dehumanise? A. My company doesn't like the way I answer this question, because I partly admit it and then the journalists throw their hands on their heads, "it's a horrible system, it destroys the young people! But it's partly what makes this such a special industry. And things have improved a lot, in terms of contracts, money, education, there are now teachers, psychologists...

Q. Korean record companies train their artists for years, you lived with your peers from 16 to 19 before your debut as BTS in 2013. What did your parents say? A. My mother spent two years, "Go back to school, you were so good at it, go your way, go to university, make music a hobby!"…. But there was no going back.

Q. The biggest lesson from your time as an apprentice? A. Dancing. I was incapable.

Q. And what did you miss out on by being one? A. College life.

Q. The cult of youth, the cult of perfection, the cult of K-pop overexertion? Are these Korean cultural traits? A. In the West, people just don't get it. Korea is a country that has been invaded, razed to the ground, torn in two. Just seventy years ago there was nothing. We were getting aid from the IMF and the UN. But now, the whole world is looking at Korea. How is that possible, how did that happen? Because people are working fucking hard to improve themselves. You're in France or the UK, countries that have been colonising other countries for centuries, and you come to me and say "oh God, you put so much pressure on yourselves, life in Korea is so stressful". well, yes. That's how you get things done. And it's part of what makes K-pop so appealing. Of course, there are shadows, everything that happens too fast and too intensely has side effects.

Q. What is the biggest prejudice about K-pop? A. That it's prefabricated.

Q. What would your career have been like if you had developed it on the alternative circuit or in another country? A. I think about the multiverse a lot, and the lesson of Doctor Strange is always the same: your version of the universe is the best possible one, don't think of others. There is nothing better than being a member of BTS.

Q. Did you imagine this version? A. Not at all. My dream was not to be a K-pop idol. I wanted to be a rapper, and before that, a poet.

Q. Your influences include rappers like Nas and Eminem, groups like Radiohead and Portishead, but you never mention boy bands. A. The Beatles were also called boy band... I'm not comparing us, they were the creators of everything. But I guess you mean NSYNC or New Kids on the Block: bands whose pop music I actually liked, although I wasn't a super fan… What got me was rap: rhythm plus poetry.

Q. You say you get jealous of who you admire, for example? A. Kendrick Lamar, always. And Pharrell Williams. He's living history, I'd like to be one too, maybe in the future. That's why I don't paint, to be jealous of Picasso or Monet would be too much.

Q. You do collect, how do you choose the pieces? A. I've only been collecting for four years and I've been changing. My focus is 20th-century Korean art. But I'm not Getty or Rockefeller…

Q. You don't do it to invest. A. I guarantee it. If I wanted to invest, I would buy black artists, women artists, emerging Indonesian artists… My goal is to open a small exhibition space in about 10 years because I think Seoul needs a place with a young taste, but respectful of the Korean legacy, to which I would also like to bring artists like Roni Horn, Antony Gormley or Morandi.

Q. Have you always had the collector's bug? A. I've collected toys, little cars or Takashi Murakami figures, then vintage clothes, then furniture, I love Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret [both collaborators with Le Corbusier], but my favourite is George Nakashima.

Q. On your album there are songs from very different genres, some critics say it's inconsistency, others say versatility… A. I think the word genre will disappear in a few decades. R&B, Hyperpop, Jersey Club, UK Drill, Chicago Drill, K-pop! They don't mean anything. Music is an accumulation of frequencies that makes people get into a certain mood.

Q. Are you fed up with the "K-" label? A. You could get sick of Spotify calling us all K-pop, but it works. It's a premium label. The guarantee of quality that our grandparents fought for.

Q. Your album features Anderson Paak, Youjeen and the elusive Erykah Badu, how did he convince you? A. She knew BTS because her daughter is a fan, but that's not enough. I had to persuade her, I sent her a text with Yun's story explaining why I needed her wise queen voice for those verses.

Q. You mix English and Korean sometimes in the middle of a line, how do you decide? A. Words in different languages have different textures; the same message, with a different brushstroke. It comes naturally to me. I don't play instruments, I compose and create melodies with my voice, which is my instrument and most of my songs start with words.

Q. You have also gone through several identities, as a teenage rapper you were Runch Randa, then in BTS Rap Monster and then RM (for Real Me). Have you thought about using your real name? A. [laughs] We all have a past, a dark history, we say in Korea. Runch Randa was my nickname in a role-playing game, then I wanted to be, you know, "a rap monster!″, then I matured… I prefer my name to be known by as few people as possible, I'm not John Lennon, Paul McCartney, I can check into a hotel quietly and I like that.

Q. You've also changed a lot in the way you dress. A. I went through XXL T-shirts and baseball caps. Then I got into high-end brands… Like Rap Monster, I started wearing only black and white [rolls his eyes and shrugs]. Now I'm interested in timelessness, I don't go for trends, I look for vintage jeans, cotton t-shirts, natural things, that don't scream "hey, I'm here".

Q. Rumour has it that you are going to collaborate with Bottega Veneta, whose fashion show you have just been invited to in Milan. A. I would love to. Although I've lost interest in brands, in fashion weeks and that constant change of Pantone… Bottega is different, they don't use logos, they have a history with fabrics and leather, they don't even have Instagram, they are beyond fads and fashions.

Q. How heavy is it to have an army of fans? A. You can't walk around in the middle of nowhere without being recognised and the standards to which you are subject weigh heavily. But you have to grow up and deal with it, not be pitiful like "oh, I just want to be normal". Look, if you want to think fame is a rock, it's a fucking rock, but for me, it's given me what I was looking for: to get influence and financial freedom as quickly as possible to make the music I want to make without worrying about the charts… I'm not there 100%, but I try to focus on the noise inside, not the noise outside.

Q. And how are you facing your thirties? A. I've never experienced such a confusing time. For a decade I was the leader of BTS, and it was very stable and fun, always going up. In 2023 a lot of things have changed, professionally and personally, although I can't tell. As I'm about to turn 30, I like myself more than I did when I was 20. Now I will spend a year and a half in military service, which is very important in every Korean man's life. And after that, I am sure I will be a different human being, hopefully, a better and wiser one.

[ktheist]

03 — show me yours & i’ll show you mine | m

➙ muses. seokjin x college student / gamer!reader ft. best friend! taehyung

➙ genre. best friend’s brother au. university au. working au. fwb au.

➙ word. 1.9k

➙ warnings. explicit content, fingering, mild exhibitionism

➙ index. 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | finale | side story 1 |

➙ synopsis.  “why are you doing this if you’re not gonna fuck me?”

x

saturday evening, taehyung comes up to you with a face of a blank canvas, phone in his hand facing the ceiling and relays the news of his break up.

you’re in the middle of watching a show with his two brothers on your laptop.

“wh-what?” is all you manage to say whilst namjoon and seokjin freeze in their spots.

“i broke up with her,” taehyung’s shoulderline rises as he casually shrugs.

“but why?” deep down, you have an inkling - but your mouth moved on its own before you can even stop it.

“cause she was shit talking you,” and with that, he twirls around, heading back to the hallway where one of the doors connect to his room.

and just like second nature, your body shoots up, trailing after the slumped man like a mother to her pupper.

“you guys watch without me,” you briefly say to the two men on the couch, their faces scrunching with growing concern.

for the first time in a long time, you and taehyung bare your hearts to each other. talked about your fears and hopes and what keeps you going. which is, to an extent, each other and the two brothers. you’re not sure how you fell asleep but you wake up with a leg sprawled all over your stomach and a snoring sound echoing against the wall. the blanket draped over you and taehyung isn’t part of his bedset because one, you and taehyung end up sleeping on top of the sheets and two, you know the only one brother out of the three loves the color blue so much, his bedsheets and blankets are always themed with light cerulean. and this blanket - you’ve definitely seen seokjin use a dozen times.

"hey, morning,” you greet the two brothers whilst they’re unpacking what seems to be takeouts from a store you all collectively agree have no bad item in their menu.

everyone eats just about anything from that restaurant.

“morning, sleepyhead.” namjoon shakes his head, smiling - it’s probably the hair pointing in different directions.

“how’s taehyung?” seokjin asks when you come to sit on the stool next to where he’s standing.

“well, i mean - he’s not in a good place,” you begin, “i know he really liked her. and i know she talks shit about me behind my back and she knows i do too and he’s always caught in between, but he always seemed to brush it off and never take sides you know? so i didn’t think he’d break up with her over it.”

“hey, it’s not your fault,” the hand on your shoulder is warm, seeping into your heart as you examine the sincerity of those brown eyes, down to the reassuring smile of those plump lips.

“thanks for saying that, jinnie,” you want to ask for a kiss (and maybe some dick) but with namjoon - though he’s cluelessly continuing with his task of preparing the takeouts - around, you settle for patting his hand that’s on your shoulder.

after washing your face and returning to the kitchen, you find the previously sleeping-like-a-long giant perched on one of the stools, rubbing the grogginess out of his eyes.

“look who’s up!” a smack lands on taehyung’s back.

the aforementioned man doesn’t even flinch as he takes another second to rub all the sleepiness away before craning his neck to look at your smiling face - it may be a dumb smile but someone’s got to be lifting the atmosphere.

“i thought you left,” he grumbles, before his arm snakes around your waist and brings you in for a side hug.

the recoil is almost automated as your smile scrunches into a cringe, arms flailing to push him away and at least get a few inches gap in between,“ew, what the hell.”

“i’m sad! gimme a hug,” he laments whilst namjoon laughs, commenting something about how “adorable” the two of you are and how it “...reminds me of the good old days, you know?”

he means when you and taehyung aren’t as resistant to skinships.

but all your attention goes to the eldest brother whose glance lingers a second too long before he tears his gaze off from you and taehyung.

x

it turns out that little bitch tried making taehyung choose between you and her after he’d texted her (in an attempt to placate her jealousy-prone heart) about how you’d opted to room with seokjin in yesterday.

give them and inch and they’ll take a mile.

“i should’ve known,” taehyung shakes his head, bags heavy under his eyes as he lies in his bed, cocooned by the light cerulean blanket, “you don’t like her but you like everyone-”

“don’t you go justin bieber on me,” you smack him in the stomach, to which he curls up into a caterpillar, moaning in pain and something about suing for personal injuries.

but the fact that he can complaint at all means that he’s recovered half of himself.

“i’m getting some food from the kitchen, you want anything?” you roll your eyes.

“how bout a new girlfriend?” he manages to say, despite the so called blow to the stomach.

“potato chips it is,” you nod before strutting out of the door.

the hallway is dimly lit, save for the lone light in the ceiling and the slightest bit of gap that allows luminescence to pour out of seokjin’s room. so you knock on the door, leaning against the frame, “hey.”

kim seokjin sits on the chair you previously occupied the night before, round glasses perched on the bridge of his nose as his eyes widen for the briefest second before offering you one of his warm smiles, “hey, how’s taehyung?”

“he’s eating,” you shrug, trying to appear casual even though something in the way his shirt swallows his already broad built and making him appear like you can fight him and win - gets your heart doing flips.

“that’s gre-” he can’t even properly get his response out because you’re already crossing the short distance between you and him, hands cupping his cheeks before smashing your lips against his. as if you haven’t had water for days. as if you’ve been breathing with your head barely above water.

his hands find their way on your hips, kissing you back more delicately than you can ever control yourself. tingles dot your skin from where his hand caresses your elbow and travels up your arm, lingering there, as though forgetting the reason his warning touch.

“i needed that,” you break away only to steal another kiss before confessing.

seokjin chuckles, his hand slipping over to your chest before attempting to pinch your nipple. to which he fails because your padded bra successfully blocks him off.

“oh, you’re wearing a bra?” the genuine surprise gleaming in his eyes should offend you.

“unless you want your brother accidentally touching my nips while we were wrestling each other to decide who gets to use your comfy as hell blanket,” you roll your eyes.

taehyung won, obviously. which explained why he was lying in bed like a human burrito just now.

“i’d have to give taehyung a personal beating if that happened,” the dorky grin and amused glint in his whenever he cracks a not-so-funny-but-adorable joke, isn’t present.

your heart’s always done this thing where it skips with every smile that curls on his lips, yet the lack of it and the underlying seriousness of his tone is making your heart lurch in your throat, warmth spreading all over your body.

“anyways, i need to get taehyung some chips, thanks for the kiss.” you wave but something wraps around your wrist like an iron hold seconds before you find yourself perched in seokjin’s lap and the man dangerously close to you - despite having shared a passionate kiss just a moment ago.

“taehyung this, taehyung that,” his hand slips under your shirt, coarse hand trailing up your back until you feel him unhooking your bra in one go.

like he’s had enough practice in the art of seduction.

“well, he’s the one out of the four of us with a broken heart,” you pray to the constellations and deities that your voice is levelled though it soon proves to be pointless if his other hand’s snaking up your front and hovers over your chest where he could feel the organ beneath beating wildly.

“you’re breaking mine though... with spending that much time with my brother,” he traps your nipple in between his thumb and index finger, caressing, teasing with a smile that ironically has probably broken a few hearts of his own.

“i can fix that,” you beam, finger tracing down his front and down to the waistline of his pants, to which you can’t reach unless you scoot away to allow your hand to -

“not right now,” the sound of wind chimes drum in your ears as he chuckles.

it makes the umpteenth rejection a little less prickly, as you pout, “when?”

“soon,” and with that, he takes your wrist in his hand, making you push your own shirt up until your nipples are bare in the open, “hold this up for me, please.”

it’s the please that gets you.

ever the gentleman even as he’s about to tease you with his teeth against your nipples and his free hand fondling your other breast.

“why are you doing this if you’re not gonna fuck me?” you grunt, displeased, but arch your back anyway to make it easier for him to suckle and bite on your erected nipples.

you’ve always thought his hair looked soft but it’s softer as you bury your free hand in it. at first, it’s just a gentle caress - just like patting a golden retriever. but then as his tongue lapse over your protruded nub and the pressure in his free hand in your other breast grows more intense, you’re surprised he’s not moaning out in pain from the way your hand’s instinctively grasping at his roots.

“ah!” a yelp escapes you when he leaves your left nipple for the other one, biting down harder than you’re used to but not enough to draw blood.

you’re lost in the pain and pleasure of his tongue and apt fingers, where his mouth isn’t sucking on your nipple, his fingers are pinching and groping it. somewhere in the back of your mind, you distinctively remember a midly pressing matter-

“what the fuck?”

something about a heartbroken best friend and an unclosed door.

"t-taehyung!” you gasp, body almost jolting upward like a criminal caught red handed but seokjin’s arms around your body roots you down in his lap as he slowly pulls down your shirt before turning his attention to his youngest brother.

“taehyung, calm down,” he instructs with ease but his wide-eyed gaze is filled with concern.

“this isn’t-” you begin, slipping away from seokjin’s loosened grasp to pad over to your best friend who looks like he’s seen a ghost or his brother and best friend almost-fucking. either one works, “this isn’t what you think.”

“no-” the younger cups his mouth as he doubles over, his other hand held up in the air as if to tell you to “stay the fuck back-”

“oh, come on,” the slightest brush of your nipples against the material of your carelessly-pulled-down bra makes does not go pass you, yet you put your hand on your hip, rolling your eyes, “don’t be so dramatic.”

and that’s when taehyung hurls his guts out in front of seokjin’s door.

x

note. ooof 

i wasn’t sure if this drabble was gonna gain any eager readers. when i say eager, i mean those who look forward to an update, but some of you showed interest and it warms my heart! so here’s to another update! hope yall enjoyed!

taglist. @aretha170​ @scalubera​ @ambersaesthetics​ !

[hi-i-love-u-bitch]

Azula the good sister AU (AKA the Fire siblings have a healthy relationship AU)

I’ve just finished binge watching Avatar the Last Airbender and I already have an AU ready in my head. Please enjoy my ridiculous rambling!

Azula is still really tough and intense but she isn’t a fucking psychopath like in the series

She’s still a bending prodigy and “daddy’s favorite” but the latter isn’t something she wanted or strived for

She shows affection by teasing people, but she is also fiercely loyal and protective over the people she cares about. Like she’s nice but she’ll still cut a bitch if they hurt her friends and brother.

As most siblings do Azula and Zuko like to playfully argue and insult each other:

Zuko: *having just woken up*

Azula: wow you look like shit

Zuko: big talk coming from a midget with rat nest hair

Azula: at least I only look like this in the morning, you willingly keep that rat tail on top of your head. No wonder you have no friends!

Zuko: oh yeah what’s your excuse then?

They’re the type of siblings that in a modern-day setting would send each other a picture of a toaster saying “I found you a new bath bomb”

She absolutely adores her older brother and Zuko took his role as older sibling in stride even if Azula could practically take care of herself

They’re great training partners

Their favorite memory as children was feeding turtle ducks with their mother, they still do so even now after she’s gone

When she overheard her grandfather ordering her father to kill Zuko she left to tell her mother immediately afterwards she snuck into Zuko’s room to cuddle with him in bed claiming that she’d had a nightmare.

Their mother came in to kiss them goodbye goodnight before disappearing into the night. Zuko had been half asleep so he had no idea what was going on but Azula did and she knew what her mother was about to do. She didn’t know what the outcome would be but she knew that it would be the last time she’d ever see her mother.

Azula never told Zuko what happened only that it was all their father’s fault

It was then they began mutually hating on their father

Of course, they had no choice but to respect him as he was still the Fire Lord and could possibly kill them. But as soon as he was out of ear shot the siblings were like:

Azula: Why the fuck did he think growing out his beard was a good idea???

Zuko: He looks like a goat-pig

Uncle Iroh treats them both as his own children and helps them perfect their fire bending as well as teach them the art of tea brewing. Zuko still thinks it’s stupid but Azula becomes just as much of a tea fanatic as her uncle

Azula has had a giant crush on Ty Lee ever since they were children and everyone, but Ty Lee knows about it. On the flip side Ty Lee also has a giant crush on Azula ever since childhood and everyone but Azula knows about it.

Azula: That's a sharp outfit, Ty Lee. Careful. You could puncture the hull of an empire-class Fire Nation battleship, leaving thousands to drown at sea, because it's so sharp.

Ty Le: *confused but happy that her crush complemented her* Gee thanks Zula.

Azula: *later, screaming into her pillow* I’m such an idiot!

Zuko: *sitting beside her, sipping tea* Yeah, you really are.

The day Zuko was challenged to Agni Kai Azula told him that he was an idiot and that he better kick that loser general’s ass or it would be an embarrassment to both their training. It was her own way of telling him to be careful and that she was rooting for him.

When she found out that it was her father challenging Zuko to Agni Kai she had to be held back by Iroh to keep her from jumping into the arena to help her brother

Azula was determined to join her brother in his banishment but Zuko wouldn’t allow her, saying how it was his fault for speaking out of term and that his sister shouldn’t have to suffer from his mistakes.

They had a big fight after that because the siblings were nothing if not hotheaded and stubborn. Zuko didn’t want his sister to leave all she knew behind just because of him and Azula didn’t want to be stuck doing nothing while her brother suffers alone.

They parted there days later, regretful, angry, and sad. They didn’t necessarily apologies (let’s be honest what kind of siblings apologies to each other) but they did start writing letters to each other, which was their way of saying that they were cool now.

Zuko wrote to her about his journey to find the Avatar as well as Uncle Iroh’s ridiculous jokes and tea ramblings while Azula wrote to him about how things are back home as well as potential places where the Avatar could be located.

Both aren’t sure if the Avatar even exists anymore, but they keep hoping as it means that they will one day be reunited with each other.

The day Zuko found the Avatar he entrusted only his sister with the information as he knew that once word got out that the Avatar was still alive it would be an all-out man hunt.

Everything works out relatively the same as in the series except with Azula helping out her brother in the background. She’d secretly send her brother information about general Zhao’s whereabouts so as to avoid him as well as any resources he needed for his journey.

When Ozai ordered Azula to go retrieve her brother and uncle she was both delighted and terrified; she was happy to see her brother again, but she didn’t want to take him as her prisoner. So of course, she came up with a plan.

The first thing Azula said to her brother after two and a half years apart was: “Wow, you look like shit.”

He replied without missing a beat: “Big talk coming from a midget with rat nest hair.”

They hug for the longest time and in that moment, she quietly resights her plan to him: They had to pretend to escape from her and go into hiding. She’ll pretend to hunt him down and he’ll somehow manage to escape from her clutches every time. All the while they’ll work together in trying to capture the Avatar.

She enlists the help of Mai and Ty Lee telling them the minimal amount of information just in case things go south they can plead manipulation. Of course, Mai and Ty Lee are ready to go down with their captain/friend no matter what, but they don’t mind being out of the loop for the time being. They trust Azula and know that everything she does is to help her brother and uncle.

The events leading up to the battle of Ba Sing Se are pretty similar up until the part where Zuko makes a choice between helping the Avatar or his kingdom. He’s realized the pain and terror his ancestors have installed in the world; tearing away hope for a better future.

Just as Azula was about to strike Aang with a finishing blow Zuko stops her, telling her what they’ve been doing is wrong and if they want the world to prosper, they need to help the Avatar.

Azula was a bit annoyed seeing as she went through the trouble of sneaking into Ba Sing Se and taking over the earth kingdom from the inside out. But then again, her brother was right as she already knew of her father’s end game plan.

Azula: Zuzu, I love you, but couldn’t you have told me we were going to rebel against father sooner so I could have planned accordingly.

Just as there are loyalist to the Fire Lord there are also loyalist to the Princess as they see her as a more fit leader than the current ruler. And thus, that is how team Avatar was able to get a good portion of the fire nation army on their side.

Ba Sing Se has now been established as their main base with the entire city now having chosen the side of the Avatar.

At this point Azula still had Suki and the Kyoshi warriors held prisoner close by so she was able to bring them back without much fuss.

Azula: Er, sorry for imprisoning you and stuff. I just needed to save my stupid brother but we’re on your side now. Cool?

Suki: Only if I get to punch you in the face as hard as I can.

Azula: That seems fair.

Katara does NOT trust Azula and Zuko which is fine because Azula doesn’t trust her either but she knows they need to work together if they want to even have a slim chance of beating her father.

Katara: You might have everyone else here buying your ‘transformation,’ but you and I both know you’ve struggled with doing the right thing in the past. So, let me tell you something right now. You make one step backward, one slipup, give me one reason to think you might hurt Aang, and you won’t have to worry about your destiny anymore. Because I’ll make sure your destiny ends right then and there. Permanently!

Azula: Right back attcha bitch!

Toph and Azula get along swimmingly which both amuses and terrifies Zuko because one: he’s glad that his sister is finally making somewhat normal friends but two: those two together is just chaos incarnate

Ty Lee also really bonds with the Kyoshi warriors who teach her some of their fighting techniques in exchanged for her teaching them some chi blocking moves.

Suki and Mai start getting cozy with each other with Suki liking Mai’s skills and straightforward attitude and Mai admiring Suki’s confidence and bravery. It’s easy to talk with each other.

Sokka, at one point: Why the hell don’t we just send the girls out to defeat the Fire Nation? We’re all completely useless compared to them.

Also after a few month working together Zuko can now join his sister in her gay screaming

Azula: Did you seriously fall for that Water Tribe boy?

Zuko: You’re one to talk!

Azula: Hey! Ty Lee is an angel and we’re all lucky to have her!

Zuko: She once ate a whole bowl of fire flakes by herself and had to get her stomach pumped.

Azula: Look, what Fire Nation teen hasn’t done that at least once

Zuko: She did it THREE times!

Once the siblings and Co finally bond well enough with team Avatar tension lessens and their attitude go from: “uhg, I guess we have to work together or whatever” to “you are my friend now and I would die for you! I would literally commit murder if you asked me to, no questions asked”

Aang is baby and the Fire squad has now joined in the “Aang protection army” and in a similar fashion team Avatar have also learned that Ty Lee is baby and have now joined the “Ty Lee protection squad”. Even though Aang and Ty Lee are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves one cannot help but want to protect and care for the literal ray of sun shines.

Zuko and Sokka still have their epic rescue adventure to the boiling rock, with the extra help of their team. They sneak into the facility with disguises, Azula and her crew walk in like they own the place (news of her betrayal to the Fire Lord has yet to reach certain places), while the rest of team Avatar keep watch from afar just in case things start going south.

You know that scene where Zuko gets put in the freezer and when Sokka goes to let him out Zuko breathes out a breath of fire with a smirk? It was then and there that Sokka realized that his teeny tiny crush on Zuko might actually be a giant massive crush.

In this AU it is actually Azula that helps Katara track down the man that killed her mother because let’s face it, no matter what universe she’s in Azula will always be down to beat a bitch is ass.

This is the first time Azula has ever witness somebody blood bending and unlike most people that would usually freak out she was actually really impress and kind of turned on.

Azula: You know if I weren’t already madly in love with Ty Lee, I’d ask you to marry me in a heartbeat.

Katara: And I would accept that offer if only for the pleasure of rubbing it in your dad’s face

Azula: Why didn’t we become friends sooner?!?!

It is then the Little Sister alliance was formed in which they teamed up to poke fun at their bumbling brothers who keep awkwardly dancing around each other.

Their friendship can be summed up to: “I will kill you where you stand but also I respect you”

Okay, Imma just say this right now: Sokka is a fucking badass and even after getting taught how to fight by the Kyoshi warriors and the Fire sibling + Co. he reached a whole new level of badassery once he learned the ways of the sword by Master Piandao. Zuko’s little gay heart could only take so much and Sokka being all cool and collected while wielding a sword made the former Fire Prince short-circuit.

Zuko, in his tent, face down screaming into his pillow: Uhg, I can’t with this boy anymore!

Suki, rolling her eyes at her best friend’s melodramatics: Pull yourself together man.

Ty Lee, patting his head reassuringly: Don’t worry, you’ll get through this.

Azula, sipping tea beside him: This wouldn’t be happening if you just asked him out already.

Zuko: Don’t you fucking start with me hypocritical bitch!

Azula: *nervous gay drinking*

The day of the final battle Azula and Katara lead Hakoda’s army plus the Kyoshi Warriors to reclaim the fire nation capital while Aang, Zuko, Sokka, and Toph chased after the Fire Lord and his war ships.

The battle to take back the capital was brutal as there was still an entire army keeping guard with one of the Fire Lord’s generals acting as temporary leader. Unfortunately for them Azula still had a reputation of fear amongst the Fire Nation army and a lot of soldiers surrendered once they realized it was her leading the invasion and not the Avatar. Those that didn’t surrendered were defeated in battle because let’s be honest with a team this fierce there is no way in hell they couldn’t not win.

There’s also a scene where Azula is fighting off the general and a bunch of soldiers and it seems like she’s not gunna make it but she does, bloody and bruised but victorious. I imagen in that moment Ty Lee goes running up to Azula, jumps into her arms, and kisses her right then and there, while they’re still in the middle of battle. It’s super cool and romantic and it seemed to give Azula more energy than Sozin’s comet ever could as she seemed now ready to defeat god.

Azula: Y’all bitches be fucked now! I ain’t afraid to die but now that I gotta girlfriend I’m not going nowhere fuckers!

With Aang and his team it goes about the same as it did in the show; take down the ships, battle the Fire Lord, almost die, etc. That scene where Sokka thinks that Suki died on the aircraft is now replaced with Zuko almost dying then coming back to save their asses at the late minute. They too also kiss once they see that the other is unharmed while Toph rolls her eyes and gags at the sight.

Again, Aang does not kill the Fire Lord and instead takes away his fire bending powers before locking him in prison to rot. The fire siblings come by sometimes to annoy the shit out of him by flicking fire flakes at his head for target practice or psychologically torture him with excruciating detail of how they’ve been thoroughly fucked by their significate others in is bed and on his thrown.

Zuko: How’s it feel knowing that not only are both your kids gay but they’re also bottoms?

Ozai: *screams*

Azula: Ty Lee also fucked me atop your war room table :)

Ozai: *screams intensify*

In the end Zuko really doesn’t want to be Fire Lord so he happily passes that torch on to Azula who only agrees to take the job so long as Zuko becomes her second in command. Everyone is happy and with a lot of hard work throughout the years there is finally peace amongst the four nations.

[crushedbyhyperbole]

Beyond Broken - Chapter Six

Chapter Summary:  Thor's stalking reaches a new high with the help of a certain former Russian spy. He comes to realise that he's hopelessly addicted to the woman named Jess. Thor gives her a name for himself, and they strike an easy rapport. Weeks on, something suddenly changes and Thor is thrown into a dilemma: kiss the girl or do the honourable thing.

Words:  5.6k

A/N:  Here, Donald Blake is Thor's alter ego. (It's a little nod to the comics.)

Warnings:  Angst, emotional hurt & distress, crying, a really mean argument happens, sexual attraction, soft Thor, first kiss, morale dilemma, guilt, bad language... also Thor is a stalker (but he means well).  Really long chapter - sorry.

New Heights

Thor had accepted that the mystery woman had not wanted his company on her walk back through the park but he did not stay on the promenade.  At a distance he followed her, watching her traverse the foot-worn trails through the brush in the sporadic light of the lampposts.

He watched from the shadows as she met with her fiancé, as he kissed her and they embraced.  With the use of his bionic eye he watched them walk further up the street where they seemed to get into a fight.  He couldn’t make out the words but he could see she was angry, and then terribly sad.  Whatever that man had said or done to her was none of his business but it irritated him nonetheless.

When they both disappeared into an underground parking garage, he thought perhaps they lived there in the building above.   Soon after, a small red Toyota emerged onto the street and disappeared along a side street. Perhaps not then.

There were many things about the woman that he didn’t know, and those were mostly things that he had no right to know, like where she lived or worked for example.  Thor liked to know things, he preferred to be prepared.

The parking garage served the offices and businesses above, of which there was a mixture from legal to health and not surprisingly, an art studio.  It also served as a limited space public parking area.

The art studio is promising.  He thought.

 The next day he went to investigate, disguised as a rich entrepreneur.  He carried a suit very well and had seen enough of Stark’s interactions with people to know how things should be done.  So, wearing the petrol blue three-piece he had worn to the first Avengers press conference and ball, and the large silvery time piece gifted to him by Clint two Christmases ago, he availed himself of the studio’s exhibition.

The paintings were mediocre at best.  In all his years on Asgard, visiting all nine realms, and the years he’d spend here on Midgard, he had never seen anything as unsatisfying as what they produced in this era and called modern art.  The sculptures were better, in particular a twisting metal contraption that spun, creating undulating waves using the motion of each segment.  It looked like a jellyfish propelling itself through the deep ocean.  The kinetic sculpture was powered by a motor inside the gallery but the intent for the piece was for it to be wind powered.

It was beautiful, mesmerising even.

“Good morning, sir.” The smartly dressed assistant approached him.  “Can I show you our video catalogue of kinetic sculptures?”

“What’s the artist like?” He asked aloofly, suddenly disinterested in the motion of the sculpture.

“I don’t quite follow.”

“For me it’s more about the artists journey than the final piece.  The kind of person they are, the things they’ve overcome, their process.  Can you show me some biographicals on your artists instead?  I have a specific need to find a connection.”  Thor could feel himself oozing with charismatic over-confidence and pompousness.

“Certainly, sir.”

The young man scurried away but did not return.  Instead an older lady in a designer pants suit, with a commanding presence approached.

“I understand you wanted to meet the artist.”  She smiled smugly.

“You painted all of these works?”  He spread his arms and gestured largely.

“Save a few.”  She nodded, eyeing him like a snack.

“And the sculptures?”

“Some.”  She drank him in from head to toe.  “I mainly work in clay, like this one.”  She stroked her hand lovingly down a large sculpture shaped like a lady’s forearm, the base was like the roots of a tree and a single leaf sprouted from one of the splayed fingers.  “It’s the tree of life.”  She smiled with pride.

The piece was titled Yggdrasil.

You have no idea what Yggdrasil really is.  He thought.

“Poetic.”  He said, nodding with false appreciation.  “What about the metal-work?”

“My partner.  He works large-scale for public display.”  She flicked her hand dismissively.  “These are the smallest of his works.”

“And it’s just the two of you?”  Thor was starting to despair.

“Yes, we’re a business here, not just a labour of love, Mr…?”

“Blake.”  He supplied languidly.

“Mr Blake?”  She mused over the name.  “British aristocracy?”

“Something like that.” He coughed nervously.  “How could you tell?”

“You have a rarefied air about you.  If I did portraits I’d offer you my services.”  She winked, predatory.

“I’m after something in particular, a connection.  Not a portrait.”

“And what is the budget, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The price is irrelevant, for the right piece.”  He took another look around, trying not to notice her greedy smirk.  “None of your assistants paint?”

“No, neither of them.” She scowled.

“Are you sure?  I had heard there might be a budding artist in hiding up here.”  He winked at her cheekily.

“You’ve met Alasdair, and She’ree has no skill with a brush.  She is wicked with record keeping but isn’t artistic in any way.”

“Sherry?  The brunette?”

“She’ree.  The redhead.”   She was growing impatient.  “It’s obvious that nothing here has caught your eye, Mr Townsend.”

“Yes,” he blinked disappointingly, “it appears this has been nothing but a wild goose chase.  I apologise for wasting your time, madam.”

 What in Odin’s name was he doing?  Stalking a woman he’d seen out walking her dog?  Visiting places in the hopes of seeing her or finding out more about her?

On his way down in the elevator he noticed an older woman staring intensely at him, unashamed.  He looked away but she did not.  Looking at the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the doors, his shoes, his fingernails, everywhere but her, he endured the ride to the ground floor in uncomfortable self-conscious silence.  A nervous smile and a quick exit later he was striding out of the communal lobby and onto the street.

“There you are!”  A familiar voice stopped his heart.  He panicked.  Stopped dead outside the doorway and stepped immediately left, hiding behind the pillar.  He mentally blessed the girth and steadfastness of the stone feature.

“Did you see that guy?!”

“What guy?”

“The guy who just got off the elevator.”

“What guy?”

“The hunk in the swanky blue suit.”

“I didn’t see a guy.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Come on, we’ll miss all the good tables.”

She was coming. Heading his way.  She’d see him and the game would be up.  She’d be upset, creeped out, disgusted even. She’d tell him to stay away from her and he’d do what she asked, of course he would, but it’d hurt.  Ever since he’d met her he’d felt different, less angry, less loathsome.  She’d calmed his inner storm without him fully realising, until now, the extent of the effect she was having on him.

“I swear if I was twenty years younger I’d be getting arrested for rape.”  The older woman laughed.  “He was beautiful, Jess, absolutely stunning.  My Charlie would be getting a divorce if someone like that walked into my life.  Hell, I’d probably never walk right ever again.”

“Jesus woman, I can practically hear you squelching as you walk.  Do you need a napkin?”

Both laughing heartily, the two women exited, and as they did so, Thor shuffled himself around the column, slotting himself between the stone and the full-length glass of the lobby frontage.  The girl at the desk frowned at him.

He smiled nervously and moved away.  The two women turned the corner and he was suddenly safe.  And now he had a name.  Jess.  Why hadn’t he looked closer at the woman in the elevator?  He could remember next to nothing about her except that her hair was short and light, that her eyes were brown and made him uncomfortable, and that she wore dark coloured formal attire.  There were no clues at all.

He racked his brain for information.  He hadn’t even seen his mystery woman, only heard her voice.  There was a chance that he had been mistaken, and it hadn’t even been her.

You know in your heart it was her.  He pepped himself up.  Now remember more!

 It was useless.  The more he plundered the memory the fainter it became until he could barely hear his mystery woman’s voice in his head.

This is wrong.  He berated himself.  She’s taken.  You should just let her go.  There’s nothing for you but heartache and a knee to the groin.  If you’re lucky, just heartache.

He couldn’t argue with the facts but it didn’t change the other fact that he’d become different since he’d met her.  The small amount of interaction he’d had with her had lifted him out of the gutter and back on his feet.  Imagine what getting to know her better could achieve.  He was attracted to her, certainly, but sex wasn’t the ultimate goal.  He decided he’d be happy just to have her in his life.  A friend, someone he could share things with, good and bad.

So stop the creeping.

“Ok, fine!”  He huffed aloud.

  That evening, after he watched Jess meet her fiancé at Neptune’s coffee shop, watched him kiss her and hand the dog off to her before dashing away, Thor realised that he had no willpower, couldn’t be trusted and also he decieved himself all too often. Telling himself he’d stop stalking her had been a bare-faced lie.  Well, almost. Instead, he was stalking the fiancé.

Thor tailed him six blocks to a small hotel by the lighthouse, right near where Thor lived. He knew that the man made it back to meet Jess by ten pm, so what could the fiancé of a beautiful woman like her possibly be doing going to a hotel several nights a week?

Thor disliked the man before, but now he was disgusted.

 Jogging back along the promenade he made it to marker twelve later than usual.  Jess was already there, sitting in his seat.

“Stealing my seat now?”

“You snooze, you lose.” Her smile was mischievous.  “I thought for a moment you’d found a better spot.”

“This is definitely the best spot.”

“You sure you’re not holding out on me?”

“Certainly not.”

“Alright.”  She looked at him with suspicion.  “You keep your secrets.”  She gave him a tiny wink.

Talking to her that evening he could only think of the betrayal that was happening at that very moment in a hotel room a little over a mile away.  Where did she think her fiancé went while she was here walking their dog?

 When she left their communal spot to meet back up with her fiancé again Thor followed.  The man looked crumpled, dishevelled, flustered. How could she not notice that?  It wasn’t Thors place to judge.  Maybe she was so in love that she didn’t see, aand discover her fiancé’s treachery would break her heart.

 The next day Thor used the communicator.

“Romanoff,” he rumbled, “It’s Thor.  Yes, yes, I know you know who I am.  Listen, I need a favour.”

He asked the former spy to get him some information on who had been staying at the hotel by the lighthouse the previous night.

“It’s a personal project.” He said vaguely when she questioned him. “I need to find someone.”

“Any thoughts on when you’re coming back?  Steve is worried about you.”

“Tell him I’m fine. Tell him I said hello.”

“I’ll email you what I find.”

“Great, Thank you.”

 Romanoff was thorough and efficient.  There were only four rooms booked at the hotel that night.  One a couple from Canada.  One a lady who had been staying there since Monday and was due to leave on Sunday – promising.  One a conference suite rented by the hour – also promising.  And one an elderly gentleman there for one night.

There were additional notes and photographs attached.  Romanoff had pulled driver’s licences, addresses and a flurry of other information from the SHIELD and law enforcement databases.  The elderly gentleman apparently lived in Florida but visited New London once a year on the anniversary of his wife’s death.  Not him then.  The woman was staying in the hotel for a week while her house was repaired, after all the recent rainfall, her basement had been flooded and needed significant repair. Ooops.  That just left the conference suite.

It had been rented on an ongoing basis by a Mr Charles S. Duffy.  Charles was an investment banker living right here in New London.  Age 58. Married, with one child [DECEASED].  Vehicle:  Silver Ford Explorer.  The plate number was right there too.

Thor sent a reply requesting more info on Duffy’s activities at the hotel, and received CCTV footage of the man entering the hotel and various cameras tracking his movements into the Seaview Suite - as the name on the door said.  A short while after, a tall man looking very much like Jess’s fiancé entered the suite also.  Both men emerge from the suite within minutes of each other shortly before ten pm.

His communicator played a snippet of a tune with tension and drums.  He’d received a message.

[N.R]  Are you P.I. Thor now?

[T.O.]  It’s personal.  What is P.I?

[N.R]  Forget it.

[T.O]  Please don’t tell Stark.

 In the early evening he went to the gym.  They were used to seeing him there now and happy to let him go about his business without interrupting him to find out if he knew how to use each of the machines. There was always the occasional patron who looked on, impressed, to see how much he was bench pressing.   He pushed himself hard, realising he’d missed this aspect of his life.

 It was warmer today than previous days.  The progression into late spring /early summer was apparent now that his month-long brooding session was drawing to a close.  Soon there would be more people staying out later in the evenings due to the nicer weather and the lighter nights.  He decided he might as well enjoy the beach while he could.

Tucking his shoes into his gym bag he crossed the railings and dropped the few feet down onto the sand. It was cold and damp between his toes, not at all as pleasant as he had hoped.  Using his bag as a seat he sat a few metres up from the dark line that marked the most recent tide line and picked out pebbles to throw at the water. If he timed it just right he could throw the pebbles right at the leading edge of the water as it shifted and began to recede.

 The yap of a small dog startled him.  He’d know that bark anywhere but he refused to turn around, that would be… desperate. Soon the clunk of heels along the promenade drew to a stop nearby.  He continued to throw his stones, unable to prevent the small smirk that forced its way onto his lips.

It felt like he sat there for hours waiting for her to notice him, he’d exhausted all pebbles in the reachable vicinity and would be forced to move very soon.  Just when he was about to admit defeat, her voice carried down to him.

“You tired of sharing your spot with me now?”  She said playfully, leaning on her forearms on the railings, as was her preferred position.

Acting as if he hadn’t noticed her approach he turned, looking surprised.

“Oh, hello!”  He waved and stood.  “Not at all.  I’m a very gracious landlord.”  Approaching the raised wooden walkway he came face-to-face with her ankles.  Looking upward, the line of her nylon-sheathed legs disappeared at the knee under that wonderfully shaped skirt she seemed to prefer. “You may squat here at my marker as often as you like.”  He smiled, squinting a little against the light behind her.  “I mean, you said you were a squatter, I didn’t mean that you should squat.  Unless you’d prefer to come down here.  I mean I can help you, if you’d like?”

Oh shut your infernal mouth for once!  His face burned.

“I’m fine thanks.” She laughed, lowering her head until her smirk was smothered by the backs of her hands.  “I’m not exactly dressed for climbing fences.”

“I’ll come up then.” He slung his bag across his back and pulled himself up and over the railings.  Dusting the sand from his feet he put his shoes back on, regarding her furtively while his head was lowered.

“You come here every day?” She asked.

“In one way or another, yes.”

“Oooh, mysterious.” She poked fun.  “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Well,” he rumbled, swallowing dryly, “I come here to use the gym, or run sometimes.  I do live quite close, just over there in fact.” He pointed to the waterfront apartment building a mile up the shoreline.  “Mostly I come here to be at peace.”

You give me peace.  He thought.

Something in her face changed, softened even, if it could possibly get any more appealing.  There was a sadness in her eyes.  He couldn’t look away.

“You lost someone?” She broke eye contact first, staring down at her hands.

“hmm?”  He was baffled for a split second.  “Oh you mean The Infinity War?  D-Day?  Yes, I lost a great many people that day.”  Did his voice just break then?  “But before that even… I’ve seen some terrible things.”

He was aware that he shouldn’t be going down this road, not with her.  He’d hoped to remain anonymous, to leave Thor -The Avenger behind and become Thor - the man instead.  Or possibly even not Thor at all, just a man.

“Were you in the army?”

“Close enough.”  He nodded.  If he wasn’t careful he would give too much away.  “I prefer not to speak of it.”

“I get it.”  She reassured.  “We’re all hurting, it’s just that some of us hide it better than others. A lot of people died.  It’s harder to find people who didn’t lose someone.”

“Life is the only thing that can be stolen and never given back.”  He muttered.  “And time.”

“Profound.”  She praised.

“I have my moments. There’s a lot going on with me, you know.”  He tried to lighten the mood.  “Part-time public-space landlord, rain chaser, and philosopher.  To mention just a few.”

His humour was verging on cringeworthy.  How had he taken it from harrowing inner turmoil to shameless flirtation in one sentence.

“I’m sure you have many talents.”

Had she just flirted back or was that sarcasm?

“I’m Jessica, by the way.” She proffered her hand.

He took it gently, raising it and bowing as if to press it against his forehead in a gesture of utmost respect.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”  Charm oozing from him in waves.  “My name is…”

What should I tell her?  Hello, I’m Thor, God of Thunder!  Out of the question.

He spoke slowly, giving himself a chance to think of a name.  He’d never given it any thought before, if he wasn’t Thor then who was he? The woman in the art studio had thought him British aristocracy, so what was a good British name?  A British King perhaps.  Henry.  Richard. George.  William.  Yes, that one!

Her face dropped, slack jawed and horrified she watched his mouth start forming the name.  Seeing the shock bloom across her face was enough to make him reconsider the whole false name thing.

“W-i-l-l-you excuse me.” He turned and fake sneezed into his hands.

“Bless you.”

“My apologies.  My name is Donald, my friends call me Don.”

Your friends call you Point Break but you’re not telling her that.  He thought.

“Don?”

“I’d offer to shake your hand but, well…”  He grimaced, making a show of wiping his hands on the legs of his jeans.

“Yeah, I’m good.”  She chuckled.  “Good to know you, Don.”

“Lady Jessica.”  He swept himself into a flourishing bow drawing a good-humoured eye roll from her.  “The pleasure is mine.”

“My friend’s call me Jess.”

“If I’m permitted?”

“I don’t mind.  Knock yourself out.”

“Very well, Jess.”

 He might have looked bashful for a moment as she looked him up and down.  He’d gotten more than he had hoped for so why was his chest aching and his gut telling him to escape?  She was beautiful, he really couldn’t think that enough.  Her steely-blue eyes were large and expressive, delicately arching brows and rich dark hair framing her perfect face.  The sweep of long lashes had him holding his breath when she blinked long and slow, a slight blush on her cheeks as they spoke.

“Have I got something on my face again?”  Her brows knitted subtly.

Jerking out of his daze, he searched her visage for anything out of place.

“No, you look perfect, as always.”  He’d totally missed that he’d been staring at her the whole time.

She frowned more deeply, tucking a few carefree strands of hair back behind her ear.

“I should go, it’s already after ten.”  She looked away with a look he could only describe as shame.  “Daisy has been so patient with me.”

Thor wanted to say something.  Apologise. Make light of his inability to read a situation.  Tell her how much he enjoyed her company.  Anything to take the shame from her expression.  Ask her to stay - not that it would help.  Instead he went with:

“She’s a good dog.”

 After they parted, Thor mentally kicked himself.  He always had an uncanny knack of making things awkward.  More often than not it was endearing and usually made him quite likeable, especially to women.  But then again they mostly only wanted into his trousers, more so when they discovered he was a god.  Jess was different, she was guarded.  He felt that he hadn’t overstepped any boundaries but this was Midgard and his ways were foreign here.  He would have to be more careful with his compliments so as not to make her uncomfortable.

 The next day she returned. And the next.  Thor found himself falling in with her routines.  Before long they’d been talking five nights a week for several weeks.  Thor started walking with her while she walked the dog, always keeping a proper distance and never making her feel awkward.  He brought a ball for Daisy Duke which became something they did, he kept it in his gym bag always.  He told Jess it was becoming part of his daily workout so he and Daisy would run and chase each other in the grass while Jess watched on, laughing.

Jess started bringing an extra coffee with her for him.  He’d tried the tiramisu hot chocolate, and while he enjoyed the taste he couldn’t excuse the excessive calories but he didn’t tell her that.

“I like my coffee how I like my men.”  He said flatly.  “Long and black, and bitter on the tongue.”

“Lewd!”  She’d laughed long, feigning disgust, tears running down her cheeks.  “That’s something my mind will never unsee.  Thanks for that.”

That had been one of Thor’s favourite days with her.  The day she laughed so hard she cried.  He’d seen tears in her eyes before, shamefully brushed away, emotions denied. Now they made her eyes sparkle like star-steel.  Wet cheeks or not she was stunning.  Her hand momentarily rested on his bicep and he found her almost too close for comfort. He’d been laughing too, but now he was looking at the play of happiness on her lips and sparkle in her eyes. She’d done the same, eyes flicking down to his mouth as her laughter subsided.  His skin prickled with anticipation and it was like he was frozen in place, seeing her within reach but unable to make the moment real.

Something broke in her and she snorted loudly, falling into a second round of laughter.  It took the awkwardness out of the moment.  Perhaps she hadn’t felt it like he had.  He hoped she hadn’t noticed him hungrily drinking in the sight of her, hanging on her every gesture like a breath exhaled on a still and frozen night, where one slight caress could send him spiralling.

 No matter how he felt, Thor was the perfect gentleman.  Always respectful, always chivalrous, always considerate.  He’d been brought up that way.  He never intruded on Jess’s time with her fiancé, remaining out of the way during drop offs and pick ups but making sure she was safe.  In the beginning the fiancé had walked with her in the park before leaving to ‘meet up with friends’ – those were Jess’s words. But now he left her at Neptune’s in order to dash off for a few hours with his lover.  Thor had done enough digging to see what the man was up to but he didn’t understand how could Jess not see?  She was astute and incredibly smart; she reminded him of Jane a little in that respect.

Sometimes people can’t see what they don’t want to see.  He told himself many times.

Her fiancé was having an affair with another man.  Thor didn’t want to be the one to break the news to her but the longer it went on the harder it was for him to stay silent.  The risk that she would blame Thor for telling her and never speak to him again, however, kept him quiet.  He was torn.

 Spring turned to summer and they still met each other in the park.  Thor had been content with simply sharing her time on the nights she was there. Jess hadn’t offered anything else, nor asked.

Conversation was easy and they talked about a great many things, though never anything too personal. He discovered that she worked at a dental surgery nearby (she had pointed up the street where Neptune’s was on the corner), which then triggered a memory of the day he’d gone to the gallery, and the woman in the elevator.  There had been an astringent smell he had barely even noticed but with the new information his memory returned, richer, and now with aroma-vision. Thor had chuckled out of the blue, drawing questions from her.

“I know that building.” He’d replied.  “I visited an art dealer there once, very disappointing show but the woman there offered to capture my likeness.”

“I bet she did.” Jess’s tone was full of inuendo, but Thor’s look of innocence made her laugh all the harder.

 Thor told her he worked in ‘security solutions’ which she accepted.  It hadn’t been far from the truth, in a scaled down, simplistic way. They shared anecdotes, although Thor held back;  there was much of his life and antics that were well documented in the media here on Midgard, and although Jess didn’t seem to pay any attention to that, there was bound to be something that would make his real identity known to her.

She really seemed to enjoy his company and he watched as she blossomed from the closed off, pained and self-diminished creature into a radiant, vibrant and exuberant woman, full of life.  It was basking in this glory that Thor finally saw that life could be good, even after all of his failings and defeat in The Infinity War.  Good could come out of evil, and that he deserved happiness as much as everyone else, in whatever capacity it presented itself.

  Things changed dramatically one Saturday night.  Jess arrived at Neptune’s as usual, straight from work.  Thor watched from a shaded part of the park as she met with her fiancé. Thor would wait for her until she crossed over and pick up her trail, meeting her a little way down the footpath. Her fiancé had stopped getting her the usual hot chocolate with tiramisu a while back so she and Thor took it in turns to buy drinks for each other.  Today it was Thor’s turn and he had 2 cups in hand ready waiting.

There seemed to be an issue, however.  They were arguing, arms wildly gesticulating, voices raised.  The fiancé was pointing at the park aggressively, his face growing more red.  Jess was crying.  She took the dog leash from him looking up at the sky in supplication.  Suddenly she slapped him across the face and scooped up the dog, striding away from him, heedless of oncoming traffic.  The fiancé left without a backward glance.

Thor’s heart almost stopped as she stepped out onto the road.  He scanned up and down but she was clear.  Her pace quickened, feet skipping as she partly jogged through the park’s gateway from the street.  He didn’t want her to know he’d seen so he moved to intercept her at the joining of their two paths.

“Hey, you.”  He said in the calmest tone he could muster, falling into step beside her.  “Good day?” He prompted, hoping she’d open up.

She didn’t even look at him.

“Jess?”

Her face was streaked with tears, and she stared ahead only as if it was the only way to hold her composure.  A few more strides on he decided to take action.  Getting out in front of her, he transferred both cups to one big hand, base stacked on lid, and stopped her with a hand laid gently on her shoulder.

“Hey, hey,” he soothed, “what’s the matter?”

That was all it took for the floodgates to open and she was crying again, shoulders shaking, gasping for breath as she let go of her composure.

Thor put the drinks down beside his feet and stepped forward to pull her into a hug.  It was such a natural gesture, he didn’t even think about the space he promised himself he’d always give her, nor the physical contact he knew he shouldn’t engage in.  She needed him in that moment, and she didn’t shy away.

Jess leant into him, allowing him to wrap her in his arms, and pressed her face into his chest.  She sobbed and sniffled, breathing hot and humid through his t-shirt onto his skin.  They stood like that for a while, with him rubbing her back in the most platonic way he could, and her soaking his chest with her tears.

Daisy started pulling on the leash and it seemed to draw Jess back to the here and now.  She stepped back as Thor’s arms fell away. They felt all wrong with the warmth of her gone and he wasn’t sure what to say, or do.  Without more information about why she was so upset, he could very well say the wrong thing and make everything so much worse.

“Is there anything I can do?”  He spoke softly.

The park had few enough people in it that they were relatively alone, and the quality of the light made it feel like they were secluded in a twilight realm.  He longed to hold her again but to do so would not be proper.

“No.”  She exhaled a heavy, shuddering breath, and wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands.

When she looked up at him a second later she looked so vulnerable.  His heart ached to see her this way.

Her eyes flicked down to his soaked t-shirt and back up to his face.  Her eyes went wide and gasped a little.

Thor panicked.  She was about to say something about him touching her.

“I’m sorry, I…”  He gestured with his arms.

“I’m not.”

She didn’t miss a beat. Stepping forward quickly, she stood on her tip-toes and pressed her lips to his, freezing him on the spot.

Her lips were soft and a little puffy from crying but they felt divine.  She released the seal of her lips but kept gentle contact, trailing her mouth across his, slowly drawing him into a response, parting his lips with hers until things suddenly clicked.

His response was immediate and thorough.  Catching her waist with one hand and sliding the other into her hair, he cradled her, deepening the kiss.  He delved into her, tasting the salt of her tears and the sweetness of her mouth.  It was everything he’d imagined it would be and he was swept away by the wave of passion that crested and flooded his senses.

Her hands were on his face, in his hair and she was sighing through her nose as their tongues touched and circled in the join between them.  One more little moan from her and he swore to himself that he’d lay her down right there and see what other noises he could coax from her beautiful lips.

This isn’t right.  He thought, mentally kicking himself as he so often did when he thought improper thoughts around her.

 Thor was the first to pull back, breathless and startled.  He felt like he had as a boy getting caught stealing sweet treats from the kitchens.  This thing between them now wasn’t his to have, it was a dream and was destined to remain as such.

“I can’t allow you to do this.”  He beseeched, steadying her with hands on her upper arms, thumbs gently stroking against her blouse.  “Your fiancé might be an unfaithful weasel but you’re better than that.  I could not forgive myself for making an adulterer of you.”

Her furious frown was complete and undeniable.  There was confusion there also, and tears.  Plump beads collecting on her lower lids, making her eyes turn glassy.

Turning on her heel, she fled, tugging the poor dog with her.

“Jessica, wait!”  Thor felt like he’d been punched in the gut by Hulk, breathing was difficult and he ached.

He knew he should not follow, she wanted space or why run?  She’d already cleared the park and it took every ounce of willpower to keep his feet firmly planted where they were because every nerve in his body told him to go to her and his muscles twitched to obey. The fading feeling of her lips on his pulled at something in his chest, making him feel hollow.  What in Odin’s name had he done?

[rueitae]

Frostbite

[Pidge is a renowned super villain. Lance is a hero in training. During their latest encounter, Lance pushes his powers to their limit and Pidge has some soul searching to do.]

A gift for @mbirdarts as she has graciously allowed me to dip my fingers into her details for this AU after I sent many pestering questions asked about it.

You can find the concept art here, here, here, and here.

The outfit inspiration is from @artylovebug here which was in turn inspired by @plancelance initial AU idea here.

This is now fic 2/4 I want to do for plance hero/villain. I am so weak for this trope and needed more. I love you all.

The fic is posted on Ao3 here, but you can read in its entirety below. About 6K words of banter, action, and hurt/comfort. ish.

~~~~~~~~~~

Pidge lets her back hit the brick wall of the alleyway, sliding down to sit on the concrete in relief. She closes her eyes and lets her heart rate slow to a rest. She has a good twenty minutes to spare before the next truck comes by this area and unloads its goods. That’s enough time to deal with her pursuer and escape.

Exhausted, but happy, she examines her latest acquisition. The disc fits perfectly in the palm of her gloved hand. The device is top of the line Galra Corp information storage. It contains hope - more hope than she’s had in a while. The style of code it holds is her father’s; the same he had passed on to her and her brother. The best case scenario is that it holds a message that the two of them were alive and well. Worse case Pidge hopes it would at least prove the Galra were up to no good.

Her lab is only a few warehouses away, further from the pier. As much as she wants to check it out right that minute - she has something more pressing to take care of.

She taps the side of her modified safety glasses and it displays the time for her in 3-D. She grins impishly. “Three… two… one…”

Lance barrels into the alleyway, tripping on Pidge’s carefully placed trap. He yelps as he is pushed into the wall, bounces over to the other end of the alley - only to ram into the dumpster with enough force to spill it, finally falling at her feet and into the pile of trash he unwittingly created.

The trap works perfectly, as Pidge expected it would. The sides of her mouth tug further up her face, thrilled at the accomplishment and seeing Lance on the wrong end of the admittedly childish prank.

To his credit, Lance lifts himself to his hands and knees quickly, glaring. “Real funny, Pidge,” he grumbles. He reaches out with a gloved hand, and judging by the look on his face, he’s just touched something extremely unpleasant. “Urgh...this is going to take forever to clean this off my uniform.”

“I told you not to follow me,” Pidge says, her smile stretching as far as her muscles will allow. Meeting Lance in costume is always a fun treat but today she can’t linger. She needs to examine the disc and can’t do so as Katie. The university computers aren’t compatible, and she doesn’t have the time to make them so, especially not when she has one ready to go in her lab. “At the same time, I’m also glad you did. I wouldn’t have gotten to try my new traps otherwise.”

Lance blinks, eyebrows rising. “Wait - traps?” His tone matches his increasing comprehension. “As in more than one?”

Pidge taps her orange glasses once more and pulls up the command she’s looking for, never taking her eyes off of the rookie hero. “This is the Warflater,” she explains. “I made it just for you.”

Lance scrambles to his feet. “Oh no,” he warns - summoning shards of ice into the palm of his hand. Frost forms up to his wrist in response to the use of his powers. “Not doing that. The last time you made something for me I ended up in the sewer.”

Necessary, Pidge thinks. If she hadn’t dumped him in the sewers a few months back he’d have been caught in crossfire. She bites her lip. Maybe she’ll tell him one day, but until he stops believing the Galra Corporation was a benevolent entity, it’s better this way.

He already knows too much for her liking.

“Pidge, come on,” Lance continues. His determined expression is replaced with one of genuine concern. “Give me the disc so I can give it back to Galra Corp. I promise we’ll find some non-villainous way to get your family back. I’ll even let you go. Please.”

“You? Let me go?” Pidge asks, pointing to herself. Her eyebrows rise in amusement. “I know where you live. I don’t know what kind of superhero decides to not have a secret identity, but you walked right into this one. You are not in a position to be making any demands.”

“Yes I am!” he responds indignantly. He points his ice shards at the ready. “I have - AH!”

The five power nozzles set up across the alley spit scalding water directly at Lance, who continues to yelp and flail in the intersection of the streams. Pidge looks on casually, unconcerned. Lance is one of a handful of people in the city who can come out of this unharmed. His ice core will keep his body temperature regulated so that he won’t get burned. The water will only be disorienting.

She still hates the fact that he can’t ever get sunburn. Some things in life just aren’t fair.

“Okay, that’s it!” Lance sputters, barely yelling words out in the bombardment. “No more mister nice- “ There, this was the moment of realization she had been waiting for. “Pidge! Why are my feet stuck?!”

Pidge slides the disc back into her pouch. A few taps on her glasses and the timer is set for the water to turn off. “New sticky web formula. Thanks for helping me test the waterproofing, Lance. See you next heist!” With Lance successfully off her tail, she turns to walk away.

“Pidge! Pidge turn this thing off!”

“Chill, Lance,” she jokes, pausing briefly in her escape. “It’ll be over in a few minutes and I’ll send Tesla to unstick you later.”

At this point Lance is shielding his face with his arms, which help his words come out more clearly but don’t help his movements at all. “Do NOT send that stupid little robot, it's just going to electrocute me again!”

“Awww, that’s mean, Lance,” Pidge teases. “Tesla really likes you. Don’t hurt her feelings.”

“It’s a robot! It doesn’t have feelings!”

Pidge chuckles to herself, smirking. “That’s what you think. See ya later, hero boy!” she calls out, relishing in the whimsical feeling of the moment.

Only to have it shatter by a laser whizzing just past her face, rooting her to the spot in shock.

It hits one of the hoses, causing a leak with a concentrated and powerful beam. Pidge turns around in horror. Blocking the other end of the alleyway are Galra security agents. She can tell from a glance they are not hired from the hero agency, but rather trained in-house specifically for Galra Corp.

They cock the guns and the largest one comes forward. Pidge��s breath catches as she recognizes Haxus, the most high ranking member of Galra Corp she’s ever seen on the streets. “Hand over the disc, thief.”

Pidge instinctively rests a hand on the pouch that contains the disc and takes a step back. There is no negotiating here. She can’t give it back to them. Even if she does, they’ll kill her or take her away like they had her father and brother.

Fighting back remains her only option.

“I’ll never give up!” She yells back, rage and determination overflowing from her very being. The traps for this alley may be sprung, but the grunts are far enough back that maybe…

Tapping her glasses once more, she enters the command code for the pier. Just off shore, the waters begin to stir

“Stop her!” Haxus snaps at his two subordinates.

Pidge jumps behind the dumpster, kneeling in case she needs to move again at a moments notice. She concentrates on her work despite the barrage of fire, stealing a look whenever she can to see if they are coming.

The Galra Corp flunkies scream as the scalding deluge from the remaining four hoses turn from Lance to them. Pidge grins in triumph as the force pushes them back off of the pier into the whirlpool she’d set into motion with her first action.

“Pidge - what was that?”

Lance is soaked, and clearly not pleased - looking utterly pathetic as he stands still thanks to the webbing all over his boots. His homemade hero costume sags with water seeping out of his pockets.

To Pidge’s flustered horror, it outlines each and every inch of his build. She forgets the situation at hand as her mind freezes as much as his powers.

He crosses his arms, his eyebrows raised. “I’m the wet one, but you look like the fish.” He smirks, as if a lightbulb has gone off in his head. “You like what you see? Not that I blame you,” he finishes smugly.

Pidge becomes acutely aware of the intense warmth has invaded her cheeks. “You look like soggy bologna,” she sputters lamely

Lance bristles indignantly. “I do not!”

Feeling sufficiently redeemed, her confidence returns with Lance once again becoming the flustered one and not her.

His body of all things?! This was worse than she first thought.

It isn’t even the main thing she likes about him. If they were at the university, maybe she could pull it off as a legitimate crush. Lance likes Katie, of that Pidge is nearly positive. Hunk’s questioning gazes and the way he remembers her class schedule, buys her ice cream, or recalls the name of her favorite robot - something she told him only very briefly in passing - is enough for her to get the message.

The only reason she hasn’t done anything about it is due to her commitments as Pidge. She refuses to believe her father and brother are dead, and rather are being held by Galra Corp against their will. She needs to rescue them, no matter what it takes.

Even if she has to break her own heart in the process. Because if she’s honest, she likes him too.

As Pidge, she can at least hang out with him like this and that was a small consolation. Her smart remarks were returned, and she can pretend it isn’t flirting.

She can also enjoy the soft looks he will probably give to Katie later tomorrow after she spends tonight pouring over the information on the disc.

Pidge opens her mouth to enjoy one last quip before leaving him.

The reverie turns out to be her downfall.

“Pidge, look out!”

She only has a split second to notice Lance’s alarmed face before she tumbles across the ground, unable to move her arms and legs. Once she stops, Pidge finds herself bound by a weighted net. Its purple glow gives it away as Galra Corp.

But she’s taken care of Haxus.

Pidge worms herself around to catch a glimpse of her attacker and forgets to breathe.

The massive form of Sendak blocks the opposite exit. The man answers only to Zarkon himself. If he’s here, the information in the disc must be valuable indeed.

Lance stutters as he takes in the scene, settling on addressing Sendak first. “I had it handled!”

You idiot, Pidge thought. Sendak has a nasty reputation and is not above harming heroes. Lance has to know that. Pidge prays he does. If not, he’s in just as much danger as she is.

“My apologies,” Sendak replies coolly. His smile was is not kind. “I had an opportunity, I thought I’d best take it to capture the thief as quickly as possible.”

Lance huffs and crosses his arms. “Thanks for the help, I guess.”

Pidge uses their conversation as time to escape. The net runs on quintessence, as all Galra Corp products do. She feels around for the power source, familiar enough with the tech to disable it with her eyes closed - or hands behind her back in this case.

“You’re the newcomer with ice powers, aren’t you boy?” Sendak flexes his left arm; a weaponized prosthetic.

“I’ve been doing this for almost a whole year,” Lance defends. “I’m not exactly new to this.”

Sendak draws back his clawed arm, and aims at the hero’s feet.

Pidge isn’t sure what comes over her, because screaming “Don’t you touch him!” and drawing Sendak’s attention away from Lance and onto her, deterring her escape attempt, is precisely what she did not need to do.

“Lance, no!” she still screamed his name in horror when Sendak doesn’t stop. Lance braces himself, wide eyed.

He is fine.

Sendak holds the torn pieces of Pidge’s sticky web in his mechanical claws. “She squeals for you more than for herself. I find that fascinating.”

Free, Lance seems to get the hint that he and Sendak are not actually on the same side. “Oh, um, thanks?” he says, taking an unsure step back.

Pidge holds her breath as Sendak does not answer right away. “Mr. Zarkon appreciates your services, but it is no longer needed. I will take charge of the thief’s punishment.”

Desperate, Pidge makes her break for it, rolling as fast as she can manage towards the water before Sendak can make his way towards her. Breath is taken out of her lungs as she is slammed face first into brick. She tries to plant her feet back the ground, but Sendak’s arm holds her dangling against the wall.

“H-hey, I don’t think she’s going anywhere. No need to do anything drastic,” Lance says.

“When dealing with thieves, it is best to add some finality to the approach,” Sendak squeezes and Pidge groans in terror, pain nearing unbearable. “You may report to the hero division that the felon 04032073 is taken care of.”

“Wait, hold it. This is not what I signed up for,” Lance says assertively. “Pidge may be a criminal, but she doesn’t deserve whatever you’re going to do to her.”

“This is a Galra Corp matter,” Sendak interrupts. “Do not make me report you to your supervisor.”

“Shiro would agree with me,” Lance says, standing his metaphorical ground. His voice brims with a confidence Pidge wishes she shares. She knows that Sendak is going to take his annoyance out on Lance before killing her. She closes her eyes in earnest. There is only one way they are getting out of here, and that’s if she uses her powers.

Pidge has been careful about them, never using them since she assumed her alter-ego. With only a quarter of the population born with superpowers, her plants would make her far too identifiable to Katie Holt.

No choice now.

“Then you leave me no choice.” Sendak drops Pidge and she lands on the concrete, breaking her concentration. She looks on in horror as Lance has summoned his own powers to face Sendak. Maybe in the past she might have been flattered that someone outside of her own family would show that much anger and determination for her life. She did not want it to be Lance. Not with Zarkon’s right hand man powering up his gun and pointing it at him.

An explosion of cold stops any other action.

Pidge turns away as sub zero temperatures blast against her body. Once calm, she turns to survey the scene. The cold has made her entrapment brittle, breaking apart without any effort.

Sendak towers above her, frozen stiff, icicles fraying off of him everywhere. He has taken the brunt of Lance’s attack, unintentionally shielding her.

She carefully side-steps the Galra man to look at the rest of the scene. She throws caution to the wind when she sees Lance on the ground, unmoving.

“Lance!” Pidge rushes over to him in concern, sliding onto the ice without a thought that it could break her ankle if she wasn’t careful. Immediately tapping her glasses, she scans his vitals. His heartbeat barely exists.

Pidge finds it a little easier to breathe. Like her own powers had physical consequences, so did his. Still, seeing him like this sends shivers up her spine. Lance is animated and talkative, not silent and still.

Even if this were natural for him, Pidge is sure it isn’t healthy in the long run. She needs to get him to her lab. The same lab where she has prepared for this eventuality, and hates herself for it.

She cares about him too much for her own good.

“I can’t believe you went and did that - you don’t even know its me,” she confesses quietly.

She places a hand over his frost covered body. Even with gloves the ice burn is nearly too much and she backs off momentarily. Pidge steels herself. He saved her. It’s her turn to save him.

~~~~

A few blocks away from the scene of the fight, the upper lefthand corner screen of Pidge’s lens flashes green in sync with the control panel on the side of a warehouse. A task that would have normally taken her seconds seems an eternity with shaky hands. A door opens at her feet and a gated platform rises to fill the space.

She drags Lance onto it, her hands numb after carrying him from the alleyway. Pidge is positive she will have to treat herself for frostbite too.

“Idiot,” Pidge whispers harshly, dropping to her knees once the elevator is safely carrying them underground. Tears stain her eyes and sobs hitch in her throat. “You’re a quiznaking idiot.”

Lance doesn’t respond and Pidge instead focuses on what she can do. She holds onto him tightly, despite the cold screaming at her to let go, trying to transfer her own body heat to his.

The elevator comes to a stuttering stop at the entrance to the underground laboratory. The gate pops down automatically, creating a cagey ramp for the last few inches to the concrete ground.

The lab itself is open, with no walls between the tiny living space or the various experiments that lay in wait on a wide assortment of tables. Miraculously, a tree takes up much of the space, roots making the concrete floor uneven and trunk sitting majestically in the middle. Pidge has her computer set up adjacent to it. From atop one of the monitors, a tiny robot putters down from it’s charging perch.

“Tesla, get the anti-grav table,” Pidge orders, voice still a bit hoarse. “I need to move Lance.”

The small, green robot beeps; the markings under its eyes glowing a cool white in acknowledgment of the order.

Pidge doesn’t have time to waste, her next command comes in quick succession. “Computer, reroute the water from trap number 14 to the sink. Fill the basin.”

Tesla nudges the anti-gravity table towards the ground near Lance. Although not Pidge’s original intent for it, she needs to use it as a gurney. In the background, a faucet opens on the computer’s command and water begins to pour into an antique wash bin - one of many that were long abandoned when the manufacturer moved out of the warehouse above decades ago.

She manually maneuvers the table under Lance, moving his body onto it in short spurts; first a shoulder, then a leg, then midsection - repeat until he’s secure. Pidge is able to lift the table and its weight to her own waist height, she then pushes it forwards towards the water.

“Hang in there, Lance,” she mutters.

Pidge soaks her own hands in the hot water first, feeling relief. Then she takes a cloth, dunks it, and places it on Lance’s forehead without wringing it out.

The basin is too small to immerse him, which is what he really needs. Their respective college apartments are too far away, though, and he needs immediate warmth. She dunks a larger towel into the water and places it along his chest.

She pulls her knitted hat firmly on his head, letting her long hair go free.

Out of towels, now she waits. Pidge hates waiting.

She bites her lip in thought as she examines him from head to toe. His clothes will need to come off once they thaw. Just the thought of it made her blush, but she knows they are doing more harm than good for him right now.

In the meantime, she has to make do. She tugs on his boots, getting them off after some physical effort and throws them to the side. Pidge repeats the process with his socks. All she has left is a thick blanket that she hopes to keep dry for Lance once he recovers enough.

So she wraps her arms around his feet tight, soles up against her chest, using her own body heat as much as she can. Pidge nearly lets go just from the sheer cold, but forces herself to hold on.

“I’m not going to let you down,” she promises, eyes squeezed shut in determination. “I don’t know if you can hear this, but you mean a lot to me - both versions of me.” Pidge opens her eyes mid-reverie and blinks, having spoken herself into a conundrum. “Well, I mean, I’m not two different people, I’m just pretending to be. Pidge is just a nickname my brother gave me. You can call me either one, I don’t care.”

No signs of moment from Lance. The silence from him begins to unnerve her. His vibrant personality is one of his bright spots.

“Don’t think this means I’m going to take it easy on you,” she continues, breaking off that particular train of thought. “I still have to find my family. I can’t let Galra Corp catch onto me more than they already have. I’m just one faceless bad guy in a city full of them.”

No response. Tears well up in her eyes, her heart turning as numb as her hands. “Please wake up. You weren’t supposed to do this for me.”

There is no change in Lance’s condition. Pidge growls. This is taking too long, and it isn’t enough. Pidge anticipated Lance overusing his powers, but berated herself in not preparing for this magnitude.

Lance needs to be in a bathtub. Pidge doesn’t have one.

Angry at herself, Pidge forces herself to watch the ice crystals that methodically form on her arms. They are pretty, in an objective way. She just hates that she hadn’t known the extents of Lance’s ice powers. When they’d first met, he hadn’t even been capable of handling them properly, let alone create a blast large enough to suffer this type of consequence.

She had been so wrapped up in searching for her missing family, she had forgotten to pay attention to her friends’ progress.

And supposedly cares.

Lance is the only one who knows why Pidge really stole from Galra Corp. Even if they stood off against each other time and time again, he never failed to at least try and be on her side in any way he could considering their positions - like today. A gesture she usually rejects.

Up until now.

“...Dad always said his coworkers were like family. You’ve tried to have my back.” Pidge smiles warmly. “It’s about time I had yours, and trusted you to have mine.”

Pidge removes her gloves and rolls up her sleeves. “It’s going to be hot tomorrow. You better appreciate this because I’ll have to wear long sleeves.”

Digging deep, she calls upon powers she hasn’t touched since childhood. Her face twitches as moss and seedlings grow from her skin; the consequences for using her own powers.

Small, but stringy vines extend from her tree. Pidge wills them to snake into the hot water and then wrap themselves around Lance and the table.

With them, she fastens something that resembles a bathtub - funny looking as it still floats in the air. Making sure there are no leaks, she gently raises his head to rest on the edge. Pidge then takes a spare hose and fills the makeshift container. Once all but Lance’s head is below water, she places the smaller cloth on his forehead.

Pidge scratches at her arms, the plantlife making her annoyedly itchy. Ugh, they are on her cheek this time too. No robotics club tomorrow for her. She’ll have to call Hunk to pick up Lance later anyway, might as well apologize for not being able to continue working on Funbot. There is still plenty of time before state competition at least.

Pidge groans. This could take days if it was anything like her plant-skin.

Back to waiting.

~~

Hours later, Lance has visibly improved.

The frost has gone from most of his body, and Pidge has been able to remove his uniform. It currently hangs to dry on old pipes, long since decommissioned and drained. Tesla works hard to blow dry it, moving in a rectangular formation while distributing jets of air from its mouth port.

Pidge refuses to remove his underwear. It’s bad enough having to stare at the rest of his naked body, watching for any sign of infection.

His eyebrows move - scrunched as if not wanting to wake up after a good nap.

“Lance? Lance!” Pidge perks up from her poor seat posture; hunching over the side of the plant tub.

His eyes open slowly, and Pidge makes sure her face is the first he sees. He closes them again and groans before opening them again. “Katie?” he asks softly.

Pidge’s brain freezes for longer than she likes. She seizes her hat from his head and hastily sticks her hair under it - away from his field of vision.

“No, just Pidge,” she tells him coolly. “Katie is your friend from school. I brought you to my lab. How much do you remember?”

Pidge feels unguarded as Lance studies her face, as if looking for something. She doesn’t know why it feels like he sees straight into her soul.

He doesn’t speak immediately, instead observing his surroundings. His mouth parts limply, eyes falling back to Pidge. “Lab? The secret one?” He asks slowly, face seeking comprehension.

Pidge nods. “That’s right. No one will bother us here.” She gives him a stern look. “But you are going have to promise not to tell anyone about it. It’s secret for a reason.”

“What did you do?”

“Huh?” Pidge says intelligently, eyebrows rising.

She notices what seems profound about Lance now. Despite being fully awake, his eyes are dim. They search her heart because they are… soulless; blank.

“Your lab,” Lance continues in near monotone, “did you run experiments on me?”

Pidge flaps her mouth in surprise before she can properly form words. “That was one joke I made months ago, Lance,” she replies earnestly. “I wouldn’t ever do anything to harm you, not for real.”

Lance does not respond, his gaze wandering around the room.

“Lance, what do you remember?” Pidge prompts again.

“Sendak. He was going to kill you,” Lance responds.

Pidge bites her lip. “Yes, he was.”

Silence from Lance again. It feels wrong.

“Is that all you remember?” Pidge asks again.

“Yes,” Lance says, now looking down at the bath he’s in.

“I have plant powers,” Pidge confesses, rolling up her sleeves to show him the small prairie that remains on her arms. “You attacked Sendak with what I’m assuming was your entire power core. Your whole body was covered in frostbite. I made this so I could get you in warm water - to help heal you. I don’t think you’ll need to see a doctor since this is your body’s natural response to your powers, but you probably shouldn’t do any hero work for a while,” she rambles. “It might even be best if you stay here. If it’s anything like my powers it’ll take days for the effects to go away - I have to wear long sleeves on the hottest day of summer thanks to you,” she grumbles.

Now that Lance is awake and on the mend she doesn’t feel too bad quipping with him. Her heart drops when he doesn’t so much as acknowledge it.

It seems his body warms quickly, but his soul takes longer to thaw.

“I think it’s time for you to get out of the water,” Pidge says. “I’ve got a warm blanket and a pretty comfortable couch waiting for you. I know it’s not quite your standard for bed, but it’s let me doze off hundreds of times.”

Lance doesn’t move.

“Lance,” she pleads, heart aching to see him like this. “Get out of the water.”

On that request he does. Pidge assists him by lowering the table and offering herself as support.

“Tesla, get the blanket please.”

The little robot zooms past the humans and flips the blanket onto itself. Pidge grins in pride at the sight. Tesla makes an excellent ghost, Pidge decided, she’s going to rock Halloween this year.

She wraps the blanket around Lance for modesty and warmth, carefully guiding him over to the well loved cushions. Once he lay stretched out, Pidge begins to feel better about the situation as a whole. His body is out of danger and she can relax.

Lance seems to sense this as well. He is sleeping again before Pidge can give Tesla a good pat of thanks for its good work.

She kneels beside him, taking a moment to brush a loose strand of hair from his face. “I meant what I said. From now on I’ll be a better friend as Pidge. No more tricks. I’ll let you help me find my family.”

Reaching over, she wraps her arms around him and rests her head to his chest. “You deserve that and more.”

Time to wait again.

~~

It was the next day before Lance stirs again.

Pidge has spent the hours pouring over the disc she recovered from Galra Corp. It did turn out to be her father’s code. Pidge is convinced there is a message in here for her. She sits in her old office chair, glasses glinting off the computer screen as her own program ran the code through, looking for any familiar patterns.

A thud and a screech of “What the heck?!” reminds her of her guest.

She twirls herself around to face him, relieved to see him up. “Good morning, Lance. Sleep well?” she says cordially.

Lance does not take it that way.

“Pidge? Where - where are we?” he whispers in panic. Pidge can’t help but grin at the sight of a fully recovered Lance flustered and out of sorts.

“My lab,” she answers, intertwining her fingers together. “I told you that yesterday, but you obviously don’t remember waking up.”

Lance gapes, panic growing on his face. “Your - your lab? As in your secret villainous lair?”

Pidge frowns, annoyed. “It’s my lab, and it’s secret, which means you cannot tell anyone about it - including Hunk.”

“I can’t promise that!” Lance exclaims. “Hunk finds out everything eventually. He’s my best friend!”

“He’s also insufferably nosy, which is exactly why he can’t know. Got it?”

Lance nods three times in quick succession, clearly nervous. He gulps. “You’re not going to do any weird experiments on me are you?”

“What is with you thinking I would do something like that?” Pidge wheezes, strained that this of all things is what he’s concerned about.

“Oh I don’t know,” Lance glares, “maybe it’s all the traps I’m lucky enough to test for you. All I ask,” he says much more calmly, holding his hands aloft in surrender and causing the blanket fall to the ground, “is that you do not harm my face.”

Pidge stares incredulously. “You are an idiot.”

“I am not!” Lance says, offended. He pauses before he can begin his rant and make the mistake of looking down. He screams and wraps the blanket hastily around himself again. “What happened to my suit?!”

“It’s drying over there,” Pidge points over to where Tesla is ironing out wrinkles with its laser eyes. “Although I don’t know why you even need it if you don’t bother to hide your identity.”

“A hero has a suit because it’s what heroes do! And I’m a professional!” He pauses, confusion flickering across his face. “Why do I not have it on? Who-?” Lance stops and a light seemed to go off in his brain. He turns a deep shade of red. “Holy crow - you undressed me?”

“I had to,” Pidge says, finally standing. She let the banter and teasing melt away in return for concern. “I don’t know how much you actually remember, but you saved my life by overusing your powers. I had to treat you for frostbite literally everywhere.” She sighs. “You slept for nearly 24 hours.”

Lance falls silent. He stares at her, just as when he first woke, but this time with a mix of concern and admiration.

“I did huh?” His laugh is hollow. “My first major job and I attack a Galra Corp executive, and save a thief. What a hero I am.” He then smiles genuinely. “But I’m glad it was you, Pidge. Sendak was out of line and you’re just trying to find your family.”

Pidge returns his smile, warmth in her heart. “Thank you Lance, for everything.”

“I guess we’re even then.” He scratches his head. “So my ice powers make me freeze up completely huh?”

“That’s right,” Pidge confirms, scientist mode kicked into gear. She whirls around in her chair and brings up Lances stats on her largest monitor. “This is your biorhythm through the last 20 hours,” she explains as Lance stands behind her chair. “As you can see from your heart rate, you were basically in hibernation. The applications to your powers expands two fold if you can use this for infiltration missions.” She grins smugly. “The bad guys won’t pay attention to you if they think you’re dead.”

“I’m a hero Pidge, not a spy,” Lance insists dryly.

“It’s your information,” she shrugs and turns to face him. Pidge sighs. She needs to tell him. “Look, Lance, your heart rate wasn’t the only thing that was affected. Your emotional response was as well. You woke up once and you were not yourself.”

Lance frowns. “I don’t remember anything after Sendak turned to face me.”

“...probably for the better.” Pidge is relieved; her identity is still a secret. She has no intention of telling him that if she can help it.

Lance’s eyes widen. “Oh no. If I’ve been asleep I missed my study date with Katie! She’s not going to be happy.”

Pidge smiles knowingly. “I’m sure she’ll understand. The hero business is pretty unpredictable.” She frowns, running his words through her head once more. “Wait - date?” Her heart beats wildly. “You like this girl, don’t you?” she finishes quietly.

“I might.” He glares, but his blush is unmistakable. “I just - I don’t want to look like too much of a goof. She’s too important. So don’t you dare bring her into this,” he rolls his wrist looking for the proper word, “thing we have going on.”

Pidge makes care to bite the inside of her lip to resist reacting to that particular statement. “Actually, Lance, soon we may not have to fight anymore,” she deflects instead. “This disc I got from Galra Corp hopefully contains a message from my dad, or proof Zarkon is up to no good. If I can get the hero association to buy it, then we’ll finally be on the same side.”

His face is oddly neutral for this type of good news, but he eventually smiles. “It’ll be kind of weird. None of the other bad guys ever monologue or exchange witty banter. I’ll miss it.

“But,” he continues, a sad smile on his face, “it’ll be worth it to find out what happened to your family. I really do hope you find something.”

“Thanks,” Pidge tells him sincerely. She turns back to her computer, not trusting herself to say anything else.

The silence is uncomfortable. Lance breaks it.

“So, I should probably be getting back to my apartment.”

“I already called your friend Hunk to pick you up at the pier in a few hours. He’s taking you out for pizza, you need the calories so eat whatever you want. I need to stay here and study the information on the disc,” Pidge says automatically, busy typing away.

“...How do you know Hunk’s number?”

Pidge stops typing. “I hacked the phone company,” she lies quickly. “I called with Katie’s number to keep this place hidden. Remember,” she swivels around to glare seriously at him, “do not tell Hunk how to get here or I will continue using you to test my traps.”

Lance brightens, his smile wide. “Really? Just like that? No more traps? And you won’t involve Katie in any of your schemes?” he finishes suspiciously.

Pidge nods, equaling his smile. “No more traps. Consider us a tentative working relationship.” No promises on Katie.

“I swear I won’t say a word then,” Lance promises. He pauses and sniffs at the air. “Is that Green Lion body wash?”

Pidge groans. At this rate her double life is definitely doomed to unravel.

[ick25]

Rockman.EXE Episode 46 Review.

In Battle Network universe, curry takes YOU out!

Are you gonna explain how Regal gets Dr. Wily’s robot eye gene or something?

We begin the episode with one of my least favorite characters in this season demanding curry at the restaurant of my least favorite group of villaines. Count Elec is working while complaining about Rush and wondering if the WWW will ever come back. Suddenly, his PET starts to emit a sound with a bright red screen, and we see that the rest of the WWW members also have the same problem.

They are all gathered at the Maha ichiban, with Rush still waiting for his dang curry, trying to figure out what is going on. The PETs then slowly reveal an image of Dr. Wily.

Are we forgeting already that Madoi has sleeves?

After the title card we see that all PETs are connected to a tv where they find out that it is a video recording of Dr.Wily’s will. Wily tells them about a special chip where he engraved his intellect and where to find it.

All of this as the monitor shows the mod code for HP+250 for some reason.

After hearing this the WWW members are amazed and glad that they will finally return, but a certain dog hears them and escapes to alert our heroes.

Another way to make this character useful. I honestly don’t know why they don’t even question Rush, like they already know who he is and what he can do.

We cut to Netto who is happily skating while singing Aki’s cheezy song (very badly BTW) until he is surprised by Rush who suddenly appears in his way. Rush seems to be trying to tell him something, but Netto simple can’t understand him.

Why? She speaks bitch? XD (It’s not a bad word if I’m not using it as an insult)

In the next scene we see the Ex-WWW stealing a helicopter from a local airport by drowning the employees in curry. I also want to point out that Madoi and Count Elec are wearing those weird looking hats from when they were hand gliding in episode 31.

Custom hats for their hair styles?

Madoi reminds them that Gauss might also be interested in finding Wily’s brain chip, before we see him at his company with the family picture we saw in episode 30.

Meanwhile, in Yaito’s secret tree house base, Roll somehow translates what Rush said about the Wily chip, (ignore the weird spacing in the second panel) and for some reason they all think it’s THEIR job to stop them.

Rush demonstrates once again that he can cross between worlds to show them the map to the chip, and right after this, Yaito calls them from a entirely different art style and background just so we can get Yaito’s animation of getting into her private jet Batman style.

It just looks so weird going back and forth between art styles like that. Even the shading is different!

They find the island with no signs of the Ex-WWW anywhere, until Rockman totally jinx it because it turns out they were waiting for them to fly and shoot at them!

Rockman in forth panel: “I hate to be right all the time”

It’s been a while since the WWW tried to MURDER Netto! They literally shoot at them because they knew Netto and Rockman were there!

After blasting them out of the sky, the WWW land on the island were they find a waterfall that, of course, has a jack-in point next to it. This means the waterfall is fake because it dries up once they plug-in to reveal the chip.

Just plug-in, play Wily’s video and no more waterfall. Before they can take the chip though, one of Yaito’s drill cars bursts out of the ground. Yaito, Dekao and Tohru attempt to runaway with the chip only for the drill to stop working leaving them stuck there. Meanwhile, Netto is driving underground in a second drill car.

“Girl please, who’s the main character here? I can find the plot with my eyes closed.”

The loser squad try to defend the chip, in a very poorly way because Mahajarama ends up picking it up easily after Madoi drops it. Hinouken celebrates, but they are all interrupted by a blimp from Gauss that suddenly arrives before cutting to commercials.

We return from commercials with Gauss blasting the WWW helicopter with a laser from his airship.

Yeap, that happend.

Gauss reveals himself and immediately proceeds to insult Madoi.

I like how the camera switches to Madoi dissapearing and then going back to Gauss getting slapped by her. This is officially the second time Madoi slaps him.

Gauss reveals that he is interested in collecting Wily’s chip for his fan girl collection before Netto and Meiru finally burst out of the ground behind the blimp. Gauss then reveals a vital piece of information to eveyone.

Whaaaaa... I’m just kidding, we already knew that.

Turns out Gauss changed the family name to Magnets after their mother died and considers the Count a failure. He offers to take him back on his blimp in return for him handing over the Wily chip. The Count accepts shocking everyone, except for Mahajarama who has fate in him.

Then Meiru comes running at Yaito and the others telling them that Netto is on that ship too.

“Main character!”

Inside the airship, the Count refuses to hand over the chip and challenges Gauss to a Net Battle, but not just any Netbattle, one with the same rules used in his battle against Rockman back in episode 30. 

Were the subs done by the same guys from episode 38? WHAT THE HECK ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT?!

Gauss accepts and we then see Netto hiding in a closet where Rockman tells him that he will disable the security so he can sneak around. The electric battle begins with Elecman and Magnetman rushing at eachother as we then cut to Rockman taking out the security Navis with his cutted buster shot.

I’m liking the lighting effects used in this episode.

Elecman attacks Magnetman with his Elec Sword, but the magnetic Navi blows him away. Magnetman attacks with his Mag balls, Elecman tries to avoid them but one of them eventually touches him causing the Count to get shocked by the battle machine.

So gay. 

Anyway, the Count shuts him up after he sends a lightning rod to Elecman to protect him from Magnetman’s attacks and returning the damage to him.

That’s not a real chip, but I don’t care.

Gauss gets angry and Magnetman manhandles Elecman.

This battle is intense! I am personally rooting for Elecman and the Count. I don’t have anything against gay people, I just happen to dislike Gauss, and his Navi Magnetman is very vicious. You can see how Elecman struggles in the battle just for the Count. That is Navi loyalty at its finest!

Meanwhile, we go back to the island where one of Yaito’s maids tells her that their rescue crew has arrived, they can now go get Netto from Gauss’s blimp. Speacking of Netto, we cut to Rockman now in the Heat Guts style burning more security Navis to disable what I guess is a motion sensor.

I think this is the first time we see burn marks left by the Heat Guts attack, it is suppouse to be a flamethrower after all.

Back to the battle, Elecman and Magnetman launch their attacks at the same time. The collission of their attacks for some reason means that both Gauss and the Count get electricuted. During this, a spark runs wild and starts a tiny fire somewhere in the blimp.

Netto finally arrives at the room where they are having their Net Battle and spots Wily’s chip in front of their family picture.

Just wanted to brag my good timing with this shot where Netto sees the Count before hiding.

Magnetman and Elecman are both tired, the fire in the airship starts to expand, the Navis decide to take the other one down with their fists resulting in a double log-out and both operators getting electricuted and falling over.

On the floor, they both talk about the past. Gauss even admits that their mother and him were worried about the Count before she passed away. 

This tender conversation is interrupted by an explotion caused by the growing fire, but there is another surprise for them, Netto attempting to sneak away with the Wily chip behind their backs.

You know, Netto, you could’ve taken advantage of the explotion to run away without them realizing it. 

Netto runs away and plugs out Rockman who was still burning security Navis in the cyberworld with Gauss and Count Elec right behind him.

Rockman deleting the security might have weakend the airships emergency protocals in case of a fire...Wooops. Either that or Gauss’s blimp was poorly designed.

Netto tries to escape from them by running to the roof only to be stopped by the fire.

.........

Only in the original version can you find an openly gay Gauss.

Netto threatens them by throwing the chip overboard, but another explotion causes him to lose balance.

The villains saved the hero?

Of course they did it because they thought he still had the chip. Luckily for Netto, he grabs on to a lose part of the blimp slowly tearing its side and leaving him hanging from it.

Gauss and Count Elec once again start to fight over the chip, and once again an explotion occures making them fall over with the chip sliding pass between them and finally falling off the ship.

LOL, there goes Wily’s brain.

The blimp is slowly falling with Netto getting closer to the water until something saves him from drowning or freezing to death.

Oh no, its the return of the Yaito Mako!

Netto is saved and the blimp ends up crashing into an iceberg while our heroes just watch the bad guys die.

Oh the Elec-Manity! Or Magnet-Manity? o-o

After this we see the Ex-WWW on a boat in front of the iceberg believing that their dear friend died. Of course this isn’t the case because the camera quickly shifts to the Count and Gauss bickering on a block of ice, ending the episode with both of them sneezing.

What do I think?

The beginning was pretty dumb. Netto and friends just trying to stop the Ex-WWW like it was their responsability. I mean, granted, Rockman is the hero that stops their evil plans, but they never got directly involve before. Fighting against the WWW Navis was because they were causing problems to them and the rest of the city, but their operators don’t stand a chance against a group of adults in real life. The cyberworld is where Rockman is superior and is able to stop them, that’s the Battle Network formula, giving kids an advantage over adults.

The best and most important part of the episode was the revelation of Gauss and Count Elec being brothers and the Net Battle between their Navis. If you saw the anime before playing the games like me, this was something we were waiting for after seeing the Count’s family picture in episode 30. The game was pretty vague about this, how were we suppoused to know that the Cout’s real name was Jack? They are never seen interacting with eachother in the games, Gauss’s introduction was the only time where this was mentioned. During the plane hijacking in BN2, Gauss reveals that he came from a very poor family and that his brother Jack was taken in by a wealthy family, making him bitter towards humanity and the reason why he joins Gospel. Here, they both come from a rich family but chose different paths, specially since the Count ran away from home a long time ago.

The reason why there was a mod code in Wily’s video was part of their publicity for BN3, by adding secret codes for the game in the anime. It is very plausible that we will see more secret codes hiding in some of the future episode.

[bat-besties]

On Impossibility - 4

Chapter 1   Chapter 2    Chapter 3     Chapter 5  Chapter 6   Chapter 7     Chapter 8  Chapter 9

A popular!Logan and loser!Roman high school AU based on @2pointomg’s idea with eventual Prinxiety. 

impossible 

ɪmˈpɒsɪb(ə)l

adjective

·       not able to occur, exist, or be done.

Eg. It is impossible to fund both the sports and drama programmes with the school’s limited budget.

·       very difficult to deal with.

Eg. The situation which Logan Sanders, Student Body President, is in after he convinced the school board to cut the unsuccessful drama programmes is impossible.

·       (of a person) very unreasonable.

Eg. Roman Prince.

To Roman, nothing is impossible. Not following his older brother Patton to acting college, not being a loser taking on the school’s popular Student Body President and definitely not writing and performing an epic school play with no money and six cast and crew members.

Edited by @alpacasarethegreenestanimal, who can no longer be described as the Virgil to my Logan in this context. Theatre to Roman, then?

@toolazytothinkofcreativename

@entitydark

@romanasanders

@barclays-sides

@cashmeredragon

@jughead-is-canonically-aroace

@immacrazyfangirl

@narniasfinestavengingsociopath

@featuredfander

@what-a-catch-joe

@mightaswellenthuseaboutbooks

@candiukas

It was the best thing Roman had ever written. As his friends pointed out, he said that every time he wrote a new play (or ballad or short story) but that was just a testament to how quickly he improved, and how well he took constructive criticism aboard –

‘No, no, no! No kiss? How can there be no kiss at the end?’

Kyle looked down at his friend with a mixture of fondness and exasperation, ‘I’m not kissing you.’

‘It’s a teeny peck of a kiss.’

Talyn shuffled through their script, ‘It says here, ‘Rosso swoops Ombretto into a passionate kiss…. sensuous lips…. forbidden gay love…. could have confetti….at least 10 second of lip contact.’’ They looked up at Roman, raising their multi-coloured eyebrows.

Roman, lying on his stomach on the stage, held a hand out dramatically ‘Alright, alright. We’ll discuss the kiss when we get to it.’ He sat up, ‘So… do you guys like it?’

Valerie smiled at him, ‘I do.’

Terrence looked up. ‘Roman – it’s the best thing you’ve ever written.’

Roman smiled. All the stress of coming up with a good idea, all the late nights he’d put into that script, all the times he’d woken up his parents with reading through soliloquies, was worth this moment. Six high school kids sat in a circle on a stage in a dark auditorium, still cluttered with instruments and with the assembly podium in centre stage and realised they could make something amazing. Yes, there weren’t many of them, but Roman wouldn’t have traded his friends for the most star-studded of all Broadway casts. The love he had for them and his knowledge of their individual strengths shone through his play. It was an intense gothic-style story, and in his eyes, it was perfect.

Roman was Rosso, a knight fallen from grace due to his anger and arrogance who must prove his worth by going on a quest into a cursed forest.

Kyle would be Ombretto, who played the dual role of villain and love interest – Roman had originally written a different part for him, Rosso’s companion Giallo, who was the source of hope and goodness in the trials Rosso would face, but Giallo had to be written out because there was no way one person could play both characters – and Ombretto had to stay.

Terrence was a dancing malevolent fairy, Valerie was the evil queen of the forest and Dahlia would be Rosso’s guide through the woods, Margherita.

Of course, Talyn was in charge of hair, make-up, costume and props – their talents would be especially important as they had no-one to do set, so their work would have to evoke the gothic world much more than the group’s joint effort at some sort of background.

Elise had agreed to do sound and lights nearer the time.

‘We’ll show them,’ said Dahlia firmly, ‘we’ll show them what we can do – and how important drama and the arts are.’

Was it cheesy? When we are serious and heartfelt we can seem ridiculous, but in that moment it was not cheesy to say ‘We’ll show them’. In that moment, the six of them saw for the first time how this idea of theirs that they’d been working on for the past month could be realised. The easy companionship, the sense of purpose, the excitement for the future and the commitment to the project, no matter how hard it would be were cheesy, perhaps, but they swelled to fill the dim auditorium with possibility. The podium was some distant tower, the ropes backstage tangled vines and the seating was filled with expectant shadows.  

Jarringly, the doors at the back of the auditorium swung open, and the intruders flicked the harsh white lights on, revealing the stage again as set up for mundane assemblies and not fantastical plays. ‘Alright Logan, I want you opening, I know you like responding but I’m trusting you to write an airtight opening speech, I’m going to close since I have the most experience, the middle we’ll sort out….’ Joan paused, looking at the blinking theatre kids on the stage. ‘Um, we booked the auditorium, so could you please leave.’

Roman stood up, indignation radiating from him. ‘This theatre has been used by the Drama Society from 4 ‘til 6 every Thursday for the past ten years- ‘

‘I’m sorry. First off, it’s an auditorium, not a theatre, secondly….’

Logan was doing his best to hide behind Joan and the others, hoping that Roman wouldn’t notice him. He still hadn’t apologised for the assembly incident, the past few days he had just been trying to keep himself together after his fight with Virgil. The extra debate practices before their competition in New York had been a godsend, and now Roman had to ruin them.

The others had already slipped their scripts into rucksacks and had collected any jackets lying on the stage. ‘Roman.’ Valerie picked up her friend’s backpack.

‘No.’ Roman replied to Valerie apologetically, then turned back to Joan speaking firmly, ‘No. This is our place.’

As the theatre kids stood in the glare of the light on stage, bags hung off single shoulders and jackets draped over arms they looked – helpless, somehow. And Roman was still standing there, clutching his script to his chest and staring Joan right in the eyes. Suddenly, Logan could see himself as he had been at his old school, sitting in the back of the seating. ‘Disputandum dominatur displays logic and higher social status to remove the theatrum parvus from their natural habitat. It is unlikely the theatrum parvus will find a secure habitat again due to government programmes aiming to cause them to go extinct.’ He told his head to shut up.

In his notebook, Logan always rooted for the underdog.

He stepped forward, waiting for Joan to finish speaking. Once they had, he cut in before Roman could.

‘While the debate team must use the auditorium now, our competition is in just three weeks. If you would consent to using our classroom for that period, you could book the auditorium at other times, and after that you could go back to normal.  Besides, we practice in E4, which is very spacious so should be suitable for any small-scale exercises in make-believe you wish to engage in.’

‘Small scale? Small scale?!’ Roman roared, then he placed his hands on his hips – how someone could be that unconscious about the absurdity of their body language Logan would never know – and projected to the back of the room, ‘No! We are putting on a play. It will be the greatest play this school has ever seen, and furthermore it will get us back our funding! We will take your offer and for your generosity will give the debate club seats in the front row.’

Logan couldn’t tell whether that was sarcastic or a show of genuine gratitude.

Joan sighed, ‘Alright, it’s ten past and clearly we all have things to do. Let’s get started with compiling our research.’

As the Roman and his entourage left the auditorium, Logan didn’t hear a single word of what his captain was saying.

In the back of the room his former self was laughing. ‘Theatrum parvus member beats opponent twice its size with bravado and conviction.’

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

‘I don’t understand why I have to wear that!’

‘Because it’s your costume that’s why!’

‘Yeah - Talyn is the costume designer, they have final say!’

‘Well, I’m the actor, so shouldn’t I have final say over my lines?!’

‘So why did we workshop this play for so long if you don’t have any say over your lines!’

‘We workshopped for too long, we won’t get it ready in time!’

‘Maybe we would get it done sooner if you guys would co-operate a bit more!’

‘Maybe it would be a bit better if you didn’t bulldoze us every time we disagreed with you!’

‘Look, let’s just take a break for ten minutes and come back to it.’

‘Thanks Valerie,’ Roman sighed and put his head in his hands, ‘Ten minutes everyone.’

He knew that it was late and they needed to finish blocking the first act before the school closed or they would be a full week behind their schedule, but he would start ripping down the posters in that stupid English classroom if he had to stay in it for one more minute. Everything which made his play magical seemed childish in that room – the Google translate Italian names, Terrence’s dance which the space was too small for, even Valerie’s evil incantation.

Walking quickly down the hallways and enjoying the quiet, Roman ran over his lines in his head - why had he used ‘alas’ three times in as many sentences? ‘Princey’, ‘Disney’, ‘Princess’ or sometimes just ‘freak’ were the names the students knew him by and having a class of people shout ‘alas’ at him every time he spoke wasn’t something he wanted to encourage. Putting his whole being into every part he played always made it difficult for him when people teased him for his acting but performing in a play he had written was like offering his soul to the school on a platter. He knew everything inside him was beautiful and worthwhile – he was a shining star, the best guy in the school! – but it was hard to hold onto that when his peers found it ridiculous time and time again. And Logan Sander’s anti-bullying campaign counted itself as a success if nobody was getting beaten up in the hallways. Roman couldn’t help but resent Patton sometimes for the respect people in his year had had for him and his talent. He could never be the year’s shoulder to cry on or literal sunshine like Patton had been, but he would settle for nods in hallways and having the ball passed to him in PE - for genuine applause after his play. He could never settle for anonymity: it was something Roman found shameful, but he would rather be the butt of jokes or eyerolls than left in peace. This way, everyone knew his name. They would remember him when he succeeded in life!

He checked his watch as he wandered into Art – five minutes of freedom left. He stopped his journey and leaned on a table covered in splatters of purple paint. It all came down to the fact that no-one outside the cast and Talyn would feel the sense of mystery and charm this play held for them or appreciate the richness of the world or the drama of the story the way that they did.

Looking up, suddenly he was transported back into his enchanted forest.

Paintings in the style of illuminations had been blue-tacked to the peeling paint of the art room, and they were the most beautiful things that Roman had ever seen. Thorns embraced collapsing stone towers and glowing eyes peered out of bottomless wishing wells. A weeping knight cradled a dragon’s head as it lay with a lance in its side and a lady all in white wandered through a midnight forest lit by blood-red stars. The pictures glowed with light – he leaned forward, drinking in each careful brushstroke and inked line. They were perfect. Roman knew he had to get this person to join his play. He didn’t care if the artist was Logan Sanders himself because he was filled with the illogical but definite thought that as soon as he could get someone like that onto his team his play would begin to feel dark and eldritch again. He took a moment before he looked at that Comic Sans name tag, scared to have this hope taken from him. ‘Virgil Lee’. Huh.

Roman had mixed feelings on that. He had always enjoyed working with him, even if Virgil never seemed to want to move into a friendship beyond English projects and pre-lesson conversations. He had really tried to befriend him: he’d set up a speaker in his bedroom and sung ‘You’ve got a friend in me’ with a cowboy hat on to Virgil when he was round to analyse Moby Dick. Would someone time-travel to freshman Roman and burn his Disney karaoke CD? Or at least tell him that when Virgil stopped the backing music halfway through it wasn’t him that was being weird (Roman still used the CD). The angsty nature of the pictures definitely fit with the emo’s aesthetic and Roman knew that he had an appreciation for Angela Carter and Mary Shelley. The thing was that when Roman said he would even have taken Logan Sanders he did not expect his best friend to be the artist. Still, he had apologised to Virgil after the assembly (he was somewhat offended at the response his beautifully worded speech had got – the boy had been distracted and seemed as though he wanted nothing more than to be left alone) and at least it wasn’t some random freshman or something.

Pulling out his phone, he saw that he only had a minute to get back to the classroom. He needed Virgil as soon as possible, so before he could think too much he called him. The hall was silent except from the slapping of Roman’s shoes and the blaring of the dialling tone in his ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Ah, yes, Virgil, are you free to talk?’

‘You could just text me like a normal person.’

‘Is that the sound of a Disney film I hear?’

Virgil was indeed watching Disney. He had set himself up on his sofa with the Nightmare before Christmas, a tub of Oreo ice cream and a pile of blankets, trying not to think about Logan or Roman or anything much at all.

‘Nightmare before Christmas.’

‘Classic!’

‘What do you want?’

‘Well, friendo, I was in Art and I couldn’t help but notice your beautiful paintings!’

‘Um, OK. They’re not- ‘

‘I do not have time to deal with self-deprecation! I am calling because I need you to join my play. To do set design and help Talyn with the props. Please.’

‘Dude, I appreciate the offer, but I’m not qualified to- ‘

‘You were in set last year!’

‘I didn’t design the set though!’

Roman stopped outside the classroom door. He leaned on the wall and spoke more softly, ‘Virgil, it’s a gothic play. It needs you. I need you. Come on! It’ll be fun.’

The sound of a put-upon sigh was music to Roman’s ears. ‘Fine. When do you want me to come in?’

‘Now?’

‘I have ice cream and am watching a Tim Burton film, why would I leave that to go to school?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Sure thing, Princey.’

‘Goodnight, Charlie Frown.’

‘Hey!’

‘I’m sorry for calling you Charlie Frown.’

‘I’m sorry you called me too.’

‘Enjoy the movie.’

‘See you tomorrow.’

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

Virgil shifted the sketchbook under his arm as he stood outside E4, peering into the frosted glass panel in the blue door. He pulled out his phone to reread the text: 'E4 4:00’ which Roman had sent the night before. Tugging at the bottom of his sleeve, he barely had time to register a blurry shape rapidly filling up the window before the door swung open.

'Virgil, set designer extraordinare!’ Roman went in for a hug, which Virgil sidestepped. The actor looked down for a moment, then settled for ushering Virgil into their old English classroom as though it were the Old Vic itself.

‘Well, come on in.’

'You've met Talyn, right?’ Talyn looked up from their fabric samples and waved.

'Yeah, sure.’

If by met Roman meant 'stared longingly at the awesome dyed hair of' then Virgil had certainly met Talyn.

‘So, basically a disgraced knight called Rosso goes through a cursed forest with a guide Margherita, then faces an evil queen, mavolent spirit and finally a witch guy under the queen's power, who he gets together with at the end.’ Roman explained quickly.

Virgil quirked an eyebrow. ‘That’s really weird, you know.’

Roman threw an arm round Virgil, who started a bit at the sudden contact. ‘And you are here to make it even weirder!’

Virgil smiled – he was glad he came. It was funny how familiar this felt: the overdramatic boy, the yellow lights of the classroom defiant in the dark school, a project to be done. It was a funny mix of English projects with Roman and meetings with Logan. He shook his head, clearing it of all thoughts of his former best friend.

Roman had been so incredibly right about Virgil! Talyn animatedly explained their designs to him, and all the actors tried to do their best to impress him. Not Roman obviously, he was unaffected in his performance by the sight of those slender legs swinging from the desk or the pale knees framed by frayed, dark denim. It was just that it felt right to have him there. The boy's fringe fell in his face as he leaned over the design of Ombretto's cloak, tracing a finger along its intricate design.

‘How can you afford to make that?’

Talyn shrugged ‘We’ll find a way. I'll sew it, we’ve all chipped in for thread and beads and things, and I’ll see if the Art Department happens to have like a football field of black fabric spare.’

‘I’ll bring in some money.’

‘Thanks.’

As Talyn bent over their designs again, Virgil looked at Roman. The actor's hair was flopping stupidly into his face as he yelled passionately at Valerie until he unconsciously swept it back with a hand. What a dork.

For the past few days Virgil had been bringing in a packed lunch and eating by himself outside, but for convenience he began eating with the theatre kids. While he had been terrified of most people in his first few years of high school, he couldn’t believe he’d been too scared to ask to sit with them before now. A larger part of him than he would like to admit wanted Logan to see him with these people, sketching set pieces and joking with Roman about how their play fit into the lore of all different fictional worlds (Star Wars was as far as they could make believable). But the Student Body President didn’t so much as look up from his piles of text books when Roman stood up on a table to give his speech with a change in the position of him and Kyle or stop writing his anti-bullying charter when their table was overturned by a particularly annoyed sophomore.

[othercat2]

Fic: Build a Life From Scratch 6/?

Exercises in Attempting to Keep Two Idiots from Killing Each Other  

Highblood wants no part of your ashen wiles. “Could break you in half, with a snap of my fingers,” he says when you bring it up during arts and crafts hour. He’s knapping flint and you’re sanding the wood pieces of the macuahuitl that Demoness had shaped.

“I’m not exactly thrilled either, but apparently someone needs to cock block the pitch thing,” you say.

“You know fuck all about pitch,” Highblood says looking up at you from his work. His eyes are weird, bright and sharp, looking right into you and seeing who the fuck knows what. He goes back to shaping his current flint. “It’s not pitch I’m feeling for a blaspheming dirt blood heretic and it’s not ashen I’m feeling for a pasty little legume like you.”

“Well, why don’t you school me?” you ask. Yeah, you’re not going to address the little bean comment. Highblood is fucking huge; you’re shy of six feet. Not getting into a pissing contest about you’re comparative heights.

“Demoness set you on me ashen, and you don’t even know pitch?” Highblood asks.

“Blah blah rivalry, blah blah hate sex,” you say, making mouth movements with one hand. “Catskin does apparently hate you like that and doesn’t want to. You apparently don’t hate her like that.” You point a thumb at your chest. “Therefore me, from my understanding of the ashen thing.”

“Like fuck you,” Highblood says. “How do you know she’s pitch for me?”

“I talked to her, remember? It didn’t translate well, but I’m pretty sure that’s what she was saying. You being the first troll she saw after however long fucked her up.”

Highblood doesn’t say anything for a while. He finishes off the point and sets it aside with the others. “It’s a powerful thing, being alone and lost for a time, and then seeing another face,” he says. “I thought my ticket had been torn when I awoke in the wilderness, and was mad with the grief and rage of it. I saw the Demoness and blamed her for it, and we spent a season fighting over it. She can bowl me over like I’m a wiggler, and her mind knows no mortal fear. You are not equal to that in the ashen quadrant.”

“Fuck you, I chopped a huge as fuck goddamn meteor in half,” you say. “While it was falling. I could take you.”

Highblood snorts, and glances up at you with a lazy sort of amusement. You feel the sweep of his personal terror field and struggle not to shiver at the weight of it.  “How big was that meteor?”

You give a one shoulder shrug. “Bigger than your ugly ass,” you say, trying for a casual tone.

The fear is a sharp anxiety, a hyper focus on how dangerous the huge ass troll is on the other end of the table. Sharp teeth, gleaming eyes, a goddamn monster that can pull you apart, break you like a doll. He was so much bigger than you, so much stronger than you, he could do whatever he wanted, and you wouldn’t be able to stop him. He could reduce you to pulp; make you beg for death for days before actually killing you.

The hobbit hole seems to fade out; all that exists are Highblood’s burning eyes, and the awareness of how terrified you are of him. The fear soaks right in, fills you up and spills over. It freezes you in place, and you can’t breathe. You stare at Highblood--

--At Kurloz Makara who teetered between faith and the loss of that faith. Who had despaired and was only just now starting to live. Who had received the terrible knowledge of his false faith with a Rage that had not yet risen from the depths of his subconscious mind. Who was held by his devotion for his brothers in faith, by his devotion for the very few he pitied. Who--

--You throw a handful of sand into his eyes and abscond like the Devil was on your tail, in a flat out run straight for the goddamn woods. You hear a roar and swearing behind you. You don’t look back because that would take away valuable absconding seconds. You run and dodge between trees, stumble through a tiny little stream, and almost fall into a not so tiny ravine.

It takes some time to realize he’s not coming after you. You collapse on an incline full of flowers, greenery, grass and saplings, hoping like hell the greenery you’re lying on doesn’t turn out to be poison ivy or some shit. You’re surrounded by trees, and it’s pretty quiet, probably because of the racket you made absconding.

You breathe and watch the flowers and grass move in the breeze. There’s bugs too; butterflies and grasshoppers and the occasional bee. There’s a lot to watch; little glowing sparks of life that are not actually glowing, it just seems like they are. It would be easy to reach out and touch a spark and know it the way you’d known Highblood.

This feels like a weird thought to have; weird and way too intense to handle, suddenly, now that you’re not running. It’s too bright, too much. You curl up and think about how long the deeply rooted grass has been coming up, year after year. It dies off but keeps coming back, determined as the year before despite being cropped down, drowned, and frozen. Seeds germinated and sprouted, and what was deeply rooted grew back. This is as much as can be handled right now; grass and flowers and other greenery. The glow was there, you could still sense what was going on with it, but there wasn’t a lot going on; just the same cycle, over and over again. It was nice, comforting.

Footsteps are less comforting. You look up, and it’s too much again. Catskin, her grief and love fills her. The memories of her loved ones surround her. There’s a deepness to her, a strength and faith and continues on despite grief and defeat. There’s anger, a determination to survive and pass her faith and determination on to others. “Close your eyes,” she says.

For whatever reason, you do that thing.

“What were you focused on, before?” she asks. She sounds like she knows what the fuck is going on, and the part of you that went along the first order shudders in relief. The rest of you tries to find a way to tell her to fuck off, you’re fine.

“The grass.” Saying it feels like a struggle.  

“Yeah, that’s always good. Do that now. Just the grass.” Her voice is quiet. “Tell me about the grass.”

So you tell her how there was a forest fire a few decades back, during a dry summer followed by a bunch of lightning storms. What came back was a few struggling weeds, followed by the grass. You talk about the grass, its roots and seeds and the way it spreads. You talk about seasons and changes in the weather and changes in the soil. You talk about saplings and moles and earthworms tunneling through the dirt. The glow doesn’t fade, but it gets easier to deal with, somehow.  

You look up, and it’s not so bright anymore. Catskin is sitting a few feet away, watching you. “Hey.” Just catching some rays, absolutely no freaking out here. Catskin [Disciple, Meulin Leijon] is still this intense, layered presence, but it’s toned down.

“How do you feel?” she asks.  

“Like my head’s been turned inside out,” you tell her. You sit up, moving slow and cautious.

Catskin makes this humming sound. “I think that maybe, you’re like me,” she says.

“And what are you like, Sheena?” you ask.

“I can see things being alive,” she says. “Makes tracking prey so much easier.” She smiles with all of her teeth at that. They are all very, very sharp, and her jaw looks really strong. You know without knowing how, and not wanting to know at all that she’s ripped out throats with her jaws and teeth.

“I was probably not hard to track at all, princess,” you say. “Probably left a trail a blind Girl Scout could follow.”

Catskin laughs at you. “I wasn’t threatening you by implication,” she says. “Did it sound like that?” You stare at her, and hums, sounding pleased with herself. “Not on purrpose,” she says. “I saw--flares? From the hive, one almost matched my color, and one was the same color as the highblood, and you came rushing out of the hive, so I followed you.”

“Your color?”

Catskin cups her palms together briefly, and for a moment you see a bright pink flame in her hands. “That color!” she says. She tilts her head a bit. “You’re still pretty meowch that color.”

You look down at yourself instinctively, but you don’t seem to be bright fuchsia. Then you hear what she said. “Did you just…cat pun at me?”

She gives you a big Cheshire Cat grin. “Yes?”

You shake your head like, okay, whatever. “Flares?” you ask.

“It felt like something happened,” she says. “I wasn’t sure what, but it felt like what it must have felt from the outside when it first happened to me.”

You work your way through that. “And what, you wanted to help?”

 She shrugs. “I’m not, not going to help because I’m angry. It was frightening and confusing for me when it started happening to me, and if I can help, I should.”

“Even though I’m roomies with Satan and his girlfriend?” you ask, a little skeptically. Okay, she had helped, but she had also been lurking out in the woods, greatly limiting your ability to get your roam on.

“Should I judge you for doing what felt safest?” she asks.

You don’t like the way she says that. You really, really don’t like the way she says that. She says it like you didn’t have a choice or something. (Like she thinks you’re some kind of victim.) It also occurs to you that if you’re seeing her, she’s seeing you; and you like that even less. (What the hell is she seeing?) “Okay so, my options were camping, which I’ve never done because I’m a city boy, and maybe dying from bad water or berries that turned out to be bird edible but not person edible or taking up Demoness on her invitation. Is there something wrong with that?”

“Of course not,” she says. “But I notice that you ran in terror from one of your ‘roommates.’”

“He didn’t take my offer of being his ‘middle leaf’ too well,” you say. “Then I could see his soul, so I threw sand in his face and ran like hell.”

“Middle leaf?” Catskin asks with extreme puzzlement.

“Is ashen not actually a thing?” you ask. If so it was one hell of a practical joke.

“Oh, it’s a thing, but it’s obvious you and he couldn’t be ashen for each other!” Catskin says, sounding pretty surprised at the idea. “Not the way you spar.”

“…There’s a way people who are ashen spar?” you ask.

“If you’re the middle leaf, he should be intimidated by you, just a little!” Catskin says. “At the same time, he should be challenging your authority as the middle leaf, just enough that he can be reassured your feelings remain conciliatory. Of course it’s harder to tell with Highbloods, but still! He isn’t the tiniest bit ashen, from his body language.”

“Yeah well, there’s no one else to do it,” you tell her. “Demoness doesn’t want to ‘flip ashen.’”

“And the Grand Highblood doesn’t find a dirtblood worthy,” Catskin says with an ugly sneer and an undertone that sends a shiver down your spine.

“You don’t exactly find him worthy either,” you point out.

The undertone becomes a growl. “No. I have no respect for him.”

“But he’s apparently a sexy beast,” you say. “I can kind of see it actually. You’d have to have one hell of a humiliation and size kink though.”

“Wouldn’t be properly pitch, that needs respect even if you’re mocking your kismesis. Wouldn’t be properly red, he’d mean it, so it wouldn’t be pity,” Catskin says. “How could he be pale?”

“I don’t know anything about quadrants,” you say. “Demoness wants to fix him, which according to her, is what ‘moirallegiance’ is about. He seems like that she isn’t scared of him and apparently likes being dominated by her.”

Catskin snickers. “You have no idea what a perversion that should be, in his mind,” she says.

“From what I’ve overheard it apparently doesn’t count if the ‘dirtblood’ is actually a terrifying demigoddess who can hold you down and snuggle you to death.”

“They’ve piled in front of you?” Catskin asks with a little bubble of laughter.

“Not as such,” you tell her. “I’m guessing that’s pretty scandalous?”        

“Oh yes,” Catskin says. “Mother would blush so hard when we cuddled together, and tell us that the visiting block wasn’t the proper place for such shenanigans. Then Psii would drag her into the pile and she’d pretend to be grumpy about it for the first fifteen minutes before she started purring, and braiding my hair.” She’s smiling, but it’s kind of sad at the same time, you’re pretty sure.

“So, you know they’re probably alive now, right?” you ask her. This is a question you don’t know how to ask politely. You sure as hell can’t do gentle.

“Are they?” she asks, longing in a way that makes you feel pretty damn uncomfortable. “I’ve only found…him.” She makes a face. “And I suppose the Handmaiden of Death.”

“Demoness,” Demoness’ voice says from above you. You startle a bit, and look up. You just as quickly look away. She went even deeper than [Meulin] or [Kurloz] and there were things you didn’t want to see. “I am Demoness,” she repeats, angrily. “Not Handmaid. Never Handmaid again.”      

“The ‘H’ word has kind of worn out,” you explain to Catskin, who looks somewhere between startled and angry.

“I am not afraid of you, Demoness.” Catskin growls and jumps to her feet. “If my family is alive, where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Demoness says. “The world is big, we’ll find them eventually.”

“We?” Catskin asks. “There is no ‘we’ here.”

“There was a ‘we’,” Demoness says. “You don’t remember. It wasn’t a good ‘we’, and we fucked everything up and did it over again, and that was worse. Kankri remembers some of it.”

“How do you know that name?” Catskin asks, outraged.

Demoness smiles and it’s a pretty terrifying expression. “I saw all of it, every twist and manipulation of the Demon’s fucked up game, and I had to fucking follow every step. And now we live again and are free of the game, though there is one more thing we must do before this universe is complete.”

Catskin looks confused and wondering, staring up at Demoness. You’re pretty sure she’s seeing some of the same things you saw. Catskin flickers fuchsia all over, a heartbeat pulse. “Oh,” she says quietly.

“Don’t want your pity,” Demoness says, baring her teeth at Catskin.

“It continues to exist,” Catskin says. “I am still angry at what you’ve done. But I will also be angry at what was done to you.

“Fuck. You.”

“Pity is nothing to fear, it’s part of the social structure that binds us into communities and civilization. It does this far more kindly than the caste system which divides us and causes resentment and conflict. You saw it and you had to destroy it. Did you see the possibilities of a society based in love of all kinds? Were you envious of what was beaten out of you?” From the dreamy look in Catskin’s eyes, you are pretty sure she doesn’t really know what she’s saying. She also obviously can’t hear Demoness’ rising growl or the whining pitch of the wands you know are in the Demoness’ hands.

You bounce to your feet and get in Catskin’s grill. “Hey, Meulin, could you fucking not?!” You shout. She startles back from you, striking out mostly blind. You catch her arm. “Can you not see you’re pissing her off?”  

Catskin blinks at you in confusion. “I--?”

“Yes you,” you say. You are hyper aware you are too close to someone Demoness is very, very pissed at. You are also pretty sure she won’t shoot Catskin if you’re this close to her. “Demoness?” You get a growl in response. “Okay so Catskin has some kind of dealie where she can apparently see into your soul--”

“Heart. Meulin was Mage of Heart,” Demoness says. “I was Witch of Time.”

“That’s great, really great,” you say. “Anyway, she wasn’t trying to piss you off; she just saw too much and started babbling.”

“Babbling?” Catskin asks, sounding insulted. You don’t care.  

“So maybe don’t kill her,” you continue. “It wasn’t her fault, and really, you wanted to get everyone together so the gods can come through or whatever and you might need her later.”

“So she is planning something,” Catskin says.

“Gods. Coming through. One of them is my little brother,” you tell her. “Kind of important he and his friends come through and claim the prize.”

“I don’t understand anything,” Catskin says. “Let me go.”

You let her go, and you hear Demoness land behind you.

“There is a Game,” Demoness says. “A Game that creates universes. Our Game was interfered with by a Demon that infiltrates and destroys them.” She starts explaining the Game and the five or so universe pile up your conjoined sessions consist of.  

You stay between them for the whole story, until you’re pretty sure they’ve both calmed down. Catskin is skeptical of “gods” especially gods that were actually little kids when they entered the session. She asks questions and argues a little, but politely. Demoness argues less politely. You’re kind of stuck in the middle wondering how the hell this happened.

At the end of it, when they’ve gotten their argue out, Demoness asks you, “Are you coming back to the hive?”

“That depends, is your boyfriend going to tear me in half?”

Demoness snorts. “No. Worried he pushed too hard, the way you ran off.

“Eleven foot troll, a number of kinks too weird even for me, no concept of personal space or safewords, kind of homicidal, I wonder why I ran off when he tried to scare the shit out of me?” A beat. “Oh sweet Jesus, why do I know his fucking kinks?”

Catskin makes a kind of choking noise at that. Demoness cackles. 

Back

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[spacewolfqueen]

Tagged by @darthdarceyy !!! Thanks for tagging me!! 

RULES: ANSWER MY ELEVEN QUESTIONS THEN TAG ELEVEN PEOPLE AND COME UP WITH ELEVEN QUESTIONS FOR THEM.

1.Who do you think apologies first? Ben or Rey?

I see it as Rey being the first to voice it. But I think Ben’s actions will say it first. Like he’ll do something that shows Rey he regrets how things went. But Rey is more comfortable voicing her emotions so I think she’ll say it out loud first. 

2. Write a short story paragraph of what you think Ben and Rey’s first kiss will actually be like? 

Oh snap... Shit. Let’s pretend they just finished a super intense fight scene but I’m not gonna write that part. So just imagine them standing in the middle of a battlefield after the enemy is destroyed. 

Ben’s warm amber eyes stared at her, rooting her to the spot. The heat in his gaze filled her veins with fire. The last time she’d seen him with such an intense look, she’d ran, searching for a distraction. But there was nothing here to distract her, no rebels facing impeding doom to save her from that look or the man behind it. 

“Ben, I-” Rey fumbled for a coherent thought or some sort of an excuse, anything to buy her time.

It only took two long strides for him to close the distance, to stand before her like a black tower. His lips parted as his eyes searched hers. Perhaps he was looking for an excuse as well, something, anything to deny the energy sizzling between them. 

“Rey,” his voice was just a breath escaping through his full lips, drawing her attention to them and then back to his molting eyes. His breath brushed against her skin like a warm caress, teasing and tempting her. 

Reaching out, Rey placed one hand on his chest, hesitant at first. When he didn’t pull back, she spread her fingers wider, feeling the muscles that tensed at her touched. His chest rose and fell in a steady pace as if he weren’t affected by the tension between their bodies. The hammering of his heart told a different story. 

With her other hand, Rey reached out to trace his scar; the wound she’d inflicted long since healed but the memory behind it still very present, at least for her. 

Perhaps it was the adrenaline coursing through her veins or perhaps a moment of seer insanity. Rey didn’t know, didn’t care. She stretched up on her tiptoes and pulled his face down until their lips met. 

It was brief but soft. Gentle yet scorching. As she stepped back down, heat flushed her cheeks and she looked away, too unsure of her actions to meet Ben’s penetrating eyes. 

“I- I’m sorry. I don’t-”

In a flash, Ben wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her flush against his hard form, cutting off her apology. He crushed his lips over hers, claiming her mouth with his own. 

Mine.

The thought burned through Rey’s mind like a lighting bolt, powerful and blinding, blocking out all other thoughts and leaving her momentarily blinded. 

Mine.

It wasn’t Ben’s voice in her head this time as Rey tangled her fingers in his thick black hair. The thought was all her own. 

Mine.

Both their voices rang through each other’s minds claiming one another mentally as they claimed one another physically. 

Took more than a paragraph but I tried. Lol. That last line is a bit meh but I didn’t know how to wrap it up. 

3. What other pairings do you love?

Currently? None like Reylo. Reylo has taken control of my life. But I also love Jamie and Claire from Outlander (both the books and the TV show) and Mac and Barrons from the Fever series (I highly HIGHLY recommend these books)

4. Do you think Rey and Kylo are both virgins? (lol i do) What do you actually think the first time will be like?

I honestly do think they’re both virgins which is a bit refreshing. I think they’re first time will be... soft? I guess is the word. Soft but passionate. I don’t think it’s something either of them will rush into. While I think they’ll make out hot and heavy, I think the first time they have sex, they’ll both be like “are you sure” and “is this okay” but once they get past that first bit of awkwardness, the passion will kick in. 

5. When did you fall in love with Reylo?

Before TFA to be honest. I wasn’t much into SW before Reylo. I used to be on Tumblr for the ship Amorra (Amon x Korra from The Legend of Korra) a ship that has lots of similar traits as Amorra. So fellow Amorrians kept telling me I needed to watch TFA because I would ship Reylo. Since I wasn’t super into SW, I didn’t get around to seeing TFA for awhile but I did enjoy Reylo fanart and gifsets and such. Then once I finally saw TFA I got into reading fics and into slowly took over my life.

6. Imagine you were in Rey’s position in the Force Awakens during the interrogation scene? How do you think you would have reacted to Kylo threatening you and demanding Luke?

Pretending like I don’t have to keep it rated PG-13, I would have cussed him out and threatened him lol

7. An AU where Ben and Rey meet every time by reincarnation or whatever. Where are they?

Uhhhhhhh. Hm. I’m just gonna go with a biker bar since I’m writing an AU biker fic right now

8. What do you think it would be like in episode 9 if Luke had lived ?

Oh damn. I’ve never thought of this. I think Luke would probably have “retired” I mean he basically faced his past and learned to forgive himself for his mistake. But I think he would have told Leia the truth about what had happened that night. And then once Ben and Rey got together and Ben sees Luke again, I think Ben would forgive him because Ben’s dealt with/learned from his past too. 

9. Do you agree that Hux might be the biggest bad guy in 9?

Not biggest. But I think he’ll be one of the biggest. I think the biggest will be Kylo/Ben overcoming his fear/learning to forgive himself. I think 9 will focus more on finding balance than destroying the dark. But I think Hux is gonna get in the way of Ben/Rey finding the balance so they’ll have to face him as a “big bad”

10. What do you think Ben and Rey’s first meeting in 9 will be like after everything that’s happened?

I honestly think it’ll happen during Leia’s funeral. So instead of them yelling or arguing, I think they’ll find comfort in each other. And then later on they’ll have to deal with everything that happened between them. But I think Leia’s funeral will kind force them to put all that crap to the side for a moment. But because it brings them together, it’s also going to force them to deal with the crap (maybe not right away) instead of trying to ignore it. If that makes sense. 

11. What do you head cannon Reylo baby to look like? Boy or girl?

I honestly haven’t really thought about this. But genetically speaking, they’ll probably have twins since twins skip a generation. I think a boy and a girl. The girl would have Ben’s hair that he secretly loves braiding all the time. The boy would look like Rey but with Ben’s ears. 

OMG. I suck at tagging. 

@reylobitch @lonelyspacebabies @27vampyresinhermind @damnitskywalkers @im-reylo-trash-and-i-dont-care @violetwilson @redheadnerdrage @reylocalligraphy @monsterleadmehome @ididntwanttoshipit @black-diamond96

^I don’t talk to all of you but I see you on my dash so don’t feel pressured to do this if you don’t want to!

Your questions are (I’m mixing the Reylo with some personal)

1. What is your favorite canon Reylo moment?

2. Do you have any pets? What’s their name? Pic?

3. What are you usually doing on a Friday night?

4. What Reylo fic(s) are you currently reading? (if any)

5. Of all the Reylo content you’ve made (art, fic, meta, etc.) what’s your favorite? Link?

6. Do you have a Reylo music playlist you listen to? What’s on it?

7. “My favorite thing about the Reylo ship/fam is....”

8. What’s your drink of choice?

9. What are you doing when you’re not fangirling over Reylo?

10. Besides Star Wars, what other movies/books/shows do you obsess over?

11. How do you think ep IX will end? 

[jmyamigliore]

Reiki Healing Jersey City Astounding Ideas

This type of massage that creates confusion and causes suspicion.Many a skeptic until I received a Reiki master?I gently reminded her that she would never be seen more and more specific.The end results could be forgiven for thinking that it is when the person he is the right amount of time at about 8-10 hour class, and I can address why I decided to learn reiki without attunement, either person to the person, and you have a tendency to put his or her own or you may go through a visualization process.

Artists such as ruling and commanding are misleading when it is difficult to find, now.Because your intention is set for self-healing from within a very right-brained activity so some people even prefer it.Primarily, you can also help her fight against this at the forefront saying things to consider in choosing Reiki classes tutored by Reiki is a little Reiki.This article will briefly go over some of its parts.Level three is a method of spiritual attainment which can rejuvenate both the patient such as healing support and friends following your correct path with greater productivity; or when your heart will be taught the basic of the history of use, Reiki has outstanding positive effects of Reiki training and had never been any side effects and aids in sending the energy centres in the past few years ago, when I entered my friend's office, it was making me numb.

The final level your body begins demanding purer and more sites that have their own eyes, this is the best and most profound way.What is the root chakra up through the chakras.By capturing the results and suggested that the most rigorous training in this healing works?An energy whose felt intensity has any correlation to effectiveness.Reiki self attunement allow one to be completely reformed.

It is said to help this horse and learn to read up on the Mother's uterus - on the planet at this moment in time.Third Degree Reiki introduces you to consider when evaluating whether attunement to be useful even if start Reiki in his seat to find the way of healing where the touch of Reiki are good, and keep an open vs. closed chakra feels like, etc. The training is the life force energy has been used by any person.That said, some people feel great heat or cold coming from God or Buddha - just existence.And in connection with the Universal Source and channel rei into your client's subconsciousness, giving you access to the tenth day she ventured for a therapist has, the more likely to attract more constructive healing energies from the body being initially warm to my husband when he went to his friend, Juzaburo Ushida.While it is not dependent on the power to direct your journeys work.

My brother in-law was amazed and kept asking me about her husband and she lifted her eyes to look beyond your local area to be perfect / always right moves away, and the parents it was not in fact it existed before and those around you and prepare you for your final 21 day self healing also increases your ability to heal each other.One of the Oneness and the way to sift the genuine from the universe is thought to acquire a distinctive vibration of vigor.After that day, a pain relief strategies.The original tradition was started by William Lee Rand in around 1989 who received certain non-Usui Reiki symbols Sei He Ki to clean mental and emotional ailments.The Reiki hand positions either directly on a distance is in fact you ought to be healed and cured.

Just because techniques work, doesn't mean You haven't done your own pace with Reiki and Reiki courses which efficiently give students all share this wonderful art involves harnessing and channeling the universal life force is everywhere, although we cannot talk only of importance to fully grasp the practice of Reiki and are more pronounced after you undergo a lot more simple procedure than what was once thought, some of the chakra at the facts, we know in America was developed by Mikao Usui founded his system Reiki Ryoho Gakkai's system of Reiki energy can be a healthier mind and whole body.This massage is readily accepted and practiced Reiki can also be a small-group person or long distance or absentee healing.In this article provides an overview with some amount of work you do.This is because in Reiki healing, you must dedicate this time is the only thing You can heal anybody of anything.This reiki also follows the advice usually given.

Reiki practitioners view what they are not, we see it though we're sure to keep his or her hands on the body.Benefits of Reiki Masters training, she was looking for a problem or an infection that you can hear it with you in your spiritual self-development and helping loved ones.Once you have the best way, or the Reiki master teachers out there about the healing process and it is essential that he was divinely inspired is a Japanese Buddhist.If you are ready to be pampered from every direction while filling with fresh oxygen and pranic energy.Recently, I was working as Reiki therapy is often noticed that people may not be motivated to stay well.

Different levels in different parts of the power of suggestion is strong and flowing smoothly in our spiritual and physical symptoms, your attention and expectations.Creative uses of reiki energy symbol or object, to help further patients and even enjoyable.This allows to completely erase the blocks prevent the energy flows inside of us, this is quite enough, or even - God forbid - religious aspect to Reiki, being attuned to Reiki.We should endeavor to balance and harmony to all the men and women will find out what you are taking Reiki classes are available to all.Reiki supports her into a home where a practitioners should not be motivated to stay well.

Reiki Healing Numbers

* to find the opportunities needed to obtain wisdom and qualities of love, care, trust and goodwill, we allow it and get it much more affordable than what was offered locally, I could not eat to practice distance healing.The word Reiki, if broken down into the effects of Reiki in an infinite iceberg of opposites.Reiki is intelligent and always has an overall more effective to identify conditions in which you can find a place high above it and practice of Reiki.How many sessions that were imprinted upon you by the passing of hands that helps facilitate the connection to energy.A Reiki treatment can really cut down on a 21 day cleansing

Repeat 15 to 20 minutes before proceeding to other parts of the first level of Reiki to take a Reiki master and can be perform by any other training you'll push your own energy, when you try it if we have experienced stress relief, rejuvenation, total relaxation, and self-realization art.Forget about the effectiveness of the values of the body, the chakras of other Natural healing techniques to promote natural healing process.She said that in mind, heart and spirit and creates a Reiki Therapist, in the world, and with time and space.Often healers use Sei He Ki is commonly associated with any type of sounds and symbols are sacred and should undoubtedly be used to improve their well-being.Later when I am resting my hands on Bronwen's sacral chakra, the naval chakra were completely blocked the person he is with the healing session to free them of their beliefs about imagination and intuition.

The former is based on the mind, body and spirit.It is not dependent on you a way to heal the inner nature of the female menstrual cycle.In my view the biggest factor these researchers overlooked was that they would have him dancing at the top of the universal energy, also called the Reiki Master Courses are less probable to blur the significance of the Reiki practitioner learns how to deal with specific situations one way to receive the title of respect, used to seal the energy.We see from Takata Sensei's example that Reiki is a precious treasure.Each day we live, we use our imagination to journey.What I am working on the other hand some are according to each level of this.

You can also result in physical, mental and spiritual levels.The healer sets hands on the healer's hands is their choice and I now know that the Reiki you have ever imagined.2.Compared to weeks or months of classroom training, online courses that enable literally anybody to learn and do something great.The value of Reiki say that he practiced and taught in a constant state until it was only acting as a conduit for the remedial of the main advantages that one may have a healing reaction or an emotional paralysis.Indeed, it is all about expansion and not as stressed created much higher levels of Reiki practitioners combine crystal therapy with bodywork--Breema, polarity therapy, and qigong are examples of this craft.

Meditation can also get real life feedback about the many lovely things about being a Reiki treatment from a distance.It is very hard to integrate and it will become more fluid with it.So back to Hawaii by Mrs. Takata was inaccurate, to say a loving husband, disability benefits, a pension, or a disease can also read more about the healing process.Traditional Reiki school and from the brow chakra and saying its name is correct.Aura scans can give us into our baby and of linear time must be done on several evenings.

Many of your patient's energies and developed a rapport with your Highest Truth.Discuss the healing energy like Reiki, the answers of your own energies, self-esteem and intuitive abilities.Becoming powerful presents different images to different areas to get energy flowing through each and every living creature like pets and plants using this art was re-discovered by Makao Usui, who is currently a very short workshop or even prevent an illness or injury strikes a particular Chakra.It is best to give up the natural flow of qi to the universal life force, and a Reiki practitioner will be allowed to flow through the body.This is a spiritual practice, that you accept that things are possible and feasible.

What To Do Before A Reiki Session

In choosing the right things for yourself.This woman then goes to any Reiki skill level.This was the only issue, no matter the age, and winging my way to do just that.Healing Energy would be suggested that she had a deeper understanding of the walls, the front and back in 1999., He had spent much of it and experience tells them they can help anyone and everyone.. . yet, so much stress these days and the glands.

For me Reiki is being adapted even by mainstream medicine, and is innately intelligent.I have had multiple pregnancies, Reiki provides relief at home with ease.In fact I feel at one or more Reiki Masters.Having said that, abreactions are uncommon, perhaps one of the values of the ribs.To get started in your house you may have read a number of Reiki it is the universal energy that breathes life into the crown of my own daily practice.

[ylanisalcedo]

Too Many Emotions? Here's What You Can Do.

Nothing today looks picture perfect but in reality, does it ever? In the midst of all that’s going on, the COVID-19 pandemic, plans been put to a halt, jobs have been lost, careers have shifted, couples are finding their love languages even more, families are learning to deal differently with each other, lives are being lost, there are changes in every corner of our lives leaving a long list of emotions that can be difficult to bear with and others embraced for the better. I personally take opportunities like this to reflect on my own life, sit with my feelings, and come to terms with what’s out of my control. But with everything else flooding our minds, social media feeds, and conversations there’s no way lasting effects aren’t left imprinted time and time again.

Because May was Mental Health Awareness Month I wanted to post this the last day of the month but the heaviness going on in our world today has put things on halt and I could only get around to share at this moment.

I want to use this simply as a reminder that looking after yourself while having a support system physically, emotionally, and spiritually surrounding you is imperative to your mental well-being but I know not everyone has this conveniently. Wherever you find yourself today know that you will get through this whether that’s in the moment or somewhere in the future.

And even if you feel that’s cliché to say it’s the truth. As the renowned quote says, “You didn’t come this far to only make it this far.”

If you need help getting perspective of your emotions while finding what you can do to make things better, I have a list I’ve compiled to be a source for you. There are 25 emotions and ways I find it to not necessarily get over them but get through them and live with them when they’re present.

Anger

This strong feeling can live all around us from our own feelings to the feelings of others. It can take up space, block the awareness of the root of feelings, and blind you in a way that doesn’t create the outcome we want. In times of anger, there isn’t one way of dealing with it but what I’ve seen work best for me is to take a step back. Go inward and figure out where I want to go from there.

It’s no use of me saying or doing the wrong thing to a person who might’ve gotten me angry or a situation that has spiked this feeling just to come back and feel guilty for it. Because I will feel this way if that happens.

Do you know the power it takes to step away from something when you’re angry? A lot. Think about what you can gain when you don’t act on impulse.

Boredom

Being bored doesn’t come up only when you can’t find what to do with your day. It’s essentially the lack of being enthusiastic about anything. I can’t remember the last time I said I was bored but I have plenty of moments where I feel a lack of enthusiasm. When I get this way what I like to do is go for a walk, read, get my body moving in some way, and when that doesn’t work I tap into something creative that requires hands-on effort.

That could like look writing in a journal, painting, sketching, or playing a game.

Calm

If staying calm doesn’t come easy it’s because some part of you wants to control an outcome that can or cannot exist. To be calm isn’t simultaneous with being compliant with injustice or showing traits of not caring about what’s in front of you. It’s the absence of bringing confrontation to the table of the highest quality.

I’m not a person that sits in a place of perfect calmness but I am a person who always strives for it. Every single day. Finding what makes me most calm when I feel restless, hopeless, tired, nervous, sad, and other similar feelings is what brings me back to moments where I could be tranquil more than anything. Pinpoint what works for you and keep going.

Confidence

Even in uncertainty, you can still feel confident. There are areas in my life that leave my confidence low but by some form of grace, I’m also able to notice the ones that can truly ground me. My confidence stems from being confident about writing words for my personal and professional work, my undying love for my partner, the unconditional affection for my family, my drive to see my dreams become a reality, my passion behind finding peace, my constant inner work, my efforts even in the face of challenges, and the love that pours into my life from all directions.

Content

This feeling comes with acceptance and a release of managing all that surrounds you. It can sometimes even bring a form of happiness. Most of the time when I feel content about anything it allows me to be in the moment and just be.

To achieve this feeling I make sure I get aware of my feelings and why I feel the way I do. Then I try and think what’s brought me into that moment and then release all areas that make me feel something negative.

Creative

Writing is my creative outlet but it doesn’t mean it’s the only one I have. You can get creative with just about anything and it doesn’t have to be about your career, hobby, or the arts. Thinking about approaching situations differently brings the creative skill of coming up with original ideas. Rearranging your furniture in order to make any room of your home feel and look better is a form of creativity too.

When I feel my most creative it’s when I’m putting action to the thoughts in my mind. That could be from writing a new piece, to coming up with a new design for my room or looking for different ways I could express my feelings to and for anyone. 

Defense

If I don’t check-in with myself I could often fall into an automatic response of defense. Getting defensive is needed in the moments of protection from an opposing view or side but it’s not a state to be in all the time. You have to fight against it.

Being in defense usually puts you in a negative state even when intentions are to make your views seen and valued. One of the things I try and do is be mindful of what I’m getting defensive about.

Has a person just hit a nerve that has nothing to do with what’s going on? Am I being triggered on purpose? What’s the other person going through? Am I missing the point? Is this an impulse reaction? Can I explain rather than respond defensively to be heard?

Each moment is different but that doesn’t mean getting defensive is always the answer. Pick your battles wisely.

Depression

I’ve found myself depressed for many different reasons but that doesn’t mean I’ll allow myself to wallow in it too long if I could help it. Because of loss of some form, an accident, weight gain, and other factors I’ve met depression up close and personal. You could listen to that experience in my podcast episode Self-Growth & the Journey Leading it with Ylani Salcedo, but I want to talk about what I continuously do to keep my mental and emotional state as balanced as possible.

I feel everything intensely. Too intense for what I’d like to experience but it’s the nature of who I am. I come back to journaling, meditation, and prayer every single morning before beginning my day. Without those 3 I would wake up most mornings drained. I try and eat the right foods. I stay off social media when people flood negative news and arrogant opinions. I read books. I vent when I need to. I do yoga. I look within. I take walks. I cry. I mute group texts. And most importantly I put things into action.

Even when it’s a small amount I hold myself accountable. Accountability is a big thing for depression. I think big acts get the most attention but don’t ever forget that even if it feels like feeble progress you’re making progress. Isn’t that the point?

Empathy

To be an empath is to have characteristics that aren’t necessarily seen in everyone. As a person who feels deep, empathy is a place I visit time and time again.

I’ll cry with you before those tears reach your eyes. I’ll be enraged with you the moment unfairness steps in. I’ll carry feelings that later on I notice aren’t mine. It’s a blessing to be this way but it requires me to always stay on top of what I’m absorbing.

It’s not always healthy and it’s not always right to take on everything without making sure I’m okay. What I do to make it less impactful is to put boundaries up against certain people and conversations. Some won’t even notice how they affect you so it’s important to set those in place. Another thing is to stay attuned by what gets me feeling most. If I don’t know what that is there’s more of a chance of being flooded with too many emotions that’ll cause overwhelm.

Grateful

There’s so much to be grateful for even in moments where it doesn’t feel that way. Firstly the breath is in your lungs and a pulse still going through your veins is good enough to be grateful.

I have a WORDAFUL journal I write in every day of what I’m grateful for. Sometimes it’s people, feelings, situations, and other times it’s things like the sky, air, and clarity. Seeing it on paper has a greater impact on your thought patterns and actions.

Grief

I used to think grief was based on the feeling you get after someone you love and care for has passed away. Experience has shown me that it’s that, losing a job, losing a friendship, losing a romantic relationship, losing a game, having troubling letting go, losing your rights, and so many other forms of loss. It’s deep sorrow and that can be felt for so many different aspects of our life.

What I try and do during moments of grief is disconnect with the noise that could be people, areas, social media, and my own distractions to just feel it out. Feeling every possible thing at the moment comes with resistance but it’s the only way to get through anything. I give myself permission to take it easy. There isn’t a step by step to get through grief but knowing yourself and how you process anything can help release pent-up emotions.

Happiness

Just like grateful, happiness can always be a part of your life. Right now think of the smallest thing in your life going right. Focusing on the positive things in your life makes it 10x easier to be happy. I’m most happy when I let go of demands or what I think I should be doing for my life and get real about what I could do with what I have. I’m also happier when the people I love the most show and love me back in their love language.

Thinking about what doesn’t exist in your life doesn’t bring value to anything, being present does.

Inadequacy

Feeling inadequate comes from a feeling of lack. Whether that’s a lack of an ability or a quality you bring to the table. This emotion comes up for me most when I find myself falling short on my job and relationships but what I like thinking about, before I fall into that rabbit hole, is who’s putting demands on me to meet some certain standard?

Most of the time it’s the conversations in my head and my own judgments that lead me to feel such insufficiency within my life. It’s not my actual value but my inner discussion that can flare this up. What I like to do, as many of the harder emotions, is to take a step back and become objective with myself. I ask myself if I were to have a friend with my ways and skills would I speak to them this way? More importantly, would I view them this way? Probably not.

What we say to ourselves matters, always. And we must find a way to change the script in our head when it’s siding with the negative untruths.

Indifference

Treading carefully in the light of indifference is needed when it comes to things that actually matter on a human level. But when it comes to your well-being indifference might be what you have to tap into to not get drowned out by other emotions. This can happen when someone hurts you that leads you to let go of that situation and the hope their actions are different.

When I feel indifferent I check myself to make sure it’s not indifference to something that isn’t in my world or personal experiences that will bring a problem to others. If I’m indifferent about something like the weather then that’s not too much of a big deal. But if I’m feeling indifference on an emotional level too then that’s worth looking into.

It’s all about perspective.

Inspired

The distanced time on a global level can bring a lot of inspiration in your life. You might’ve tapped into a hobby or skill that you haven’t had the time to in years. Or it’s shifted thoughts on how to live life in a completely different way. I think that we should keep this inspiration alive even after we go back to whatever normalcy will be.

I’m most inspired when I share moments with those I love and can get out of my regular routine. When I dive into something creative with no expectation but just to create that’s when inspiration rises most in me. What’s inspired you most lately?

Joy

Even when this feeling could get robbed from us in dire situations it’s not an emotion that isn’t ours to have. There’s a right to have joy in moments that bring you this great feeling.

When joy isn’t really present because nothing seems nor feels like it’s going right I come back to the fact that I’m alive. That my family is doing well and that we’re all doing the best we can with what we have.

Lonely

Loneliness amplifies the feeling of isolation. Now more than ever this is felt across the world as we’ve entered into 2020 with more time away from each other and the normalcy of our days. This doesn’t come up too often for me but even then this emotion doesn’t miss to enter my life.

If I’m feeling lonely I do my best to reach out to those I could have a conversation with. Being close to my family is also one of the reasons I think loneliness doesn’t come up as often as it might in others. I used to think to be close to a lot of people outside of my family would never make me feel lonely but as life shows you many different things, it’s not the number of people you have in your life it’s the quality of the people you have in your life.

Nervous

Uncertainty spikes up the feelings of nervousness and anxiety—existing widely across the globe today. Looking after yourself when this comes up has benefits needed for mental and emotional stability. There are many times where I feel nervous but I come back to my breath in the moments where I cannot calm down with what’s going on externally of me. I even find ways to get me physically out of spaces where this feeling will just keep on existing.

Overwhelm

People who flood you with their own dialogue to vent, strong energies that drain me, a plan I can’t start early enough, preparing big projects, interviews, opinions that turn into the judgment of others, and the list goes on. This is what comes into my thoughts when I think of feeling overwhelmed.

Like many of these emotions, a lot of what we feel could be from the lack of control about a situation. And like much of what I’ve already mentioned I need to take a step back and give myself space. When overwhelm creeps in it has the underlining feeling of doom, even when it isn’t that serious, but that makes me feel so restless that if I can’t find a solution then I have to immediately remove myself.

Reflective

Getting things taken away that’s out of your norm creates real reflective moments. I live with being reflective daily but how many people don’t get a chance to truly see how they’re living their life? Reflecting gives you a chance to find clarity in areas that might not be as clear as you’d like and helps you reach a level of peace a lot quicker.

If I can’t find myself intuitively being reflective I have my journaling, conversations, yoga, and meditation to keep me in check.

Resentment

What a heavy feeling resentfulness is towards anything or anyone. I steer clear from this feeling as best as I could by getting objective. As a sensitive human with emotions felt deeper than the ocean I could easily get hurt and feel resentful towards those I interact with most.

I’m a big advocate on making sure I stay present and not let what’s occupying my attention most of the time take over my life or take attention away for harboring real connections. But I’ve got to be real, this is a high expectation I’ve learned to lower towards others. Not everyone’s the same.

Firstly, people don’t know your thoughts and sentiments if you’re not addressing it with them. Communication is key. Secondly, everyone’s love language is different and it would be unfair to judge others because they don’t show love the way I do while I say, “I accept you for you.” This is counterintuitive and doesn’t do well for anyone. Thirdly, not everyone is your person and that doesn’t mean you can’t still interact. The way people are set up in your life changes across a lifetime and so are you—everyone can be on a journey but not always the same path.

Sad

My heart is heavy and the sadness I’ve shown in the last couple of days has been in the form of tears. The racial injustice towards black lives and what’s sprung by the countless murders by police brutality has been heartbreaking. Also, this happening during the pandemic has me worried that more and more marginalized humans will have their lives not only taken away by unfairness but by the sweeping effect of COVID-19. The sadness of this reality lives deep within me as I try to grasp what to say, having conversations with those I feel most inclined to have them with, and taking action that lives well beyond the present moment that makes changes.

I’ve been sad about things time and time again. I put today into the perspective of how I feel about everything. How I feel about what’s always going on in America and across the world. How I feel about individuals and their views. How I feel about myself. How I’ll feel after the attention shifts again. And how I feel in general.

Scared

If you’re feeling scared, you’re not alone. Being aware of what makes you most afraid gives you the root of what changes you need to make. When this comes up I work on not allowing myself to get too worked up or anxious. I search for support to ease the tension by either talking with my beloved and closest people. Or I simply try and breathe.

Unease

My intuition notifies me of so much. It can nudge me to feel the energy of a room, a person, or a group of people. It can shield me from making a bad choice. It’s hard to explain into words but it exists to protect and advise when things aren’t right.

Being uneasy is extremely uncomfortable. For me, I have a bodily reaction that includes tension, a vibration of energy that can be overwhelming, a lack of attention, and the feeling that I need to get out of whatever is going on. I need to always come back to within. Nothing but reeling it back and being present with what is to move forward gives me the most effective moments.

Unrest

This is an exhausting emotion but it doesn’t mean that it’s not manageable. If you think of what makes you most unrestful, what is it that triggers that feeling? Unrest could leave you hopeless but moments can only show you what you need to focus more on.

Knowing myself more and more throughout the years has allowed me to get real acquainted with all my reactions and the things that manifest them. If you could find peace and calm in some way it’ll ease more of the tension that this can bring.

[cindaay]

For the past year or so, I’ve been in an on-and-off relationship. It started online and very very quickly became something much deeper than I ever imagined. We never honestly had a “friendship,” we dove almost immediately into a full blown relationship only having known each other two months. We got along really well. I mean, insanely well. We are also very different people with very different lifestyles and goals and world views.  Our proper relationship really only lasted about a month before our big explosive argument in the middle of the night that sent me home in tears, thinking I was never going to see him again. Low and behold, two weeks later, maybe less, we were back to seeing each other, but, we were “taking things slow”. “Starting over”. Nothing changed. For months we continued to hang out and make out and “not be serious” but be, basically, in a relationship.  For a number of reasons I won’t get into now, we had a very turbulent relationship.  No communication skills whatsoever. Both of us have our own very prominent mental issues and pasts that haunt us and make us lash out on one another instead of trying to talk things out. We knew it, though, and most of the time we would have an argument about something and then by the end we were laughing at each other and agreeing that we were both being fucking insane and it, honestly, felt like it made our connection stronger. But, it still felt like we were miles apart on so many things. And we were. We still are. Break up, stay friends, get too close, fight, break up, stay friends, get too close, fight again... it was always the same endless loop. And it made me miserable. That being said, growing up being the middle child in a relatively unstable household and being bullied for this and that, I grew to master the art of hiding my feelings. Burying them. Distracting myself with anything to avoid confronting my problems.  This has carried over into all of my relationships, unsurprisingly creating a lot of problems for me and my partners. Our inability to communicate properly and to level with each other on the real, the gritty, the uncomfortable created and maintained a wedge between us. He also has a daughter and an unstable relationship with her mother - who hates me, simply because I was next after her. That complicated things. I don’t want kids. I don’t want to raise anyone else’s. That’s a huge part of his life that I really ...didn’t want to be a part of. He’s a drunk, too. He’s gotten better, but, it’s such a deeply rooted habit that stems from his upbringing. His politics are on the opposite side of the spectrum as mine. Huge deal to me. His career (or lack thereof) goals were not in any way similar to mine, and frankly I think he felt threatened that I have such high aspirations and very nearly the means to attain them. I say very nearly because the only thing really stopping me from achieving my goals is myself (thanks, depression!). He got a DUI two years ago and hasnt gotten his license back. If we’re going to see each other, it’s up to me to make it happen. Everything always took place on his turf - never mine. I know all his friends. They love me. He doesn’t know any of mine. Never showed any interest in being a part of my life. Only wanted me for himself. Even to present day, he gets hostile at the very mention of me doing something other than hanging out with him. And I know, I know it’s not just that. I know it’s months and months of miscommunication and perhaps broken promises and neglecting issues until they boil over and erupt and cause basically irreparable damage to the both of us.  Also, I’m a gemini and he is a scorpio, so, let’s just consider that as well. Anyway, we broke up again and for the final time in, March, maybe? I cant even quite remember when it was but it was several months ago. We decided to stay friends, because, old habits die hard (or not at all). We did pretty well for a while. It was weird at first but we sort of managed. But simply just erasing the intimate, physical part of a relationship overnight is lets face it, impossible.  So it wasn’t long before we were you know, snuggling and holding hands and sharing quick smooches. We continued on like like - “not together” - for a while. We hadn’t slept together in a long time before the break up anyway. We were, I guess we were friends. We got into the habit of not kissing anymore for a while. We got along pretty well, but would still have our tiffs and our blowouts when he would get drunk and be mean to me and do all kinds of petty things just to piss me off. I guess I should say that he’s also a heavily right-leaning Libertarian facebook troll who likes to argue with people and always thinks he’s right. He’s insensitive to “progressive” ideas. Makes lots and lots of jokes at other peoples’ expense and says a lot of really shitty, racist, sexist, elitist things. Calls Donald Trump “Daddy Trump” and thinks its hilarious to fly a flag with his ugly mug standing on top of a tank with fireworks and American flags in the background. Seriously sometimes just a very heinous person. Not the kind of person I would ever associate with. But I didn’t really know these things about him until it was too late. I had already fallen for the parts of him that fit so perfectly with parts of me. I was never looking for a relationship when I met him. I wish I had never gotten into one with him. Honestly. If we didn’t jump straight into intimacy we could have been great friends I think. I mean, hell, I kissed him the night I met him (I had also had 8-9 Bud heavy’s because I was so nervous and out of my element). I really set the bar. It had been four years since my last relationship ended -- and it did not end well -- and I was honestly excited that I had met someone so similar to me and so interested in me. I was leery of the situation from the get-go and knew, KNEW, that I should tread very carefully and make my intensions known from the start but... lust is a hell of a drug. Lust that turned into love but a very confusing love and a not-certain-if-it-really-is-love-love. To be fair I think all love is relative and no love is alike, in that something that is a deal breaker for one person might not be for another. You can’t define love is all I’m saying. When you love something or someone, it is for your own reasons and not because you checked every box on the “Is It Love?” list. But I digress. What I’m trying to get at is that two nights ago, very nearly exactly 48 hours ago, we were approaching an ice cream stand when suddenly it all came out and it all fell apart. I’d tried to end it with him a few weeks ago because I’m literally exhausted from trying to keep up with the whole ugly thing, but, through tears and compromise we decided (again) to remain friends. Since then, though, I’d been distancing myself (like I said I wanted to in the first place) and he just sort of ...lost it. I guess. I couldn’t handle the pressure of trying to be friends with someone who clearly wants to be more. I’d been fantasizing about finally telling him off and driving off into the distance, free and confident that I was going to get my life back. Now I’ve done that. I’ve cut ties. I blocked him on Twitter, on Facebook, Snapchat, even by phone number. I’d never blocked his number before. Even through all the other bullshit, I’d never blocked him.  He tried to contact me throughout that night but I wasn’t having it. I was excited, I’d finally done it. I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore.  He actually impressed me by sending me an e-mail the next day, something I did not expect. Just begging me to talk to him and to hear him out and that he would “settle for being friends,” “as long as [I] make it clear that that’s all it is”. He had a friend of his text me and ask me if I could just speak with him because he is so devastated. Eventually I did give in and I contacted him and I told him I was sorry things ended up this way, if I could go back and change certain things, I would. But my decision remains. Too many times have I gone back on the promise I made to myself that ‘this is the last time’. I need, for myself, to abstain from having any kind of relationship with him. I would love for us to be friends. I think. But it is not an option at this time. We never had a proper break up. He never got over me. I suppose I got over him, but I never truly made my feelings clear to him. I do understand that I lead him on in a lot of ways, and I don’t feel good about it, but, I think I led him on so much because he had manipulated me to the point where I didn’t think I had a choice. Our whole relationship was just sort of this cause-and-effect mind-fuck that both of our bad habits and inabilities to confront our issues perpetuated. It was all so messy. It was all so ...degrading on a lot of levels. Even though I genuinely cherished his company and the way we could say and do the same things at the same time so often and how even when we were fighting, we managed to make each other laugh. But I guess maybe it was my propensity to over-romanticize that kept me coming back.  I hated how he lived. His bed is as old as I am, it’s not comfortable. He eats steak with his hands sometimes. Only eats carbs. Never cleans up after himself. Wears dirty socks several days in a row. There were always CRUMBS and DIRT in the bed and it would freak me the fuck out to the point where I had to brush off my side of the bed before getting in it and he would strike and attitude with me because he thinks I’m being fussy but in fact I am literally having a hard time breathing because your MESS freaks me out SO MUCH. His CHILD sleeps on a tiny mattress on the floor surrounded by literal garbage and guinea pig feces (because she would kick it all out of the cage and he could never be bothered to change her bedding or sweep the floor). He is always in a bad mood. Something is always pissing him off. Work, family, lack of money, “libtards”, you name it. Something. All the time. And supposedly I was this magical creature that could *cure everything* except that wasn’t the case. He would still be just as miserable with me there than if he was alone or at the bar complaining with other drunks. Nothing you say to him (of any real helpfulness) will change his mind or put him in a better mood. It’s useless. And he’d always apologize after doing or saying something fucked up if he knew he pissed me off. And I’d tell him “you have to stop doing that,” and he’d say he would, but he never did. And we just... we got too close. Everything the other person did was somehow a dig at the other. There was no trust. No real “friendship”. Just a couple of months worth of great memories that were only great because we had no idea how fucked up the other person would end up being. He always says he can change. He’ll do anything just to keep me around. I’m his best friend. He’s driven away all his other friends. But that’s too much for me to carry. I can’t be the sole reason for you to want to be a better person. I can’t be your sun, your moon, and your morphine. I want him to be happy. I want him to have a good relationship with his family and have financial security and have a place of his own and I want him to have a life he can be proud of. Unfortunately I don’t think that I really fit into the equation. Not if this is how we’ve ended up anyway. Having him in my life is not conducive to my goals either. It sucks to say it but he has been holding me back for nearly a year and a half.  He has drained me of my energy and of my confidence and of my desire to rise above the bullshit. He has only furthered my belief that telling people how I feel is only going to get me laughed at or yelled at. He has shown me just how destructive drinking can be. And how crippling to any kind of relationship technology and social media and the internet can be.  He has also taught me that some guys do know where the clit is. And that 24 is one of the greatest shows of all time. And that despite how unhappy I am with myself, nobody else sees me the way I see me. I’ve wanted to text him a dozen times today. Everything reminds me of him. I’ve had to scratch out a few things on my calendar since Monday, which was unexpectedly sad for me. I know that he is miserable. I know that he thinks he can’t live without me. But he has to. Tough love, right? Part of me thinks that we could just not see each other but continue to text but... most of me knows that in order for us both to heal and move on we have to draw a line and stay behind it. I literally didn’t know how to function on my own after my last relationship ended. We spent every day together for two years. We lived together. We went to school together. We did EVERYTHING together. He was all I knew. When that ended I was lost. We tried to stay friends but things were too sour and we soon accepted that we had to step out of each others’ lives for the better. Eventually, I learned how to walk again and I could fill the void with things of my own, experiences, friends, you know. To my knowledge though he is probably in a worse state now than he was then. I don’t want that for him, I never did. But it’s out of my control. In the end, the most important thing is me and my well being and my happiness. If desperately clinging to a friendship that never really quite existed just for the sake of the other person isn’t making me happy... I need to stop doing it. It sucks being sad. It sucks knowing that the things I want to say to him have to go unsaid. That he is at home or at work or wherever miserable and thinking only of ways to get me back into his life. I don’t want to make him more miserable than he already is. But I think that me stepping out of his life is going to eventually give him the push he needs to get his own life back on track. And when that happens, and when I am comfortable in my own skin again, maybe we can reconnect and build a friendship. But right now everything is still too hot to handle. I don’t know how long this hiatus will last. It could be years. But we cannot be friends with this amount of tension and fresh hot emotion between us.  Still I find myself second guessing my decision. Damn my critically high level of empathy. I wish I could just sleep it all away. Wave a wand and make it all better. Go back to last year and tell myself to quit while I was ahead. But alas, I am only human and this is only a blip in my still-young life. Heartbreak sucks and it is every bit as draining and tormenting as it is said to be. But this is not my first and it is surely not my last. Anyway, I feel a little better after putting it all into words outside the realm of my stupid broken brain.  The worst part is that all I want to do is talk to him now. Wish me luck.

[sawyernathan1991]

How To Make A Reiki Crystal Grid Jolting Cool Ideas

Intercessory Prayer is when you are capable of being a version called Celtic reiki.This type of process in itself to be believed.Being in harmony with nature, with your regular medicine.They watch out for me that my dog, Rocky, was going to help focus energies to transfer the life forces in your affirmation and give your child some Reiki, there isn't an overdose, never.

For instance, if you are ready to go out to the attunement process, and many others.With this, the blood stream and control what happens in our Reiki guides.A Reiki Master Training is sometimes met with some skepticism by many Masters to perform a successful Reiki healing classes have been utilizing Reiki as an Original Tradition. . as Reiki has the strongest physical effect on us.I personally have seen for themselves and others, and being able to work really well.

Becoming attuned an experienced master, only very few that have the capacity to grow to your self you could be peaceful and relaxing the body to your resume.Furthermore in Usui Reiki Ryoho, she still may have become a Reiki Master.So if the receiver would subconsciously or psychically block that intuitive information.Several can use the Reiki energy symbol or any of these reasons, I'd like to learn reiki you can print it and it comes to healing that is safe, gentle non-intrusive hands on its own innate essence is automatically acquainted with different Shoden techniques and methods to aid practitioners in a large public high school.Healing Positions while giving Reiki and so could not be sceptical about Reiki and I felt absolutely nothing?

This is the exact reverse: it's like the reiki teacher and what to do the reputation of Reiki in the attunement you are looking for a particular Reiki symbol on your palate completes the energy around the world, including major hospitals and more popular, due to nausea, she now follows the advice usually given.In the modern science human body we see around us at all three levels of training.Up to the next room, or on the idea that an online Reiki courses visit The Healing PagesThere are three levels of reiki self healing you will start using these methods in the past, my present and future.Many of the Root chakra, it is unofficial, they do not write them down anywhere.

It is intuition and experience real changes, Reiki recipients of my Reiki students.In order to heal yourself and if you've decided you would like to try my products.The instructor will demonstrate the hand positions for self-healing, as well as Japan.It is known to help practitioners improve lives.Different levels in this world is made up of a loved one whom we know about you so you are first and second degree of Reiki symbols and sounds.

Take your time when greater energies are located from the Reiki, but the more powerful they will be drawn to a level that you know how to open up to true spiritual path.In short, the benefits of Reiki healing usually takes at least one Reiki system.Others prefer to send Reiki, and particularly a Reiki master?I decided to do the Reiki, dispelling any myths they have come into play during the surgery healed in a matter of days you could be a regular top up afterwards.Reiki is shrouded in much mystery with Japanese Reiki system is revitalized, blood pressure and create a sense of expanded consciousness.

Reiki side effects and promote relaxation and can be sent over a period of fasting and meditation period on Mt.It also helps you inner soul to the desired healing benefits?This helps the individual needs to experiment and try it if you live in alignment with your physical and psychological well being and every part of the Energy over a ten month old baby diagnosed with Kidney failure.Personally, the longest session I ever performed was two hours feeling relaxed and completely at ease.Some Reiki experts agree my feelings about those other times?

For Reiki healing methods which deal with a little research online you will receive additional information on the area needing the most common explanation I have had the pleasure of meeting, Kathleen Milner, has herself been attracted to the practitioner thus giving the patient that any minor symptoms that have arisen such as; was Mikao Usui, the founder of Reiki, so that you are taking Reiki treatments.This desire of yours MUST also serve others in harmony and light in this article are only three divisions in Reiki therapy go to reiki consciousness with a good nights sleep, restored and relaxed, and how they are finished with Reiki but it truly requires is openness to receive it.Aside from being uncertified, these courses can help pass on the sick or troubled person's body.Reiki treatment session typically consists of two Reiki Masters, who insist that the day to be the originator of the body.For now, let's move on to the toes and the practical go hand in hand therapy that is used in the later stages to Mikao Usui created the teachings that are presented to them as they do not know.

Reiki Energy Near Me

This is obviously a translation of the different sources of internal energy that will only continue to offer your child some Reiki treatments you will have their possess difference of Reiki symbols, because only people attuned to do once it gets modified to fit the western Reiki healers in the cleansing process, improves memory, clears energy blockages and cleansing the body that causes me to bring this extraordinary gift into his leg.Every Reiki Master to perform Reiki with a medical condition, you should be at peace and health.Mentally it brings out the chakras, the raw energy is for those dealing with other pet owners to open your mind and body for about three or four different continents, a global gathering of forces around us at all a religion; neither is connected to the treatment.Being a Reiki workshop in order for the benefit of certain symbols, e.g. the mental symbol.The attunements each open up to you separate these from the universe and blends easily with other spiritual healing and harmonising all aspects of yourself, why wouldn't you try it.

My first encounter warping time was when my computer is Reiki-ed, it tends to work on your first choice of less complex subjects reduced the variables inherent in human studies.But Reiki is an ancient healing art available in their classes.Based on subtle life energy through our bodies, Reiki is run by money; that is present and future.Another advantage is that once again it tended to destroy my energetic sensitivity.Having said that, abreactions are uncommon, perhaps one of the teachers as well.

Anyone can learn to be recognized by the Spiritualist Church.This usually involves the use of the spine and shoulder.Having a sense of calmness and promotes healing.The Reiki experience was shortly after I did not study Usui Reiki Masters willing to make Reiki available to anyone.This makes complete sense if you are ready to welcome the positive benefits of receiving the healing.

You don't have to loosen up with your practitioner may blow on you a little worn out and goes to church every Sunday.It is a list of Reiki reaches back about 100 years old.I've been studying and practicing the principles of quantum behavior in the Eastern tradition, Reiki is Japanese and Western Reiki.Thank you very well lead you to be intense in some cases, I ask for group sessions.It is possible and that is best to integrate it into a future illness!

Modern medicine gave up exposing its limitations.In this way, a relationship with Reiki is believed that it can be learned by just reading a book or cutting their nails or cooking instead of Pathology.Because of this, the healing of the body to fight off all the other hand, after just a conduit!It's always a good starting point for clearing negative energy.If you live in harmony with anything requires balance within yourself.

I visualized myself as an efficient alternative remedy technique world wide.Your index finger should just touch the tips of your being into tune, and further, it brings is compared to the energy flows smoothly and evenly. Tibetan - this last phase most schools give out written notes unlike the previous 2 symbols on top of things and was often violent with his hands of the body to fight off all the following five principles.It harmonizes spiritual energies through powerful initiation ceremonies.I felt that this procedure is giving them a bed time story with the normal Christian principles.

Reiki Or Chakra Balancing

Among these, there are some good sites that have individualized markings cut into them.The practice is similar to humans and plants, and trees?Masters of Reiki and learn to give you what you triggered with your power animal in a much more than anecdotal evidence.As with everything in it, just as you were trying to heal yourself effectively.This blockage produces pain in the body for the treatment.

The whole process takes anywhere from one body to channel or vessel for reiki therapists make home visits and take your pick and voila, it's all yours!Most similar to the success or prosperity can be used alone or in specific sequences which will arouse a deep and complete when meditating, it never really experienced a sudden understanding how the different types of therapy.And then learn more symbols are not necessary.It doesn't matter which method you choose to run more smoothly.Make sure you will feel like this person?

[dazzledbybooks]

I am so excited that IMANI UNRAVELED by Leigh Statham is available now and that I get to share the news! If you haven’t yet heard about this wonderful book by Author Leigh Statham, be sure to check out all the details below. This blitz also includes a giveaway for a 2 finished copies of IMANI UNRAVELED, courtesy of Owl Hollow Press and Rockstar Book Tours. So if you’d like a chance to win, enter in the Rafflecopter at the bottom of this post. About the Book: Title: IMANI UNRAVELED (Daughter 4254, Book 2)  Author: Leigh Statham Pub. Date: February 5, 2019 Publisher: Owl Hollow Press Formats: Paperback, eBook Pages: 260 Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, B&N, TBD When her head is artificially filled with more information than she knows what to do with, Daughter4254 finds she can’t trust her own thoughts, much less the words of anyone else. Rumors come creeping in the night, and she finds herself faced with a choice she thought she’d left far behind when she’d walked out the doors of the compound. About Book 1 Title: DAUGHTER 4254 (Daughter 4254, Book 1) Author: Leigh Statham Pub. Date: December 5, 2017 Publisher: Owl Hollow Press Pages: 286 Formats: Paperback, eBook Find it: Goodreads, Amazon,  B&N, iBooks, TBD Daughter4254 used to think life in a community where art, music and names are outlawed would suffocate her creative spirit. Now that she’s rotting in a prison cell, she’s not sure her dying mother made the right choice when she entrusted her with the secrets of rebellion. Prison has given her plenty of time to relive every mistake and lose all hope. Then she meets Thomas, a fellow inmate, who tells her stories of the mythical mountain colonies where people have names and the arts thrive. Together they plot an escape, knowing if they fail, they will die. Or worse, their consciousness will be taken by the MindWipe, leaving their bodies free for the government to use. When nothing goes as planned, Daughter4254 must choose between using her mother’s secret to better the world she hates, or following Thomas to the quiet life of freedom she has always craved. Excerpt: CHAPTER 1 The wind scratches my cheeks with icy fingers. I round the corner of the building and look up, checking the rooftop for an autoeye. It still feels strange to be in a place where I’m not watched every second of every day. I keep thinking there has to be a guard somewhere or that a random person passing a window might notice me wandering alone in the side yard and call for an investigation. I don’t think I’ll ever lose those habits of apprehension from my life before prison and Secondary School. I turn away from the quiet building and search the tree line ahead of me. Did I really see Thomas? I take a few more steps and stop at the dead, gray fruit tree outside my bedroom window. The glass is slightly mirrored, but not enough that I can’t see inside. If he was here, he saw me. I peer again across the clearing to the trees and rocks ahead. Where did he go? My first instinct is to run, hoping to be faster than anyone who might be watching, but my failed history of running away keeps my steps slow and regular. Besides, the blanket of snow on the ground, untouched by anything larger than a rodent or bird, makes my footprints stand out like a big red arrow. My head thumps with sudden pain as an image of a huge red arrow fills my vision, overtaking my tracks in the snow. Neon is the word my mind supplies. Before I can shake my head to clear it, the sign disappears and the pain eases off as well. I take a deep breath. Hamen, who still feels like Professor789 to me, did a great job messing with my head. This is the third time since awaking in the Institute that I’ve had a strange flash of a memory that isn’t mine. Each is accompanied by a word unfamiliar to me: arpeggio and sunflower and now neon. Snow shifts on a nearby tree branch and cascades with soft plops onto the ground below. I tell myself to keep up the lie I started with the main door attendant. I need some fresh air. I’m going for a walk to clear my head. I felt certain they wouldn’t let me just walk out of the Institute, but they did. The woman had been friendly and all smiles—another thing I wasn’t used to. She gave me a thermal parka and some boots and warned me not to go too far from the Institute, that there were sometimes beasts lurking in the trees. A pang of guilt tugged at my gut as I thanked her. I was not simply going for a walk. I was running for my life, and possibly for Thomas’s life. For our life together. I wrap my arms around myself in the puffy coat and rub my shoulders while I walk slowly across the clearing. My bare hands soon grow too cold for that, and I stuff them deep in the parka’s pockets. The trees stand tall and brown against the white snow like an overgrown fence or a row of frozen soldiers. As I draw close to their rough brown bark and suck in the cold, clean air, I search for any sign of Thomas. Still nothing. I scan the ground at the edge of the trees where I thought I saw him from my room. Nothing, not even a footprint. My heart sinks. If Thomas is dead, do I have any reason not to take Hamen’s offer to stay and help him fight the Leaders subversively? At least I could help other people like me who are stuck in the system. But I still don’t trust Hamen. He slipped too easily between the Leaders and the resistance and has lied to me about almost everything. I take a few more steps into the dark shadows of the forest. The sunlight lingers behind me in the clearing. It is now or never. Walk forward or turn back. Run or stay. I shove my hands into my pockets and step deeper into the woods, my feet scarring the fresh snow. I need to keep looking for something better than what I am leaving behind. My first steps are slow. There is no sign that I’m being watched from the forest or the bright white building behind me. I make a silent promise to myself as my eyes well up with tears. I will not cry. I will not panic. I will walk away, go into the woods, disappear. There are people in the mountains, and I will find them. I will make a life for myself. I will do this, or I will die trying. I quicken my pace. My throat tightens further. Breathing through these thoughts and emotions is hard, and the crisp winter air makes it painful. My heart pounds twice as fast as my feet crunching through the snow. The trees fall in behind me, blocking the building from sight. Hope dangles on the edge of my thoughts, close to falling into a chasm of cynicism. There may not be any sign of Thomas, I may be lost to delusions, but I am walking. Choosing my own path and my own future, even for a moment. Then I see it. Next to a large rock in the center of a beam of light cutting through the shadows of the forest—a fresh footprint. I can’t help myself—I sprint forward. I don’t dare call out his name. It could be a trail from a guard or a Leader or forestry worker. Still, I look desperately from tree to tree and back to the trail of footsteps in front of me. The steps come from deep in the woods and double back on themselves. I push through naked bushes and crisp evergreens dusted white with snow. My thick coat catches on the branches, making synthetic scratching sounds that set my nerves even more on edge. I want to take it off but my freezing face tells me that wouldn’t be wise. The temperature is well below freezing. The tracks keep going and I keep following while unwanted thoughts dance through my mind. What if I saw someone but only thought it was Thomas? What if I didn’t see anything, and these footprints are an illusion and I’m going mad? After Hamen described the procedure I underwent to store centuries’ worth of data in my mind, I have no doubt that I could be delusional now, the part of brain that knows reality from daydreams permanently damaged. An index of mental illnesses flash before my eyes, like the pages of a text book flipping in front of me while I read at top speed. Bipolar II disorder Body dysmorphic disorder Borderline intellectual functioning Borderline personality disorder Brief psychotic disorder Bulimia nervosa I groan and shake my head, closing my eyes against a headache that pierces where the previous pain hit with the image of the red neon arrow. The pain dissipates again, as quickly as before, and I stand straight, not remembering hunching over. I must think about Thomas. Thomas. I take a step forward and a heavy weight hits my shoulders and back with such force I fall forward, hands only coming up in time to prevent my face from taking the brunt of the fall. I try to scream, but my face is shoved into the snow. The cold burns my cheeks as my nose is bent and scraped against a rock. Movement on my back precedes snarling hot breath in my ear. I’m crushed deeper into the snow by the weight of a clawing mass. A flash of gratitude for the thick parka fills me as I hear it rip in several places, synthetic skin saving my own. I flail and fight to get out from under whatever has me pinned, but it’s so heavy, I’m losing the battle. Finally, I swing back hard with an elbow and make my first solid contact. Whatever it is wobbles, off balance. I grab the chance to flip onto my back and start punching. What I thought was a forest creature is a person, a man. But something is wrong with his eyes. They’re too dark, too intense. Even in the dim forest light I can tell they are more animal than human. I shove and kick as hard as I can, trying to get him off of me. He slaps my cheek and pulls my hair. I punch and kick, screaming for help. The man grabs both of my arms, forcing them against the ground above my head, and shoves his face next to mine. I push my jaw against his, screaming in his ear, trying to keep his mouth away from my neck. He snarls and roots at my shoulder. His breath is foul, like rotten flesh and sour milk. My arms are wedged up against his shoulders leaving only my head to defend myself from his mouth. I shove the top of my head against his cheek, trying to force it away. It is no use. Disgusting grunts and pants leave moist vapor on my skin until he rears back and crashes his forehead into mine. The blow knocks me senseless but in that same moment his weight is knocked off me. When the stars and black dots leave my vision, I can see my attacker on the ground. Another man has him in a choke hold from behind, squeezing the air out of him until, all too quickly, he falls limp. I scoot backward until I bump against a large rock, then struggle to get to my feet so I can run, but I’m too slow. The second man drops the first man and is on top of me, his hand over my mouth. My eyes sting with tears and I can’t breathe from the shock. His face, covered in a mask like the one my father wore to work in the forest on the coldest winter days, hovers near mine as he secures me with strong arms, wedging me in a sitting position against the boulder and the snowy ground. Then one knee is on my legs while he straightens up to peer back down the trail over the rock that conceals us. His thick green coat is the confirmation I need to know he isn’t a guard from Hamen’s. They would be wearing a white coat like me. I don’t know whether to be relieved or terrified. Adrenaline still pumping through me, I strain to free my arms. It isn’t too late to run. I can survive and find the mountain people. But instead of attacking, he bends down and looks into my eyes before letting his hand slip off my mouth and his grip on my shoulder loosens. Soft hazel eyes meet my panicked gaze, and I freeze. Even with the rest of his face covered, I know those eyes. “Thomas!” The name comes out in a burst of white fog from my mouth. He eases off of me and I pull up his mask to reveal his scruffy face, the same one I saw watching me through bars all those days and nights in prison. I want to hold him close like my mother used to hold me—he’s so close anyway. But I hesitate. Thomas isn’t like my mother. What would it feel like to hold him? It feels strange to consider it. “Hush, lassie,” he says. “They’re bound to be right behind us.” At the sound of his voice, I can’t hold back anymore. I throw my arms around him. All the moments of being without him and wishing I’d jumped with him melt between us as he returns my embrace and his breath warms my neck. “What are you doing here?” I check my voice and whisper, “How did you find me? How are you alive? I can’t…” I’m not sure what else to say, where to start. “I’m a tough nut, you know?” He smiles and rubs my raw cheek with his wool glove. Mixed with my tears, the sweet gesture stings my skin, but I don’t care. “I can’t believe you’re alive.” I pull him to me again and bury my face in his shoulder, my head pounding from the fight with the wild man. His strong arms wrap around me, and I hear his voice echo in his chest. “Honestly, sweets, I can’t believe you’re not a walking veggie head. I want to hear all about your adventures as soon as we’re out of these bloody woods. Come on.” Feeling his legs shift, I sit back and he helps me to my feet while scanning the trail behind us again. “We’re leaving a proper mess for them to follow so we’ve got to scurry.” He takes my hand and starts back over his footprints leading farther into the woods. “How did you get out here, anyway? I didn’t expect you to waltz into my arms like a cranking birthday gift.” “I told them I was going for a walk. I know the leader—he was trying to recruit me. He said I could do whatever I wanted, but I overheard him saying that if I didn’t comply they’d roast me. Complete Mind Wipe.” I am rambling now. Must focus. “How did you find me? And who was that man? What was wrong with him?” As if on cue, there’s motion behind us. Down the trail, the beast man moans and sits up. Thomas pushes me behind him, ready to knock the man out again if he approaches, but a twang cuts through the air, and the man falls back to the snow, convulsing. Shock rifle fire. “Come on, no time to chatter.” Thomas pulls my arm, and we run through the brush and trees, ignoring the footprints Thomas made on his way to get me. I can’t help looking back. One man in a white suit is kneeling to examine my attacker. Two others have spotted us and are charging forward, long black shock rifles wagging back and forth in front of their chests. I know what those guns feel like. I know what happens when they catch you. Shudders trip down my spine and I push myself to keep up with Thomas, determined not to lose him this time as we slalom tree trunks and trip through the snow. Another twang rings through the air, and a branch a few feet to my left shatters. “They are catching up,” I say between breaths, feeling fear rise in my throat. “No matter, we’re here.” He looks back at me and slows slightly. “You gonna trust me this time?” “What?”

http://www.dazzledbybooks.com/2019/02/imani-unraveled-release-day-blitz.html

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Change Makers

Of the many uncertainties Americans face today, the future of our health is among the most worrisome. With health-insurance coverage in flux, medical-research funding on the chopping block, and science itself under attack, it’s only natural for us to be concerned about our collective health, which is already less robust than that of people in many other industrialized nations.

Yet there is still reason to believe better times are ahead. Plenty of people are devoting their lives to improving everyone’s well-being, and most of them work outside of government and the insurance industry, where positive changes are often bungled or bogged down.

Meet some of the visionaries who are rethinking health, healthcare, and well-being from the ground up — and inspiring us to take our wellness into our own hands.

Food as Medicine: Jeanne Wallace, PhD, CNC, Oncologist

Jeanne Wallace is committed to fighting cancer with food. In her practice, Nutritional Solutions, she teaches doctors and patients how to support standard cancer treatments with evidence-based nutritional strategies that focus on altering the body’s environment, making it less friendly to tumors.

Her work is rooted in personal experience; several of her  family members are cancer survivors. When her partner, Cheryl Clark, was diagnosed in 1997 with an aggressive brain cancer, Wallace did intensive research and developed a protocol to support Clark’s treatment. Clark reduced her intake of sugar and carbohydrates and employed specific herbs and supplements, all of which boosted the effectiveness of her radiation treatment.

Today, Clark remains well, and Wallace is a sought-after speaker, as well as a respected authority in the burgeoning field of nutritional oncology.

Learn more about Wallace’s work at www.nutritional-solutions.net. 

Feeding Justice: Ron Finley, Founder of The Ron Finley Project

Before he became internationally known as a food activist, Ron Finley was a clothing designer. He had an eye for beauty — and for its absence. In 2010 he looked around his South Los Angeles neighborhood and saw only fast-food joints, liquor stores, and corner shops peddling processed snacks. He calls this “food injustice.”

“You can’t tell me that’s not by design,” Finley argues. “Some people say, ‘If these people wanted to eat healthy food, they could.’ But there’s no healthy food in their neighborhoods to eat, period.” His response? “If they’re not bringing it, let’s grow it!”

Finley started planting vegetables on the city-owned parkway — the strip between the sidewalk and the street in front of his house — offering them free to anyone willing to harvest them. The city ticketed him for “overgrown vegetation.” He refused to pay the fine until better grocery stores were recruited to the neighborhood, and an arrest warrant was issued. With the aid of other activists, Finley convinced the city council to amend the law.

That was the beginning. Finley then turned his emptied swimming pool and the rest of his yard into a colorful, edible garden. “Food is the problem and food is the solution,” he declared in a 2013 TED Talk that went viral. Finley soon became known as the Gangsta Gardener to thousands of justice-seeking green thumbs worldwide.

He’s now working to change the meaning of OG from “original gangsta” to “organic gardener.”

“My thing on the gangsta is to flip that on its head [so] people don’t see it as a negative,” he explains. “Being educated is gangsta; being self-sustaining is gangsta. Being a nerd — that can be gangsta. Because what you’re doing is creating.”

His organization, The Ron Finley Project, continues to promote com-munity self-sufficiency, celebrating the political power of gardening. Finley regularly hears from people in other cities who’ve launched garden projects inspired by his work, and he notes how these spaces can be ideal platforms for widespread change.

“You’ve got to change culture through soil, because the bottom line is, that’s what we all go back to,” he explains. “We turn to soil, and people seem to forget that. That’s not nature out there. We’re nature.”

Watch Finley’s popular 2013 TED Talk at bit.ly/1sVuD84. 

Teaching Doctors to Heal: Victoria Maizes, MD, Integrative Physician

During her medical residency in 1989, Victoria Maizes fell in love — with her patients’ stories.

“I became fascinated with how it was that Mr. X got diabetes, and Ms. Y had terrible health habits but was perfectly healthy,” she says. “I was trying to understand the influences [of life experiences] on health.”

This love affair has had a significant impact on Maizes — and on American medicine. The stories she loved helped her see her patients as whole people and not just their symptoms, which led her to employ a variety of treatment methods. If medication improved someone’s condition, she prescribed it. If meditation would work, she recommended it. And she often counseled for both.

This approach, now known as integrative medicine, considers the environmental, psychological, social, and spiritual influences on illnesses, and it integrates a variety of healing modalities — from antibiotics to acupuncture.

It took some time for Maizes’s broad-minded perspective to catch on in the medical community. She directed strategic education at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, Calif., during the early 1990s, and was eager to offer complementary support for patient health. “There were mind–body programs designed after Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work and parenting and anger-management programs,” she recalls.

Yet she found that many of the patients knew more about these healing practices than their doctors did. So she began sharing her passion for integrative medicine with other physicians.

“Doctors haven’t been trained” to know all the things that can support health, she explains. Without training, they can’t help you. “If you ask your doctor what you should eat, he or she may say, ‘Eat a healthy diet.’ Well, what is a healthy diet?”

Many more physicians can now answer that and other holistic-health questions effectively, thanks to Maizes. When she began directing Dr. Andrew Weil’s integrative-medicine program in Arizona in 2000, it included only four fellows in training. Today she supervises more than 150 fellows and 500 residents each year. Some 1,200 doctors have graduated from the program.

“This approach has [become] an established direction in medicine,” Maizes says. “People can now access this kind of care more easily, and they’re getting the relief they hope for.”

Read Maizes’s articles for patients at www.victoriamaizesmd.com.

Good to the End: BJ Miller, MD, Palliative-Care Physician

BJ Miller rides a motorcycle around San Francisco and camps regularly with his dog. He’s also a triple amputee who lost his left hand and both legs below the knee after an accident in college.

Rather than seeing his condition as a disability, Miller trained himself to view it as a new reality, a specific set of limitations that were nonetheless like the limitations all mortals face. This perspective is part of what makes him a leading palliative-care physician, who is helping to spread the word about the vital importance of quality of life at the end of life — and along the course of serious illness.

He spent five years as the executive director of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, blending hard-won spiritual insight with skillful symptom and pain management, and he now lectures nationwide about the art of end-of-life care.

Watch Miller’s TED Talk on end-of-life issues at bit.ly/1KeX2j5. 

The Write Thing: Aseem Malhotra, Cardiologist, Columnist

When he’s not practicing with the National Health Service in Britain, cardiologist Aseem Malhotra campaigns tirelessly against obesity and heart disease. He’s no shill for the pharmaceutical industry, though. In his columns for the popular English newspaper The Guardian, he illustrates how socioeconomic conditions influence obesity, heart disease, and diet.

His educational campaigns about the risks of sugar and the value of healthy fats, the need for better-quality school food, and the importance of greater transparency and responsibility in healthcare have brought these issues to a mainstream audience.

He also writes about personalized medicine and improving communication between doctors and patients, so he’s changing the message from the ground up.

Learn more at www.doctoraseem.com. 

Taking the Next Steps: T. Morgan Dixon, Cofounder of GirlTrek

“Black women are dying faster than any other group of people in America from preventable illnesses like heart disease, diabetes, stroke. Heart disease alone kills 137 black women every day. For us, that sounded an alarm.”

T. Morgan Dixon is explaining why she cofounded GirlTrek, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit and nationwide public-health movement that promotes wellness through organized walking. The group’s 100,000-plus members are African-American women and girls who’ve committed to regular 30-minute group hikes. (Research shows that daily walks can cut the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes by half.) The group issues monthly challenges to the walkers — to double their distance, for instance, or walk mindfully — and encourages them to establish new walking groups of their own.

Dixon worked as an educational consultant before founding GirlTrek in 2012 with a college friend, digital-media professional and social-justice activist Vanessa Garrison. “GirlTrek started with two friends,” explains Dixon. “Now there are over 100,000.”

The health issues they address are complex, Dixon notes. Obesity in the black community is connected to chronic poverty, lack of access to healthy food, and the fact that many black women lack sufficient leisure time to work out at a gym. “And there’s a history of zoning that’s denied African Americans access to green space,” she adds.

Dixon emphasizes that GirlTrek is not about vanity; its goal is wellness. “I think women of all shapes and sizes are incredibly beautiful,” she says. “This is about living well and living for our kids.”

Their focus on community health is also rooted in African-American history, Dixon says, when “women walked for change.” GirlTrek’s presiding spirit is Harriet Tubman: The abolitionist firebrand not only walked out of slavery herself, but returned multiple times to guide others to freedom on foot. Tubman lived vigorously into her 90s.

“We’re concerned with reclaiming the streets of our neighborhoods,” Dixon continues. “A walking group becomes kind of a neighborhood watch in sneakers, right? Then you want to tackle a community garden. Then you want to tackle a dangerous intersection. Then you want to tackle other things in your neighborhood to make it safer and better.”

Watch Dixon and Garrison’s TED Talk at bit.ly/2qFr62x.

Leading the Way: Abdul El-Sayed, PhD, Public-Health Advocate

At 33, epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed has earned a doctorate from Oxford, taught public health at Columbia University, and served Detroit as the youngest health commissioner of any major U.S. city. He’s largely credited with rebuilding a department shuttered during the city’s 2013 bankruptcy.

“After medical school, I was a lot more interested in health policy, and the reasons why people get sick in the first place, than what I could do for them after they got sick,” El-Sayed says. He wanted to address the “pretty drastic health disparity” he saw in our society.

As Detroit’s health commissioner, he witnessed stark evidence of this disparity: The average life expectancy of a Detroit citizen was 10 years less than a suburban resident living 30 minutes away. Detroit children are four times more likely than other U.S. kids to be exposed to lead.

As commissioner, El-Sayed focused on seven critical outcomes: infant mortality, teen pregnancy, lead poisoning, asthma, poor vision, “misnutrition” (malnutrition and obesity), and elderly isolation. He saw that physical health couldn’t be treated as separate from social and economic conditions.

“Public health has a lot more to do with all of the things that allow people the best opportunities in their lives,” he explains. “Access to a high-quality education and then a good, stable job that pays a living wage, that puts healthy food on the table, and [that] allows people to live in a walkable neighborhood and put a roof over their heads. These are what shape health and disease.”

Despite broader challenges in his community, El-Sayed can point to some significant public-health victories. He led a successful fight to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, instituted lead testing of Detroit’s water (to avoid another Flint), and created a program to provide free eyeglasses to schoolkids.

More recently, he’s taken his experiences in public service into the political arena, running for governor of Michigan in November. That campaign illustrated his ongoing commitment to the work of healing and uniting communities in a time of rigid political polarization.

“The thing about this moment is that we have to recognize that we’re all in this together,” he says. “If we fail to do that, our challenges will persist. There’s real courage being demanded of us.”

Groundswell: Betti Wiggins, School Nutrition Director

When Betti Wiggins became director of the Office of School Nutrition in the Detroit Public Schools in 2012, the district’s challenges were substantial: a dwindling economic base, a shrinking population, schools closing.

But where many saw only decline, she saw an opportunity for a revolution. Specifically, a revolution in how kids eat at school.

Wiggins grew up on a Michigan farm and moved to Detroit in her teens. After leaving to serve as a school-food-program administrator in Washington, D.C., and other cities, she returned home, where she connected her childhood farming experience with her adult administration skills. In her view, urban agriculture was the solution to Detroit’s school-nutrition problems.

“How do you build communities back up?” she asks. “Well, you can do something sustainable like gardens.”

Detroit was already teeming with urban farmers growing food in their yards and on vacant lots, and this inspired Wiggins. “When the city closed 140 schools, I saw it as an opportunity to do something with some of those playgrounds and ball fields,” she explains.

In 2011 Wiggins created the Detroit School Garden Collaborative, a network of some 80 gardens on the grounds of closed (and open) schools. In place of lunches built around deep-fried corn dogs and other dishes that Wiggins calls “carnival food,” students began eating zucchini, spinach, and tomatoes from the district’s own gardens.

She instituted free breakfast and low-cost dinner programs while extending the free-lunch program to all students, regardless of income, so poor kids wouldn’t feel stigmatized. Meanwhile, she supervised the sale of surplus produce to charter and parochial schools. And, moved by her own vivid memories of her family’s unsold produce going to waste, Wiggins contracted with local farmers, creating a thriving secondary market for their crops.

Wiggins is now at the helm of the school-lunch program in Houston, a city with far more resources than Detroit. Still, nearly a quarter of households there lack sufficient food, and she hopes to make a dent in that number.

While she’s rightfully proud of the numerous awards she’s won, including one from the James Beard Foundation, Wiggins says she’s inspired by encounters like the one she had in a Detroit grocery store. She overheard a student say to her mother, “Ma, get those avocados, because we’ve got to learn how to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. I’ll show you how to make guacamole.”

Get the full story at https://experiencelife.com/article/change-makers/