#:3

[crazysnor1ax]

Here for all yours werekrakens (insert here a photo of werewolf biscuits can and a cake looking like a anime meat with a bone made of white cookie)

Nothing like some good treats to keep both the krakens and non-krakens entertained on a full moon!

[rowanisawriter]

writer q&a

thanks for the tag @luvwich i love talking about myself lmao

tagging… @mashamorevvna @yourworsttotebag @swordbisexual no pressure

When did you start writing?

10 or 11 handwriting a three part series in notebooks lol i still remember the plot of my first book which was basically xmen AU. fic writing also started around that time

Are there different themes or genres you enjoy reading than what you write?

not really, my writing and my taste in reading usually align. even poetry which i read a lot of but don’t write, somehow still sneaks into my writing because i like making things read pretty

Is there a writer you want to emulate or get compared to often?

idk about fic but for published authors i like sally rooney and her character work, and i also love t. s. eliot’s rhythmic style in poetry, im always trying to emulate them

Can you tell me a bit about your writing space?

i have a toddler to the answer so this for now is my phone on the couch or in my bed in the middle of the night lmao. i’ve learned how to write under weird circumstances, but hopefully once she gives back some of the mental capacity she takes from me daily then i’ll sit at a table or something

What's your most effective way to muster up a muse?

can’t do it easily lol it comes to me in visions, usually after i read something or see a piece of art but if it’s not there it’s not there

Are there any recurring themes in your writing? Do they surprise you?

i write a lot about religion… no that’s not surprising…. i also write a lot about love… that’s not surprising either lol

What is your reason for writing?

i like stories a lot, and i like being praised, so writing stories and having people read them checks two boxes for me lol

Is there any specific comment or type of comment you find particularly motivating?

all comments are precious, but comments where people find something that i didn’t consciously put into a fic those are my favorite comments. i put a lot of myself into everything i write, sometimes i write things i don’t think about, when someone points it out it feels very personal (good)

How do you want to be thought about by your readers?

hope i don’t come across as insane, i want to be aloof and interesting but then people find me on tumblr and learn the truth

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a writer?

hopefully emotion, i focus a lot on that instead of setting or plot most of the time so if i get emotion right then that’s good, as long as i can make someone feel something then they’re compelled to continue reading (conversely when i am reading something and don’t feel any emotional connection to the thing then i put it down)

How do you feel about your own writing?

i like it very much, it’s the exact thing i want to read, and it was a very long road getting here to my true voice and style. i reread my own work constantly i really like it

When you write, are you influenced by what others might enjoy reading, or do you write purely for yourself, or a mix of both?

i can only write for myself, the motivation to write is only there if it’s something i want to write, even challenges and prompts i struggle with because there is some aspect of “this isn’t truly my idea” that i struggle with. i’ve written things that just aren’t popular (weird ship, quiet fandom, etc) but i wrote it anyway because i wanted to. obvs i want to be read otherwise i wouldn’t post online but i have a good audience now so usually no matter what i write it does get read anyway, so may as well just write what i want lol

[bythepen98]

Doodle || Rarepair || Shigadeku 🩶💚

Didn't have a set backstory while drawing this.

Could be a scene from that other Shigadeku piece where they would sneak out and meet whenever they had the chance Tomura finding ways to sneak in Deku's dorm and they'd either chill there or he'd wisk Deku away to another place for the night, but mostly I just wanted to draw something cute-angst (bc lbr ships like this always have a layer of heavy angst that I don't like to think about :'D)

On an unrelated note, I've decided to continue drawing and posting pen sketches/doodles whenever I'm too busy on my tablet working on non fanart stuff. It'd be a good excuse to fill up my sketchbook plus I don't want to neglect my trad skills just because my main focus rn is improving my digital art.

[rustingcat]

tagged by @inkedroplets who tagged me in a few things now, and I forgot to answer some of them. Shame on me, but thanks for the tag, darling:)

1. What sort of content do you create, and what is the thing you’ve made that you’re most proud of?

I started with art, then began writing, then started animating, and recently uploaded a fanvid 😅

I'm proud of them all because they are all part of the progress 😌

2. What fandom(s) do you create for?

Supergirl. I'm counting my Sadie/Saskia vid as supercorp.

3. What is your current favourite ship (or brotp if you prefer), and how controversial is it?

Supercorp. And apparently a lot of people don't like them because they hated supergirl? (At least according to tumblr tags in polls. But those people also accuse them of being too straight...)

4. For your answer to question 3, are they canon?

They are in my heart. Also, I feel that their last conversation was as close to canon as they could get.

5. What was your first fandom, and how old were you?

I was deep into Harry Potter for a long while in my life. That's what got me into fanfiction and tumblr. I still have a sweet spot for what it represented to me in my childhood and the stuff I took away from it despite the actions of some extreme lady.

6. What is your most unhinged fandom creation to date?

My Twilight Au fic 🤣

Was written as a parody, but somehow ended up being way too wholesome.

The power of pasta is my one crack fic, so there's also that.

7. Do you remember what started you off creating fandom content, and if so, what was it?

I was an avid consumer for years, but it was all thanks to the Supergirl fandom that I dared to try and create something. I was in the process of coming out and accepting myself for who I am, which, despite being in a very open and accepting environment and family, was really hard on me. Both the show, and especially the fandom, were what helped me not only to come out but also to see it in a positive light. It made me understand the meaning of pride, and I am forever grateful for that. That's why I decided to dedicate my time to creating stuff myself as thanks to this amazing community and to do my best to keep it active.♥️

8. Do you let people you know in real life see your fandom creations?

Some, yes. I have a few friends who know I write, but had not read any of my stuff. I have a few I share my art with, though.

9. How do you feel about fanworks of fanworks? Has anyone ever made something based on a thing you made?

Someone wrote a fic based on my art a while ago, and I'm still excited about it!

10. What feeling do you most often try to evoke with your creations?

Depends on the content. Each piece has its own purpose. I try to aim for fluff, but I've been told I accidentally write a lot of angst... oops?

11. Has someone ever paid your work a compliment (in any form) that has stuck with you, and what was it?

I'm always excited when fandom friends tell me they like my stuff. Or just anyone in general. It just warms my heart.

12. What’s your favourite thing someone else has made that you’ve seen in the last 24 hours (and link it if you can find it again!)

Have you read the most recent space log update? It's pretty cool...

13. Give a small sneak preview of something you’re working on right now (eg a couple of sentences of fic from a WIP, a gif set theme, a small piece of a larger picture, whatever you feel happy to share)

"Alex, you're saying that as if we're not literally standing at the entrance of a school for fairies." Kara said as she rested her hand on the handle of her large blue suitcase.

"Fair point."

"It is ridiculous, isn't it? Like, fairy collage, it just sounds so…"

"Bizarre?" Alex raised an eyebrow as a small chuckle escaped her lips.

Kara sheepishly nodded.

"Well, yes. Very. But that's our lives now, I suppose," Alex shrugged and shoved her hands in her jeans's pockets.

"You mean my life. You're going to badass school for ass kicking," Kara teased her sister.

Because apparently I'm not done making AUs based on questionable IPs.

And a bit of my card game AU:

Lena was the one to drag Andea to sneak out of school for a change. Only unlike her best friend, Lena didn't drag her out to a party or to drink alcohol, but instead to the local game shop where she could learn more about that mysterious game. Andrea wasn't as excited as her, but reluctantly agreed (if only to get out of trigonometry class). Fight for Justice, while being a bit too cheesy, Lena couldn't deny the strange allure of the name. She was fascinated to learn the different ways the game could change from moment to moment, the various objectives one can approach to win the game, and she couldn't help but absolutely adore the art on each and every card.

14. Have you ever seen/read anything made by the person who tagged you? If so, what was it and what was your favourite thing about it? (pick a favourite if there are several)

Rich girl with issues is a masterpiece, and you should all go read it!

15. Do you leave comments on fandom works, and if so how would you describe your comment style?

I try to always comment, and especially on stuff I like. I don't think I have a specific style tho😅

16. How many works in progress do you currently have? Will you finish them all?

I have about 12 that I actively started, but more that are in the concept phase. Ideally, I'll finish them all eventually.

17. what’s the longest it’s ever taken you to finish a fandom project?

It's been almost 2 years since I started The Art Of The Game. I'm close to the end, but it's been a while...

18. Describe the thing you made most recently in a way that is technically true, but also completely misleading. Link the thing if it’s published!

The hottest new trailer for the film we all have been waiting for;)

19. Do you ever engage with fanworks for a fandom you’re not in? Which one(s) and how did you get into it?

I feel like a foreigner when I see stuff from other fandoms, and I usually don't know enough about it to interact with it.

20. Recommend a fan work from your fandom to your followers

@awaitingrain has some really amazing artwork with adorable chibi designs! I'd recommend checking out her stuff!

Suggested tag list, but there are no rules here, follow your heart.

@eqt-95 @fazedlight @autisticlenaluthor @snowydragonscave @missluthorwillseeyounow @luthordamnvers have fun;)

[inkedroplets]

tagged by @sideguitars Thank you for the tag!

1. What sort of content do you create, and what is the thing you’ve made that you’re most proud of?

I guess I've mostly focused on offramps from canon and expanding the scope of the world that I'm playing around in

2. What fandom(s) do you create for?

Supergirl for the most part but I have a few other fandoms I'm dabbling in: Warrior Nun, MCU and Killing Eve

3. What is your current favourite ship (or brotp if you prefer), and how controversial is it?

Supercorp. I guess it's more controversial than I ever realized? I've somehow been able to avoid or outright not see any of the discourse online which is probably for the best.

4. For your answer to question 3, are they canon?

No but what is canon?

5. What was your first fandom, and how old were you?

I would say either Xena or The X-Files. I think I'd have to give the win to the X-Files because I was much more certain that I would be abducted by aliens

6. What is your most unhinged fandom creation to date?

Unhinged... Probably the MCU/Supergirl crossover I'm writing now. Lena gets yeeted to Earth-616. Not many days you get to see Matt Murdock and Kara Danvers having a conversation or Lena dancing with Peggy...

7. Do you remember what started you off creating fandom content, and if so, what was it?

Funnily enough, I was quite ignorant about the existence of fandom content. I've always liked writing so it was a very short hop to start making stories that I wanted to see inbetween the bad poetry and short stories.

8. Do you let people you know in real life see your fandom creations?

My gf reads my stuff but beyond that I'm quiet private when it comes to my fandom creations.

9. How do you feel about fanworks of fanworks? Has anyone ever made something based on a thing you made?

I feel like at its core that's what fandom is essentially. So to see these offshoots of someone's own work it's for the most part flattering. But I do see the other side of the coin where someone might feel protective of their work and find it difficult to give their blessing to it.

10. What feeling do you most often try to evoke with your creations?

I don't know if there would be a feeling above any of the others that I'm trying to evoke with my writing. I guess if I had to pick I might say I hope that it makes you cry. Angsty angsty tears

11. Has someone ever paid your work a compliment (in any form) that has stuck with you, and what was it?

I've been very blessed to have a handful of people create art for some of my fics and that's maybe the biggest compliment I could ever hope to get. To see it come to life in a different way is really magical. But I would say that every compliment has really meant so much to me.

12. What’s your favourite thing someone else has made that you’ve seen in the last 24 hours (and link it if you can find it again!)

I've been very blessed to get to see snippets from @sideguitars about fics they have in progress and those have all just been so deliciously angsty.

13. Give a small sneak preview of something you’re working on right now (eg a couple of sentences of fic from a WIP, a gif set theme, a small piece of a larger picture, whatever you feel happy to share)

I'll give a grab bag of things in various states of chaos

Snippet from my Lena learns magic from Johanna Constantine fic

“Where the fuck is it?” the woman asked. She advanced on Lena, looming over her. Not content to simply tower over Lena she leaned over her and seized her by the shoulders, hard as if she meant to shake her if she didn’t get a favorable answer. Whatever anger she might have felt at being spoken to in such a way or to have this stranger lay hands on her was nothing compared to the fear that still held her in place. It had robbed her of not only her strength but it had stolen whatever scathing remark she would have normally had at the ready in response to the woman’s question. “Where’s what?” Lena managed to ask in a voice that at least sounded mostly like her own.  “The grimoire or scroll or whatever magical thing you’ve decided to fuck around with that lured a demon here.” The woman examined Lena carefully, a flicker of dull recognition coming alight in her eyes. “Fuck me,” she grumbled. “You’re Lena Luthor, aren’t you? Yeah, it’s you. I’d recognize that jawline anywhere.” The woman ran her hand along her own face in what Lena had to assume was a mocking gesture. “Why is it you rich people always want to muck around with the occult? You can’t be that bloody bored.”

The Lucifer Crossover that I don't feel is good enough to share

"Yes, I remember," Lena said sourly. "When I asked the devil for a favor I was under the assumption that the eventual repayment would come much later and be far less annoying.” "As did I,” Lucifer said, making a hard right that sent a bolt of pain through Lena’s temple. “Usually when I call in favors they’re a lot more fun for me. I’m the devil, not some wish-granting fairy-godmother.” He appeared to shudder at the thought and focused his attention back on the road. “I can assure you that Linda is the best of the best. She’s been my therapist for years now…” “So,” Lena said slowly, rattling the pill caddy before tossing it back into his lap. “This is you after years of therapy?”

and a peek at the MCU/Supergirl crossover brain rot

“You got my message,” Lena said, relieved to have an excuse to put her pen down. “I got your message,” Lillian said. “I also saw the news.” A flicker of annoyance passed over her face and Lena instinctively braced herself for whatever venom would come spilling out of her mouth. “Why?” she asked. She tilted her head at an insouciant angle as if trying to suss out Lena’s reasoning before she could answer. “I didn’t think people would sleep very well at night if they learned that out of nowhere that the sky ripped open and aliens from another Earth destroyed half the city.”

14. Have you ever seen/read anything made by the person who tagged you? If so, what was it and what was your favourite thing about it? (pick a favourite if there are several)

I really really love(d) Aftermath I just love how you brought Andrea into the fold (and called out that stupid nickname they gave her in the show)

15. Do you leave comments on fandom works, and if so how would you describe your comment style?

I'm getting a lot better at it, just as I stopped reading so many fics. I like to pick out certain passages that really resonated with me or just thought were really well-written and tell the author why.

16. How many works in progress do you currently have? Will you finish them all?

I have about 15 WIP's that I really want to finish and a handful more that I'm more iffy on. The plan is to finish them all but if I'll ever actually do it... I hope so though.

17. what’s the longest it’s ever taken you to finish a fandom project?

I'm too embarrassed to look at the last time I updated rich girl. Years. Or Year. Anyway, too fucking long. But I'm just about done. Sorry. Life was kind of kicking my ass majorly for a while.

18. Describe the thing you made most recently in a way that is technically true, but also completely misleading. Link the thing if it’s published!

Define recently. All I See is You Lena's magic derails game night

19. Do you ever engage with fanworks for a fandom you’re not in? Which one(s) and how did you get into it?

I'm quite lucky to get a wide variety of fanart that crosses my dash so I'll engage to the point of gushing about it in the tags.

20. Recommend a fan work from your fandom to your followers

This very recent fic, To Want and to Have and to Hold that's caught my full attention by @eqt-95 Really can't say enough nice things about it and am eagerly awaiting an update

Suggested tag list, but there are no rules here, follow your heart.

I hate tagging people. i feel like I'm bothering them but I will poke @rustingcat since I always want to hear more about what they're working on

[bonezhead]

platonic wammy boy headcanons

amazing art by @valfeathers ! go check out his account cuz he only posts death note ( loser lol imagine ) ( i got permission from him to use this piece ) i decided to post some of my own headcanons cuz my ego is large and i like seeing myself on the wammy's house/boys tags warning: i don't have a specific problem with any of the characters/ships on the wammy boys tag and i completely understand comfort ships. i am in no way trying to force my headcanons onto you and i respect your opinion! i swear i'm just trying to write some platonic stuff cuz i don't see it on the tags a lot. i don't want to get into any fights and disagreements over these and i understand that this might be out of character but i still find it fun to imagine a situation where these three can be brothers in peace cuz they're my comfort characters <3 however, i appreciate mentions of any critiques or plotholes in my headcanons as long as it's civil and respectful in addition if you want to add onto these headcanons or tell me your headcanons my messages are open and i'd appreciate it a lot! i love these guys and i really wanna read more of them :) 1- probably the most common headcanon but i think that whilst successors have their own rooms matt normally sneaks out and has sleepovers/study sessions in mello's dorm cuz he's an extroverted weirdo and gets lonely in his room sometimes likewise, mello and matt sneak out of wammy's house to go to concerts and festivals nearby, the longest they've probably escaped for is a week, maybe a week and a half and they wake up on their assigned street bench with roger towering over them 2- i see a lot of tropes in media where if someone doesn't like the food they just feed it to their dog when the parents/cooks aren't looking. (idk if this happens in real life BUT) i think mello and matt would find random food in the wammy canteen like plain crisps or desserts or cereals or bread, stuff that's not too overwhelming for near. cuz mello is afraid of being nice or something he would always be so dramatic about it he'd be like "someone stepped on my foot while i was getting your coco pops, you owe me your life now". 2.5- near would get those small pieces of side bread and a jacket potato for lunch & which was probably his autism-safe-food for 99% of the time in wammy's house, but sometimes he'd get something extremely cursed like plain pasta and cheese. and that's how he cheated the wammy's house nutritional system. 3- punishments in wammy's house would vary from detention to cleaning dishes or scraping litter. they would also have to do room service, for example near probably corrected a teacher's method and had to clean out mello's room. matt and mello would take advantage of lunch helper duties to sneak out chocolate, chips and other stuff. if they felt like it they'd pick up some stuff for near as well. those are the only ones i can remember off the top of my head, but i will make a part two eventually about the successor program and how each wammy boy got into it, the benefits and how long it lasts, thank you so much for reading this much if you got here!

[maidenvault]

Hiya! 💕 Could I please have 🍓🍄🍬🦴🐚 for the Writers Truth or Dare ask game? 😊

Thanks for the ask! 🥰

how did you get into writing fanfiction? Going by a loose definition of fanfic, my sister and I wrote a Star Wars story when we were in grade school and I filled up many notebooks with a never-ending Animorphs one later myself. So when I got into my first internet fandom, Roswell, and came across fanfic on the most popular fansite, it was a no-brainer that of course I wanted to do this and I was off running with it immediately.

share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings Throughout much of their friendship, especially early on, Zuko and Katara are unspokenly conscious of having some level of attraction to each other with no real wish to act on it. But they grow closer than ever after they've been without their spouses for some time and end up getting married in old age.

post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character Kotetsu Kaburagi is a really flawed guy and not the greatest dad because of it, and the more significant arc in the original series is his own, not Barnaby's.

is there a piece of media that inspires your writing?

So many Hayao Miyazaki movies were formative for me and elements of them sneak into my ideas for original writing, but he's more of an inspiration to me as a person and creator himself. Miyazaki often despairs over the state of the industry and the seeming futility of making art in a world that's headed for disaster in so many ways, and in recent years he's had to reconcile with his own limitations as he gets older. (In the documentary Never Ending Man he says at one point, "If I try to focus like I used to I get exhausted, so I just fool around"...and fuck, at not half his age I already feel that way a lot lol.) In the end he just can't seem to not work no matter how he reasons with himself that it's time to give it up. His work is a constant demonstration that the value of life, and of art, is in humanity's drive to just keep going and keep creating even in the face of apparent hopelessness. It's that leper in Princess Mononoke saying, "The world is cursed, but still we find reasons to keep on living," a moment that always moves me like just about nothing else in film. It's an idea that has haunted almost his entire filmography and he still has no easy answers, there's just the work.

do you like or dislike surprises? In fiction they're great. Irl they better be good surprises.

[kelocitta]

This post has grown far outside of its original scope and lots of people have commented on things I do and don't agree with, so I want to say one last piece on this topic: First and foremost: It is fine to want to grow your audience, and to study and implement ways to do that. Its also perfectly fine to feel frustrated when your work goes largely unnoticed despite your efforts, or even frustrated at how people who seem to be in a significantly better place than you complain about numbers that would make your day. These are understandable feelings, and I don't think people should dismiss them. The system you have to work within when putting content online is unfair and random, its going to feel unfair and random- gambling doesn't feel great until you get payout. This is not a post to say just get over it and be happy with what you got, because sometimes what you got fucking sucks. And for a lot of people this isn't just a fun hobby but something that puts food on the table, and they are desperately trying to get a boost to help secure that. But what it is a post is about how most people do not mean to talk down to you about this kind of thing, or intend to come off as smug about it- and are in fact earnestly trying to tell you to watch out for a type mindset that can easily sneak up on you and make the entire process of being a creator completely miserable. A lot of artists who feel completely massive compared to you fell into this trap and maybe they recovered, but a lot of them don't and fret about these same things constantly, despite the change in position. A lot of them jumped ship and never looked back. When you exercise for a long time, its good to step back and take a breather to stretch and rest. Its an important pause that gives you a break and helps protect against long term damage from strain. You need to be willing to do that mentally with art and content creation for the same reason. Its not just about numbers equating to self worth or quality (although thats perhaps one of the most common problems people have)- theres other ways it manifests like a hyper-focus on what the "well performing" posts are, a desire to seek audience approval in a way that has you rewriting how you engage with your own work or what work you deem acceptable to make. And while you can do that for a little bit, and it may even pay out- its not sustainable long term. You will burn out, you will hate creating, you will hate posting, you will hate even thinking about drawing- eventually the exhaustion will hit. We shouldn't pretend like art is strictly fun and games (because its not, for many its a job or the closest they have to one, and that sometimes means doing things that aren't fun) just like we shouldn't pretend like these pitfalls aren't a legitimate issue- they can be as debilitating as wrist damage. But just being aware of them and taking small steps to re-ground yourself can go a long way. Check your follower counts every couple month instead of every day. Check how many notes you got on that piece after a week instead of after an hour. Remind yourself that 10 reblogs is still 10 whole people, visualize notes as people in a room instead of a nebulous concept. Dont post for a bit but still draw. Try to appreciate likes as their own thing instead of as "worthless" engagement. Find an extension to hid the numbers, etc, etc. Its hard to say what might help because everyones different- but just take time to step back and make sure some element of what your doing is still fun and for you- even if it cant always always be all of it.

Small artists you need to understand that when you see an artist who you think has 'made it' tells you not to worry about the numbers and to not fret about getting more likes than reblogs they are not telling you it because they think you are stupid for caring or because they dont need to network to survive they are very likely telling you that because they have witnessed first hand the way the numbers game tears people to shreds in terms of mental health and motivation

[kataang-week]

Special thanks to Mod Atarah ( @penguinsledder​ ) for the lovely gif!

What is Kataang Week?

Kataang Week is when we, as a corner of the fandom, celebrate the ship Kataang! The prompts for Kataang Week 2022 were selected through five rounds of voting over the last few weeks and all prompts were submitted by Tumblr users.

Cool, when is it?

Summer Kataang Week 2022 starts on Monday, July 25th - seven weeks from today - and ends on Monday, August 1st.  

How do I participate?

The most common ways to participate are by creating art or writing a fic and posting it online. Some people try and create something for every day while others only fill one or two prompts.  

As always, we want to reassure you that it’s perfectly okay not to do every prompt! We just hope to have lovely pieces to share on each day.

But I can’t draw or write!

That’s totally fine - there are more ways to participate! You can sing a song, create a graphic, write a poem - just about anything really. You can also show your support by reblogging and liking other people’s contributions.

What are the prompts?

The following will be the running order for Kataang Week 2022:

Admiration (physical features, strengths, etc.) - Monday July 25th

Jealousy / “Just Friends” - Tuesday July 26th

Sneaking Off - Wednesday July 27th

Drunk Kataang - Thursday July 28th

Power Couple - Friday July 29th

Quiet Moments / Healing Techniques - Saturday July 30th

Wait for Me - Sunday July 31st

Free Day - Monday August 1st

*Jealousy and “Just Friends,” as well as Quiet Moments and Healing Techniques were tied with votes, so instead of flipping a coin/deciding on my own, I am including both tied prompts as options. You can incorporate one or both prompts for each day. And I am also doing this because I see no advantage to any additional rounds of voting and further delays.

**And as always, there is a Free Day at the end of the week.  You can use this day to post anything you’d like!  It can be a prompt that didn’t receive enough votes or something you’ve been wanting to work on, anything goes!

How should I tag my work?

The easiest way for us to find your work so we can reblog it to this blog is by using the tag “kataang week”. Using “kataang” and “kataangtag” also help. You must tag one of the three in your first five tags otherwise it doesn’t appear in the search.

Sometimes even properly tagged posts may not appear when we search the tags, so if you do not see your content reblogged, please let us know.

Once we’ve reblogged it to this blog we add our own tags (a prompt tag and a user tag) for easy organization.  This means we can find all the work for one prompt or all the work from one user in one easy click (this also means that if you have changed your username since participating last year you need to let us know so we can update your tag!).

Can I post my stuff other places online too?

Of course you can!

Why seven weeks?  Is that enough time?

Traditionally, we like to provide our content creators seven weeks (for the seven prompts) to create quality content. Kataang Week is also traditionally held in the last week of July.  

If you are unable to complete a prompt in time, please do not fret.  You can alert this blog by mentioning it in your post (ex. @kataang-week​ ) or messaging one of the mods and your content will still be shared even if it is a week (or a month - or sometimes more!) late.

We also like to post WIP for Kataang Week and encourage everyone else to do so as well - we reblog it here for motivation!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, don’t hesitate to send an ask. Don’t forget to reblog this as well to help spread the word!

Good luck, Kataangers, and happy content creating! :) - The Mods

[valenhell]

From the studio that brought you “I can’t find good Byler fics in the ao3 tag”, comes:

"The Definitive Byler fic rec list"

Literally no one asked for this but because I spent the majority of last year (...and 2019, and 2018...) reading byler fics and coping with life, I thought I’d make a list of some of my absolute favorites. 

The other day I was basically starving for some byler fics and the angel @magicalfairy provided me with some of her faves so I thought I’d do the same, because I love reading, and I love all of these fics and I appreciate their writers💗 And fic writers in general, come on!

- This is a mix of long works and one-shots/short stories. - Everything is mostly fluff with a tad of angst and a lot of internalized homophobia conflict.  - Every fic is completed, except for the ones I mention that they are not. - I try my best to lay out the stories in a way that I won’t spoil you the plot but also warning you of some stuff you might don’t like. Either way, all of these fics are correctly tagged by their respective authors/owners, so read at your own risk. For better understanding, in between brackets I denote Rating, Words and quantity of Chapters. - I feel like I should clarify, none of these are narrated in the singular first person. None of that “And I told him...”, no. 

Long fics

a dream always the same (T, 99k, 35 chapters) What happened in those few weeks between the Battle of Starcourt and the Byers leaving Hawkins. Literally a satisfying and very needed fill in of season three, with a good dose of Mike’s thoughts and conflict. Mike’s characterization is specially amazing in this one. The writing style is amazing and I know the author put everything into making it historically accurate, and it was really sweet. You probably read it, it’s by the amazing sevensided here on Tumblr🧡

Spring Break (T, 120k, 14/15 chapters) The slowburn of my dreams. Lots of internalized conflict and conflict with each other. Conflict within the Party (uhh kind of), conflict with Mike and Will. Byers family has moved and the kids are visiting! Chaos. Characterization is on point. Yeah, I know it’s unfinished, but the fourteenth chapter actually serves as a pretty nice ending. 

This is where it starts (M, 148.8k, 24 chapters) Aged up characters. The Party is in college and Will disappears again, but now it’s different. Mike knows he didn’t vanish from thin air, and the discovery he and the Party end up making is pretty insane. Mystery solving/fantasy/third dimension, throw in a bit of D&D and Mike realizing some shit, and you get this marvelous fic. It’s a breath of fresh air. The world building is definitely one of the elements that stands out the most, because it’s very nicely described, it sounds like a dream and it’s completely immersive. Absolute gem of a fic. 

there’s a Starman waiting in the sky (M, 30.6k, 8 chapters) Do I need to say anything? Will is out there living his best life and Mike realizes that wow, umm, maybe his best friend looks a bit too nice with that costume... and wait, is he getting horny? It’s actually really fun and sexy.

The Evening Speaks (T, 23k, 7 chapters) In where Mike is a late-night college radio host and Will is the art student that stays up till late to catch up with Wheeler on the Mic. They flirt through songs y’all, this one is really sweet. 

heads or tails? (E, 24k, 3 chapters) Aged up characters. I know most people don’t enjoy sex in fics and with specific characters but this one is insanely well written. It’s a slowburn that commits to the tension and with every word you are grasping and anticipating their next move. I think you can find the author here on Tumblr as yousaidyes🧡

The Man of Average (M, 56.7k, 5/? chapters) Aged up characters. No but you don’t understand, the writing here is absolute gourmet. The story is exciting as well, it’s super interesting. Weirdly enough, for being very aged up characters, they are well characterized but they don’t feel like teenagers. They are naturally Mike and Will. The author really captured Mike and Will’s essence. I know, it’s unfinished and it’s updated very rarely, but this is the typical fic you can’t believe someone just posted on the internet for free. I will say though, I think it’s definitely not for everyone. Read at your own risk.

Heartstrings (E, 82.8k, 24/? chapters) Aged up characters. By the same author of The Man of Average. A collection of memories, the road to Mike and Will’s happy ever after. And fucking hell!!!!! You’ll cry and get angry, you’ll cheer for them, then you’ll want to crash their faces together because god dammit you love each other!!! But yeah, same thing here. The writing and the way the story is laid out as a nonlinear narrative is brilliant. And I also think this is one of the best Will versions I’ve read. The author might as well be the og creator of this two characters tbh. You can find the author here as mylesimeblr🧡

Sinners behind the walls (T, 1.5k, 1/1) And because I can’t stop recommending this author, a little thing of Mike tormenting himself but also being too deeply committed to Will. 

The Red Envelope series (T/E, 167K, two completed works) Something happens that Will thought was impossible and from there, pure drama and romance. Anything by this author has the potential to become your absolute favorite fic, but this series in particular is amazing. I doubt that any of you haven’t read this, but it doesn’t hurt to put it in this list. I’m pretty sure the author is serendipitous-magic on Tumblr🧡

A New Fight series (T, 91k, two completed works, one WIP) And finally the Star Wars AU that we all needed. But this isn’t your typical “Mike is Han”, “Will is Leia” and “El is Luke”, it’s way more interesting than that, and the author has appropriated the Star Wars world like no other. I’ll admit I’m not a 100% fluent in SW lore but this is amazing to me either way. This author is also on Tumblr, tea-for-one-please🧡

- Yes, most of these are (if not all), in a way, canon compliant/canonverse/canon continuation into fanon. (In a way)

One-shots and short stories

Sundae for Two, Please (G, 4.8k) Steve being the supportive friend and older brother these kids collectively need. (not Jonathan erasure, we love him). Steve is very sweet himself, and this little cute thing through his POV is gorgeous. Yes, it’s byler.

Backstage (T, 10k, 2/2) Jonathan, you forgot to mention to Will how hot your new band’s guitarist is, dude. Now he’s hyperventilating and weirdly flirting with him in the corner. Background Stonathan because why not.

102 Peach Street (G, 3.8k) Established relationship, but not only that, they are married :’’))) PURE fluff. Extreme fluffiness. Diabetes. 

sweatshirts and bottled up feelings (T, 3.2k) Or, Mike thinks that the sweatshirt Will wears looks insanely good on him. And kitchens are for lovers. 

kiss it better (T, 16.3k) Basically one of the best character studies of a few precise moments of Mike and Will’s relationship and feelings. 

will wonders ever cease (T, 11.3k) #i ship will and happiness. Omfg what a beautiful piece of fanfic. Will centric, this kid really deserves all the good in the world.

The Calm After the Storm (T, 1.6k) Tooth rotting fluff, boyfriends in love. Boyfriends being lazy, cuddling, love words, kisses. Boys loving each other’s company... Basically, Mike and Will in their element. What more can you ask for?

neither of us ready to let go (T, 4.8k) That scene from season three, but a bit of a fix it. 

Still in love (G, 1k) Domestic, married life au fluff. Y’all, I’m a sucker for established Byler, even if I can’t find many fics with it. But this is very sweet. It takes place in 2020, but I don’t think there are any mentions of the COVID-19 crisis that I remember.

I Nver Find Out ‘Til I’m Head Over Heels (G, 12.5K) Classic 5+1 fic. If you haven’t read it, where have you been? This is your moment. In where Mike keeps inviting Will to the school dances and Will thinks it’s just a joke until he realizes it’s not. 

Before You’re Gone (T, 5.9k) Will is leaving Hawkins and Mike thinks this is a great moment for a confession. This one I discovered last friday, thank you friend @magicalfairy 💗

You’re weird Wheeler (M, 4.5k) Mike unintentionally starts a tradition of going to each other to talk about their sexual encounters just after they finish. Will keeps getting more explicit with the details he shares, and he makes his best friend interested. This one is really fun y’all.

Out-Of-Town Friends (N/R, 4.6K) It’s not rated. I haven’t re- read it but I’d say it would probably fall in a T rating. So cute!! Will has new friends and sneaks off every friday and the Party doesn’t know where he is going, so Mike decides to follow him and is surprised. 

Snowed Under (G, 1.3k) By the same author of The New Fight series. Mike is spending christmas by himself in college because a snowstorm hits Chicago and Nancy can’t drive to see him, but then he has a surprise visitor. Ahhh just a lil sweet holiday fic. Super cute. 

you love me anyway series (T, 7.1k, three completed works) Literally just the cutest thing ever. Established Byler. Will loves to take pictures and he loves taking pictures of Mike. It’s adorable. 

you wanna be friends forever (i can think of something better) (T, 9k) This one is so amazing. So. Amazing. From Will’s POV, my kid deserves the world and he gets it. 

okay not to be okay (T, 4.9k) Mike is a bit sad but then everything is okay. 

can’t hold out forever (G, 18.4k) Y’all!!!!! 5+1 sweetness. Mike has been falling in love since kindergarten. And it’s long af, you’ll enjoy it. 

even if it takes forever (G, 1.3k) College short AU, they miss each other, they love each other, they promise all to each other. It is sappy y’all.

clear as day (N/R, 18.4K, 4 chapters) It’s not rated, but I’d say it falls in the T category. Strangers to friends to lovers. And also, everyone is pretty gay; we have our dynamic trio Mike, Max and El as disaster lesbians (and gay). Will works at the library and he is also gay. Lucas and Dustin and Will are the best friends we needed. It’s very sweet and the Party is kind of formed here!

I went overboard with the one-shots, so you must have realized how much I love long one-shots and I favor them over long works lmao but they are all amazing!!! If it’s on this list, I probably read it at 2 am, sobbing in my bed. So. Hope you enjoy it☺️🧡

[hpalways]

Heyy I was wondering if you could write just a few hc or one shots for Albedo, Kazuha, or Venti with an s/o who overworks themself with work and stuff? Yknow- comfort stuff :3 Unfortunately I’ve been having to work over fifty + hours these past few weeks, and I love your writing! Have a nice day btw-!!

Note: hiiiii! yes! of course. this sounds lovely to write about. please take care of yourself omg, that sounds really stressful and tiring. aww! and thank you for enjoying my works, im so happy to hear that ^^

Fandom: Genshin Impact

Characters: Albedo, Kazuha, Venti

Warnings: None

Albedo

When he sees you studying religiously in the workshop, he goes to the nearby campfire. Finding a pot and some water, he warms it up to make hot cocoa. Heading back to you, he hands it to you, watching your face light up in pleasant surprise. 

As the workshop in the mountains can still get cold, he fetches a wool blanket to wrap around your arms. It allows you to have a better time with your research. 

He tries to take your mind off of work by asking you to be his model for his next art piece. You are told to lay down, because he wants to draw you that way. Despite shooting him a confused look, you follow through with it anyway, getting into a position that’s too relaxing. Soon enough, you fall asleep and he quickly tends to you and tuck you in. 

Other times, he wants you away from the workaholic atmosphere. Holding your hand tightly, he leads you out of the cave-like study and into the pretty snow. A light flutter falls from the skies, tickling your cheeks in gentle waves. The two of you stroll through the slippery slopes, and he makes sure no harm comes to you.

He talks philosophically and about the world, giving you a break from the load of paperwork. 

However, he is quite the workaholic himself, his thoughts always straying to him own studies. This usually strikes some sense in you, where you help pull him out of his stupor, as well as your own. The two of you continues to remind each other that breaks are needed. He’s your rock to hold onto; and you were his. 

“[Y/N]? You appear very tired. Slow down and let me fix you some tea.”

Kazuha

Whispers poetry into your ear. His voice itself is soothing to you, calming your frantic nerves from the ongoing training that was set in stone. Every word that comes out is like silk, which relaxes your tense muscles. 

Pulling you away from the training grounds, he shows the nature views he has grown so fond of. Maple leaves rain down in gentle motion, the scenery warming you up inside with comfort. It is beautiful and you do not regret sneaking out with Kazuha for this moment. 

He talks about his homeland, Inazuma, full of raw emotion and beautiful phrases that take your breath away. He tells you not to rush what fate has in store for you, to take it easy and go at your own pace. This relieves your stress easily. 

You are sometimes taken out to the ship, where you are not allowed to train. The sea laps beneath the engine, blue waves furling in a way that soothed you. It is beautiful, the horizons stretching far and wide, with the rising morning sun in the distance. 

Seeing your tired expression, he takes you to the middle of nowhere -- the meadows where it is warm and the sun basks. He says the wind leads him here. And before you know it, the two of you are knocked out on a rock, taking a nap together to find your energy again for the next coming day. 

At times, he goes easy on you during battles, soon turning it into a fun word game where he contemplates haiku. 

“The wind is calm today. Come. We don’t need you rushing either.”

Venti

Always very willing to distract you from your paperwork. Barging right into your office at the Favonius Headquarters, he walks to you with a giddy smirk. 

He takes no objections, deaf to your protests as he forces you out of there, running through the fields with you fumbling behind him. He goes to Windrise, expertly climbing up his favorite tree. You sit beside him, letting out a sigh at the male. You are secretly happy to be here instead.

Plays his precious lyre to you, the melodic song ringing into your ears. They make you feel warm inside... and sleepy. His voice is angelic as always, with favorite lyrics tumbling out of his precious lips. 

Of course, he brings you to his favorite tavern in Mondstadt, Angel’s Share. Buying a bunch of drinks, the two of you drink and feel the rush of it kicking in. He is smiling in content when you sag your shoulders into a relaxed state, no more worrying about the irrelevant stuff from before.

Tells you lots of jokes. You try not to laugh at them, but he eventually gets to you anyway. His teal eyes watch you softly, content to destress you from the workload you keep putting on yourself. He misses when you had more freetime -- when you aren’t fretting about the littlest things. 

He gives you a lot of surprise hugs. His arms are surprisingly strong, tightening around you and stubborn to let you go. You feel yourself giving in to the sturdiness of his arms. 

“Free yourself from the chains of responsibility, [Y/N]. Eheheh. Pretty please?”

[let-them-read-fics]

Blackpink HC / One Shots: Enemies to Lovers, College AU (2/2)

Requested: Yes

Warnings / Misc. -- Bickering, Rivalry, Fluff

A/N: Hey everyone! This is the second half of the request, featuring Rosé and Lisa. If you want to see the first part, with Jisoo and Jennie, click the link below. I hope you enjoy!

Click for Jisoo and Jennie

♡ Happy Reading ♡

🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

Rosé

Park Chaeyoung: The girl who hung with the wrong crowd.

Your problem lied more so with the people she associated with than her herself. You couldn't wrap your head around why such a kind person like her would spend time with the class clowns and bullies, and to make matters worse, she would stick up for them as well.

She spent most of her days in either the art or music room, creating the masterpieces that her brain came up with.

But as soon as school was over, she'd be hanging out with them again and getting into trouble. For instance, because of her talents, they would invite her to go with them and graffiti various hot spots around town. She never vandalized any monuments or landmarks of importance -- she typically stuck to bridges or abandoned buildings -- but after getting caught with them multiple times, it was inevitable for her to be held accountable.

She was given a week's detention to make up for her actions

You, coincidentally, had a teacher that absolutely loathed you for no reason at all. No matter how good of a student you were for him, he didn't care; he had a vendetta against you for some reason, and he patiently waited for the opportunity to ruin your day.

You came in literally 10 seconds after the bell rang, putting the breakfast sandwich you stopped to get on the way into your mouth so you could open the door. He was standing at the front with a smug grin on his face, and you already knew what was coming.

You were also given an ungodly sentence of a week's detention.

Turning Point

"If I see you on your phones, I'm taking them." The monitor informs before sitting at the desk, reclining in the chair and putting his feet up soon after. You sigh and lean back in your seat, attempting to find a way to pass the next two hours without getting in trouble. Your eyes scan across the room, eventually landing on Rosé, where she sits a couple rows away from you. Sunlight is streaming in through the window next to her, its golden rays peeking through the breaks in the clouds above to shine on her. She looks gorgeous as she doodles away in her notebook, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear when it falls in front of her face.

After waiting on the monitor to fall asleep and sending one last glance to double check, you quietly stand from your seat and go sit next to her.

You barely know each other, but she's your only hope of remaining sane and occupied.

"Hi," you greet, looking into her eyes.

"Hi," she copies, a tiny smile forming on her lips when she notices your impressed expression upon gazing down at her paper. You have to hand it to her -- she's really talented.

"You're really good," you compliment, still admiring the artistry. Seeing as how you're looking down, you fail to notice the blush that works its way to her cheeks. Coming from you, the simple remark meant a lot to her.

You spend the rest of the day making small talk and getting used to one another, leaving detention later with the hopes of sitting together again.

----

The Next Day

"Hi again," you whisper, glancing over your shoulder to ensure that the coast is clear. The monitor is out like a light, with his mouth hanging open and an obnoxiously loud snore coming out.

"Hi," she giggles, watching as you dive into the floor for cover when the man shifts in his sleep. You thought he was waking up, and if he finds out you moved seats, he'll definitely have something to say about it.

"The coast is clear, cadet," she nods like a soldier, assuring you that it's okay to move back after a minute.

"That was close," you breathe out in relief, glad to live to see another day.

You share a laugh, though it has to be hidden behind your hands and kept a minimum. It's cute though -- like a little secret between the two of you, only for you to know.

"What're you drawing today?" You ask later, laying your chin in your palm as you gaze down at her work. Her reply comes out stuttered at first when she feels your leg innocently brush against hers under the table.

"D-dalgom. My friend's dog." She manages out, mentally smacking herself for looking like a fool.

You smile, thinking she's adorable. "I bet it'll be great," you encourage. She grins back as her eyes scan over your face, committing the memory of you to heart. She's always had a thing for you, ever since the time you were paired up in Biology last semester, so she's been enjoying detention more than she thought she would. Seeing you makes the time go by faster, though ironically, she wishes it would slow down a bit.

You make her feel appreciated for more than just what she's capable of producing, and the divide between you and her friend group is blaringly obvious. They like her because of the rush she can help them achieve; you like her because of her.

That thought persists in her mind for the rest of detention, and before she knows it, the monitor is releasing you again. She bends down to put her notebook in her bag when a thought pops into her mind: she wants to ask if you want to go to the park with her. When she's done zipping her bag up, she looks back up at you, only to find you on your phone, talking to someone.

"Yeah, mom. I'll stop by on the way home. So milk, cereal, ramen, and paper towels, right?"

She watches as you wait for a reply, tucking the phone into the crook of your neck as you move to write the list down on a spare piece of paper.

"Alright, love you, too. See you later." You hang up before looking back at Rosie. She looks a little down, and you have no idea why.

You pause for a moment, silently psyching yourself up for what you're about to ask. "This is gonna sound really strange, but do you want to come with me to the store?"

Her heart's pace increases at that, happy to know that you want to spend more time with her, just as she does with you.

"Actually, yeah. That sounds like fun."

You grin at her before spinning around and doing a little celebratory dance, which wins you a strange look from the monitor. You stick your tongue out at him before grabbing her hand and rushing out of the room, hearing his disapproval shouted after you.

--

"Milk?"

"Check."

"Ramen?"

"Check."

"Cereal?"

"Nope."

You nod at her words, now reminded of what you were forgetting. You push the buggy towards the aisle of cereals, gazing around in wonder at the huge selection. Rosé is just the same, eyeing all of the options like a kid in a candy store. After grabbing your mom's favorite kind, you decide on one for yourself and bring it back to the cart. Rosie scoots her leg over, making room for them beside where she sits, reclined in the cart.

You grin when you see her eyeing a box of fruit loops. Huh; fruity. Go figure.

You wordlessly grab the box and hand it to her, feeling your heart melt when she looks up at you like you hold the key to the universe.

"Thank you, Y/N."

"No problem, Rosie." You say, putting your hands on the bar as you begin pushing the buggy again. "Now, I say we see how long it takes to get to the paper towel aisle. My last record was 30 seconds."

She looks at you, clearly impressed, with her eyebrows raised. Without question, she pulls her phone out and gets the stop watch feature ready to go.

"3...2...1... GO!" She shouts, commanding your legs to start pumping as you race down the long strip of store before you. A couple kids dart out of the way just before getting smacked into, quickly turning around and cheering you on as you charge forward.

Her giggles fill the air as you drift around a corner, shouting apologies to the lady you almost bumped into.

"Sorry ma'am!"

A few seconds later, chest heaving and legs sore, you come to a stop in the aisle, dramatically collapsing in a heap next to the buggy. Rosé checks her phone as she reaches down to poke you.

"22.18 seconds, champ," she declares victoriously, smiling when you magically regain enough energy to stand up and celebrate.

"Woohoo! Team Y/S/N (Your Ship Name) for the win!"

She laughs along at that, joining in on your celebration, but she's blushing like crazy on the inside.

-----

The Last Day Of Detention

Ever since your trip to the store, you and Rosé have grown closer and closer. You traded numbers and text occasionally, though nothing beats having her all to yourself for 2 hours straight with no distractions. She feels the same; when she's in class, she can't wait for the bell to ring and signal your reunion. Part of her wants to get in trouble again, just to see you more often.

So, as you'd expect, it's really no surprise that you're sat right in front of her again, telling jokes and asking about her day. You've grown a bit more bold with every step closer you've taken towards her heart, and now you reach down to intertwine your fingers with hers.

She happily accepts, even bringing your hand up to her lips to press a kiss to the back of it. She smiles against your skin after it, making butterflies take flight in your stomach. She's got you wrapped around her finger, and you don't even try to fight it anymore.

The sound of the classroom door opening alerts you, making her lower your hand. She doesn't let go of you, though, and that fact warms your heart for some reason. The squeaky hinges groan out again as the door opens wider, revealing about 4 or 5 people from the friend group that she hangs out with. They motion for her to sneak out with them, but she just shakes her head.

"Come on, Rosé!" They whisper-scream, offering her a way to freedom. Little do they know that she'd take this imprisonment over freedom any day, so long as you're by her side.

"No! Get out before he wakes up!" She whisper-shouts back, eventually convincing them to leave.

"Why didn't you go?" You ask once they're gone, toying with her fingers as your hands rest on the desk.

"Because I like spending time with you." She admits, letting her defenses down.

"I was hoping you'd say that," you smile, letting her know that you feel the same.

The Fallout

After detention, the two of you walked out of the school, hand in hand

"Would you maybe, I don't know... wanna go to the park with me?" She asks nervously, glancing up at you.

"You read my mind, Rosie." You smile at each other and head towards the parking lot.

You started hanging out more, and she distanced herself from her old crowd

You encouraged her to enroll in your school's art program and show her work that way

"You're really talented; it deserves to be seen."

Your support meant the world to her, and she never failed to let you know

"Thank you, Y/N. Having you behind me means the world to me."

At one of her art shows, where she was tasked with unveiling a new piece that she'd been working on for months, you got the biggest surprise of your life.

She created a mural of you, all decked out with every color of the rainbow, utterly gorgeous

She lit up when she saw your reaction

"This piece is titled 'Mine', which I hope the girl in it will soon be." She says into the microphone, looking at you with hope shining in her eyes.

You nod your head with a smile and walk up to her, pressing your lips to hers in a kiss that was long-overdue. She wraps her arms around your waist, pulling you in closer with her sweater-padded hands and kissing you again and again.

The crowd claps for you, happy to see such an ending.

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

Lisa

I couldn't choose between these two gifs so enjoy both for the price of one ^^^

Lisa Manoban: Cocky, smug, and self-assured. The dancer knew she was hot shit, and she wasn't afraid to show off.

You're all for people being confident and happy with themselves, especially when they're talented, but something about Lisa always seemed to rub you the wrong way.

Whether it be her lack of a filter or the arrogant swagger that she naturally exuded, you weren't sure. People wanted to either be her or be with her, but you fell into neither of those categories.

She always left you frustrated in one way or another, whether it be from her teasing or her witty comebacks

The teachers loved her, as did the students. She was the class clown, so her position was pretty sacred in the grand scheme of things

You, on the other hand, irritated her for other reasons. You were the only person she couldn't get to crack; you never gave into her charms, and it infuriated her to no end. She wasn't used to not getting what she wanted (as childish as that may seem) and having you, one of the most attractive girls at school, turn her down? Well that was a massive blow to her ego.

You weren't afraid to say your piece, and that both pleasantly surprised and upset her.

She constantly tried to flirt with you in class, but you knew it was all for the attention. She just wanted to make her friends laugh, which they always did.

"Y/N, come here babe. There's an empty seat next to me," she coos, batting her eyelashes as you walk in the door. It's a free day, so everyone is sitting with their friends, wherever they like.

"I'm good," you decline, deciding to sit against the wall beneath the large window of the classroom.

"Oooo, denied," Lisa's friends laugh at her this time, chuckling harder when she sticks her middle finger up at them.

"Yah, shut up," she says, nursing her bruised ego as she turns around and opens her phone.

You smile as you continue working on the homework you cracked open, scribbling an answer down onto the notebook paper in front of you. Your fingers glide over your textbook in search of the definition of the term you're on, and Lisa secretly watches from afar. Without realizing it, she grins when you light up upon spotting the answer.

Sometimes her flirting does work, though, and you turn into a blushing mess

*whistle* "Damn, Y/N. You're looking fine today," she exclaims, fanning herself. You worry that she doesn't really mean it, but when her eyes remain on you a second too long to just be friendly, you blush. She's taking in all of you, looking impressed all the while.

"Right back at you, Manoban." You wink, sitting down in your seat across the room. She lightly blushes back, though she does a good job of concealing it.

Considering you share a couple classes and the class sizes are relatively small, it was pretty likely that you'd end up paired together eventually

You weren't happy about it, especially not after the way she had acted that week. Her cockiness had been at an all time high as of late, leaving you frustrated and upset. She was so full of herself; all you wanted to do was wipe that stupid smirk off her face.

"Y/N, you'll be paired with Lisa," your photography teacher informs, pushing her glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose.

"But Mrs. Ta--"

"Pairings are final," she cocks her head at you, persuading you to give in. With a sigh, you respond, "Yes ma'am," and attempt to ignore the sound of Lisa's friends high fiving each other in celebration.

The Turning Point

"My parents are gone for the rest of the week..." she says, holding the door open for you as you carry in your equipment. A hint of suggestiveness lies in it; she's alluding to exactly what you think she is, and you push her shoulder upon realizing it.

"Knock it off, Manoban."

"Okay, okay," she chuckles, listening to you for once. The surprise is clear on your face.

She leads you towards the backyard, where you set up one of your highest power cameras and turn it on. You have to create a gallery of different photos, all under the same theme. You both agreed to do a time-lapse of the sunset, and take pictures of the stars after.

Once she makes sure that the timer is set correctly and that the auto shut-off feature is enabled, she motions for you to follow her back into the house. You do, and she leads you into the kitchen.

"Do you want a snack?"

"Sure, do you have any ramen?"

She nods, quickly busying herself by bending down and searching through the cabinets. After she finds it, exclaiming a pleased, "Aha!", she tells you to go get comfortable in the living room.

Three minutes later, from your place on the couch, you begin to smell something burning. You scramble up and rush to the kitchen, only to find Lisa running around like a headless chicken, attempting to put out the small fire she started.

"HOW THE HELL DID YOU MANAGE TO BURN RAMEN?" You shout, though your tone isn't angry. You're just very shocked, and loud about it. You push her away from the pot, albeit gently, and get the flames to go down relatively quickly. You turn the burners off and put the pot in the sink, leaning against the counter to recover from the adrenaline rush.

"Oops?" She asks more so that says, with a growing smile evident in her voice.

You shake your head and chuckle despite yourself, turning around to face her. "You can order a pizza now to make up for that." You point a finger at her, grinning stupidly when she presses the tip of hers to it.

"Your wish is my command, princess."

Thankfully you're already walking away as she says that, so she doesn't get the satisfaction of seeing you blush.

---

"Lisa, I can't keep going." You groan out, sweat dripping down your face. The pizza you ate earlier is giving you a stomache ache, paired with the physical activity you're doing.

"Y/N, just a little longer, we're almost there," she huffs out, keeping her movements steady somehow. You're a mess by now, so you don't understand how she's still going.

A couple minutes later, the TV in front of you lights up, saying, "Awesome moves! You win!" as you collapse to the ground in a heap.

Why you agreed to play Just Dance with her after eating is beyond you.

"Good job," she compliments, grabbing your hand to high five herself with it.

"Yeah, yeah," you roll over, catching your breath.

She lays down beside you as you recover, telling jokes to hear that laugh that she loves so much. She prefers yours over anyone elses, so it's always such a reward when she gets you to crack up.

"We should probably head up now," she notes, realizing that the stars will be coming out soon. You agree, and she carefully helps you up.

"Here, I'll carry you," she turns, bending down so you can get on her back.

"Lisa, you can't carry me," you brush off, feeling insecurity bubble up again like it always does when you're offered a piggyback ride.

"Y/N, I promise that I can. Trust me," she reassures, looking into your eyes sincerely.

"Alright," you sigh, standing onto the couch to get on easier.

"See?" She asks, sliding her warm hands up your thighs to keep you secured against her. "I've got you, babe."

You tuck your head into the space between her shoulder and neck, inhaling the sweet scent of her perfume.

"I'm gonna punch you if you drop me," you whisper, feeling her laugh against you.

"Fair enough."

-----

Later, On The Rooftop

"Careful," she instructs, outstretching a hand to help you climb out the window. Her camera hangs around her neck, and she takes the cap off of the lense once you're both safely sitting on the roof.

"Wow," you sigh, gazing up at the sky in wonder. Her house is far enough away from the city that you're rewarded with a gorgeous view of the stars, unburdened by the industrial fog that hangs over the cosmopolis.

"It's beautiful out here," you say, looking back at her. You tense up a bit, not expecting her to already be looking at you.

"Sorry," she laughs at herself, looking away once she gets caught admiring you.

"It's okay," you reach down and gently squeeze her hand, making her blush lightly.

"Let's get started," you conclude, pointing at the camera. She nods, knowing that she'd never get the assignment done if you didn't step in to tell her to (considering she'd rather admire you), and she points the device to the sky.

After snapping a few pictures, she lays back in order to get a better vantage point of one of the star systems. She hands it to you after she's satisfied with her work, and you take your turn with it.

She notices that you keep brushing your hair out of the way when it falls in your face, so she decides to help you.

"Here," she says, saddling up behind you. She gathers your hair up, running her fingers through it to neatly pull it up for you. Thankfully she always keeps a spare tie on her wrist.

"Thanks," you smile, snapping another picture. The simple act warms your heart; she's being selfless for once, and helping you without even being asked. It's a refreshing change of pace.

"You're welcome." She chirps, sitting back down beside you.

-----

Later, In Her Bedroom

"Oh, I really like that one!" She says excitedly, pointing at the TV. Her phone, which is connected via Bluetooth and automatically receives pictures of her choosing from the camera, is displaying some of your best shots.

"Yeah, you did really well with that. I think we might beat everyone else if we use that as our cover piece."

Your compliment makes her momentarily shy, and she quickly realizes how much she loves your praise.

The two of you continue like that, reviewing the different pictures and choosing your favorites. She always finds ways to compliment yours, noting your technique or the filter you used, and it always makes you smile. She's different than you're used to, and it's throwing you for a loop, pleasantly surprising.

---

Lisa steps out of the room to go to the bathroom a few minutes later, leaving her phone connected to the TV. A ding sounds out across the space, pulling your attention away from the stack of notes laid out before you. Your eyes dart up to the screen, reading the text message that appeared at the top of it.

Austin ⛓: "Dude, did you get into her pants yet? We're literally betting over here 😂"

You blink a few times as their words sink in, making your chest hurt. You were really beginning to believe that you had been wrong about Lisa; clearly, though, your instincts were right.

Feeling betrayed, you shove your folders back into your bag and stand from the chair, willing yourself not to cry. The sound of the sink turning on lets you know that she's almost done, so you hurry your movements and make your way towards the door. She steps out into the hall just as you exit her room, looking at you with wide eyes.

"Woah, woah, woah, what's going on?" She asks with furrowed brows, approaching you. One of her hands lands on your arm, and you shrug it off as you brush past her without another word.

"Y/N, did I do something wrong?" She asks from the top of her staircase, watching as you walk towards her foyer.

"Why don't you ask Austin?" You bitterly call over your shoulder as you turn the knob, slipping out the front door. She hangs her head upon registering your words, realizing what must've happened. She makes a mental note to give him hell when she sees him again.

Tears sting your eyes as you exit the house, wrapping your jacket tighter around yourself. You should've known something like this would happen. The chilly night air bites at your skin, stealing more of its warmth away with every step you take. The temperature doesn't change your mind, though; you're upset, and you'd rather freeze out here than be face to face with her right now.

"Y/N, wait!" She calls after you, blasting out the front foor. Her footfalls sound off behind you, announcing her rapid approach, but you don't turn around. Realizing this, she darts in front of you, keeping you from walking any further.

"Please, don't go. He's an idiot, Y/N."

"He might he an idiot, but that doesn't take away what he said," you scowl, clenching your jaw. "Betting? Really, Lisa?" You ask quietly, hurt evident in your voice.

"It was a stupid thing they tried to convince me to do. I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop them from talking once you and I were paired up. That's not what I want, though. I'm not just in it for that."

"How am I supposed to believe that? This is your M.O., Lisa."

"It's different with you, I don't know why." That's a lie; she knows exactly why you're different than anyone else she's flirted with in the past.

You stand there before her, silently weighing your options. After seeing the pleading look in her eye, her dark orbs full of sincerity, you relent. "Just take me home. We'll work on it another day," you compromise, allowing her in just enough to take you home, but not enough to stay at her place any longer. You're still weary after a text like that, and you will be for a while.

"Thank you," she breaths a sigh of relief, clasping her hands behind herself as you begin walking back to her house. She notices you shiver on the way, and she slips her jacket off without hesitation to cover you. Neither of you have to say anything; one glance from you is enough for her, and she's content knowing you're warm.

The Fallout

From there on out she was always honest with you and actually spoke out when her friends tried to do something stupid

She still remained the charming class clown that she naturally is, just getting rid of the not-so-nice parts of herself

You slowly let her regain your trust, little by little

She did nice things for you on the daily, whether it be holding the door, carrying your books, or offering to buy you some lunch

"Morning, Y/N. Wanna grab some breakfast?" She asks, moving her head to the side towards the café at the center of campus.

"Sure," you smile, laughing when she celebrates.

She invites you to her dance perfomances

When she goes to championships, you're always first on her list of invites

"I want you there." She declares, handing you the flyer.

"You've got it," you decide, knowing there's no where you'd rather be. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

At said championship, she won the highest title and claimed victory for your school

You joined the rest of the team on the stage to celebrate, congratulating the solo dancer on her achievement.

"I'm so proud of you, Lis--"

She suddenly kisses you, clearly high off her win. She pulls back when she realizes what she just did, a worried look on her face.

"Shit, I'm sorry." She looks between your eyes, attempting to gauge your reaction.

"Get your ass back here," you order, feeling butterflies take flight when she eagerly presses her lips to yours again, wrapping her arms around you to spin you.

"Does this mean I'm forgiven?" She mumbles against your lips.

You squint, pretending to think about it. "Maybe... or maybe not."

Her subsequent gasp is quickly muffled by your kiss, which she can't seem to get enough of.

[ohmyasmodeus]

𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘶𝘮 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 ❖

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 　　 *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

♡ 𝘭𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘳 ; 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘳𝘵

✧   Sure, Lucifer is looking forward to appreciating art and the history behind each piece, but he finds himself much more excited to spend more time alone with you. History can be preserved, but every moment spent with you is simply irreplaceable; he ends up surprisingly spending more time gazing at you than admiring the artwork.

✧   You make him feel young again. In between displays, he sneaks kisses, mischievously pulling you away from the crowds just to hold you in his arms for a stolen moment. Lucifer adores the way you fall into his arms with soft laughter, and it makes him cradle your face between his gloved hands while he whispers about the way everyone looks at you like you’re a work of art.

“But do you?” You ask softly.

“I always do, ______.” Silhouetted by the gallery lights, he pulls you into a tender kiss full of emotion; a moment that no doubt belongs among the displays of beauty and immortality that surround you.

✧   Lucifer is the kind of person to actually read the little plaques beside the pieces that go into detail about the artist and the intentions behind their art. It takes a while for him to take it all in, but you don’t mind— it’s very cute to see him have to bend down and squint to read them.

✧   Your day hardly ends there. Even as he takes you home, he very much enjoys discussing your opinions on the works included in the gallery and the artists behind them. It’s Lucifer’s way of getting closer, trying to decipher how your mind works, how you view art pieces that are open to multiple interpretations. It’s his favourite part. He loves you and your brilliant mind.

♡ 𝘮𝘢𝘮𝘮𝘰𝘯 ; 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 / 𝘢𝘳𝘵

✧   Your demon is the definition of a kinaesthetic learner. Mammon fits right in with the kids that run around the place, tugging on your hand as he begs you to come play these games with him! He never wants to do anything without you and you end up being basically dragged around the museum. But it’s okay because he’s cute!

✧   While surrounded by so many people, it’s even easier for him to get flustered about affection. His cheeks flush red whenever he thinks too hard about holding your hand, whether it’s to bring you somewhere, or just to hold your hand for the sake of it. The back of his fingers brush against yours, making you smile.

“Hm? What do you want to show me?” you ask as you take his hand to intertwine your fingers with his.

Mammon fidgets with his free hand before shoving it into his jacket pocket, looking away with a brilliant blush. His voice is quiet as he mumbles, “N-nothing, I just… wanted to hold your hand. Or whatever.”

✧   He’s much smarter than people like to give him credit for at times, and surprises you with bits of information he picks up that you couldn’t understand. At the same time, it’s hard to stop him from gushing about how cool it was to see that chunk of sodium explode when dropped in water and how he wants to watch that over and over again.

✧   Mammon runs wild in the gift shop, especially at those little archaeology or mining kits that let you dig through hunks of sand that claim to contain a piece of gold. Of course, there are a million things the both of you want to buy for yourselves, but so little money to do so with. He settles for something small in the end, because he wants to be able to buy something small for his brothers too.

♡ 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 ; 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦

✧   From the beginning, Leviathan is absolutely fascinated. The calming atmosphere of the museum and being completely surrounded by his element makes Levi relax, even if he’d normally panic and try to hide from the people that walk along the exhibitions with you. But even then, you make sure to hold his hand just to reassure him a little more.

✧   Just like he rants about pretty much anything he has an interest in, Levi rants about the equipment on display and compares weapons or ships from different eras to each other, as if he’s talking about mere video game stats. It’s actually kind of hot to see him act like the Grand Admiral of hell’s navy is supposed to.

✧   Treat him like a Grand Admiral, actually. His brain totally short circuits when you lean into him and put a hand on his chest and gasp about how knowledgeable and strong he is.

“Oh captain, my captain!” you sing as you pepper his face in kisses, making him squirm in your arms. His face is beet red as he attempts to cover it with his hands.

“People are- they’re going to see us!” Levi whines.

You laugh and kiss him properly, arms wrapped around him tight. “That’s the point, baby! I like it when people know I’m yours.”

✧   He actually gets a little sad when he sees the bones of massive whales or the various preserved remains of sea life on display. They all feel like a part of him. At times, he feels like sea animals understand him much better than people do, and he has to give your hand a squeeze as the two of you through the section. At least he brightens up when you tell him that most of these specimens die a natural death or were cared for during their life.

♡ 𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘯 ; 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺

✧   His choice of museum goes without explanation. Humans are frail creatures that are essentially doomed to make the same mistakes again and again, despite a new era or millennia, but Satan still finds their history remarkable. He’s fascinated with seeing the butterfly effect ripple through time, sparking wars and conflicts. It makes him wonder about the universe’s decisions— especially the ones that brought you to him.

✧   Satan has always been more fond of reading the ancient texts on display or translating archaic inscriptions on bronze age charms, but when he’s with you, he finds himself more drawn to the elegant gowns and elaborately crafted jewellery on display. You always find his emerald eyes lingering on you, imagining what you would look like in something so grand. Your beauty stuns him in every way, especially with the way you smile at him while framed by the display’s lights.

✧   “I thought you wanted to learn,” you mumble with a quiet laugh into the kiss that Satan pulls you into. The two of you are wrapped in each other’s arms in the back of a crowded amphitheatre, making an attempt to watch a historical film.

In the darkness, Satan’s blush goes unseen, but you feel it in the heat of his face as you kiss him back eagerly. “I’ve learned enough about humans, ______. I want to focus on my favourite one now.”

You close your eyes, and so does he. History couldn’t matter less, not when it feels like the two of you are the only beings to exist, the only people that matter.

✧   Despite wanting to learn, Satan finds himself getting dragged into shenanigans with you as you voice historical figures with the goofiest accents and clown around with some of the interactive props. He laughs along and snaps a million pictures of you to keep, and he supposes that humans aren’t the only ones that make recurring mistakes. After all, he lets you loosen him up and lets you force your way into his heart time and time again, but he still can’t force himself to complain about it.

♡ 𝘢𝘴𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘶𝘴 ; 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘰𝘯

✧   Beauty in its different forms has always mesmerised Asmodeus. Museums have never been his thing, but with a fashion museum, you might just be able to change his mind. He goes between gushing about the textures and layering of different pieces to gushing about you and how amazing you look today!

✧   Asmo is always on top of the latest trends, but there’s something that always brings him back to the ostentatious allure of baroque and rococo dresses. He loves reading about the rise of these styles, but he would rather pull you along into a waltz as the quiet ambient music plays around you, the both of you giggling and referring to each other as ‘lord’ and ‘lady’.

✧   Or ‘your majesty’ and ‘my consort’...

✧   You, as always, expect him to pull you away somewhere quiet to make out and be general public nuisances, but Asmodeus surprises you this time. He’s far too busy taking pictures of you together and of just you alone, his amber gaze so soft as he contemplates your beauty. He ends up leaning in serenely as the two of you find yourselves alone together in a gallery.

“You’re gorgeous,” Asmo mumbles with a smile, delicately tucking a lock of your hair behind your ear. “There’s just something so magnetic about you, I can’t look away…”

“I don’t have to say it back because you know you’re handsome and your ego is big enough... but there’s nothing that can compare to how lovely your soul is.” You chuckle softly, resting a hand affectionately on the side of his face. Asmo rests his forehead against yours, wrapping his arms around the back of his neck with a delighted giggle, delighted in knowing that you see him beyond his superficialities and flaws.

✧   He buys you a set of jewellery from the gift shop, and not one of the cheap ones either. He splurges on one of the most expensive professionally made vintage sets because he really wants to daydream about you dancing with him in those rococo dresses, the most gorgeous royal couple in the world…

♡ 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘻𝘦𝘣𝘶𝘣 ; 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘵

✧   Delighted by the more colourful and almost bizarre applications of mixed-media art (think Yayoi Kusama), Beelzebub enjoys contemporary art the most. He’s easily fascinated with the elaborately abstract displays, and quietly wraps his arm around your waist as the two of you gawk at stunning larger-than-life works that probably get him a little hungry.

✧   He’s a respectful visitor and likes to stay silent so he doesn’t disturb the quiet atmosphere for everyone else appreciating the art. It ends up in him having to lean down and murmur softly in your ear when he has something to tell you, his warm arms pulling you into an embrace that you never want to leave.

✧   Workshops! Please bring Beel to the workshops because they’re his favourite part of museums. No matter how hungry he gets while putting in so much effort, he’ll sit still and work hard to make you something you can treasure.

“Do you like it?” he asks with a smile as he presents you with a little figurine version of one of the sculptures featured in the exhibition, hand painted by him. It’s easy to notice how the colours he picked out match your features. “It’s yours.”

“I love it, Beel! Oh, it’s wearing my coat and everything!” you gasp. The elated smile he gives you is absolutely priceless, and you can’t help but tiptoe to kiss him in thanks for his hard work.

Beel lets out a soft laugh and nuzzles his cheek into yours. “I really liked the art, but it felt like something was missing… Maybe the exhibition would’ve been a lot more beautiful if you were an art piece on display too.”

✧   Bringing him to a museum like that just might inspire him to create art by himself. After creating something for you, he feels hooked on it! You find him doodling a lot more on his homework and giving you the most endearing drawings of things you like, or his own hilarious renditions of what Lucifer looks like when he’s about to burst a blood vessel. Beel definitely has a hidden talent for caricatures.

♡ 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘨𝘰𝘳 ; 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺

✧   Humans? Belphegor has had enough of them for a lifetime and can’t be bothered with learning more about them, but natural history is something that captivates him. There’s a kind of innocent wonder in his eye as you lead him around the exhibitions, marvelling at the displayed remains of the massive creatures that came before, wondering how they evolved into the tiny little animals of today. (But it’s probably also morbid curiosity with the way he looks at preserved carcasses and skeletons.)

✧   But you’re an exception to him. He's tired of humans but never of you, even if he jokes about it at times. Even if he knows about most of the things on display, Belphie is still asking you to tell him about them because he just loves hearing your voice. Coupled with the soothing silence of the museum, it almost puts him to sleep.

✧   “Don’t fall asleep! You paid to watch this!” you whisper when Belphie rests his head on your shoulder. You want to pay attention to the dinosaurs beating the shit out of each other in the surprisingly well-rendered 3D documentary, but you can’t help but gaze at your boyfriend instead, and the way he looks in those dumb 3D glasses.

“I won’t,” he mumbles, rolling his eyes. “You’re warm.”

“You’re a little leech, you know that?” Despite your snarky tone, you lift up the partition between the theatre’s seats to let Belphie snuggle into you. Just like a leech, he’s immediately all over you with his arms wrapped tight around your waist, chuckling as he buries his face in your neck.

✧   You wouldn’t expect it, but he’s also the kind to go wild in the gift shop, albeit in more subtle ways— like staring really hard at something or carrying something only to put it down for you to get the hint. He ends up getting the both of you a big plushy to cuddle and name on the way home.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 　　 *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

[yeojaa]

( VELVETEEN RABBIT. )

What do you get when you mix Thumper and Bambi?  Answer:  Jeon Jungkook.

pairing.  french lop bunny!jjk x ragdoll cat f!reader.

genre + rating.   hybrid!au set in college.  super fluffy, a little angsty, with a dash of smut to balance it all out.  explicit towards the end because i just can’t help myself.  oops.

tags / warnings.  honestly, this jungkook should just come with his own warning.  but more realistically, mentions of kook using a scrunchie, kook being cute, kook railing his date after using the world’s worst puns...  the usual.

wc.  4.4k

beta reader(s).  @hobi-gif​ as always become, c’mon.  i’m me.  she’s her.  

author note.  this was written as part of @thebtswritersclub​‘s a hybrid fest and is gloriously late (i’m so sorry @ditttiii​​).  i’ve never written anything hybrid-related before so hopefully you enjoy.  feedback goes a long way!  xoxo

He orders the same thing every time he’s in.  Iced Americano, no room for cream, and a single almond croissant.  (Every once in a while, he switches it up for matcha but that’s exceedingly rare.)  He always pays with a tap of his wrist - a sleek black AppleWatch with rubber band - and flashes his trademark slightly too-big smile.  All the girls swoon.  So do the guys.  Everyone except for you.

He’s unnervingly handsome, with long dark ears that sometimes hang in front of his eyes.  You’ve caught him with them pulled back Lola Bunny-style, knotted with a loose silk scrunchie that looks nearly as soft as his fur.  His hair’s usually unkempt, tossed into a little sprout of a bun, overly long fringe falling all over his big round eyes.  He wears butterfly clips sometimes, though that’s usually on days where he isn’t freshly sweaty and carrying his gym bag.  They appear in his hair when it’s damp from a shower, the smell of papaya and honey clinging to every inch of him.  You know, because you have a great nose - one that’s sensitive to every smell under the sun but especially his.  (You try not to think about it much.)  

It’s a Wednesday morning when you notice the change.  It doesn’t register at first, acknowledgement coming in a curious sniff at the air.  Weird. 

“Thanks,” he says like clockwork, a well-oiled polite machine, deceptively slender hands receiving the exceedingly hot cup without a care in the world. He’s got his usual bag over his shoulder - overly big, black, almost tactical - and a pair of comfortable looking pants on that seem more like they belong on your beloved grandmother.  Somehow, he rocks it (but he always does).  “Have a nice day.”

Because of course he says that.  Of course he steals the words right out of your mouth, turns them back on you as easy as he makes your heart rattle around in your chest like it’s a Friday night bingo ball. 

He moves toward the bar - he only ever grabs three napkins, tucks them into the slot on the left side of his bag - but pauses halfway there.  Rooted to the same spot as always, sleek ears following the imposing line of his shoulders.  

One, two—

The thumping starts, so quiet it’s almost negligible.  But you catch it, because you always do and because you’re the reason for it. 

He turns then, levels you with a look from the corner of those pretty, pretty eyes and you can’t help but laugh, openly, unashamedly, with the back of your hand plastered to your mouth. A true ojou-sama. 

His mouth quirks - does that funny thing where he sucks in his cheek then rolls it back out with his tongue - and you think he might finally say something.  Call you out for writing his name wrong for the past five weeks, finding more and more creative ways to do so every time.  Even occasionally using nicknames - silly things you’d come up with while on the walk home, or during lunch, or in bed.

“Good one,”  he states, laugh lines threading over his face, prominent around his eyes.  His nose wiggles with the sound - another of his traits that comes out to play often.  Your favourite of them all, if you’re being honest.

“Anytime.”  

You don’t realise it’s him until it’s too late, until you’re practically running into him, bouncing off the broad expanse of his back with a startled squeak.  Lucky for you, you’re quick on your feet, catching yourself before your skull can become too well-acquainted with the red brick wall to your right.

“You okay?”  Though he asks, you have a sneaking suspicion he knows you’re not and an even stronger suspicion that he’d been waiting for you, hovering past the entrance of the cafe with his big university hoodie on.

“Barely,”  you manage around a laugh, straightening the backpack slung over your shoulders, packed to the brim with goodies you got to bring home at the end of the night and two of your textbooks.

“Should watch where you’re going.”  

This is the most conversation you’ve had - ever.  But it’s fun, easy, organic and natural.  You wonder why that is. 

“You should watch where you’re standing, actually.”

He’s so much bigger than you, imposingly tall (especially being part of the Leporidae family) and wide in the chest.  Not bulky by any means, but big.  Strong.  Threaded with a strength you don’t normally see in hybrids of his kind.  It probably has to do with how often you see him covered in sweat and panting, basketball hooked under his arm, soccer cleats tied to his bag.

When he speaks again, it’s full of mirth, squeezing his round eyes near shut.  “Got a problem with me standing here?”  

You nod, solemn as ever (which is really never, but that’s besides the point).  “It’s dangerous to block entryways, didn’t you know?”  You’re gesturing to the awning, the dark interior just past the window of the shop.  “You’re loitering, Jungkook.”

“So you do know my name.”  You can tell he’s not surprised - that he’s hamming it up for dramatics, softly pink lips rounded in a little ‘O’.  He’s cute like this, you think.  Playful in a way you’ve never seen before.  

“I do?” 

There’s that cheek thing again.  It’s even more attractive up close, the shape of his jaw thrown into prominent relief when he sucks in a breath.  

“You just said it.”

You nod, thoughtful, finger tapping upon your chin.  “I guess I did.”

“Say it again,”  he states, expression inscrutable, eyes bright.  They’re so glossy even under the dimmed streetlights, impossibly big and undeniable.  So easy to get lost in - if your attention weren’t caught by something else.

“What is that?”  

You’d noticed it earlier in the day, caught the scent in passing sometime during the early hours.  You’d been unable to place it then, too distracted by freshly ground coffee, a girl’s three too many spritzes of Daisy by Marc Jacobs, and baking banana loaves.

It’s heady, masculine.  A strong musk that sinks into your nose and makes it twitch, ears rotating as if that’ll help pin the smell down.  

“What’s what?”  You hadn’t realised how close you’d become, your face five seconds from planting directly into his chest.  (It’d probably be nice - you know how soft your school’s merchandise is.)  “Are you okay?”  He asks because you’re now, actually, planting your face right against the worn navy cotton.  It’s terribly nice, silk upon your cheek.  

You answer more to his clothes than to him, nosing into the fabric. “You smell different.”

You feel more than hear his laughter, the sound barreling past his teeth seconds later.  The vibrations running along his spine jostle you from your position face first upon him but you don’t mind.  It doesn’t send you far, dark eyes peering up into the face of the bunny hybrid.  True to his kind, his nose is twitching, puffs of laughter expanding his cheeks when he meets your stare. 

“No I don’t.”

“You do.”  Tone firm, a finger lands upon the neatly embroidered N on his hoodie.  The white stitching stands in stark contrast to your baby blue nails.  “You smell… off.”

Whether Jungkook’s offended or not, you can’t tell.  He’s got that same strange expression on his face - the one from this morning when he’d received his coffee.  It’s made up of too many moving parts:  the flutter of his lashes, the coil of his jaw, the minute tick of the corner of his mouth.  You can’t read him for shit, somehow more confused now than in your 300-level art history class.  (You’d taken it as one of your optional electives assuming it’d be an easy A.  You were wrong.)

“Sorry you think so,”  he hums, looking down at you.  You’ve seemed to fully forget the meaning of personal space, edged up beside him as if you’re best friends and not just two ships passing in the night. 

“It’s not bad.”  Really, it isn’t.  It’s strong and sensual, vegetal in a way, calming in another.  But it isn’t unwelcome. 

In fact, you think you might like this scent a little more - less sweet than what normally clings to his skin, natural honeycomb rather than processed sugar.  It zings across your teeth, pieces broken up and scattered behind your molars.  You can practically taste it.  Him.

“Is that so?”  

“Yep.”

You share a look - one that says more than all the words you’ve ever spoken, that threads together all the silly laughter, narrowed stares, (written) flirtations.  It settles between the two of you, filling the spaces with something akin to cotton, light and airy and soft.

The desire to speak lingers, hidden just beyond the cotton candy dusting.  Should you?  Shouldn’t you?  You still have no idea what he’s doing here, a street urchin making his rounds on the campus village.  

He beats you to it.  “Can I walk you back to your dorm?”  

You don’t think you could want anything more.  “Sure.”

Silence falls again but it’s comfortable, a caress rather than a crutch.  The grounds are surprisingly quiet - wayward students on their way to the library or heading home from lectures.  There are no picnic blankets spread across the grass, no gaggles of girls dressed in school colours.  It feels like the first day of fall, change sitting heavy in the air. 

“So—”  You start.

He finishes,  “do you wanna go on a date with me?” 

That’s surprising.  (Or is it?  You’re not really sure.)  You nearly trip over your own two feet in your haste to look at him, entire body swivelling on the spot because apparently you can’t just turn your head like a normal person.  Something something all or nothing. 

“What?”  

“Do.  You.  Want.  To—”  He’s being insufferable for the hell of it.  You can see it in his eyes, glossy things shining down at you like he’s got the entire fucking nightsky hung in them.  

“Not if you keep that up,”  you retort, though you both know you’re lying.  You’ve been waiting - wishing, wanting - for this moment since the day you laid eyes on him.  Since Yuri had elbowed you so hard in the ribs you’d thought you’d be bruised for days, since Jae had rambled on and on for his entire shift about the cute new bunny who’d come in that morning.  Since that very first wrongly spelt name on his plastic cup and every visit since.  

“Is that a challenge?”  

“You won’t get it in.”  

He scoffs, loud and drawn out, cheek rounding with disbelief at your disbelief.  How can you possibly doubt him - school basketball star and all-around athletic freak of nature? 

“What do I get if I do?”  The ball rests in his palm, poised to be shot through the hoop, sunk without making contact with the rim.  He’s confident - he’s done it a million times.  

“A pat on the back?”  As much as you tease him - loop mockery around nearly every syllable you speak, you’re endlessly supportive, already carrying the fruits of his labour under your arms.  A Pikachu shoved haphazardly into the purse slung across your body, a Snorlax tucked under your arm at an awkward angle that crushes his poor head, a Sylveon tucked into the side pocket of his joggers.  (The arcade was really into Pokemon, apparently.)  “Me saying thank you?”

“Not good enough.”  He leans in close - those big galaxy eyes practically swallowing you whole - and taps a single finger upon your nose.  It makes your nostrils flare, an itch blooming under his touch.  “Gotta sweeten the deal.”

You must look hilarious because Jungkook’s biting back a smile, smirking down at you.  Then, all at once, without breaking eye contact, he’s extending his arm, flicking his wrist, and— swish!  

In goes the ball, leaving him with a perfect score.  

“I want you to stay the night.”

You think he’s joking.  He must be joking.  This is your third date.  

But he’s staring at you like he’s completely serious, gaze expectant, lips pursed around something that reads like a smile but has your heart doing a strange little one-two step in your chest.  It soars for a moment, high above the clouds like the string orchestra of a choral work - Beethoven’s Ninth in D minor. 

“Are you propositioning me, Jeon Jungkook?”  It’s the same reaction he always has when you say his name: a twitch of his ear, the corner of his bottom lip quirking and then resetting, eyes so sparkly it’s almost absurd.

“No.  I’m just telling you what I want.”

“Huh.”  You should say no.  Guys like him - with charm that oozes out of every pore, whose offhanded smiles break more hearts than you ever have - are almost always bad news.  Too sweet, too funny, simply too much for your feeble heart to take.  

“Is that a yes?”  He’s got you in his clutches - a viper rather than a hare, with a smile so dangerous you’re paralysed by just the sight of it.  (Who needs venom?)

Your words catch in your throat, stick to one another like the deformed gummies at the bottom of the movie theatre bag.  What comes out isn’t what you expect.  “Okay.”

Damn you.  Damn him.  Damn how good he smells and the big dumb grin that spreads over his lips, sunshine in human form, undeniable and warm and cute enough to start a war over.  (That’s probably what’s happening - a vicious battle between your head and your heart.)  

Damn his stupid thumping foot that you can make out over the sound of the video games, the boisterous din.  It’s so cute you can’t help yourself from smiling, mouth pulling and pursing around the delight that begs to be freed.  

“Cool,”  he says, and you almost think that’s not very cool.  He’s so nonchalant, cavalier about it as if it means nothing.  You’d be bothered if you felt like you didn’t know him so well - hadn’t learnt his idiosyncrasies over the last two months.  

How he looks when he laughs really hard, his slightly too-big front teeth taking up all the real estate in his mouth.  How he sounds when he’s tired (groggy, with a lisp that rarely sees the light of day otherwise) or when he’s told he’s wrong (pouty, with his bottom lip jutted out so cutely you want to scream).  How he runs every morning, hits the gym every night, and eats double your protein because fitness, bro!  How his cheat meal of choice is soy garlic fried chicken from the place off-campus and he hates tangy, tart desserts (your lemonade lip gloss not included, he insists).  How he can’t sleep if he’s too hot - which he often is - and he spends way too long combing through his ears with a specialty brush he doesn’t let anyone touch.  How he’s secretly raindrops and gummy bears and hand holding in the car, so much more than his high school superlative of most likely to grace the cover of GQ.

You wonder, because you know those things, does that make you special?  Does it make you immune to the heartbreak that you swear you imagine whenever your mood drops (not often, but often enough)?  

You hope so.

“Let’s go shoot guns?”  He’s tearing you from your reverie, planting an open-mouthed kiss to your temple.  It’s sloppy and not very refined, much less suave than what you’d expect from your school’s soccer captain (and basketball small forward and swim team stand-in).  You suppose that’s why you like him so much - because he’s always surprising you, keeping you on your toes. 

“Let’s.”  You agree, letting your date drag you toward the Time Crisis machine.  It’s blissfully unoccupied, allowing the two of you to slide into place.  He takes the blue gun, you the red.  

He squeezes your hip when you take up position, one eye squeezed shut as you look down the barrel of the plastic weapon.  “Better not let me die.”

“Better not get shot,”  you return.  

He doesn’t listen - failing halfway through the helicopter scene, his shot missing and resulting in some sad miserable death in the form of Continue? blinking across the screen.  Neither of you mind that much though.  He occupies himself on his phone, free hand tucked into the back pocket of your jeans.  You play better when he’s not shouting terrible call-outs, nearly crashing into you because he gets so into it.

(How he’s never got a concussion on the basketball/soccer/etc. field before, you’re not sure.)

By the time you’re done - a good five minutes later, you think - Jungkook’s growing restless, tugging at your belt loops enough that you stumble with every shot, nearly knocking yourself out when you have to steady yourself on the centre console.  

“Kook!”  Your glare is barely that, too affectionate to dissuade him from his childish antics.  

He pulls you forward, traps you between his thick thighs, tattooed hands settling comfortably on your hips.  “Let’s go home.”

“Someone’s in a hurry.”

Of course, he doesn’t deny that.

It’s not the first time you’ve been over.  Not even your second or third.  You’ve met up with him before his games, thrown his jersey overtop and helped him wrap his fingers before hitting the court.  You’d even had to grab his cleats for him once, running across campus as he did drills in his socks as punishment.

This time feels different.  You know why but it doesn’t make it an easier pill to swallow.  It lodges somewhere in your throat, makes it hard to breathe when you kick off your shoes and tuck them neatly beside Jungkook’s.  

“Are you hungry?”  He’s already in the small kitchen, glancing over his shoulder at you as you linger in the adjoining hallway, bag halfway over your head.  

“I’m good.”  You are, really.  You’d eaten one donut too many at the arcade, indulged in a little too much disgusting nacho cheese goodness.  You don’t really understand how your date’s still hungry, a cucumber crunching between his teeth when he turns back to you. 

Standing there, vegetable devoured in quick, decisive bites, he looks every inch the French lop bunny he is.

You reach him in the same instant he finishes his midnight snack.  Arms fold around you like there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing, head dropping to rest comfortably upon yours.  Like this, his ears tickle your cheek - velveteen fur lost to the silk of your hair.  “Are you tired?”  

Another no comes - spoken into the fuzzy fabric of his sweater - and he hums above you, whole frame rattling with the noise.  

“No bed then?”  

At least he’s transparent, you think.

“One track mind much?”  You’re only teasing.  A part of you looks forward to… whatever it is that sits over the horizon, lost past the creaky bedroom door and somewhere beneath his surprisingly soft sheets.  (You’d asked about them once - he’d told you his mother liked to send him housewares to remind him of home.  He was a real mama’s boy that way.)

The monster only laughs, snuggles into your hair like it’s home.  “Can you blame me?”  

You can’t do much of anything when he’s like this - so utterly adorable and enticing and good for your heart that it feels as if you’ve taken a straight dose of morphine.

“Let’s go to bed, Wookie.”  Another nickname, recently coined after you’d spent an evening watching Star Wars for the first time.

“Yes, ma’am.”

You whack him on the way to his bedroom, smack a hand over the arm curled around your shoulders.  He pretends like it hurts, howls in a way he he thinks resembles a wounded animal but really just sounds stupid.  “Not a ma’am.”

“Sir?”  He asks, just to make you laugh. 

“If you don’t shut up—”  

He pushes you through the door of his bedroom while giggling to himself, sound puffing out of his cheeks.  “Don’t be mad, kitten.”  The two of you drop to the bed, a tangle of limbs and silken fur and squeaking laughter.  “You’re so purr-ty when you’re annoyed.”

He’s doing it again.  Dropping those stupid cat puns that make your nose wrinkle, ink-tipped ears folding back against your head.   

“I think I’m hiss-terical, don’t you?”  

Face adamantly buried into his sheets, you don’t give him the time of day.  You don’t even care that your mascara is probably rubbing off against the charcoal fabric, lipstick tint doing potentially irreversible damage.  He knows how unfunny you find these jokes, how you’ve heard them your whole life and roll your eyes so hard your optic nerve might sever every time you face another.  

What’s the point of sharing your pet peeves with him when all he does is lean into them?  Use them against you like it’s the cool thing to do.  Make you wonder what you’d seen in him when he was just another customer, another boy in Seoul National indigo and bedhead so dishevelled it begged to be managed.  

(You’re not sure why you’re so irritated suddenly, caught in the clutches of a moodswing as you curl into your side and ignore his bad jokes.)

Stupid Jeon Jungkook.  Annoying, silly, too-cool-for-his-own-good Jeon Jungkook.  

Jeon Jungkook who makes you second guess your choices, leaves you breathless and confused with just one dumb look.  Who has convinced you into his bed and teases you mercilessly, snickering to himself as his foot bounces against the floorboards because he finds himself that funny.

“Baby?”  The pet name comes, presses itself past your curtain of hair and invades your thoughts.  

You say nothing, adamantly faced away.

He doesn’t like that, sneaking his hands around you and cradling you into his chest as if that’ll lighten the mood.  (It does, a little bit, but you don’t tell him that.)  “Don’t ignore me,”  he mumbles, warmth breath tickling your ears, fingers dancing over the rungs of your ribs as if they’re ivory and not bone, playing a tune only he can hear.

“Stop with the shitty jokes,”  you retort.  You’re being difficult - can feel the vinegar turning your blood even as he tries to will it all away.

You feel the intake, the rise and fall of his broad chest.  You can only imagine how hard he’s biting his tongue, careful to keep his next errant pun at bay.  People don’t tell him no - only you.  Maybe that’s why you do it, to remind him you’re not just like everyone else.  

“Sorry.”  

You don’t tell him to show you how sorry— but he does anyway.

You’re astounded by him, utterly entranced by the way he moves.  How power runs the length of his frame, manoeuvres each of his limbs and turns your own to jelly.  

He’s got you face down, ass up, hands cradling your hips like they’re his home and he can’t bear to let go.  Every upward stroke feels like heaven - feels like a million lifetimes of pleasure you can barely wrap your thoughts around.  He’s impossibly big, thick and long.  The first thought you’d had when he’d stripped his black Calvin Kleins was pretty.  

You realise now there’s nothing pretty about him.  He’s filthy - the devil come to collect as he fucks you across his bed, nearly loses you to the pillows at the head with each snap of his hips.  (What they said about rabbits was true, you think.)

“B-Bunny,”  you sob, scratch over cotton that’s worn soft and smells exactly like your favourite sweater of his.  The linens are defenseless, tangled up and wrinkled with each flex of your fingers, bunched up within your palms every time he buries himself like he’s looking for the answer to life, thinks he might find it within the fluttering walls of your pussy.

“Not my name.”  When he sounds like this, he’s more predator than prey, a thousand volts of electricity shooting up your spine.  He’s demanding and unrelenting.  It makes your head spin.

“Wook—”  

“Not.”  Bunny teeth are just as painful as a feline’s, doing their job as they dig into the flushed skin over your back, marking his territory with two prominent indents right between your neck and shoulder.  “A.”  He ruts into you as if he’s got something to prove, snaps his hips to a beat you can’t keep up with.  “Wookie.”  Grips you so tight you might snap, red blooming beneath his hands.

You sob under him, drool against the pillows because you can’t seem to keep your mouth shut.  (You feel like Jungkook post-win, spewing nonsense as he prattles on about game winning plays with his teammates.)

“K-Kookie.”  It’s what he wants to hear - hits him right in the chest, a bull’s eye to the thing that beats wildly and in tandem with your own.  

His rhythm stutters.  The bed is shaking and not because he’s practically breaking the weak wooden frame.  No, his foot’s thumping, bouncing across the sheets even as he tries to regulate the roll of his hips, return it to the assured, teeth-numbingly good tempo it’d been at.  

It doesn’t work.  You love it anyway.  Like it more, because it means he’s just as affected by you as you are him. Your heart sings, leaps out of your chest on hummingbird wings, and dances around your head.  You’re a goddamn cartoon - Pepé Le Pew in ragdoll form - animated pink shapes circling like a crown.

You don’t care.  You can’t.  Not when he plasters himself to your back and asks you to say it again, begs you to tell him how good he is, tells you how he wants to make you his.  

Who cares if it’s three dates in, if your meeting was cliched and silly and he’s the campus heartthrob?  

You don’t - because he’s yours and when he flips you onto your back and you curl your fingers into his hair, it’s your name he stutters out.  It’s you who has him coming apart beneath your hands, the feel of his ears like velvet, the little whines he huffs growing louder each time you tug at the base.  It’s you who knows what he sounds like as he falls to pieces, throws himself against you as if gravity demands it.  It’s you who holds him to sleep, whose skin acts as a canvas for the doodles he traces as he drifts off.  

It’s you and it’s him and that’s enough.

tag list.  @neverthefirstchoice​ @youwannabelostandnotbefound​ @snackhobi​ @codeinebelle​​

[katyamorrigan]

‘Hope is the thing with Feathers’ by KatyaMorrigan

For the Grishaverse Reverse Mini-Bang 2021, run by @grishaversebigbang, and with stunning art created by @wqemzz-blog - click here for her incredible illustration of Kaz and Inej!

Captain Inej Ghafa has returned to Ketterdam for the first time in three years. In all that time, The Wraith never docked at Berth 22 for more than an afternoon, and the crew never strayed further than the harbour front.

Could she have stopped by sooner? Absolutely. Did she choose not to for entirely business-related reasons? Absolutely not. She has no idea what her friends will make of seeing her again after so long, least of all Kaz. But there is hope - hope that in that time, he will have grown as much as she has. That he will be the kind of person that she can share a pot of tea with without a thought of how he might feel about her.

Because Inej isn't done with being a pirate yet. But it doesn't mean she wants to be at sea forever.

I had the best time getting to write this fic based on the idea proposed by Emma. So much of a good time, in fact, that I overwrote it by around 4k words in the end... This is the much more civilised 2k word version - the full iteration of the story is on my AO3 ), but this significantly neater version will remain on my Tumblr for good. I really hope that you like it, and check out @wqemzz-blog for all your beautiful art needs!

Link to the fic on AO3: ‘Hope is the thing with Feathers’

And available to read below the cut here:

‘Hope is the thing with Feathers’

It occurred to Inej as she entered Kaz’s office for the first time in three years, that in the past she might have second-guessed the meaning of his offer to have tea together. They had just spent a few hours talking during dinner – mostly talking over Jesper and Wylan, who had hosted the meal and were either polite or forgiving enough to allow them to dominate the conversation with reflections on Inej’s time beyond Ketterdam. Three years was a long time when you had last been teenagers breaking into the Ice Court together, when you were now the owner of a galleon that hunted slaver ships from Fjerda to the Wandering Isle. There was plenty to discuss between them, and it seemed that Kaz had changed enough to ask her to stay with no apprehension, so that they could be in each other’s company a little while longer.

The attic room was identical to her memories of it but her gaze was drawn to Kaz, with ungloved hands, stooping to open the cupboard and bring out two tins. With a tentative look at her, he placed them on the desk and opened them. Inej couldn’t help laughing.

“When did Dirtyhands start keeping cookies in his office?” she teased. “Two kinds, as well.”

He gave a permissive smile. “Nina may have had more influence over me than I would like to admit. She sends them to me from Ravka.”

Feeling a bittersweet rush of longing for her friend, Inej reached over and helped herself to an iced biscuit with a red star on the top as Kaz took the other tin and started to make them tea. The room filled with the smell, quiet clinking noises coming from the cupboard again as Kaz fetched cups and saucers, and Inej watched him from the corner of her eye as she nibbled. He had taken off his jacket, and Inej could see the strong line of his shoulders as he prepared their drinks. Yes, a younger version of herself would have been much more flustered than Captain Ghafa, as she was now. She might have told herself stories about how invested Kaz was, about his tactics and techniques for making her trust him – for making her want to stay. Now she had no such worries. She was in the bedroom of an old friend – an old partner, in many ways – and they were sharing a pot of tea.

Inej smiled as she turned away from sneaking glances at Kaz and looked out of the window instead, at the uncharacteristically beautiful light that was shining in. The fog of the early afternoon had lifted, and Ketterdam seemed to concentrate every scrap of colour on painting the evening sky in crimson and gold. It felt like a personal display from the city, like it was finally welcoming her in. She couldn’t believe that she had been away for so long.

“Can I open the window?” she asked. Kaz chuckled.

“You have never once asked my permission to open a window.” Kaz brought over their cups and placed them on the sill, where Inej was now sitting, and obligingly opened it for her.

A gentle breeze entered the room, tickling Inej’s cheek. She closed her eyes for a second and forgot that she had ever been away. The sensation of being here – in Kaz’s office, on the windowsill, letting the fading sunlight warm her skin – made her feel so young and so old at the same time. It was like slipping into an outfit she hadn’t worn in years, feeling the ways it had always fit her, and the ways that she had grown since. Inej was nothing like the girl that Kaz had once known, but she didn’t feel so different when she was back here, just a little taller and a little more forgiving.

Kaz brought over a plate with more cookies, taking a large one heavily studded with chocolate, and leaned against the wall. It had been three years, but still they were so comfortable existing in a space like this together, breathing in the warm air. She took a sip of her tea, and tasted honey. Just the way she had always liked it.

“You look well,” he said, not breaking the silence but disrupting it, like ripples on a pond. “The sea suits you.”

“Thank you. I rather like it too. Ketterdam has continued to suit you – is that a new scar on your jaw, or have I just never noticed it?”

“It’s new. About a year ago I was very nearly shot in the face by a Razorgull. Fortunately Jesper manipulated the bullet at the last second and I was only burnt.”

She inhaled sharply in sympathy, and Kaz shrugged. “It healed quickly, and that’s all I ask for.”

“Do you ever think you’ll end up more scar than skin?” she said, half in jest and half with sincerity. As the words left her mouth, she thought of how closely her question came to the kind of Suli proverb that she had goaded him with previously. That she had tested him with.  

“Not anymore.”

His reply was unexpectedly thoughtful. Inej turned to him, and he gave a soft smile.

“The Dregs don’t get caught up in the same trouble that they used to. There’s less chance for me to get hurt.”

“I’m glad.”

She took a cookie, a chocolate one like Kaz’s, and bit into it. It crumbled instantly, scattering crumbs all down her chin and the front of her waistcoat. Kaz saw; there was a beat of silence and then laughter, Inej’s giggles muffled by the cookie.

“You pirates make our manners look sophisticated,” he commented. She swatted the air in front of him.

“My manners haven’t suffered at all, I’ll have you know!”

“My poor windowsill. I’ll have to clean it now.”

“It could probably do with a clean if you’re anything like you used to be,” she replied, and Kaz raised an eyebrow at her.

“I always cleaned the windows frequently.”

“Specifically the windows.”

He tilted his shoulder and looked out across the city. The gilded roofs stretched from the harbour all the way to the Barrel. Inej watched him as he absorbed it all, taking a sip of tea, adjusting the cup in his bare hands. He looked exactly the way she had hoped to find him – a little stronger, a little harsher, that new scar dimpling the line of his jaw like a tally on a gun barrel, but unmistakeably the same Kaz that she had left behind. He looked every bit the young man that he was – handsome, clever, mean.

“You loved to sit here and look out. I always made sure you’d be able to.”

“Oh.”

She was glad he kept looking at the view. To lock eyes with him then might have done something to her – made her feel another way. A way she had felt for a long time, that she had stifled. Inej focused her gaze on the broken pieces of cookie in her hand, crumbling it more. Everything felt quietly loud; gentle, but unrelenting.

The familiar click of claws on tiles came from a little further along the roof.

Kaz leaned towards the sound. “They must have recognised you,” he smiled, “The crows have come back.”

Inej made an elated noise and turned herself to look. There they were – a little murder of crows, with sharp eyes and sharp beaks, cawing as politely as crows could.

“I can’t believe it,” she murmured.

“They stopped visiting when you left. They knew you were here.”

“No,” she said, delighted but disbelieving. He nodded.

Inej watched them move, alert and intelligent, talking to her. She remembered Kaz’s decrial of them as mannerless and untrustworthy, but when she scooped up some cookie crumbs and held them out, they arranged themselves neatly to feed from her hand. Her hands were rough now from the years of sailor’s work, but she could still feel the smoothness of their beaks as they pecked and the trace of their feathers on her fingers.

“I missed them too.”

Kaz took another sip. “Were seagulls not friendly enough?”

She laughed. “They were friendly in their own way – they certainly ate up scraps quite well. But I couldn’t feed them like this. They didn’t wait for me like the crows always did.”

“They were always looking for you to come back.” His voice was as gravelly as ever, but Inej felt a hint of longing as he spoke. With the last of the crumbs gone, she brushed off her hands and turned back towards the room, to look at him. The expression he wore was the one that she remembered most vividly, and with the least joy; that inscrutable intensity that made her feel transparent. He was looking inside of her, and she struggled to translate what he had seen from the look he was giving her.

“Do you ever wish you had stayed here instead?” Kaz asked.

Ah. The question that she had expected to be met with – it had been avoided all evening while they were with Jesper and Wylan, but now it emerged while they were alone. It was a question that she knew the answer for. Whether it was the one he wanted or not, it was the one he would get.

“No. I love being on the sea. I love having a purpose that I can enact so clearly. Everything I told you over dinner was true – it has its challenges, but I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”

Kaz nodded, and she saw pride lock into his eyes.

“You’ve become somewhat of a legend to the sailors who come to Ketterdam now,” he said, a grin building. “Men who arrive shaken by what they saw at a distance – of a pirate queen in blue and gold invading slaver ships and leaving them to die. It has certainly damaged West Stave.”

She touched her earring. “It has?”

“Of course. The bulk of working girls in any of the brothels are stolen, and with so few slaver boats succeeding in bringing any ashore…”

Inej grinned back. Her only hope when she finally decided to leave Ketterdam had been to bring justice to those children like her, but to know that her efforts were ruining trafficking from the ground up… It was almost too much. Her face hurt from smiling, and Kaz turned away from her to look out of the window again.

“How long are you staying here for?” he asked.

Another question. So much easier.

“Two weeks. My crew have been given leave in that time, but I’m hoping that they will all want to sign on for the next stint.”

“And you?”

“I have given myself leave, yes, Kaz,” she chuckled. Kaz huffed self-consciously. “I’ll be around, is what I mean. If you wanted to have tea again some time.”

“Yes.”

Their eyes met, and she was a teenager again. Inej hadn’t thought about Kaz in that way for a long time. Hadn’t allowed herself to. She knew that the moment in which she let the thought of anything tender and vulnerable growing between them take root in her mind again was the moment in which she would have to rethink her answer to that tricky question. But Saints, it had always been hard not to.

“I can tell stories about Captain Ghafa while you’re gone, if you’d like.” Kaz’s smile was sharp. “Make sure that everyone in Ketterdam knows the name and fears it.”

Her heart betrayed her so, so quietly.

“You don’t need to,” she said.

“Why’s that, Inej?”

Three years of never letting herself near him, just in case the possibility of a dual life came back into play. Three years in which she only regretted one thing.

“I’ll be back again before too long.”

[lokilickedme]

The Way

I’m writing horror again.  I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason.  And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly.  Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note:  I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you.  But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed.  It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case.  We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to.  There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did.  If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us.  We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew.  Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care.  It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE.  There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish.  As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me.  I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

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This is, regrettably, a true story.  Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

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They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

.

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.  Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption.  Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances.  We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks.  Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well.  You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave?  The one who died under mysterious circumstances?  That one.

He left the way he always came in.  Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking.  She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998.  I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband.  He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live.  It wasn’t bad.  He’d tell you otherwise.  The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it.  I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times.  But now I know.  That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back.  It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway.  This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of.  The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon.  My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other.  James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him.  Perception bias, he said.  Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly.  We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe.  We meant it.  He made people nervous.  He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know.  It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones.  We were the smart ones, in retrospect.  I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family.  But mostly the congregation.  It was always more important than anything else.  And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking.  Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right?  The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition.  They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home.  Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed.  God’s not like that.  And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it?  I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain.  A moral code, yes.  But isn’t that what God is, really?  Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us.  But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result.  Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned.  And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water.  The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow.  He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest.  So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay.  I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that.  Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself.  It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day.  The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that.  It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further.  Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different.  What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person.  I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then.  You were just weird, or you weren’t.  And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking.  But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to.  He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known.  And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now.  I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult.  There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it.  My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later.  My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though.  He took the easy way.  He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

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December 22, 1998.  Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us.  The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work.  We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years.  The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires.  Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making.  He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot.  Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time.  I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother.  He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior.  The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong.  Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult.  It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

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My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation.  They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise.  I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son.  I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy.  She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather.  Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much.  He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders.  My grandmother couldn’t swim.  We could make another Ruthie, he said.  But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice.  I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy.  I was never close to him.  But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me.  I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life.  But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak.  I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear.  And I felt bad.  I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized.  My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying.  Granddads are supposed to be fun.  Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam.  And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him.  She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on.  She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown.  That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next.  How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand.  It affected her.  She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it.  And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for.  He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad.  The homestead.  The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived.  A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives.  James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for.  She’d wanted us all to stay.  We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said.  That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be.  We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke.  It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me.  James was dead, had been for years.  Robbie was dead now too.  Dad was gone, so was granddad.  Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them.  We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life.  And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts.  Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land.  And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew.  The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it.  It was just an old grave.  The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground.  My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him.  He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it.  He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line.  It was a cool jacket.  Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era.  He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door.  To this day I can’t sort it.  It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness.  It wasn’t grief.  It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for.  It was cold.  I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it.  And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said.  He’s in his house.  I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told.  He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants.  There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do.  And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point.  He said he didn’t know.  He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important.  Something tells me it was.  Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again.  He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow.  I’m sorry.

What do we do?  I asked him.  I’ve never felt more blank.  What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother.  I remember thinking that was a good idea.  Robbie would know what to do.  He always did.  Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them.  He would get on it, whatever needed doing.  He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut.  I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

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It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it.  Someone you saw just yesterday.  Someone who was alive.  Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow.  And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from.  The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life.  I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him.  I never saw him.  I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van.  I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with.  And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that.  Some days it helps.  And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped.  I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

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For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill.  Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable.  We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm.  Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office.  There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down.  And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice.  By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

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No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose.  The end report was obtained two months later.  It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue.  There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death.  His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life.  There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery.  He was a secretive person, intensely private.  He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family.  He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep.  There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box.  He simply hadn’t woken up to use it.  Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said.  He was melted, literally.  It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say.  He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me.  I’ll go with you if you want to go.  But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead.  I never saw any proof that he was gone.  He just wasn’t there anymore.  There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

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Dad was different from that day on.  He’d always been stoic, terse, strict.  My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years.  The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him.  He was nicer suddenly.  Mellow.  Kind.  After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny.  The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before.  He and I became friends.  I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it.  But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again.  And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again.  He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him?  She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished.  Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes.  I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager.  I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well.  She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority.  She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me.  I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down.  I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever.  It changed me forever.  That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either.  She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me.  It was the first of several disownings over the next few years.  I got used to it.  We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk.  It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

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A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together.  It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him.  The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there.  I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric.  James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end.  The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it.  I don’t know why.  It was dry.

He was gone.

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David and I laughed a lot that day.  James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted.  And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me.  He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him.  He was unknowable and therefore unbindable.  But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub.  I’m not sure what it went to.  Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on.  There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it.  Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before.  Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved.  David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his.  I told him to take it.  It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something.  One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

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My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived.  After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge.  He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another.  There had been several more on the floor around the bed.  My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone.  Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how.  Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with.  My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing!  We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common.  Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation?  Dad was the only one that spoke to them.  They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that.  My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

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The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it.  Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

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The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us.  There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway.  There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret.  In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring.  We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death.  We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me.  James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway.  The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

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We never felt safe on the hill again.  Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession.  She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice.  We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness.  But we knew she was evil.  We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right.  But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself.  She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive.  The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife.  He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails.  He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat.  One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death.  She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming.  She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies.  Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come.  At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized.  She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load.  She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

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We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house.  The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would.  She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it.  The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to.  They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out.  I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her.  She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently.  No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face.  It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment.  That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are.  I can’t do that.  I won’t let her win that way.  I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name.  I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away.  My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said.  He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered.  But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

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Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking.  He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west.  The way we were going.  And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

.

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today

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