#AND two double scoop protein shakes A DAY

[thouartachoochootrain]

Bodybuilding is fun, I enjoy it. I’ve been doing this a while and been trying to keep abreast of like the culture a bit. I think I’m finally understanding why guys are so quick to say someone is taking Steroids. Like to build mass gets so much harder because like you start reaching this equilibrium point that all natural systems necessarily HAVE TO HAVE, because infinite growth literally isn’t possible.

I gram of protein per pound, bro, like have you ever tried to consume 180 or more grams of protein in a day?????? That shit is HARD!!

Some guy being like 280 lbs of pure muscle FUCK YEAH IM SUSPICIOUS WHAT SIX FIGURE JOB IS FEEDING YOU???? HOW MANY HORSES A DAY MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!??!?!?!?

[josiesbooksauce]

but i’m not a cheerleader d!et: day 2

[see pinned post for d!et plan]

i hate eggs. i wish i liked eggs. they’re so nutritious.

for breakfast i had the world’s smallest avocado, a double scoop protein shake, an apple, and an egg white omelette. the omelette was so disgusting i ended up cutting it into pieces and swallowing them whole. i couldn’t bear to chew it.

for dinner, a massive salad with black beans, vegetarian “steak,” cucumber, tomato, onion and NO DRESSING, tho i did drizzle a little soy sauce and lime juice. also an apple and some more protein shake

at least least 2.5 liters of water [✔️]

13 hour fast starting at 7 pm [✔️]

two pieces of fruit [✔️]

protein goal [✔️]

[vannahfanfics]

It’s A Wonderful Life

Word Count: 1315

Fluff, Family Fluff, Post-Canon, Siblings

Summary: After all the stress and chaos of two Games, Rhyme is grateful for the little things in life.

Tap-tap, tippa-tap, tap-tippa-tap-tap-tap-tap.  

Rhyme drummed her fingers against the sides of her coffee mug as she waited patiently in front of the coffee machine. The water hissed and boiled in the confines of the machine; the robust aroma of coffee swirled in the air, whispering promises of bursting energy and delicious flavor if Rhyme could only wait just a few more moments. Of course, Rhyme wasn’t one of those people, a slave to the Keurig who required coffee to function; no, she simply enjoyed the taste of it, and thus treated herself to a cup once or twice a week. She liked to vary her diet, especially her breakfasts; she wasn’t like Beat, who’d consumed a massive protein shake and a heaping bowl of eggs and rice every morning for as long as they both could remember. 

Just as Rhyme was giggling to herself about the fact that her brother was shoveling over-easy eggs into his mouth with all the force of a high-powered vacuum at that very moment, the coffee machine clicked, and piping-hot coffee spewed into the glass pitcher. Rhyme waited until it was finished, then retrieved the crock and filled her coffee mug to the brim. She helped it up to her nose, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply; the tantalizing aroma of the brewed coffee beans drew a soft hum from what seemed like the depths of her soul. She didn’t need it to function, but boy, was it the highlight of her day when she chose to partake in it!

Rhyme was in a rather delightful mood now, and so she couldn’t help but wiggle her hips in a little happy dance while she flounced over to the kitchen table. She eased herself into the chair next to Beat, then daintily sipped at her coffee while she watched him. He was feverishly scooping eggs and rice in his mouth with one hand while the other was tracing paragraph after paragraph of his biology textbook, following along with his roving eyes. 

“Ready for your biology test?” Rhyme asked, followed by another light sip of her drink. 

“I could study for a hundred years, and I still wouldn’t be ready for this test, yo,” came his exasperated reply. He pulled his hand away from the book to promptly slam his forehead down in it. “This block is a nightmare, yo! Who knew that trees were so damn complicated?! I gotta know how the damn things grow, how they make fruits ‘n flowers, and even the damn types o’ trees! Decidu-ish? Conifer-ish? The hell!” 

Rhyme just nodded sympathetically while her older brother ranted. After returning from the Reaper’s Game three years ago, he really did double down on his academic efforts. That didn’t mean it came any easier to him, especially the fact-heavy sciences or abstract maths. This wasn’t the first last-minute cram session and morning lament that Rhyme had borne witness to. But Beat never let his frustration get him down for long; staunch as a bull, he heaved himself back up and resumed his ardent textbook reading. He grew more and more hunched as if proximity would make him glean the knowledge easier. 

This botany section has been particularly rough, Rhyme thought with a sympathetic tut. Even I would probably find the intricate details of trees to be a bit of a slog. They’re pretty and all, but I don’t think I would care to know that much about them. 

As she pondered the nature of botanical sciences and arborescent things, the proverbial lightbulb went off. Rhyme suddenly grinned to herself. Ah, I’ve got a great idea!

She snatched up a napkin and laid it on the table in front of her. She then plucked Beat’s spoon right out of her hands, earning a scandalized squawk from her brother. She paid it no mind; the gears of creativity were whirring in her brain, and so there was no room for social graces or etiquette. She spooned up a bit of the coffee, then began to carefully and deliberately drip it onto the napkin. 

“I wasn’t done with that,” Beat whined, but made no move to retrieve his utensil. He just plopped his cheek in his hand and watched Rhyme work. Just as she was no stranger to his frantic study binges, he was accustomed to her random strikes of artistic inspiration, wherein she would use whatever was handy to construct her vision. Bubblegum, sticky notes, matchsticks, dusty furniture, food—nothing was safe from Rhyme’s bursts of ingenuity, and since her family was quite used to them, their house was littered with her handiwork. This certainly wasn’t her first impromptu coffee drip painting; in fact, her entire collection of them adorned the refrigerator. This was actually at Beat’s insistence. Of all the spontaneous artwork that Rhyme made, the coffee stain creations were his favorite. 

Drip by drip, the liquid bleeding into the absorbent paper coalesced into the shadow of Rhyme’s overall vision. Once the base was formed, Rhyme began to add detail by drawing lines of coffee with the spoon. Gradually, the image emerged—spindly limbs sprouting from a broad trunk, plumes of leaves dancing in an invisible wind, apples bunched on the branches, ready to fall but suspended in time. It only took Rhyme a few minutes to turn the blank white canvas of the napkin into an impressive rendition of a lush apple tree, and she promptly offered the spoon back to Beat. 

“Thanks for letting me borrow it.” 

“Right. ‘Borrow.’ ‘Cuz you totally didn’t just yoink it right outta my hand,” Beat laughed, taking the spoon back and digging right back into his egg and rice. After stuffing his cheeks full like a chipmunk, he turned back toward the textbook—only to find that Rhyme had set the completed artwork on top of it. He shot her a puzzled glance, and Rhyme giggled. 

“This is for you. It’s a good luck charm for your exam!” she chirped. “Do your best on your exam, then bring it home and hang it up with all the others.” 

Beat blinked dopily at her. Then, he swiftly swallowed the huge mouthful of food he had crammed into his mouth so he could flash her a blinding grin.

“I heard that, yo! Jus’ you watch; I’mma blow this test outta the water!” 

Rhyme giggled again as he resumed studying with gusto. She picked up her coffee and leaned back in the chair, sipping it casually while she watched Beat skim the book and mutter important things to himself. It was just an everyday, run-of-the-mill Friday morning, not much different than many of the Fridays that had come before. 

I’m so glad we got this second chance, Rhyme thought, smiling against the rim of the coffee cup. And it’s all thanks to you, Beat. I know that our parents are hard on you because they think you don’t work hard enough… But that’s okay. Because I know that you work hard for the things that really matter. 

For that, you’ll always be number one in my book… whether you know the difference between deciduous and coniferous trees or not!

Already, Rhyme’s creative mind was stirring again. She reached for another napkin, and, without looking up from his book, Beat held out his spoon for her. She took it with a chuckle and a sweet, quiet “Thanks!” 

Their parents would never know what they went through to have boring, typical mornings like this. And they didn’t have to. This was what they’d all worked so hard for, after all—so that anyone in Shibuya could have weird moments of creativity, and last-minute study sessions, and share breakfast with those they cared about. 

Coffee was usually the highlight of Rhyme’s day. But today, it was the simple fact that she was here, in Shibuya, enjoying breakfast with her big brother. It truly was a wonderful life. 

[olivemac]

heartbeat | chapter two | b.b.

Summary | When Steve Rogers asks Kate Stark to find the Winter Soldier, she gets too involved.

Notes | Captain America: Civil War re-write, essentially. Starts just after the events of CA: Winter Soldier.

Pairing | Bucky Barnes x fem!oc, Bucky Barnes x Stark!oc

Genre | romance

Rating | explicit

Story Warnings | angst, fluff, romance tropes, so many romance tropes, coarse language, alcohol use, canon-typical violence , smut (m/f), oral sex (f&m receiving), 18+ ONLY

Chapter Warnings | coarse language

master list | AO3 link

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prev chapter

_____

Kate is on the next commercial flight to Bucharest. She's worried Bucky will move on before she can get to him, but she knows Tony would never approve of the use of one of his jets to chase down an ex-assassin in hiding. The less he knows, the better. Which is why she told him she was escaping to Europe for a long respite after feeling oh so overwhelmed with her work at Stark Industries.

Tony barely bats an eye when she told him. There were some advantages to being Tony Starks' baby sister. The first being he feels guilty about his ineptness at raising her after their parents' death and would literally let her get away with murder. The second is an almost unlimited bank account left to her by her father and supplemented by Tony's previously mentioned guilt.

Kate Stark was her mother’s mid-life crisis. Maria, three decades younger than her husband, had – at forty-two years old – decided she wanted another baby. Tony, who was eighteen at the time, had balked at the idea. But Howard relented and called in the best team of fertility doctors money could buy, and Kate was born.

She doesn't remember her parents, not really. She was only three when they died, and she doesn't remember that event either. Though she was there, in the car, when it crashed on Long Island.

Tony's only ever spoken to her about it once, after she accused him of hating her for surviving when their parents died. Really, he hated that he survived.

When rescue workers arrived at the scene of the wreck, they found her parents dead in the front seat and her tucked safely into her car seat in the back, bundled up against the December cold. She was an orphan, and Tony, at twenty-one, was suddenly responsible for a toddler.

So, he did the only thing he could think of. He hired a series of nannies to raise her, then sent her off to boarding school as soon as she was old enough, all the while playing genius, billionaire playboy.

He wasn’t surprised when it turned out she was just as smart as him or their father. And it surprised him less when she followed in his footsteps and attended MIT. What did surprise him was when she started hacking government databases for fun. She only agreed to work for him at Stark Industries in exchange for him not sticking Rhodey on her after she released documents regarding the US Air Force‘s involvement in some less that savory overseas dealings.

On the plane, she starts an email to Steve telling him where she was headed and what she had found. Then she deletes it and starts over. Then deletes that. She chews her thumbnail and thinks. If she tells Steve where Bucky is, he'll come blazing in, shield at the ready, and Bucky will.... She doesn’t know what Bucky will do, but she has a feeling the encounter would end with a fight and Bucky running. Which will kill Steve. Again. So, she decides she doesn't need to tell Steve – not right away. She'll see if she can figure out what Bucky remembers – if anything – before telling Steve where he is.

_____

A little over forty-eight hours after her software found Bucky, Kate is assembling IKEA furniture in her new studio apartment in Romania. Getting the landlord to lease her the empty flat next to Bucky's was easy enough when Kate offered him double what he was asking in rent. He was discreet enough to not ask any questions. Most of the people in the building were hiding from something so a young American woman who paid cash upfront wasn't the most unusual thing he'd dealt with.

She makes her bed, unpacks her suitcase, and re-reads the Winter Soldier file. That night she dreams of her parents and the wreck that killed them. In the dream there's always a man outside of the car, but she can never see his face. Her father begs for help: "Help my wife, my daughter. Please. Help."

She wakes up sweating, a scream caught in her throat.

_____

The apartment next to his is no longer empty. Bucky can hear music and soft footsteps through the paper-thin walls. If he focuses his hearing, he can hear a heartbeat other than his own, but he's working to turn off the super soldier reflexes, so he tries to ignore it. He's enjoyed the silence that the empty apartment afforded him, and he hopes the new tenant isn’t as nosy as his neighbor in Kiev who had asked so many questions. He hadn't stayed long after that meeting.

Around two in the morning, he wakes to the sound of a strangled cry from his new neighbor. Bucky sits up straight, suddenly on alert. He listens closely, focusing for the sounds of a struggle, but he only hears the unfamiliar heartbeat. His neighbor was having a nightmare, he imagines. He had plenty of those himself.

Sometimes he was staring down the barrel of a gun, his only intent to kill. Other nightmares took him back to the HYDRA base and their machine that scrambled his thoughts over and over again. And others found him falling from a train, the blonde man from the Triskelion reaching out toward him. He always wakes up just before he hits the icy river he knows awaits him.

Bucky knows now that the blonde man is Steve Rogers. Without HYDRA's influence, he's started to remember more: flashes of Steve and a group called the Howling Commandos during the war, but also flashes of Steve before the war, smaller, shorter. And flashes of a family – his family – a father, a mother, a sister. Rebecca. The name comes to him one afternoon while he's browsing the used bookstore near his flat.

He's started eating plums and jogging to improve his memory. He isn't sure if it's helping, but the memories are becoming longer and more frequent. He sees himself with Steve at Coney Island, riding the Cyclone until Steve lost his lunch and Bucky laughed so hard tears were streaming down his face, and he sees himself flirting with an auburn-haired combat nurse in Italy, following her back to her tent and undressing her slowly.

He wakes the next morning feeling restless. He had slept in fits and starts, listening for any more disturbances from next door. None came.

He dresses and goes for a run, and when he returns, he catches his first glimpse of his new neighbor. She's coming out of her apartment, her face turned downward toward her phone. When he reaches the top of the stairs, she lifts her head and smiles. Bucky is struck by how pretty she is, a thought he hasn't let himself have since leaving HYDRA. He turns away quickly and slams the door to his own apartment. He doesn't need pink lips and dark curls reminding him of what he can never have again. He's too broken for her, or anyone else for that matter.

_____

Bucky has seen his new neighbor more times in five days than he's seen anyone else in the building over the past two months. They always seem to be coming or going at the same time.

The first time he actually speaks to her, she's dropping groceries up the stairs from a rip in her canvas bag.

"Fuck," she mutters as an apple rolls beneath the railing and falls to the landing below.

Bucky has a brief vision of her uttering that same word while his head is buried between her legs, but he shakes if off quickly.

"Let me," he says in English, scooping up some rogue potatoes and taking the bag from her.

"Thanks," she says before unlocking her door and holding it open for him.

Her apartment is the same layout as his – one room, with a tiny bathroom at the front and a small kitchen along the back wall. He sets the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter and steps back.

"I should—"

"Thank you—"

They both speak at the same time. Bucky bows his head and motions for her to continue.

"Thank you for your help." She pauses. "And it's nice to speak English for a change. My Romanian is atrocious," she laughs. "How’d you guess?"

"All the music you listen to is in English," he replies brusquely.

She cringes. "Sorry. I'll turn it down."

"No," he says, "It's fine. Really."

There's an awkward pause as they both stare at each other.

Bucky breaks the silence first. "I should go."

"Right." She leads him to the door. "Thanks."

Bucky nods.

When his own apartment door closes behind him, he sighs and scrubs his right hand over his face. He needs to avoid her. He doesn't need anything to distract him from regaining his memories, and he certainly doesn't need to get close to someone he'll inevitably hurt. He doesn’t even begin let himself entertain the thought that she could be a HYDRA agent waiting to turn him in.

_____

Later that evening, he's startled by a knock at his door. When he peers into the hallway, there's a plate of food on the floor, covered with a cloth and a note. He picks it up.

Thanks for saving my groceries.

- Kate

Bucky considers the possibilities that she is a HYDRA agent and the food is poisoned, but he decides it's unlikely HYDRA would take that approach. If anything, they would want their soldier back, and if they didn't, they wouldn't kill him quickly. Also, he can't remember the last time he had a home-cooked meal – definitely before the war – and he’s starving. Protein bars aren’t really cutting it anymore.

He studies the note as he eats. He runs his fingers over the name written in curling handwriting: Kate, and debates what his next move should be. He needs to ignore her – for her own safety – but his mother raised a gentleman so he should at least thank her for dinner, right?

_____

Kate nearly steps on the plate when she leaves her flat the next morning for a run. It’s sitting right at her doorway, clean, the dish towel she had with it folded with a note peeking out.

Kate,

You’re welcome. Thank you for dinner.

- Bucky

If she knew how long Bucky had agonized over whether to write back, she probably would have cried. Kate definitely would have cried if she knew he had debated whether or not to sign the note “Bucky” or “James.” He’s been using James at any off-the-books odd jobs he can get, but with his memories returning, he’s been feeling more like the Bucky Steve referred to in DC.

_____

Kate makes a potato soup that night and leaves it outside his door sans note. She brings him dinner for a week straight before she asks him to dine with her.

"Come over,” she says the next time they pass in the hall.

"What?" Bucky freezes.

"Come over tonight,” Kate repeats, “for dinner.”

"Why?" He sounds rude. He should really work on that, but she’s caught him in one of his broodier moods after another sleepless night.

"Why not?” she shrugs. “I have wine."

He’s staring at her. He realizes he needs to stop staring at her and answer.

“Okay.”

“Seven thirty?” she suggests.

"Okay," he replies.

"Okay," she laughs.

For a second, Bucky wonders if she's laughing at him, but there's a softness in her eyes that makes him think not. Talking to women used to be easy, he thinks. It took him hours to come up with the simplest response to her note the other night, and now he can't even form a sentence in front of her. He spends the rest of the day worrying he's made a huge mistake in accepting her invitation.

He's not the only one. Kate has half a mind to call it all off, phone Steve, and get on the next plane back to New York. What if he doesn't remember anything? What if he's still the Winter Soldier? She has a brief vision of Bucky snapping and wrapping that metal hand he's been hiding around her throat – and not in a fun way. But when he knocks on her door at seven thirty, she thinks she might actually die from how sweet he looks.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi," he responds, running his tongue over his lips nervously.

They're caught in another awkward moment of just staring at each other when she finally invites him.

The old Bucky would have bought flowers and then made some quip about how the flowers aren't nearly as beautiful as she is, but this Bucky – post-HYDRA Bucky – feels like he's forgotten how to interact with women at all and his tongue has suddenly turned to lead.

Kate's debated how much to reveal about herself. Finally, she decides she'll tell him everything. Well, mostly everything. He doesn't need to know that she's a Stark or friends with Steve Rogers or here on some crazy rescue mission to save the Winter Soldier because maybe, just maybe, she read his file one too many times and got caught up in the look in Steve's eyes when he talked about Bucky. No, he doesn't need to know that.

Kate's also considered how much to ask him about himself. She wants to know what – if anything – he remembers, but she also doesn't want to give herself away by revealing she knows who he really is. And she doubts he’ll tell her outright. The fact that he signed the note Bucky seems like a good indication that his memories are returning, though.

"How long have you been in Bucharest, Bucky?" she asks, plating their dinner.

"Almost two months," he says.

"Here for work?" she asks casually.

"Uh...it's complicated," he says, scratching at the back of his neck. "You?"

She looks up at him. "It's complicated."

They're staring at each other again, and Bucky has to force himself to look away.

"Family?" she asks.

"Also complicated," he says. God, he thinks, he sounds like a jackass. But it's not like he can tell her he's a ninety-eight-year-old ex-assassin in hiding so his family is probably long dead.

She motions for him to sit at her small kitchen table and sets a plate in front of him.

"You're not hiding a wedding ring under those gloves, are you?" she asks, a smirk on her lips. She knows about his arm; she just wants to see what he’ll give away.

He blushes and looks at his hands. Then he realizes he's taking too long to answer, and she probably thinks he's an idiot. "No... uh...no. No," he finally says without elaborating.

Kate can sense he's nervous so she does what Tony would do in a situation like this and just keeps talking. She tells him about Tony – minus the Stark detail. She talks about MIT and New York and the last book she read. He listens closely, laughing softly when she makes jokes and asking questions where appropriate. He likes the way her lips look when they form his name and the way her eyes light up at her own humor.

When they finish eating, Bucky helps her wash dishes. She considers asking him to stay, watch a movie or something, but then she thinks maybe she should take this slowly, not overwhelm him, so she bids him goodnight and closes the door behind him.

Bucky thinks Kate might be the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. Then he thinks that might be because she’s the first woman he’s interacted with in so long. Either way, he tries not to think of her that night when his body remembers what it's like to be a man.

He decides that staying away from her would be too hard.

On the other side of the wall, she’s thinking of him, too. She hadn't expected his eyes to be so impossibly blue. She had stared at the black and white military photo for hours, but seeing him in person, she was caught in the Arctic waters that made up his eyes.

_____

next chapter

[modecaisnow]

The Best Gift for the Big Guy

**This story contains themes suitable for those 18 years or older. This story contains themes of: Extreme Weight Gain, Farting, Sweating, and Size Difference. No relations in this one. HAPPY NEW YEARS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL MY WATCHERS! (and to those who lurk ☺ )**

Malcolm, a freshman in college, comes home for the holidays hoping for some new workout gear for Christmas. Turns out the bulking powder his parents got him might not work the way it is expected to. Instead, it seems to almost double his weight with each shake! At first, Malcolm is disgusted by the weight gain, and the farting. However, with a supportive family of fitness lovers, and his two older brother's Chris (a heavy weight bodybuilder) and Dan (a fitness instructor), Malcolm might end up falling in love with his size.

Malcolm was the youngest out of three brothers. His older brothers – Chris and Dan, were both out of college and pursuing careers in Health and Fitness. Chris was a heavyweight bodybuilder, and Dan was a fitness instructor – their entire family took fitness very seriously. Malcolm always looked up to his brothers; he especially wanted to become a bodybuilder like his oldest brother, Chris. Malcolm had just finished his first semester at college, and wanted to start exercising so by the time he reached Chris’ age, he could be big like him. For Christmas, Malcolm wanted all new fitness gear: new workout clothes, protein powder, BCAAs, Pre-workout, and bulking powder to help speed up the process. On Christmas morning that was what he got. However, instead of the bulking powder, he asked for, his parents bought him a strange brand from a different country. “It was cheaper, and a worker at the GNC in town suggested it,” Malcolm’s dad said. “That’s okay! I’m sure it’ll work fine!” Malcolm said. Malcolm was never a muscular guy like his brothers. He grew up as the scrawny, geeky kinda kid. He was picked on throughout high school, and when he graduated college he found that people didn’t really seem to notice him when he went out with his friends. This, as well as his admiration for his brothers, is what really pushed him to try and beef up a bit. Right before bed, Malcolm decided to take a scoop of the bulking powder and make himself a shake. After drinking it, he quickly passed out on his full-sized mattress and dozed off into a deep slumber. He woke up the next day feeling heavy all over. His muscles felt strong, but his body was incredibly warm and wobbly. After rubbing his eyes, Malcolm finally woke up and saw that his hands had gotten fatter. Not just that, but so were his arms. Sagging, doughy ones replaced his once boney arms. He quickly threw off the blanket and got a better look at his body. His flat torso was now a landscape of rolls and blubber. His belly button was now a deep cave with a large fold of blubber sagging above it. Malcolm’s chest flopped down over the crest of his belly. He ran his fat fingers over his nipples – they were plump and sensitive. As he hoisted himself out of bed, the frame groaned and the floor creaked slightly. His thick thighs rubbed against each other as he rushed into the bathroom and hopped on the scale. Malcolm leaned forwards and looked over his belly as the scale hesitated and eventually showed the number “423” on the screen. “Holy shit, Malcolm?” Chris yelled as he walked in the bathroom wearing nothing but boxers. His blocky abs flexed as he looked at his now overweight brother. He walked around him and laughed, “Damn! How is this possible? You’re so fuckin’ fat, bro!” “I know!” Malcolm blurted. His now fat-sounding voice took him by surprise. “I’m disgusting!” “Shit…you’re ass puts mine to shame, Malcolm!” Chris put his back against Malcolm’s. Malcolm felt the individual striations of his brother’s gorilla-like back flexing against his wings of back fat. His brother bounced his bubble butt against Malcolm’s fat ass cheeks, making them ripple. Both of Malcolm’s ass cheeks were each double the size of Chris’ muscular, rump.  Malcolm felt an air bubble build in his gut and it slid out his backside. A wet sounding fart spewed out and stunk up the bathroom. Chris gagged, “Shit, bro! That was a nasty one. Anyways, you go put on some clothes, I’ll go get mom.” Malcolm tried to put on some clothes, but nothing fit. Chris broke the news to his family, and they all went to Malcolm to see. They were all shocked at Malcolm’s size. Never in his family history has someone been overweight like that. At 423 pounds, Malcolm was a large boy, he wasn’t the largest in the world, but he was rather big. Luckily, his caring mother decided to take his measurements to try and get him some clothes. In the meantime, they told Malcolm to not use the bulking powder anymore. However, that was all he could think about all day. Malcolm’s mouth watered as he thought about making another shake. Chris was able to find a comically sized speedo that his friends bought him as a joke back when he was bulking. It was meant for someone really large, so he lent it to Malcolm in the meantime. The speedo was bright orange and covered up his fat ass nicely. Some mounds of gelatinous lard sagged down from the bottom of it, and part of his ass crack was exposed out the top, but it worked. Malcolm did his best to cover up his front with the speedo. It was hard to see over his large belly, so he had to just feel around to make sure his junk was concealed. From what he felt, it wasn’t like his junk was really exposed anyway given his fat thighs and sizeable belly, but he tried to hide as much of his fatpad as possible inside the speedo. The front of the speedo dug into his blubbery fatpad right down the middle instead of holding it. He sat on the couch all day with his brothers and played video games. Periodically he would shift over to let out a fart, and his brothers would tease him for the stench. Malcolm would laugh as he would rip a fart on Dan, and Dan would cough and fan the air, making him an easy target in the game. Dan kept saying that Malcolm was cheating by farting, but Malcolm would just elbow him with his flabby arm, knocking Dan over off the couch. That night, Malcolm broke out in a cold sweat. All he could think about was the bulking powder. The taste was euphoric the last time he had some, and he really wanted more. He figured it wouldn’t hurt, so Malcolm hoisted himself out of bed, and waddled off to get another shake. He passed out the minute his chubby face hit the pillow. Malcolm woke up the next day feeling twice as heavy as before. Low and behold, he was. Malcolm lifted up his arms, even more, saggy flesh hung down from them. Even with his arms lifted over his head, he still felt doughy beef flopping against his armpits. He tossed off the sheet and got a better look at himself. Well, from lying on his back, all he saw were his saggy tits that were almost suffocating him, and his massive belly several feet in the air. He rolled onto his side, and his belly sloshed off the side of the bed. His ass fat inched over the opposite end of the full-sized bed. Malcolm huffed and puffed as he rose out of it. The bed frame groaned and sagged painfully. His massive body now flattened the mattress itself. Malcolm panted as he widened his stance and he shifted all of his mass. His belly flopped far over his lap, all the way to his knees. His fat thighs forced his legs to spread apart, and even as far apart as they could go, the folds on the insides of his thighs still swallowed his crotch in deep mounds and warm blubber. Eventually, with a few huffs and puffs, Malcolm made it onto his fat feet. The wooden floor beneath his feet sank downwards and groaned painfully as he waddled out of his room, squeezing out of his door, and into the bathroom. He stepped on the scaled and looked down. No matter how much he tried to suck in his flabby gut or look past it – Malcolm could not see what the number said. He just relaxed his blubbery belly, and let it all hang down. His belly was incredibly heavy, pulling down on him in the front. It sagged down towards his knees, flopping over most of his thighs. When he waddled, his thighs would not only need to swing around each other, but they needed to push against the heavy, flesh skirt that was his belly. Malcolm sighed, as he couldn’t see what the scale said. As he shifted his mass the scale let out a loud series of beeping sounds before snapping in half from his weight. Malcolm’s body ripped and wobbled as his fat feet slammed onto the floor. Malcolm felt a huge pain arise in the pit of his belly. He quickly applied pressure on it, by pushing down with his fat palms. Malcolm then moaned as a long, fog-horn fart belted out from behind him. The bathroom felt slightly warmer as a massive blast of gas polluted the bathroom air. His ass cheeks rippled like pond water as the humid scent spewed out. “Jesus Christ! What’s that smell?” Chris grunted as he waltzed into the bathroom. Chris was wearing nothing but a tight, blue poser. His bubble butt was stretching the back of it. He rubbed his eyes then got a good look of Malcolm, “Holy fuckin’ shit, bro! It happened again?” “Yeah!” Malcolm’s voice felt heavy and thick. It took a lot of energy to continue talking, “I don’t know why!” “It must be that bulking powder. Did you have any more last night?” Malcolm thought to himself. He was starting to like being massively heavy. He was now much larger than both his brothers combined. Malcolm figured he would have to lie, or else his family would throw away the bulking powder if they knew he was still making shakes with it. Malcolm panted, “No…no I didn’t drink any, Chris…” “Hmmm…Well, let’s go tell mom so we can get you some more clothes, okay?” Malcolm agreed. Chris helped guide him out of the bathroom and down the stairs. By the time Malcolm made it downstairs, his face was beat red and was sweating profusely. He panted and flopped down onto the tiny couch. Malcolm easily took up half of the 4-person seater. The cushions were squashed downward and the frame sank. His mom walked in and gasped at the sight of Malcolm’s doughy, naked rolls of blubber. He leaned to the side and ripped a massive fart. His entire body rippled as the blast of air spewed out from behind him. For the entire day, his mother figured out what size clothes he would need by measuring Malcolm. They also contacted a doctor to come to check up on him tomorrow morning. Throughout the rest of the day Malcolm consumed more foods than they could cook, his brother Dan made trips to Malcolm’s favorite fast food joints, and Chris played video games with him all day. Malcolm continued to pull the same tricks he did yesterday by farting on his brother to take his attention away from the screen. Chris would just slap Malcolm’s flabby ass shelf and push back playfully. Being a heavyweight bodybuilder, Chris was quite strong. However, Malcolm, being so substantial and viscous, wasn’t even moved by his brother’s retaliation. His body just rippled and wobbled. The feeling of Chris’ hands sinking deep into his lard felt kinda nice to Malcolm. He loved being so large. Taking up most of the space on the couch felt really euphoric. He wondered how it would be if he got even bigger. That night, Malcolm made himself another shake, but this time he added two scoops of the bulking powder. Right as his flabby body hit the sunken mattress, he passed out. The next morning, it was very hard for Malcolm to lift his hands up to reach his eyes. In fact, his entire face felt heavier. As his eyes opened his chubby facial cheeks blocked the bottom part of his view. He looked down at his flabby hands, which now looked almost unrecognizable. Malcolm’s arms were incredibly heavy. His forearms were now the same size that his massive, flabby upper arms were yesterday. Malcolm’s chest rose and fell with each laborious breath. The floor groaned as he shifted his gigantic mass around. Massive, undulating waves rocked through his body with each subtle movement. Eventually, with some maneuvering, he made it into a sitting position. Malcolm gasped at the sight of his gigantic rolls and folds of doughy flesh. His entire body looked like a gelatinous, tan mountain. He could feel the crushed mattress and bed frame somewhere deep under his gigantic ass cheeks, which spilled out behind and around him by several feet. His belly was now a series of folds piled upon one another with two, sagging tits flopping down the sides. Malcolm could no longer see his fat thighs; he could feel them deep under his massive belly, which spilled around and over them, spilling onto the floor. However, he could feel that his thighs were now covered in gelatinous rolls much like the rest of him. With a massive heave and all his strength, Malcolm rose up onto his fat feet. The ground beneath him groaned painfully and the floorboards popped and cracked. He stomped his way towards his door; his wide body knocked pictures off his walls and pushed his desk and dresser away. The entire room trembled with each movement. As he stood in front of the door, Malcolm noticed it was not just impossibly narrow, but also somewhat shorter than him. He had to sink his already flabby head down into his shoulder blubber. Malcolm then reached his arms through and went through at an angle. His belly quickly spilled out of the doorway, but then mounds of fleshy dough were caught on the sides of the entryway in his bedroom. Malcolm pushed harder and harder. More of his belly oozed out into the hallway along the floor. His ass cheeks rose up higher and higher as he slowly eased his way through the doorframe. The gelatinous consistency of the blubber made it simpler to squeeze through the doorway, but it was still too much flab to get through. The frame cracked and chunks of the wall on both sides collapsed as he shoved in harder. Malcolm ripped a massive fart before sliding out of the hole in the wall. FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHRRRRRRTTTTT His ass cheeks clapped together as a massive blast of hot air spewed out. Malcolm moaned as his entire body jiggled and rippled from the force of the blast. The walls around him all shook violently from the deafening fart. Out of his room came Chris, covering his ears. “Earthquake!” Chris yelled as he stood in the doorway. He quickly gagged and realized what was actually happening. “Oh… my… god!” The family all gathered around as Malcolm’s last farts bubbled out of his blubbery ass crack. Chris and Dan teased him a bit and compared their toned rumps to his massive one. Chris even brushed his tight butt against Malcolm’s and it sank deep into the blubbery flesh. They helped Malcolm down the stairs, which was difficult given his massive belly was sliding along the ground, and his ass cheeks were flopping against the stairs behind him. Eventually, they guided him into the living room, where he parked his gigantic ass down on the couch. Malcolm immediately farted again as his ass cheeks spilled out over the armrests on both sides of the couch. FFFFFFUUUUUURRRRRRHHHHHHTTTTTTT “Nice one, big guy!” Chris said as he elbowed one of Malcolm’s many rolls. The other members of his family all gagged and coughed. “Thanks…I’m getting hungry!” Malcolm grunted. His family quickly went to work on feeding the gelatinous mound of flesh taking up a considerable amount of space in their living room. He continued to fart and rub his doughy flesh, or what parts of it he could reach, as they all continued to gather food for him. Dan tried to get Malcolm to play video games with him, but Malcolm couldn’t quite get his hands close enough together for the controller. Not that the controller even lasted long in his massive, blubbery fingers – it was crushed to pieces almost immediately. Malcolm just laughed it off. His brothers eventually played video games together and Malcolm would just watch. They sat on the ground leaning against the base of his belly. Malcolm would shift to his right or left, making his flab slosh heavily against one side of the couch, so he could fart and let the air escape from deep under his flab. Some of the rancid odors bubbled out from under his belly after being trapped in some of his underbelly lumps. Dan and Chris gagged as the potent fumes polluted the air around them. Soon, the entire house was stained with Malcolm’s rank farts. By the time the doctor came, Malcolm’s body was covered in sweat. The doctor examined every aspect of Malcolm possible and took skin, blood, and sweat samples to run some tests. The doctor also took a sample of the bulking powder. He told Malcolm that the results could take some time, and suggested staying away from any more bulking powder until they find out what caused the sudden weight gain. The doctor floated the idea of scanning Malcolm’s brain to see if there was a pituitary tumor. However, the thought of not only getting the giant blob of doughy flesh out of the house but also squeezing him into a machine made it impossible. The doctor left leaving everyone in the family optimistic. Malcolm, on the other hand, was optimistic about the lifestyle he was going to start leading. Malcolm continued to eat all day long, requesting more and more food. His rolls and folds undulated in powerful waves with every subtle movement. Sometimes the ripples would collide and slap together loudly. He leaned back on the couch and the frame of it gave out one last pop before snapping into pieces. The massive blob of lard flopped to the ground. The entire house shook viciously. Malcolm’s rolls spilled out farther around him, flopping against the back wall and knocking over his brothers who were leaning against his belly. “Mmmpph… my bad” was all Malcolm said. ---EPILOGUE--- Malcolm now lives in the family’s garage. There, he had a huge entrance and exit for when they back up the truck to take him places. It was also well ventilated so he did not need to hold back farts, not that he ever did. The entrance to the house from the garage was also expanded so that Malcolm could still waddle in and spend dinner with the family. Not that he could sit at the table, but he could sit near enough so his belly sloshed against it. Usually, he sat in the living room and for dinner, he would wobble his gelatinous rolls to face the dining room. Malcolm ended up getting clothes that could fit him. He wore a massive, jockstrap, the straps of which squeezed his ass cheeks so much that they could not be seen from all the lard. On top of that, he wore large sweatpants and a massive t-shirt. Both of which were stained with sweat and food grease. Sweat stains had completely soaked the deep ass crack on his sweatpants. Every fold of blubber produced so much heat and sweat that they too stained his clothing. Malcolm spends his days now eating from his trough and farting non-stop. The gas had become so bad, that his brothers had to place a tube in his ass crack to displace some of the farts outside. From the outside, it looked like a smokestack for a factory, but instead of producing smoke it produced a rancid, dark green haze. His brothers also kept him fed the entire day. When his brothers stopped hearing him grunting and snorting from inside the garage, they would come in and dump wheelbarrows full of fattening slop for their brother to eat. Malcolm would then return to shoving his face deep into the trough, letting his folds and rolls spill out all over the cracking, cold cement floor of the garage. His body rocked back and forth as he grunted and oinked loudly while he ate. The force of his blubber’s powerful undulations caused the entire garage to tremble. The life Malcolm started to live was not what he expected. He thought that he would be able to get people’s attention by becoming a large, muscular bodybuilder. Someone that people looked up to, and did not dare mess with. However, he found that gaining mounds of lard had the same results, but it was much easier – no pain, but plenty of gain. Malcolm loved his massive size and was excited for his friends in college to see what he looks like.

[whumphoarder]

Beanimia

Summary: While Peter is visiting Tony and Morgan at the lake house for a long weekend, the six-year-old manages to accidentally break his nose. Unfortunately, Spider-Man's super-healing decides to go on holiday the same weekend that he does.

Word count: 3,877

Genre: Fluffy illness/injury, whump, hurt/comfort, humor

A/N: Thanks to @xxx-cat-xxx and @sallyidss for beta-reading and to @awesomesockes for plot, summary, and title ideas <3

Link to read on Ao3

“So”—Tony snaps the single use ice pack to activate the chemicals and gives it a few shakes as he moves back over to the kitchen table—“which one of you is going to explain what happened here?”

Morgan shakes her head gravely side to side. “Peter didn’t catch the beans...”

“Well, to be fair,” Peter points out, his voice significantly more nasally than usual due to the wad of paper towels he’s pressing to his heavily bleeding nose, “you didn’t really warn me you were about to chuck a can of beans at my head.”

“But I did!” the six-year-old defends. “I said, ‘I’ll throw down the supplies.’”

“Supplies for what?” Tony questions. He passes Peter the ice pack, earning a grunt of thanks.

“For the mission,” Morgan explains as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “We were playing superheroes and we needed to pack the supplies to take with us ‘cus we had to go fight the bad guys in space.”

“She’d been stockpiling stuff for the last couple days in the treehouse,” Peter goes on, “so she was just tossing everything down for me to put in the bag. Which, y’know, was fine for the stuffed animals and the walkie-talkies and the plastic lightsabers”—he gingerly touches the ice to his nose—“just not for a sixteen-ounce can of refried pintos.”

(Tony winces in sympathy.)

Morgan lets out an exasperated exhale. “Well, we had to bring something to eat—it’s a long way to Pluto.”  

Huffing out a laugh, Tony shakes his head slowly. “I guess it’s hardly Peter’s first experience getting injured before a mission officially even begins...” he muses. He grins at the teenager. “Remember when you tripped off the quinjet ramp and sprained your ankle two minutes after we landed?”

Peter rolls his eyes, clearly annoyed. “That was one time, Mr. Stark.”

“Memorable though,” Tony quips. He gestures to the kid’s messy face and sighs. “Alright, let’s see the damage.”

Reluctantly, Peter pulls the paper towels away and fresh blood starts to trickle down. There’s a cut at the bridge of his nose and it’s rapidly swelling, a dark bruise already starting to form under his eye.

Tony prods carefully at the break, making Peter wince. “Well, it’s definitely broken,” he reports after a moment, “but it seems pretty well-aligned at least. Nothing to reset.”

Peter lets out a short, breathy laugh. “Probably because it was already a little crooked from the last time I broke it. Guess she knocked it back.”

“So… I made it better?” Morgan asks hopefully.

Tony turns in his daughter’s direction. “Oh no, don’t you start thinking you’re off the hook here, Little Miss Budding Plastic Surgeon,” he says, holding up a stern finger. “You still need to be more careful where you’re chucking your beans.”

Peter snorts, then instantly seems to regret that as he groans and adjusts the ice pack on his face.

Morgan’s expression sobers and she drops her gaze down to her feet. “I just thought he would catch it. He always catches stuff when I throw it to him…”

Her comment gives Tony pause. Now that he thinks about it, it’s not the first time since Peter arrived at the lake house for their long weekend that the kid has seemed rather sluggish and off his game. He’d dozed through most of the drive over on Friday afternoon and then slept in until almost noon the next day. Even now, he can see the dark circles under Peter’s eyes and the pallor to his cheeks that can’t be completely explained by his current blood loss.

“It’s okay, Mo,” Peter reassures her with a small smile. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. It’ll be all better by morning, okay?”

Morgan perks up at that, so Tony pushes aside the twinge of worry in his gut. After all, Peter’s been taking seventeen credit hours at MIT this semester, not to mention his Boston vigilante activities and the additional part-time lab assistant gig he’s picked up; that’s enough to make anyone run a little ragged.

“Why don’t you two just watch a movie or something?” Tony suggests. “Give Peter’s nose a little time to sort itself out.”

Morgan and Peter agree, so Tony rustles up some of Peter’s super-strength painkillers and sets the kids up in the living room with some weird movie that Morgan inexplicably loves about a talking parrot whose biggest goal in life is to see the sun rise over the Grand Canyon. Before they even hit the fifteen minute mark, from out of the corner of his eye, Tony sees the ice pack slide down Peter’s face as the boy drifts off.

X

The combination of pain pills and the usual post-injury recovery time knocks Peter out and he sleeps straight through the rest of the movie. He’s still a little groggy and disoriented when Tony wakes him for dinner, but years of mentoring a reckless teenage superhero have taught the man that this is all par for the course.

Given that the pork chops Pepper left for them to reheat (before heading to her sister’s house for the weekend) require a bit more chewing than Peter’s face is up for at the moment, Tony whips the kid up a smoothie to drink instead.

Peter peers warily into the glass Tony hands him, swirling the green contents around. “What’s in here?”

Tony shrugs. “Whatever I found in the fridge. Blueberries, yogurt, scoop of protein powder, a banana, some spinach…”

“Ew, why would you drink spinach?” Morgan interrupts, her nose wrinkling up in disgust. “That’s gross.”

“Says the girl who put mayonnaise on her graham crackers last week,” Tony points out.

“It was good!” she defends.

Peter takes a cautious sip of the drink. He looks contemplative for second, then must have decided that he approves of the flavor because he just shrugs and proceeds to down about half the glass in a few gulps.

Morgan makes a dramatic gagging noise. Tony rolls his eyes and flicks her arm playfully.

“It’s actually really good,” Peter admits, lowering the cup back down. “Been awhile since I’ve had real vegetables.”

“Ugh, lucky,” Morgan groans as Tony adds a few pieces of asparagus to the little girl’s plate. “They’re the worst. Except for artichokes—those are good.”

“You like artichokes?” Peter questions.

“Uh huh.” She grins. “And turnips!”

“Well, Gerald likes turnips,” Tony clarifies, “and Morgan likes feeding them to him.”

This comment inspires Morgan to launch into a long-winded explanation of all the things she’s ever seen Gerald eat—from grass, to broccoli stalks, to a weird-looking bug—and which of those were his favorites. Peter nods along to her rambling, but seems far less engaged than usual and doesn’t even react when she mentions Gerald’s favorite type of cookie is double stuffed Oreo.

(Tony, on the other hand, interrupts at that point with a stern lecture for the six-year-old on what she can and cannot feed the alpaca moving forward.)

Once dinner is over, they all migrate back to the living room. Morgan wants to play Uno, and Peter obliges for a while, but his overall lack of focus persists.

“Peeeterrrr,” Morgan whines for the third time, poking his arm to snap him out of his daze. “It’s your turn again. You gotta draw two.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Peter takes two cards from the deck and adds them to his hand before reaching up to rub tiredly at his temples.

Tony’s brow furrows. “Headache?”

“Yeah, kinda,” Peter admits. “It’s not bad, just like… there.”

“Hm.” Tony nods. Turning to Morgan he says, “What do you say we finish this game up tomorrow?” Morgan’s face screws up and she looks like she’s about to protest before he adds, “Pretty sure there are some fudge-pops left in the freezer. I won’t tell Mommy if you don’t.”

Morgan drops her cards with an excited whoop and jumps up to run to the kitchen.

Tony gets to his feet to follow her. He glances back at Peter, who has sunk into the cushions with a relieved sigh. “Fudge-pop?” he offers.

Peter makes a non-committal noise in his throat. “I dunno. Think I might just head to bed.”

Tony glances at his watch. It’s just shy of eight o’clock—even Morgan doesn’t usually go to bed for another half hour. He knows Peter’s healing always takes a lot out of him, but he’s seen the kid looking less drowsy and out of it after getting slammed into the airport tarmac in Germany and cracking three ribs than he does at the moment. “Think you might be coming down with something?” he asks.

Peter shrugs once more, prompting Tony to press his hand to the kid’s forehead. He definitely isn’t detecting a fever—if anything, Peter’s skin is a little cold.

“What’s not feeling good?” Tony clarifies. “Head? Stomach? Throat?”

Peter hesitates a second. “Just… just my head I guess.” He sighs. “I think I’m just tired. Haven’t really been sleeping that great lately,” he confesses.

Tony’s forehead creases in concern. “Kid, you know May and I talked to you about overloading yourself your first year at school.”

“No, I go to bed,” Peter clarifies, “I just don’t always, like, sleep.”

“Why?” Tony’s frown deepens. “Are you having nightmares, or…?”

“No…” Peter exhales deeply, running a hand through his hair. “It’s not that. I just can’t always, like, settle down? I don’t know—it’s really not that bad,” he quickly backtracks. “I think I just need a good night’s sleep. I’ll be better tomorrow.”

(Like an idiot, Tony believes him.)

“Alright, well, sleep well kid,” he says as Peter shuffles off to the guest room.

X

“Okay, so... this is a little weird,” Peter says as he enters the kitchen the next morning.

Tony glances up and blinks at the sight of Peter’s very swollen and now darkly bruised nose and cheekbone. He sets down the bowl of waffle batter he’s been whisking and moves over to get a closer look.

“What the hell, kid?” Tony mutters under his breath, running his fingertips carefully over the still-clearly-broken bone. “You once healed from a compound fracture overnight.” He pauses a beat. “Of your femur.”

“Eh...” Peter shrugs tiredly. “Super-healing isn’t really a science, is it?”

“Well it’s certainly not an art,” Tony retorts. He gestures to the kid’s nose. “Unless this is your Black-and-Blue Period, Picasso.”

Peter groans, sinking down onto one of the kitchen chairs. “That was almost as painful as my face,” he complains.

It’s clear the kid meant it as a joke, but that admission does nothing to alleviate Tony’s concern. He finds Peter a fresh ice pack and doses him out another painkiller before resuming making breakfast.

Somehow even a second night of sleep doesn’t seem to have restored much of the kid’s energy. Peter sits hunched forward with one elbow on the table to hold the ice to his face and has his phone resting in his lap. He scrolls idly through it, looking like he might nod off any second.

After a few minutes, the backdoor to the kitchen swings open and Morgan re-enters with pieces of hay still stuck to her boots.

“I gave Gerald two turnips,” she announces. “And he hummed at me and then he tried to steal my hat but I got it back ‘cept for the fuzzy thing.” She points at the red knit hat on her head, which is missing a pom-pom.

Tony groans as he ladles more waffle batter onto the iron. “He didn’t swallow it, did he? Because if that vet has to come out here one more time, I swear—”

“Peter!” Morgan blurts, suddenly noticing the boy at the table. He startles and looks up from his lap as the six-year-old runs over to him. “Your face looks so bad!”

Tony clears his throat. “Uh, Morgan, we don’t—”

“So, so, so, so bad,” she emphasizes, as tears well up in her eyes. She throws her arms around his waist. “I’m really r-really sorry!” she cries. “I didn’t m-mean to hit you with the beans!”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, Mo,” Peter assures, wrapping her in his arms. “It’s gonna heal really soon, okay? I’m a spider, remember? I always heal fast.”

“But sp-spiders don...don’t heal fast!” Morgan sobs into his chest. “You can squish ‘em re-really easy and they d-die if it gets too c-cold or if they get sprayed with bug killing stuff, an-and…”

Peter glances up and shoots his mentor a look of utter helplessness.

In return, Tony shrugs his shoulders in an exaggerated fashion. “Don’t look at me, kid. I’ve been wondering the same thing since we met.”

Still holding the crying child, Peter rolls his eyes at him.

“Kidding, kidding...” Tony says under his breath. He abandons the waffle iron and heads over to gather the sobbing six-year-old up into his arms. “Morgan, sweetheart, listen to me,” he says as he rubs her back gently. “Peter isn’t really a spider, okay? He’s actually more of a mutant.”

(Morgan only cries harder at that.)

Peter huffs out a short laugh and leans back against the chair. “Doing great, Mr. Stark.”

“...And because he’s a mutant,” Tony plows right along, “his DNA is different from ours and that’s why he usually heals freaky fast,” he explains over her tears as she buries her face in his shoulder. “Except it’s just being a little slow today, so we’re gonna just let him rest and eat some good food and that should help fix him up, okay?”

She hiccups a few times. “So he ju...just needs some w-waffles?” she manages to get out.

That jogs Tony’s memory. He spins around to see that the iron is still very much on and the waffle is starting to burn, smoke wafting up around the edges. “Ah shit,” he mutters.

“It’s okay, I got it,” Peter says, pushing himself quickly up from his seat. But the moment he gets to his feet, he staggers sideways and grips the table, his face draining of color.

“Pete?” Tony goes to set the still-sniffling six-year-old back down, but before he’s able to get her feet on the floor, Peter’s knees give out.

Tony curses and shoots a hand out just a second too late as Peter crumples first to his knees and then to the ground, landing directly on his already-injured face.

Morgan’s eyes go wide. “Daddy!” she shrieks.

Tony plops her down abruptly. “Go unplug the waffle maker, okay?” he instructs her as he drops to his knees next to Peter. He figures the last thing they need to add to the chaos is a smoke alarm.

Eyes still locked on the scene before her, Morgan nods and runs over to the counter to unplug the device. Meanwhile, Tony rolls Peter over onto his back and instantly grimaces at the sight. Besides the deathly pallor, the kid’s broken nose is definitely crooked now and fresh blood is streaming down.

“Is he… dead?” Morgan asks, horrified.

“No, no, of course not...” Tony presses two fingers to the pulse point in the boy’s neck, relieved to feel a strong, albeit fast, beat. “He just fainted—he’ll be fine,” he says, shaking the unconscious boy’s shoulder. 

“He looks dead,” Morgan whispers, still staring.

“Yeah, but he’s not,” Tony says firmly. Not wanting the blood to run down Peter’s throat, he continues to roll the kid over until he’s on his side in a sort of modified recovery position. “Pete, c’mon, this isn’t a good look,” he mutters, tapping Peter’s cheek. “We’re all getting enough trauma therapy as it is…”

Finally, the kid’s eyelids start fluttering open. “There you go, that’s it,” Tony praises when Peter blinks up at him. “You back with us yet?”

Peter groans and lets his eyes close again. “Do I ‘ave to be?”

“Yes,” Tony says curtly. He starts shaking Peter’s shoulder again, though gentler now. “I need to know how I’m taking you to Bruce—car or ambulance?”

“Ugh… How ‘bout neither?” Peter mumbles. He lifts a hand up tiredly to wipe a bit of blood off his upper lip. “‘M alright. Just got a lil’ dizzy…”

“Nope.” Worry is quickly taking over Tony, though it comes out in the form of briskness. “You’ve got sixty seconds to get off the floor or I’m choosing for you,” he declares, already pulling out his phone.

Morgan’s voice comes out small and quavering. “Peter...?”

Ultimately, that sound is what it takes to make Peter move. With Tony’s support, he pushes himself up and sits there for a moment, blinking wearily as blood trickles down from his nose. Tony sends Morgan to fetch a box of tissues and a clean shirt for Peter, then loads them both into the car for a little field trip.

X

“Anemia?” Peter repeats, incredulous.

The kid is sitting on an exam table at the SHIELD Medical base, his recently-reset nose now splinted. Meanwhile, Morgan sits in the chair beside Tony, entertaining herself with a handful of wooden tongue depressors and a roll of medical tape.

Bruce adjusts his glasses as he scans the results from Peter’s blood panel on his tablet. “Yeah, that’s what the tests are showing. Basically, it means that your body isn’t getting enough iron to produce hemoglobin, so it can’t carry oxygen effectively. This results in fatigue, lightheadedness, insomnia, headaches, shortness of breath, and—apparently in your case—a reduced healing factor.”

“But how did I get anemia?” Peter balks. “I’m Spider-Man.”

“Well, there are a few possible causes,” Bruce explains, “but based on several nutrient deficiencies I’m seeing in your bloodwork, my best guess is from your diet.”

“Ah.” A look of understanding flickers across Peter’s face for a second. “Yeah, okay, that checks out...” he mumbles.

“Wait, how exactly does that ‘check out’?” Tony asks.

Peter shrugs. “Well, I just… haven’t been eating the best food lately.”

Tony raises an eyebrow. “What do you mean? Doesn’t MIT’s cafeteria serve a pretty decent spread?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so,” Peter allows. He rubs a hand at the back of his neck awkwardly. “I just haven’t been really… uh, going there?”

Tony blinks at him. “Why the hell not?”

“That’s Mommy’s word,” Morgan pipes up without looking up from the two wooden sticks she’s connecting together with tape.

“I just don’t have a lot of time between my classes and job and stuff, and the cafeteria is all the way across campus,” Peter explains. “So I mostly just eat my own food.”

“Which would be…?” Bruce asks.

Peter hesitates. “Ramen,” he says after a moment. “The chicken flavor one.”

“Hm, okay…” Bruce nods, jotting this down on his tablet. “Not really the most nutritious option, but definitely a college staple. What else?”

Dropping his gaze to his lap, Peter starts picking at a piece of fuzz on his sweatshirt. “Uh… sometimes I get the beef one?”

Tony blinks at him. “Beef ramen?”

“I tried the lime chili shrimp one once. Not a fan.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Tony blinks again. “Peter, I’m paying for you to have three square meals a day at that college—not three styrofoam cups of dehydrated noodles.”

“I also eat granola bars,” Peter says. “And bagels.” He starts ticking foods off on his fingers. “Microwave burritos, yogurt, uh.... those little frozen chicken taquito thingies? But like, only if my roommate isn’t using the freezer for his weird cult ritual stuff. That’s why I usually stick to the soup.”

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose and heaves out a sigh. “Jesus take the wheel…”

“Oh! I had an apple last week!” Peter throws in.

Bruce runs a hand through his own hair, exhaling a carefully measured breath. “Okay, Peter, you know that you have an enhanced metabolism, right? That means you need to eat significantly more food than the average person.”

“Right, and I do!” Peter nods. “I always make sure I get enough calories.”

“And that’s good,” Bruce says, “but you also need to make sure you’re getting enough nutrients. Calories are just a part of that. With your unusual physiology, it’s especially important that you’re getting all the required vitamins and minerals to support the rapid regeneration of your cells, and a diet of cup noodles and bagels—”

“And frozen burritos,” Peter interrupts.

“—is simply not nutritionally dense enough for you,” Bruce finishes. “Not by a long shot.”

There’s a beat.

“Oh.”

“What does ‘nu-tri-tion-al-ly dense’ mean?” Morgan asks. Her tongue depressor creation has folded over itself and vaguely resembles a collapsed bridge now.

“It means Peter needs to eat more vegetables,” Tony butts in. “Just like you and Gerald.”

She sticks out her tongue. “Gross.”

“Alright, we’re gonna start you on some iron supplements,” Bruce addresses Peter. “But it might take a couple weeks to get your levels back up enough to reverse the anemia. I’m also going to give you a list of foods high in iron—things like dark leafy greens, broccoli, dried fruit, nuts, red meat, kidney beans—”

“NO BEANS,” the other three all declare in unison.

X

After hauling the kids back to the lake house, Tony sets Peter and Morgan up on the couch with another movie (Pirates of the Caribbean this time) and heads to the kitchen to fix them all some lunch. Potatoes and turnips are both high in iron, so he cooks and mashes up a big potful with some milk, butter, and salt, figuring that would be easy to chew without hurting the kid’s face too much. He scoops some into a bowl for Peter and then whips up another green smoothie for him to drink, as well as sandwiches for himself and Morgan. Once everything is ready, he piles it all onto a tray and heads back.

As he approaches the living room, Tony can already hear Morgan’s voice floating towards him in the falsetto stage-whisper she always uses when she’s voicing make-believe characters.

“Help me! Help me!” she cries. “Oh no, I’m falling!”

Tony stops in the room’s threshold to watch. The movie is still playing in the background, but neither kid seems to be watching. Instead, Peter is lying on his back on the sofa with his eyes closed, giggling quietly while Morgan kneels on the floor in front of the cushions, dancing a single M&M around the edges of the boy’s open mouth.

Suddenly, she drops the candy into his mouth with a dramatic gasp. “Noooo… the king has fallen into the pit! The anemia monster got him!” she cries.

“The anemia monster?” Tony asks in amusement.

Peter’s eyes snap open. “Uh, we were just playing a game.”

Morgan turns back to look at her dad, grinning. “Chocolate is on the list Uncle Bruce gave him!” she says, waving the piece of paper in Tony’s direction.

“Pretty sure that says dark chocolate,” Tony says, eyes narrowing at them as he crosses the room. “Not leftover M&Ms from the Christmas stash.”

Morgan’s face falls. “Aw…”

Tony sets the tray of food down on the coffee table. “Don't worry, kids,” he says, passing Peter the kale and fruit-rich protein smoothie. “Iron Man to the rescue.”

X

Link to all my fics

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X

[bluezey]

Inside Onward:  Typical Morning

It’s finally here!  It’s just the first chapter, or specifically, the first scene from the film.  But with the twist that we get to see what’s going on inside Ian’s head.  So, yeah, this is a crossover of sorts between Inside Out and Onward, as we see there was another story going on inside Iandore Lightfoot.  There’ll be more chapters to come, I hope, and I haven’t decided if I’m gonna update the story periodically or post when I get the rest of it finished.  Until then, read, enjoy, I hope, leave comments, all that stuff.

The familiar chime of the smartphone alarm rang through headquarters.  Followed by another familiar wake up call of a chipper voice exclaiming, “It’s morning!  It’s morning! Wake up, sleepyheads!  It’s the big day!”

Fear was stirring out of his slumber in his bed, rolling onto his back as he rubbed the sleep from one of his eyes.  “Oh, do we have to?” he thought to himself in a grumble.  His eyes shot wide open as he sat straight up in bed.  His mind just woke him up with the instant realization that this is the day, a big important day!  Quickly, Fear jumped out of bed and changed into his clothes, buttoning up his red flannel shirt, slipping into his short denim jeans, and tying his blue sneakers on nice and tight.  He struggled a bit getting his Willowdale College sweater on, having to tug to get his pointy purple elf ears and long thin nose through the collar, but thankfully succeeded and smoothed the wrinkles out with his hands.  He gave his curly blue hair a good brushing before checking his reflection in the mirror.  The blue pompadour was resting perfectly, even with his purple nerve popping out at the part on the back of his head.

“Come on guys!”  Joy voice echoed through headquarters.  “Today’s the day!”

Fear took a double take as he saw the three emotions, Sadness, Disgust and Anger, about ready to leave their shared bedroom.  Never wanting to be the last to leave, or the second, Fear quickly placed the digital watch on his wrist and grabbed the notepad and multi-colored pen off his nightstand.  He raced for the exit, barely pushing past Sadness, before slowing his pace to a steady yet leading walk down the ramp to the headquarters floor.

“Okay everyone, today is the day,” he began announcing, as he already began scribbling fresh new notes down on paper.  “Do we have everyone present?  Anger? Disgust?  Sadness?”

“Here,” Sadness called out in his quiet, melancholy voice.

“You don’t have to do roll call every day, Fear,” Disgust had to comment in his own snippy way.  “We’re not going anywhere.”

“Not like we have a reason to leave, anyway,” Anger added in his grouchy tone as he began crossing the floor towards the console.

“Okay, and Joy?  Where’s Joy?”  Fear looked up from his notepad and began looking around.  “Has anyone seen Joy?”

“Right here!”  Joy raced from the console and made a beeline towards Fear, leaving a trail of glittering particles of yellow energy in his wake.  He stood straight in front of Fear, grinning ear to ear.  Fear couldn’t help but notice Joy, as his perkiness made him jump a bit.  He collected himself and continued, “So, how was dream duty?”

“Another perfect dream,” Joy reported, following Fear as they walked towards the console.  “It was a classic, wonderfully calm dream of stargazing.”

“Relaxing, I like that,” he commented, writing Joy’s report into his notebook.  He stopped right in front of the console and asked, “So, where are we now?”

“Ian’s just finished in the bedroom,” Disgust replied, pointing up at the screen in front of them.

Fear looked up from his notes, he paused a moment as he looked at the image onscreen into the outside world.  Onscreen was a reflection in the mirror, and in that reflection was an image of Ian, a sixteen year old elf boy, just finishing putting on his dad’s old Willowdale College sweatshirt as he gave himself a little grin into the mirror. Fear smiled, along with the other emotions, as the vision onscreen turned from the mirror to the corkboard in Ian’s bedroom, where on the calendar listed today as Ian’s sixteenth birthday.

As Ian exited his bedroom and began to head downstairs, Fear turned his attention to the other emotions. “Okay gang, let’s make this sixteenth birthday the best sixteenth birthday Ian’s ever had.”

“Ian only gets one sixteenth birthday, Fear,” Disgust corrected.

Fear gulped as he felt the anxieties run through his body like frantic butterflies.  “Don’t remind me…”

“Morning, mom,” Ian called out.

The emotions looked up in unison at the screen.  “Oh hey, it’s mom,” Joy pointed out, as Fear could feel a warm glow from behind them. He turned to look out the window, into Ian’s mind world, and a small collection of Islands of Personality standing along the horizon.  Fear smiled as he saw Family Island burst to life, showing the yellow core memory of Ian’s family is working.

“Oh, and here comes Blazey!” Joy cheered.

“What?” Fear turned back just in time to see the pet dragon leap into the screen.  It was a blur of chaos as Ian fell to the ground, happily laughing as Blazey pinned him down and licked his face.  “Evasive maneuver!” Fear called out as he leaped for the controls, only to find Joy was already at the console.  Fear stepped back, a nervous smile on his face.  “Oh. Uh, nice reaction time, Joy,” he mumbled his comment.

“Why thank you,” Joy chimed back.

Ian climbed back up to his feet as his mom, Laurel, greeted him with a “Happy birthday, my little man,” and covering his cheek with kisses.

“Ew, she’s doing it again!” Disgust gagged before pushing Fear out of the way and taking control.

“Ew, mom,” Ian cried out before breaking free and wiping off his cheek.

Fear pushed himself back by the console.  “Disgust, I know we don’t like mom’s kisses, but I need to be…” The emotions looked up silently at the screen as Laurel was looking back at Ian.  Fear finally broke the silence with a whisper. “Should we be worried?” he asked, pressing a button on the console.

“What?” Ian asked.

“You’re wearing your dad’s college sweatshirt,” Laurel replied.

Disgust commented as the other emotions breathed a sigh of relief, “Oh, right.  The sweatshirt,” she commented as she flicked some switches on the console.

Ian looked down at the Willowdale College sweatshirt he was wearing over his red flannel shirt.  “Oh, well, it finally fits,” Ian said as he shrugged it off.

Laurel lit up with such joy as she approached Ian.  “Oh, my little chubby cheeks,” she said with such motherly love.

Disgust stepped back. “Ew, she’s coming back.”

“Stop her!” Anger snapped as Fear dove onto the controls.

Ian stepped back before Laurel could hug her.  “No, mom. I gotta eat breakfast before school,” he said, adding a chuckle.

Fear looked confused, until he glanced over at Joy on the other side of the console turning a dial or two. “Joy,” Fear spoke up, getting her attention.

“What?  It’s mom,” Joy explained with a smirk as she held up her hands.

“There’s nothing to eat?” Sadness asked, overhearing Laurel.  “That’s sad.”

“That’s not fair,” Anger grumbled.  “How are we supposed to survive school without food?”

“We’re gonna starve,” Sadness sighed.

“Not on my watch,” Fear said as he took over.  Ian opened the fridge door and was met with a pan of delicious finger foods for the party.

“Yum, boars in a blanket.” Joy instinctively pressed a few buttons.

Fear panicked. “Joy, what are you doing?”

Laurel playfully smacked Ian’s hand away.  “Don’t touch those, mister.  Those are for your party tonight.

“Now look what you did,” Fear reprimanded Joy.  “You got Ian in trouble!”

“Sorry, they looked so good,” Joy sheepishly excused his actions.

Ian instead grabbed a carton of milk and began to pour himself some cereal.

“How bout inviting those students from the science club to your party?” Laurel suggested to Ian.  “You said yourself they were pretty rockin.”

“I didn’t say it like that,” Ian replied, as his Disgust rolled his eyes.  “And besides, I haven’t asked them.”

“Well, it’s your birthday, it’s the day to try new things,” Laurel encouraged Ian while prepping a protein shake in the mixer.  Just as she turned it in, Laurel asked aloud, “Speaking of new things, have you signed up for your driving lesson today?”

“No!” Ian shouted, before nervously lowering his voice.  “No, I haven’t.”

Sadness glanced over at Fear, who was shaking like a frigid leaf, his eyes wide as he thought about the very idea of Ian driving.

“There’s no reason to be scared,” Laurel told Ian.

“I’m not scared,” Ian replied.  Joy pressed a few buttons, and Ian changed the subject.  “I’m gonna move Barley’s game.”

Joy glanced over at Fear, the frightened purple emotion was stepping back from the console and placing his hands under his arms.  “Relax,” Joy told him gently.  “Ian’s sixteen now.  He needs to drive.  He’ll be okay.”

“Okay?  Okay?  I know he’ll be okay,” Fear stammered.  “I just want him to be safe, I mean, okay.”

“Don’t worry, it’s Ian’s big day,” Joy assured Fear.  “What could happen?”

“HALT!!”

“NO!!” The emotions were shocked as Ian was suddenly scooped into a big bear hugging arm lock by his older brother Barley.

“Get him out of there! Get him out of there!” Fear ordered as he jumped onto the console, the other emotions scrambling for controls.

“This again?” Anger snapped.

Disgust gagged.  “He reeks!  Doesn’t he ever shower?”

Ian struggled to escape, but instead kicked over his cereal and watched helplessly as it fell to the floor. “Oh no,” Sadness thought softly as Ian slumped in defeat.

Fear started flailing his hands, darting his head back and forth to all his emotions.  “What do we do?  What do we do?  Why is Barley so strong??”

“Move over!” Anger barked as he punched Fear out of the way, sending him flying away from the console. The angry red emotion was literally steaming from atop his head as he cracked his knuckles.

“You know, Ian,” Barley commented boldly, “men of your age would prove their manhood by taking the rite of passage through the swamps of despair.”

“Oh, I’ll show you despair!” Anger roared as he took control of the console.

“I’m not testing anything,” Ian snapped back, sounding more like a gurgle through Barley’s headlock. “Now let me go!”

“Let him go, Barley,” Laurel called out from the kitchen, more of a comment than a command.

“Okay,” Barley said with a shrug, letting Ian go, as well as letting Ian drop onto the floor in a thud. “I know you’re stronger than that. There’s a warrior inside you, you just have to let him out.”

Fear finally climbed onto his feet, he looked up to see Ian struggling to climb onto his knees as well.  The purple emotion’s eyes grew wide, he stepped back slowly, then broke out into a quick, frantic nervous pace across the headquarters floor.  “Oh no… no no no no no, this isn’t right, this isn’t right…”

Joy caught the sound of worrying, leaving the console to the other three emotions, as they’re just now helping Ian quietly pick up his spilt cereal as Barley and Laurel broke out into another wrestling match.  “Hey, hey,” Joy calmly told Fear in his cheerful tone.  “It’s alright.  It’s just cereal.”

“It’s not the cereal!” Fear stopped pacing and placed his hands under his arms again.  “Okay, it is, but it’s everything!  Ian gets only one sixteenth birthday, and it’s chaos before it even started!”

“Relax,” Joy assured him. “It’s just another normal day.”

“But it’s not a normal day,” Fear replied frantically.  “It’s a birthday!”

“You’re getting stressed out, and Ian hasn’t eaten yet.”  Joy took Fear’s hand and they both sat down on a couch beside them.

“It’s my job to get stressed out,” Fear said, frustrated as well as anxious.  “I’m a Fear.”

Joy paused a moment, a thought rolling through her head, causing her smile to grow more melancholy. “Look, I shouldn’t make things worse, but, the guys…” Joy motioned to Sadness, Disgust and Anger at the console. “They’re talking about you again.”

This again.  Realizing where this is going, Fear quieted down and sank into his seat, wrapping his hands around his sides.

“Don’t get me wrong, you’re doing great.  You’re a great Fear.”  Joy paused a moment, trying to sugar coat it.  “But lately, you’re being… too good.  Again.”

“I can’t- I can’t-“ Fear began calmly.  He paused to collect his thoughts, brushing his hands up his face and through his hair. He sighed, almost seethed.  “Ian’s life is just so chaotic lately.  His school, his driving lessons, his brother. ….. that,” Fear added, pointing to a red light currently dormant on the console.

Joy chuckled, realizing he was pointing at the puberty alarm.  “That?  Don’t worry bout that.  That hasn’t been an issue since sex ed class.”

Fear shuddered so hard, a little flurry of purple particles shook off his body.  “Don’t remind me.”

Joy laughed, seeing how that at least broke the tension for one of them.  It gradually quieted into a grin when Fear finally gave the tiniest of grins back.  Joy placed a comforting hand on Fear’s shoulder.  “Look, Ian’s fine for a few minutes.  He’s just making some toast,” he commented as they both looked up at the screen.  “Nothing bad can happen from that… not even cutting himself with a butter knife.”

Fear chuckled a bit. Yeah, it’s kind of silly to be scared of butter knives… but, they are knives… and they can cut through butter…

“Why don’t you sit back here for a minute?  Clear your head.  Maybe a quick break is just what you need.”  With that, Joy stood up and walked back to the console, leaving Fear on the couch.

Fear closed his eyes, tilting his head back that it hit the back of the couch.  It made it so his neck look like it was at a ninety degree angle, thank Alora emotions are made of pure energy and not bones, so it didn’t hurt, maybe pinch a little.  He finally opened his tightly shut eyes, starring up at the mural of stars and some planets painted on the headquarters ceiling.  Well, most of them, somehow Joy managed to slap a couple of those cheap plastic ones onto the ceiling too.  He smiled, Ian sure did like space.  He stood up from the couch and walked across the headquarters to the large pane window in the back, overlooking the wide, vast expanse of the mind world.  Fear looked at the hardwood floor of headquarters. And the shelves, holding necessities for their job, from idea bulbs to mind manuals, to the newest memories they made that very morning.  While built like compartments pocked both organized and disorganized like the old headquarter shelves, they were lined with a strong wood paneling to match Ian’s bookshelves in his bedroom.  In fact, headquarters was dressed up a lot like Ian’s room these days.  He could still remember when he popped into existence in Ian’s mind, just seconds after Ian was born.  Headquarters was an empty canvas, and the emotions were just anew strangers with elf ears and generic business casual clothes.  Just a blank canvas.  And over time, as they shaped Ian into the teenager he is today, they and their headquarters were changed as well.  Well, more like influenced… inspired?  Okay, the mind world can be cryptic and confusing.  But if it meant being with Ian, helping Ian, Fear wouldn’t have it any other way.

Speaking of cryptic and confusing, Fear looked down as his foot stopped short of stepping on the core memory holder nestled into the floor.  It wouldn’t hurt to step on it, but the bright lights beaming through the floor, straight out to the mind world outside, pointing at, fueling every island of personality across the far chasm that separated headquarters from the rest of the mind world.  Fear gazed out at each island that fueled what made Ian, Ian.  School Island, complete with a stack of textbooks, with a math textbook being very prominent since he won that award.  Science Island, glowing with stars and planets to highlight Ian’s fascination with space.  Space was his most prominent interest in the sciences.  Smartphone Island.  That’s a new one.  Ian has been glued to his phone lately.  Hope that’s a phase.  Friendship Island… looking small, as Ian only has one friend.  Island upon island, big and small, displaying each important piece of Ian, each fueled by a powerfully important memory that birthed it.  And in the center was the largest, grandest island, Family Island, an island fueled and created by Ian’s love for his family. Even his brother, no matter how much of a pain he could be.  Definitely highlighted by that statue on Family Island of Barley holding Ian in a headlock and giving him a noogie.

“Hey, it’s Officer Bronco!” Joy cheered, breaking Fear’s walk down his own memory lane.  Looks like break’s over.  But, Joy may have been right, Fear does feel a little better.

As Fear approached the console, he immediately stopped dead in his tracks as he, the other emotions and Ian saw Colt and Laurel kiss.  “Eww,” the emotions grimaced in unison, Ian recoiling as well thanks to Disgust at control.

“Ugh, I’ll never get used to that.”  Disgust tried to hold himself back from throwing up.  “I’m done.  I’m done,” he said, pushing away from the console for a minute.

Ian went back inside the kitchen getting back to making some toast for his breakfast.  His ears caught the sound of loud banging of furniture, sounds of a centaur trying to get into the house without breaking things, and failing. Anger growled, “He’s coming in.”

“Relax,” Joy told Anger, patting him on the shoulder.  “Officer Bronco’s just trying to be nice.”

“Hey there, birthday boy,” Colt told Ian.  “You working hard or hardly working?” Colt gave that braying laugh of his at his own joke.

That was enough to make even Joy groan.  “Are you kidding me?” he exclaimed while the other emotions groaned.

“Well, you know just, making some, toast,” Ian replied sheepishly.

“Why is it so hard to get some breakfast around here??” Anger snapped.

Fear pushed Sadness out of the way as Disgust made his way back to the console.  “Okay okay okay,” he stammered.  “Let’s just get Ian fed and out of here before anything else happens to him.”

“Hey, Ian, you can learn a lot from Quests of Yore,” Barley called out from the dining room.  “You want to play?”

Fear froze just from hearing Barley.  “Oh no,” he uttered softly, giving Disgust a chance to take over.

“I don’t,” Ian replied.

“You can be a crafty rogue,” Barley continued.  “Or, I know! You can be a wizard!” Barley chimed, grabbing Ian in a side hug.

Fear dove onto the console the second he saw Barley’s spiky bracelet brush against Ian’s sweatshirt.

Ian quickly ducked out from Barley’s grasp.  “Hey, careful with dad’s sweatshirt.”

Barley smirked.  “I don’t even remember dad wearing that sweatshirt.”

“Well, you do only have two memories of him,” Ian told Barley.

“No, I have three,” Barley corrected.  “I remember his beard was scratchy, he had a goofy laugh, and I would play the drums-“

“-on his feet,” Ian finished.  The emotions at the console chuckled a bit, happy to hear something about dad, even if it was from Barley.

“Yeah, he went,” Barley began as he drummed on Ian’s foot with his hands, but ended up knocking Ian’s toast onto the floor.  “Oops, five second rule.”  Barley leaned over to pick up the toast, and ended up snagging a loose thread on Ian’s sweatshirt with his bracelet.

The emotions gasped as they heard the fabric rip.  “No!” Fear exclaimed in pure horror.

“It’s okay,” Barley told Ian, just as worried as his brother was.  “You just have to pull it.”

“No! Stop!!” Fear exclaimed as he slammed his hands onto the console.

“Barley, don’t!” Ian pleaded, just as a hole grew from the popped seam on the sleeve.  Laurel finally intervened, snipping the loose string with some scissors.

“You know,” Ian said, backing away, “I’m just going to grab some breakfast on the way to school.”

“I’ll sew that up for you after school, okay Ian?” Laurel said as Ian left the kitchen and headed straight for the front door.

Fear was leading the controls, and was making sure Ian went straight out the door.  “Okay guys, let’s just get Ian to school.”

“Wait!” Barley called out, catching up to Ian.

“Seriously?” Fear exclaimed, letting go of the controls in pure shock.

“Why won’t he leave us alone?” Anger shouted, as Disgust and Sadness groaned.

“By the laws of Yore, I must dub thee a man today,” Barley explained as he grabbed a sword, which may or may not have been a toy.  “Kneel before me.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Ian replied.  “I gotta get to school.”

“Okay,” Barley said.  “I’ll pick you up this afternoon.  We’ll do the ritual at school.”

“No!  You don’t need to do that!  Okay, bye!” Ian quickly grabbed his book bag and slammed the front door.  Finally out of the house, he gave a big sigh of relief and began to walk down the sidewalk.

Once he was safe, Fear gave a big sigh of relief himself.  He gradually let go of the controls and grasped his sides again. Ian’s sixteenth birthday is already a failure.

“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” Joy said to Fear, placing a calm hand on his shoulder.  “The day’s still young.  We can fix this.”

Shaking his head, Fear walked away from the console and began to pace back and forth.  The other emotions went back to work, including Joy, after glancing over to Fear one more time.

Fear gripped his hands tight against himself, his pace was quickening, his body was shivering with… well, fear.  Ian gets one sixteenth birthday, one shot.  And already it’s a disaster.  It’s all been a disaster since before Ian’s sixteenth birthday.  It’s all been a disaster since before his thirteenth birthday. Since before middle school, since before kindergarten, since…

Fear paused.  He walked up to the back of Headquarters, placing his hands on the window as he looked out.  To the side of the large Family Island was a smaller island.  The island displayed photos of a familiar stranger, and an audio cassette tape labeled “Dad.”

… since little child Ian found that tape.  Since that memory created Dad Island.

Fear placed a hand on his chest, his fingers resting on stitching that spelled out Lightfoot in cursive.  The exact replica of Ian’s Dad’s sweatshirt.

Ian has heard many stories about his dad.  How his dad was courageous, and lived every day without worry, without care.  If only Ian could be like his dad.  If only Fear could.

[ladleposts]

Pancakes

All about Sayuri's favourite food.

Notes:

This is another ficlet about Obito and my OC, Sayuri. And I guess her parents too! Minor spoilers for my long-running fic, Sayuri.

Uzumaki Yumi didn’t always cook.

In her youth, she is too busy running through the waves, like lots of children her age, or rolling about in the long grass, much to the despair of her mother, who moans about the stains.

In kunoichi lessons she listens eagerly when the teacher talks about flowers and ikebana, and her arrangements are often touted as fine examples of work.

For cookery she gets an acceptable pass. Edible. Nothing to write home about.

“Hmm,” the teacher chews thoughtfully, “a little tough. Needs more salt.”

“I don’t see what I need to cook for,” she retorts, “I can just buy from the store.”

“And what stores will you find in the middle of the field?”

“Well, uh, I’ll find one,” she replies, cheeks warm.

And then, the war starts, so she is dodging smoke bombs and projectiles, and finding the best way to patch up wounds when there is no medic nearby, and eating riceballs and protein bars on the go.

But sometimes protein bars are not enough and she has to learn how to cook, so if her teammates, her friends are to survive to the evening, they sure wouldn’t die from food poisoning.

And then, as the city crumbles, fleeing with her husband, Kenta, who says nothing of the subpar stews that she concocts, although she sees how he grimaces as he chews his way through overcooked venison.

At a civilian village in the Land of Fire, she sees a poster at the village hall.

‘Home cooking class, for all your family needs by Pan Keiko.’

“Do you want to have a go?” Kenta says, once he had doubled back after seeing his wife was not behind him, “We could stop here for a while.”

“We can’t,” Yumi shakes her head, already pulling away, “it’s far too expensive. We only have so much, and it’s got to last. Who knows how long we’ll be here for?”

“What’s wrong with right here? It seems safe enough.”

“Well, if you think so...”

“Besides you’ll be needing to eat well soon enough, for the little one,” he touches her stomach, at the subtle swell of her belly underneath her clothes.

“If you’re sure…”

“Go on,” he finishes with a kiss to her cheek, “ I’ll find a place for us to stay.”

The class consists of making a katsu curry from scratch, and, surprisingly, pancakes.

Yumi is sure her curry sauce doesn’t taste quite right, and finds herself growing increasingly flustered as she tries to fix it with the numerous spices available.

Here dear,” the elderly woman leans over from the table next to her, and works adding a bit of this and a bit of that—so it resembles something closer to the example.

“Thank you,” Yumi replies easily, “I shall have to remember more how to do the blends.”

“You’re welcome dear. But between you and me, you can easily just buy the packet roux from the shops. It tastes just as good. Of course Keiko would argue differently.”

“So you know Pan-san do you?” Yumi asks as they prepare the ingredients for pancakes. It is an odd choice, but Yumi is glad that the recipe seems simple enough.

“Oh we go way back. But what about you? You come from far?”

“We were just passing through,” Yumi says guardedly. This elderly lady looks kindly enough, but they can never be too careful.

“Little one on the way?”

“Oh, yes,” Yumi confirms, consciously putting her arm protectively over her stomach. She is barely showing and this lady has noticed already?

“It’s nice when they’re small,”  the lady muses, “I take care of my grandson. Growing lad he is, I seem to forever find myself getting more food for him. Always getting himself in trouble, fighting with his friends. But what can I do? I just make sure he’s got enough, and he’s happy, it’s the best I can do.”

Yumi nods and smiles, hoping to herself that there will not be too much trouble ahead for her child.

—

Uchiha Rina arrives home to Konoha late that evening. Her grandson is waiting on the steps, still in his mission gear, which looks rather like it need a wash. He scrambles to his feet when he sees her.

“Grandma you’re back! You should let me escort you going that far!”

“Pah!” She brushes off his hand trying to help her in—she was proud of her grandson for always being so caring, always willing to give a hand, but she is hardly an invalid—”I’m perfectly fine thank you! The road’s safe enough.”

The next morning Rina tries out the pancake recipe, seeing if she can replicate what she had done in the class.

Her grandson comes down the stairs sniffing the air. He had taken a shower thankfully, as evidenced by his hair being more unruly than it usually was. Rina always had to resist the urge to tame his locks, as whenever she tried to get a hairbrush near him, he would squirm away with a wail of “Grandma!”

“What’re you doing?”

“Trying out this recipe I got from Keiko. If you stay and help you might get some.”

“Oh no thanks! I gotta train! Gotta work hard and then I can finally beat Kakashi!”

“Rin might like it if you cooked something like these for her.” Perhaps it is a little devious, but Rina is fond of Rin. She is a good influence on him. This...rivalry with Kakashi, she had hoped it was harmless childhood play, but it had only amplified once Obito had become genin.

She does worry about him.

“Oh yes, I guess she might!” Obito exclaims, interest piqued by the mention of Rin and jumps in to help.

“Well you do it like this, that’s it, and pour the batter carefully, you’ve got to do the—watch it Obito!”

—

The village isn’t suitable after all. No housing available that isn’t an extortionate amount of money.

“I’m sorry Yumi,” Kenta says, holding her in his arms.

—

The rainy village of high rise buildings admittedly wouldn’t have been Yumi’s first choice, but it is a welcome refuge, especially when her stomach is already considerably swollen.

“Everyone’s welcome here,” they say.

And two weeks later, she gives birth to her daughter in the room of a worn and busy hospital.

Yumi sings to her daughter in the tiny cramped apartment, rocking Sayuri in the sling as she  giggles and grabs fistfuls of her hair.

It is worse when she is mobile, as she climbs over all the furniture and Yumi has to keep an eye on her at all times. She has to arrange the bulk of her cooking while Sayuri is taking a nap and then make sure to oversee as she eats from her highchair, feeding herself pancake clumsily with a fork in her pudgy little hands.

One day Sayuri manages to clamber onto the sill and knock down the vase of irises there. Yumi jumps to save it, but of course, it is too late, and she silently mourns the casualty.

Sayuri is blissfully unaware of the consequences of her actions and sits there in her napkin clad bottom, waving her little fingers.

“Buhbye.”

Kenta bursts into laughter.

“You saying bye-bye to the flower Sayuri-chan?”

She stops in her waving, looks up wide-eyed at her father, and sticks her fingers in her mouth.

But then that place too becomes unsafe and once again,  they have to flee.

Yumi is almost in tears as the skies burn, holding on tightly to her husband’s hand, Sayuri held close against her as they escape.

“Kenta, we can’t keep on running, please!”

They flit from place to place and when they hide in the cramped backroom of a store, the owner having caught sight of them and ushered them in, Yumi feeds Sayuri with cold bits of pancake to distract her, silently praying she will not cry.

Eventually, they find a place where they could rest.

It is safe. Safe and normal. It comes with a price. Renounce your old lives. Forget everything you have come from. Your family, your heritage. Shinobi create conflict. They are banned.

“Yes, of course, we’re just a simple civilian family. We just want a good life for our daughter.”

She can have the garden of her dreams. Roses and bluebells and chyransatheums and hydrangea.

Sayuri plays in the dirt, scooping up fistfuls of mud and forming them into flat discs.

“Pancakes! I’m making pancake!”

When she tires  of playtime, she runs to her mother.

“Mummy? Can I have some pancakes?”

“Sayuri-chan, you cannot have pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

“When I grow-up I will,” says Sayuri with all the wisdom of a four year old.

—

Obito learns to make pancakes properly eventually, after a few mishaps.

Rin and Kakashi come round after one failed baking session.

“Oh, Obito-kun, what are you making?”

“N-nothing!” Obito lies, glad that he has hidden the burned offerings.

Kakashi sniffs the air pointendly.

“Smells like burning.”

“Shut up Bakakashi!”

“You two! Come on, I got popcorn from the store. Let’s watch this movie.”

Some weeks later he manages to produce something edible and presents it to Rin, eagerly waiting for her reaction.

She takes a bite.

“Hey, these are pretty good! Thanks Obito.”

He tries to play it cool, though his palms are sweating.

“Ah, it’s nothing.”

Rin. How he loves her.

—

“Are you sure you’re not hungry, Sayuri-chan. Pancakes, your favourite.”

The child shakes her head.

“My tummy hurts,” she complains.

At the parent-teacher meeting, Kubo-sensei talks about Sayuri’s behaviour.

“Sayuri is a very vivacious young girl, we are only concerned where she is spending her energy. Does she practice her needlework at home?”

“Oh yes, I make a point of homework before play,” Yumi replies. She will not be seen as an incompotent mother.

“Of course. Just to make sure, your daughter does know the law of the village? We all abide by the rules.”

“You understand, don’t you Sayuri-chan?”

“Yes,” Sayuri says quickly, looking downcast.

Sayuri keeps up her subdued demeanour on the walk home.

“Are you okay? Did you want to speak to Kubo-sensei about something?”

“No mummy, I’m fine.”

—

It would be easy to just order ready made meals and takeaway, so long as she gets some form of sustenance. He doesn’t have to pay that much attention to her. Just enough to make sure she doesn’t wither away, not until she’s fulfilled her purpose

It won’t hurt to indulge, just a bit.

He makes the goofy, clumsy persona for her.

He fools around, going to drop the whisk and catching it at just the right moment, speaking in that childish voice, dancing around the kitchen.

She laughs easily at it, a childish giggle that softens the edges of his heart, just a bit. If he has a heart, that is.

“Welcome to Tobi’s pancake cookery class.”

She grins delightedly, eyes wide in childish curiosity.

She pushes the whisk around with a grim determination, pulling on all the strength from her inner core, which is not a lot. He has to take the bowl from her after to combine the ingredients properly.

Of course, she insists on flipping the pancakes herself and Obito has to navigate the delicate balance of catering to her innocent demands and not allowing her to injure herself. It’s all for the long game of course. Seeing her expression turn to sugar-induced delight is not any indication that he actually. He just has to do enough, to get her to trust him completely.

Yes, a little bit of indulgence won’t hurt.

When it becomes evident she is not what he thought, he vows not to have anything to do with her. Oh, he could keep her, as another foot soldier, she is obedient enough, but best not to pay any mind to her. Best not pay any mind to the small ache he feels when she avoids his gaze, pulling on her long sleeves.

—

When she wakes up screaming from a nightmare, he automatically goes to crack the eggs and stir in the milk and the flour.

What the hell is he doing? He isn’t meant to do this. She is nothing, nothing.

And she is everything.

She forgives him of course, far too easily.

He watches her as she pushes the food around her plate, looking towards nothing.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

At his words, she looks up at him, and for a moment the vacant expression flickers to something akin to what she would look at her childhood teacher with, before it reverts to a neutral expression. She takes a very small bite.

At night he can hear her crying.

—

She lazes on the sofa, feet up on the arm, munching something from a paper cone. He looks at the packaging and sees it’s from the new crȇpe stand she had been talking about earlier.

“They’re alright,” she says, “Yours are much better.”

She pivots, feet hitting the floor, then she stands, and her face gets very close.

“They’re sweet. Like you.”

Her smiles are becoming less of a child and more those of a woman.

—

She watches him often as he cooks, insisting that she could help. He decides to keep her far away from the stove, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to peer over his shoulder. She pokes at the batter and licks it off her finger. He takes the bowl from her and she pouts at that, then moves onto the syrup bottle, eating it by the spoon.

He grimaces; how could you like that much sugar?

She grins in that impish way of hers.

“Are you going to save any of that for your pancakes?”

“Hmm, maybe.”

She nestles in his lap, eating with her fingers, and every other bite she would pass up bits to his mouth. They are sickly sweet, although he is not sure if that is to do with her own preference, or the way his tastebuds have matured.

She licks the remnants from her fingers so that in the end she is very sticky. He has to insist she wash her hands afterwards to which she does under protest, berating him for bossing her around.

She kneels between his legs and he has to struggle to keep his moans quiet. One hand is between her own legs, fiddling with herself before she sinks down atop him.

She latches herself onto his neck, and not for the first time, Obito is grateful he wears things with high collars.

They sleep together peacefully for once.

—

He knows it has been a difficult mission, for she ends up in hospital afterwards. When she is let out she insists that she is fine. She follows the rule about not showing emotion as a shinobi to the letter and often tries to hide her feelings even when they are in private. Part of it is his own doing, he knows that. And although he could reassure her that it was perfectly okay for her to show her emotions more readily, he cannot force her.

He could hardly lecture her on it given his own track record.

Giving her the once over with his sharingan he deduces that she is mostly okay, although he feels that at least one night or two more in the hospital might have benefitted her. He does not voice his concerns though as the last time he did it had not gone well at all.

“So you don’t want me here do you,” she accuses, and flounces off.

“It is not that. I’m just thinking after your health.”

“Oh,” she blinks, and has the grace to look embarrassed, “But I like being with you.”

He can’t help but smile at that and resigns himself to let her have her way.

That night,she sobs into him as he holds her and strokes her hair. He does not ask about any details, and she does not tell him.

“Can I have something to eat?” She asks quietly after she is more settled.

“Sure. What do you want?”

“Pancakes.”

He nods and heads down to the kitchen to prepare, her trailing along behind.

Pancakes it is.

[josiesbooksauce]

but i’m not a cheerleader d!et: day 1

[see pinned post for d!et plan]

alright we are peeing peeing peeing

idk how i’m supposed to get in all this protein and skip lunch and avoid packaged food

for breakfast i had a double scoop protein shake. is that against the rules? it’s a drink that’s not water and it comes from a package. whatever. my ai coach said it was fine. she’s very sensible

for dinner i had a whole 16 ounce tub of greek yogurt, an apple, and some pineapple. it was pickled pineapple

at least 2.5 liters of water [✔️]

13 hour fast starting at 7 pm [✔️]

two pieces of fruit [✔️]

protein goal [X]

[mensbodybuildingtips]

ROCK Your Diet with 7 Meals Per Day!

You have probably seen top action celebrities get jacked for movie functions, as well as asked yourself just how they did it. Take a look at Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. In some movies, he's a thinner, lovable personality with witty one-liners as well as an approachable appearance. In other flicks, he's jacked beyond idea, using a body that would match many affordable body builders. It is typically the mark of a truly great star to be able to transform currently just the habits, but the body itself, to match that of a personality being played on film which will certainly live in infamy. Allow's consider just how The Rock consumes in order to reach this level of size and cuts for the film screen.

To get large, you have to eat big. You cannot pig out. Most "normal" individuals consume three meals a day. This gives your body 3 servings of protein, carbohydrates as well as fats, which are then digested as well as used for energy and also healing. The body can only take in so several nutrients simultaneously, however, et cetera is eliminated or stored as body fat. If you wish to be able to provide your body a lot more valuable nourishment, then you will certainly intend to eat EVEN MORE dishes daily. This doesn't imply you double your existing diet regimen. Instead, you will certainly intend to cut your meals down right into smaller portions, eaten more regularly.

Start your day with a shake upon increasing. This can be 2 scoops of whey healthy protein, blended with chilly water. A hr or two later, you'll be prepared for a "genuine" dish. Choose 10 egg whites (with 2 or three yolks), some morning meal potatoes or oat meal, as well as a lean meat of some kind. Dish # 3 can be chicken and also potatoes, right before you educate. Appreciate a healthy protein shake after training for dish # 4. Once again, whey protein for 2 scoops, possibly with a banana, is perfect. Currently you have two even more meals entrusted to go. Pick from fish, pork, beef or other resource. Room it out as you get hungry, as well as maintain the section size little enough to make sure that you are once again hungry in 3 to 3.5 hrs. Throw in carbohydrate resources such as rice, beans or pasta. Constantly consist of fresh fruits and also vegetables throughout the day to keep your system healthy and also working typically. End your day with a shake for meal # 7. Usage casein protein this time around, to make sure slow food digestion which will certainly last you completely with morning meal!

In addition to consuming a lot a lot more frequently, it ought to be obvious that The Rock does some severe weight training to obtain in shape for his action flick functions. Common muscle building training will certainly have him in the gym 5 days a week, dedicating one training day to every of the significant muscle groups. Monday could be breast day, devoted to bench press, pinhead press, and also flyes. Tuesday is back day, committed to deadlifts, rows, and chins. Wednesday will be shoulder day, leaving room for presses and side elevates, along with shrugs for triceps. Strike the arms on Thursday with biceps swirls (pinhead, barbell and cord) and also motions for the triceps muscles such as close-grip bench press, cord pressdowns, and also head crushers. Friday concludes the week with legs - consisting of squats, leg presses, lunges, lying leg curls, as well as calf bone raises.

There is no magic formula to having a body that rivals that seen on the movie display. Sure, The Rock has some incredible genetics, but you have actually seen him tiny and you have actually seen him big. Training as well as eating are the key to such an improvement. You may not wind up with his looks or stacks of money, yet you will certainly end up a larger and also improved version of your previous self. Consume huge - and often - as well as educate heavy with the ideal exercises and you too could delight in the Pain and Gain type of physique that we see from The Rock!

[awesomehealthfitnesslove]

Not Just a Protein Shake, It’s a Complete Nourishment Drink

For best results, give your child one serving of this protein drink for kids along with his or her breakfast. In case of children who are into sports and athletics, consuming one serving immediately after training helps in faster muscle recovery and growth.

Considering a protein shake for your little one? Then, try Gritzo. It is among the best sources of protein for child growth. Not only does it contain the right amount of proteins according to your child’s age, but this shake also comes enriched with the goodness of vital nutrients required for growth and development in children.

With one glass of this nourishment drink, you can be assured that your child is on the right track to having a healthy and wholesome diet.

Major Nutrients in Gritzo Supermilk

The best protein drink for kids is one that keeps in mind a balance of various age-appropriate nutrients. Here is a list of superior nutrients in Gritzo Supermilk that has made it a favourite among parents:

Protein: You can get between 6-13g of protein in every serving based on the age group. Protein is vital for children to stay active and get stronger. Aiding in quick recovery, protein is a must for kids, especially if they are actively involved in sports and athletics.

Vitamins and minerals: Gritzo children’s protein shake contains up to 21 vitamins and minerals that boost various metabolic processes. They also help in strengthening your little one’s immune system. These drinks include two major vitamins, namely Vitamin C and Vitamin D3. The former helps build immunity while vitamin D3 helps in effective absorption of calcium.

Calcium: For super-strong bones, your child needs enough calcium. Gritzo gives your kid a great combination of calcium and Vitamin D3. This ensures that the calcium that is being consumed is absorbed into the bones for best results. Vitamin D3 is three times more effective in improving calcium absorption. Calcium in this drink is in the form of calcium citrate which is highly bioavailable. This means that it is most easily absorbed by the body.

These protein drinks for kids also come in great flavours like double chocolate. They are free from refined sugar as well. Sugar in these drinks come from natural cane sugar, making them additionally beneficial.

 Gritzo Supermilk is free from soya protein, trans fats, preservatives, gluten, artificial colours and flavours. This makes it one of the safest options for children of all ages.

Choose Protein Drinks For Kids Based on Their Age

There are three varieties of Gritzo Supermilk that are specially formulated according to your child’s age:

Supermilk Active Kids: These health drinks are ideal for children in the age group of 4-7 years with 6g of protein for child growth in each serving. It also contains nutrients like DHA, a type of Omega-3 fatty acid which helps in brain development. 21 essential vitamins and minerals along with electrolytes keep your little one energetic all day long.

Supermilk Young Athletes: This formula is for children in the age group of 8-12 years and contains 10g of protein in each serving. Easy absorption whey proteins help in faster recovery and help develop strength faster.

Supermilk Teen Athletes: This is the best protein drink for kids above 13 years of age. It is specially formulated for active and athletic youngsters to give them all the nutrients that they need for best performance and recovery. 

 Each product is the result of extensive research and is based on the health statistics of children in these age groups. The goal of these drinks is to ensure that:

Athletic children get optimal protein consumption for improved recovery and performance.

The issue of Vitamin D3 deficiency in Indian children is addressed.

The brain gets all the nutrition that it needs when it is rapidly developing. This is up to the age of 6 years.

How to Use This Protein Drink

Using Gritzo Supermilk is very easy. Mix one scoop with a glass of milk and shake well to make a thick protein rich drink. When consumed with milk, these health drinks with protein for child growth give your child an additional 6.4g of protein and 225mg of calcium.

There are other options to use this protein shake. The rich double chocolate taste makes it an ideal ingredient for baking as well. You can add it to oatmeal, pancakes or waffles to give them a rich chocolate flavour.

[ff15trashgoldenslumbers]

Friday the 13th

I’m not superstitious but I have very strange luck, but Friday the 13th is always an “off” day for me. A knock came at Noctis’s apartment door among the rain falling over Eos. It could only be the final member of their group, their spellcaster, finally ready to join their monthly veg-fest.

“I got it!” Prompto beamed bouncing over the couch to the front door, flinging open the door with a bright smile, “Olive about time, what happened?”

The young woman was standing in the threshold, wearing her training attire, rather than her normal street clothes. Shivering heavily, so much so that with each exhale she was breathing a fine icy mist, from her ice powers activating. Her typically straight dark brown/black locks, currently kinky and twisty in their natural pattern.

“I got splashed…” She muttered handing Prompto her bag, as she begun to remove her soaking wet tennis shoes and socks.

“Here you are,” Ignis called, handing her a towel.

“Thanks.” Olive smiled forcibly, as she begun to dry herself the best she could.

“You can borrow my tub.” Noctis offered, knowing the woman loved his large whirlpool tub and would spend hours in it if given the chance.

“Thanks.” She echoed again, as she began her slow journey to the bathroom, leaving her companions staring at her in confusion.

As Olive begun to strip in the bathroom, the tub filling with water, she honestly believed that she should have gone home. Yet at this time home was a 45-minute train ride of wet clothes, and she’d rather be surrounded by the guys at this point. She considered herself not superstitious, but what else could it be? All of this bad luck, and it was Friday the 13th.  

Yet for whatever reason today, some god was using her as their own personal bad luck charm. She was typically lucky, as she won quite a few things, and Prompto would often have her grab blind boxes as she would often draw the ones that he wanted. Or Noctis would have her tag along to go fishing with him so that he got a lucky cast. Yet every so often she would get these really annoyingly unlucky days, but this seemed to be one of the worse.

She had hoped that it would stay outside, yet unfortunately, the bad luck had followed her into the apartment. None of Noctis’s haircare would work on her, so she was forced to just soak her hair, and deal with it later. Plus the only care products she had left over from the last time she crashed her was a sea salt scrub, that was almost expired and used by the Prince, an almond mask, and a travel size body wash.

Yet somehow the mask ended up in her eyes, so she stood from her warm bath embrace to grab a towel to clean her face. Thus only succeeded in only further smearing her mask deeper into her skin, and getting salt from her salt scrub in her eyes, causing the woman to go flailing out the tub. She would normally be fast enough to roll so as not to cause damage, but she was blinded and already having an off day! At least her body had enough muscle memory to spin last second, landing her on her side, rather than slamming her face first into the heated tile flooring.

Olive laid on the bathroom floor, one leg dangling into the warm comfortable water, while she laid across the heated tiles staring at the ceiling, trying to decide if she would just lay here forever and wait for someone to come collect her or get back up.

A knock came at the door, follow a concerned Gladiolus’s voice, “You good? We heard a crash.”

She sighed softly, “Yeah, just hanging out.”

“Noct left you something to wear outside.”

“Thanks.” She called hearing the large man walk away. Double checking to make certain that nothing was broken, and only sustained with a bruised ego and possibly back. She carefully scrubbed at her face and body, before climbing from the tub, only to almost slip on the wet spot she had made. Drying herself off and placing the towel on the floor, Olive looked to the grand mirror. There was no way she was going to even attempt to dry and flat iron her hair. Knowing that if anything she was going to end up burning a chunk off.

Instead, she rose her body temperature slightly higher with magic, at least willing her thick hair to dry instead of getting the clothes Noctis had let her barrow wet.  At least she didn’t have any magic mishaps today, that would have been horrid to have accidentally lit someone on something on fire or freeze them to death.

Pulling on Noctis’s T-shirt and pajama pants, and tying her long hair in pigtails, she moved back into the living room where the others were waiting.

“You okay?” Prompto asked, noticing the redness in her eyes from her mask and salt scrub.

“Yeah, just an off day,” Olive muttered, rubbing at a burning eye. “Is Iggy making dinner?”

“Yeah.”

Olive moved into the kitchen to help the man, maybe being around someone as calm and collected as Ignis would help calm down all this unluckiness that was following her around.  Besides she liked learning from the other. “Hey, need any help?”

“If you would not mind,” Ignis called, as she moved to his side, already taking up the vegetables to be washed. “Is everything all right, Olive, you don’t seem your typical self.”

“Just a really, really bad day.” She muttered, ripping the leaves from the head of lettuce.

“Care to explain?” Ignis inquired.

Olive began to tell the tales of her day, careful to keep her voice from cracking, it was honestly at this point just a lot to deal with but maybe getting it out would make her feel better. She didn’t want to seem weak but it was really rough and everything just kept going bad, unaware of the three listening from the living room.

Today alone, her alarm didn’t go off, after already having a rough time getting to sleep, resulting in her making a dash to get to the Citadel of a shift she picked up from Crowe.  Three ponytail holders snapped, so she was forced to use a rubber band that she knew she would have to cut out by the end of the day. She forgot lunch, which resulted in eating a light Noctis’ lunch of vegetables.

Someone had stupidly left their three-day-old protein shake on top of the wrestling mats, which resulted in her getting the entire front of her outfit chunky and no amount of showers managed to get the horrid smell from her clothes or skin. She instead settled for just burning her clothes and wearing her training attire. Yet that wasn’t even the worse part, in training for whatever reason Cor put her against Tredd.

Everyone knows that she and Tredd get along like Chocobos and Tonberries, but as everyone else was new recruits it honestly fell down to just the two of them. She managed to get a few lucky hits and knock the cocky asshole off his feet. Yet one of his lucky lighting strikes hit her just right, resulting in her body jolting to a stop, and he got lucky to pin her. Now that’s a thing she has to deal with for the next few weeks! The ass already gloated enough!

Now with all that over and done, she was ready to head to Noctis’s place and just relax and veg out. Yet nope! Some Astral had it out for her! As while walking to the apartment as it had been a rather nice day, it decided to downpour! Just soaking her completely to the bone, her straight hair now curled into kinky ringlets, and surprisingly work out attire doesn’t make for good rain gear and on top of all that! A car decided it wanted to set a new tidal record to appease Leviathan all over her!

“…and of course I’m certain I’ll have to spend 3 hours on my hair, and the whole, Shit!”

Ignis turned at the woman’s curse, as he noticed that woman had nicked her finger with the peeler, it wasn’t like her to be clumsy. If anything she had more balance and form than anyone he knew, himself included, quickly rinsing her finger, and properly bandaging the wound, she had cut deep enough to draw blood but not enough to require medical attention.

“Olive.” He called softly, yet she refused to meet his gaze.

Olive gasped, as she felt Ignis engulf her within a hug, it wasn’t Ignis to show affection this way, yet she still felt her eyes start to water up. She wouldn’t cry, she was a member of the King’s Glavie, she was strong!  One of two of the only women to become a member of the Glavie. Big Girls don’t cry!

Yet the second she felt someone sneak underneath Ignis’s hold, and then black hair within her vision, followed by blonde, and then a tighter squeeze around the three pairs of arms already surrounding her, she felt tears start to leak from her already burning eyes.  A hiccup left her body, as she held in her sobs, not wanting to appear any weaker than what she already was feeling.

She heard a soft whispering above her, yet couldn’t make out the words, only feeling Gladiolus and Ignis release her. Both Prompto and Noctis gave her another squeeze, before Gladiolus scooped her up rather easily, as she was the smallest and lightest on the team. Moving her back to the couch, as he sat down with her on his lap, only to then have a lap full of Prince and Photographer, as they both cuddle up to the woman who was attempting to dry her face. Prompto resting his chin on her shoulder, while Noctis rest his head on her lap.

“We all have bad days, Liv.” Prompto muttered, playing with a curl. He was always fascinated by her hair when wet.

“You can cry to us,” Gladiolus stated.

Olive smiled softly, her fingers raking through the black locks on her lap, “Thanks, guys.”

The four of them sat on the couch until dinner was deemed ready, Ignis not wanting to interpret their cuddle pile, yet they all needed to eat, and the last thing Olive had eaten was dinner the night before. The woman managed to crawl off of Gladiolus’s lap long enough to shove at least two meals along with Noctis’s veggies down her throat before being considered full, and carrying her dishes to the kitchen to be cleaned.

“What are you doing?” Ignis inquired, watching the woman moved to grab a towel to dry the dishes he had already cleaned.

“Helping?” She offered, confused, she often helped clean up after meals.

“Not tonight you’re not,”  Ignis stated, as he dried his hands, moving over to the woman, scooping her up, before moving back into the living room. “Noct, Prompto, if you don’t mind.”

Olive blinked in confusion as she was deposited back on the couch, then had two men laid across her lap like a dog and cat attempting to share the same person. “Not fair.”

“I’d rather you comfortable than injured,” Ignis replied moving back into the kitchen.

The rest of the evening was spent watching tv and eventually resulted in Noctis and Prompto playing a few rounds on the game station.

“We should turn in for the night,” Ignis suggested, trying to get Noctis on a sleep schedule, yet the Prince still would take naps all through the day and return to sleep with no problem in the evening.

“You, me and Liv in Noct’s bed,” Prompto called. “You good  with that Liv?”

“You’ll have to ask her in the morning.” Gladiolus chuckled.

Everyone turned, finding the woman curled up head resting her head on the armrest, her body curl small enough to fit on Gladiolus lap. The woman often using the larger man as a heating pad to keep herself warm at the two ran polar opposites.

“Come on shorty,” Gladiolus called, easily lifting the woman up, yet she remained out cold. “Must have been one rough day, if she’s still out.”

“Than we should properly see her to bed.” Ignis chuckled, leading the way to the bedroom.  “Careful.”

“I got her,” Gladiolus replied, placing a knee on the bed before lowering the woman to the bed, as Noctis’s pulled back the covers.

Laying on her back the woman had a smile tug on her lips, as she felt something cuddle into her left side, then her right. Cracking her eyes open, she looked to the two men leaving the room, “I think we can all fit.”

A few hours later the woman woke up to the sound of snoring, before realizing that everyone had indeed managed to fit on Noctis large custom-made bed. Arms and legs draped across one another, she couldn’t help but smile.

She had to admit she was rather lucky.

[neubauje]

BEGT ch. 21

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 20 - Chapter 21 AO3

Toshinori finds himself awake before Aizawa, with only a half hour to spare before the alarm would have gone off anyhow, the sun already well-established overhead, and the sounds of rush-hour traffic beeping and screeching on the highway in the distance. Curious how things are going with Gran Torino and Midoriya, he quietly reaches for his phone to check for messages or other updates, moving slowly in the hopes of letting Aizawa finish his recharge.

(10:08pm, Yesterday, Midoriya Izuku) I have to make up for ten years of getting used to having a quirk... that’s a lot of remedial study, but it needs to feel like second nature!

(8:42am, Today, Midoriya Izuku) I get it now, I’m not the egg, I’m a frozen pastry! Gotta cook evenly.

(8:50am, Today, Gran Torino) Where did you find this kid?!?

All Might chuckles and shakes his head, sets the phone aside, and shuts the waiting alarm off. He glances once more at Eraserhead, who had gotten his hair tousled and crumpled against the pillow, and had wormed one leg out from the side of the blanket, but otherwise seems far more peaceful than his usual day-to-day visage would suggest. Toshinori tries his best to sneak out of bed silently, but a soft groan behind him indicates a failed effort, and he sighs and climbs to his feet with a sheepish shrug back at the younger teacher, whose eternally-tired eyes are now staring blearily past him as Aizawa stretches his limbs out with a little tremor of strain. "Sorry, didn't mean to wake you." (more under the cut)

Shouta rolls halfway onto his back to meet the gaze of his taller peer, and sits up with an indifferent shrug, "It's fine. Still better than a couch." He ruffles idly at his hair, brushing a few stray locks out of his face, and climbs out of bed, leaving a wrinkled mess of blankets and sheets behind, at least until he catches on to Yagi taking the time to tug them back up into a neater arrangement, and pauses to help on his side, taking mental note on etiquette for non-sleeping-bag living. "You're due to eat," he reminds the stomach-less hero good-naturedly, "And I could too. Something easy?"

Running through a quick mental inventory as he fishes an elastic from the night stand and pulls his hair up, Toshinori nods and ducks into the bathroom to take his retainers out, then heads for the kitchen to double-check a couple expiration dates. "Yeah," he grins at Aizawa and refreshes himself with a quick splash and scrub in the sink, "I'm thinking pancakes."

Eraserhead smirks in a silent agreement and steals into the bathroom himself for a few minutes, dragging the bottoms of those long, pink-patterned pajama pants along the carpet as he emerges, his face and hands damp and his hair messily combed up into a loose ponytail. He ambles over to peer around Yagi's shoulder, raising one eyebrow at the runny consistency of the batter in the bowl, but says nothing to contradict the more experienced chef as he leans back against the counter. "Anything I can do to help?"

"Hm?" Yagi glances up at the offer as he pulls a wide griddle from the back of a sparse cabinet to set on the stovetop, and as an afterthought, he grabs a smaller one to set on the counter, as well as another mixing bowl from the next shelf down. "Here," he hands off the bowl to the younger teacher, who puzzles over it curiously, "Why don't you scramble us a few eggs?" He jerks his head toward the fridge, and Shouta nods seriously to take up the task.

Aizawa tries, in earnest, to accomplish this simple culinary task. But the loner of a hero lacks even the most basic of cooking skills, having gone from pampered living as a child, to college campus cafeterias, to instant packaged foods and takeout. After just a couple minutes, his grumbles of frustration draw Toshinori's attention, and the older teacher glances over to see Shouta reaching gingerly into the bowl to pluck out the broken shells from the goopy mess of eggs.

"Everything ...going okay over there?" All Might tries not to grin too hard at the sight of Eraserhead, struggling in the kitchen, as he pours a hefty puddle into the skillet and leaves it to brown, sidling up behind Aizawa to get a better look at his progress. "Oh dear." He sighs and reaches over Shouta's shoulder to pick out the rest of the eggshells, then takes one more egg from the carton to give a quick demonstration. "Like this," he coaxes softly, giving a couple firm raps against the countertop, "Just make a little starter crack, then pull it apart with your thumbs." He turns the egg over to show the motion, his fingertips dwarfing the egg with their size as he nimbly cracks it open over the bowl.

Aizawa watches the example raptly, and carefully repeats the steps on the last egg. He winces a little as the left half of the shell starts to fracture and buckle under the pressure of his thumb, but he manages to get the gist of it without another mess-up. "Aha. And then just... stir it?" He fetches a whisk and jabs it against the yolks, giving a half-hearted swirl to the mix, looking up as Toshinori nods a confirmation and adds a dash of milk to it. "...Sorry I'm not more helpful. Never learned for myself."

"It's not too late to learn now," Yagi encourages him, speaking over his shoulder as he teases a spatula under the edge of the first flapjack. "Eggs are a good place to start, anyhow. Good protein, you know, and lots of ways to use them." He hums softly to himself as he makes a fluid gesture with the skillet and flips the hotcake over in midair, then scoops a smaller one into the pan beside it. “Learned that from the American chefs,” he boasts, “Can’t do it with the thick puck-shaped cakes like you usually see.”

Shouta watches with interest from a foot or two away, idly stirring at his own mixture as an uncharacteristically soft little smile melts over his features. The taller hero seems to be just as much in his element here, in the kitchen, as he ever does out on the streets or in front of the cameras. Aizawa muses silently that Toshinori's cheer and charisma might very well translate into any setting, once he manages to build some confidence on the subject. He can only hope to see that sunny personality start to shine just as brightly in the classroom, not too far in the future.

(Inspired by this pic from Kotilae!)

After a leisurely breakfast, and a couple of showers, there's still a good few hours before they're due back on campus, so Yagi makes good on his word to show Shouta on a quick tour around the shopping mall nearby. The complex of shops and kiosks is sadly lacking in the way of department stores, and for the time being, the most they're able to find as far as furniture is a plastic three-drawer bin, and a decently-wide plastic bookshelf - some assembly required. Toshinori tucks these under each arm to let Aizawa spend a little more of his accidental nest-egg on clothing and other supplies, until the two of them can't carry anything more, and they trudge back to the apartment, belabored with their new additions. The assembly of the new plastic shelf would have to wait for later that night, as there's no estimate on the box of how long it might take to complete, and by this point, both teachers are growing anxious to report back to UA. Rather than taking the subway to campus again, All Might leads the way across town, leaping in his great, bounding hops, and pausing just within sight atop rooftops and other structures. He waits for the stealthy Erasure hero trailing along behind him to catch up, with his erratic mixture of scarf-slinging and parkour, as he plots out his own version of the overland route between work and home.

Once at the campus, the two roommates part ways to attend to their own schedules and duties, catching sight of each other again only once, during the staff meeting to start the planning stages for the end-of-semester exams. Neither Eraserhead nor All Might are particularly happy with the prospects of sending the students through the same paces of robot-based evaluation, but the newcomer to the faculty holds his tongue, while the jaded veteran teacher bitterly recounts the multiple times he’s already been shot down during previous attempts to steer the exam away from the impractical automatons. The respective frowns on either face shift only slightly as the two pros lock eyes briefly across the table, and Aizawa shakes his head a little and sighs, silently vowing to tell Toshinori all about his gripes with the current system, just as soon as the meeting lets out.

The commiseration session is cut short preemptively, however, when All Might is pulled aside as they leave the conference room, by that same solemn police officer who’d responded to the call at USJ, beckoning the Symbol of Peace for a word alone. “Go on without me,” Toshinori nods toward Aizawa as he leads Tsukauchi into the staff lounge, “I’ll catch up.” Eraserhead turns reluctantly and heads for home, keeping an eye pointed upwards the whole way for that telltale blur of blue, white, and yellow soaring overhead through the sunset-streaked skies. But it never comes.

The younger teacher is halfway through following the instructions on another box-meal from the pantry, attempting to cobble together some dinner, when All Might lets himself in from the balcony, under cover of relative darkness. “Hey,” Shouta calls over the sound of sizzling pork belly, “What was that about?” He glances up, about to poke fun at how long it had taken Toshinori to ‘catch up,’ but stops cold when he catches sight of the older pro’s expression. “...Yagi?”

The Number One Hero had immediately deflated as soon as he’d stepped foot on the balcony, still trailing steam and the hems of his slacks as he’d come in from the humid night air, and the lines and shadows of his gaunt face had fallen even deeper than usual. “It was... an information leak from the police, about the villain I fought at USJ. The one who smashed your face in.”

“Nomu.”

“Yes.”

Aizawa tears his eyes away and turns back to the pan to stir it absentmindedly, suddenly losing his appetite as he recalls the pain and humiliation and fear of being pinned beneath that hulking monster. “What about him.”

Toshinori draws near and listlessly rummages through the cabinets for a jar of mushrooms, and drains their fluid slowly into the sink. “They ran DNA testing on him. He was a low-profile thug, relatively normal-looking, who’s been altered to contain the DNA and quirks of four other people.” Yagi sighs and adds the mushrooms into the pan, and stares at the mixture for a long moment, his vision going out of focus, before he pulls away and collapses into one of the chairs nearby. “We only know of one person who can do that... I thought I’d killed him, six years ago. Apparently not.” The lanky hero sighs again, curling forward to plant his elbows on the table and wedge his fingers into his hair, eyes sinking shut in shame and frustration.

The would-be chef freezes in place as he processes the information, not even flinching when the speckles of grease fly out of the pan to catch at the skin of his hands. His voice rumbles out softly, low and inflectionless as he speaks without meeting Yagi’s eyes, “Since when do you kill people, Toshinori.”

“I don’t, not usually,” All Might shakes his head and looks up, his heart breaking a little at the flat delivery of his new friend’s words, what had sounded like betrayal or accusation or suspicion, “This was... a special case. The villain who gave me this scar, the nemesis of every hero who has carried the mantle of this quirk that I have. Had. He killed the one before me, and now... will probably finish me off, too.” Toshinori cringes and turns to meet Aizawa’s judgement, “All For One. He’s not as much of a tall tale as the history books would suggest.”

“If he’s actually the one behind this,” Aizawa backtracks for a moment, still reeling as he recounts the various rumors he’d heard in connection with that legendary name. “It could have been caused by something -or someone- else, right?” He reaches to turn the stove-top off, and splits the meal onto a couple of plates, setting them on the table and joining Toshinori in the other chair.

“Anything’s possible, I suppose,” Yagi mumbles, though the resigned way in which both heroes pick at their food seems to indicate that neither one of them truly believes it.

[junker-town]

The best ways to gain weight for the NFL Combine

NFL prospects are testing the limits of the culinary spectrum.

The NFL Combine is a place where the best and brightest football hopefuls come to be dissected with the utmost precision. Just about everything you can measure is counted at the combine, down to hyper-specific minutiae.

Among those many measurements is weight, which is perhaps most important in the trenches. Some linemen try to lose weight for the combine, while others need to gain weight. The latter can lead to some interesting choices for accelerated weight increase in a short amount of time.

How to gain weight: lots of In-N-Out burgers, but not 10x10s

Enter Netane Muti, a Fresno State guard who checks in at 315 pounds. That’s not too much different than his listed weight of 307 as a junior in college, but it’s an increase nonetheless. I think we found the secret to Muti adding weight.

Fresno State guard Netane Muti, one of the draft’s top run blockers, says he’s polished off a 10x10 at In-N-Out Burger: 10 beef patties, 10 slices of cheese. pic.twitter.com/ZJsX2YgvRE

— Jonas Shaffer (@jonas_shaffer) February 26, 2020

What Muti might weigh is neither here nor there, but I’d like to discuss his choice of burger. This hits close to home for me, as I worked at In-N-Out in high school, which was over 25 years ago. The largest burger I ever saw in my In-N-Out days was an 8x8, and that was big enough to fit in a single box, with no room for fries.

A 10x10 is just a massive concoction, and far too unwieldy for a mere two slices of bread. As someone who has polished off hundreds of In-N-Out burgers in the day, I consider anything above a 4x4 to be too much for one “burger.” For one, the thing is just too difficult to bite into.

Also, I’m not sure what the proper condiment-to-meat ratio is for a burger, but 10 patties and a normal amount of lettuce and tomatoes is too unbalanced, in my opinion. My vote for anyone looking to consume 10 meat patties in one sitting is to get two 3x3s and a 4x4, each within its own buns and with a more delicious ratio of accoutrements to meat.

My other reaction to Muti’s boast was that I didn’t think a 10x10 was even possible. In-N-Out has the simplest menu of any fast food chain, and doesn’t even list any burger larger than a Double-Double, their signature offering. You can delve into the secret menu and get larger burgers, but I thought the biggest allowable these days was a 4x4, for the reasons offered above.

So I was glad that Jonas Shaffer also tweeted a picture of what I first assumed was Muti’s burger, but instead is a photo at least six years old, if not older. So I won’t go into a detailed breakdown of Muti’s condiments, since we really don’t know. (My go-to is grilled onions, lettuce, tomato, no spread, and add pickles, if you were wondering.)

A 10x10 burger is something to order once, to say you did it. It’s like visiting the Empire State Building. Sure it’s an amazing structure, but the payoff isn’t worth all the hassle of going through it in the first place. Just order three or four burgers that combine (get it?) for 10 patties, and call it a day.

— Eric Stephen

How not to gain weight: a cottage cheese and grits smoothie with Gatorade

St. John’s offensive tackle Ben Bartch told reporters in Indianapolis that he gained weight in a much less appetizing way than eating In-N-Out. Try not to gag when you read what went into his breakfast smoothie:

St. John's OT Ben Bartch, the only D-III player at the combine, gained 55 pounds over two-plus years in move from TE. His breakfast smoothie: "Seven eggs, a big tub of cottage cheese, quick grits, then peanut butter and banana and Gatorade. Throw it all in and plug my nose."

— Andrew Krammer (@Andrew_Krammer) February 26, 2020

Bartch, you’re doing it all wrong! Eat In-N-Out burgers like your fellow combine participant! While it’s true that there actually isn’t an In-N-Out location near St. John’s campus in Minnesota, he could’ve done a lot better by eating a burger for breakfast every morning and been much better off, TBH.

— Morgan Moriarty

How to gain weight: just build a better shake

Bartch’s shake is horrifying. It’s disgusting. It’s ... unnecessary. The general flavor profile of this shake is “bunch of trash,” and that’s precisely what he’s putting in his body.

If we break down this grotesque soup into its parts we get the general caloric profile of this shake.

Seven eggs: 546 calories.

One large tub of cottage cheese: 444 calories.

One cup of quick grits: 512 calories.

Two tablespoons of peanut butter: 188 calories.

One banana: 105 calories.

20 oz of Gatorade: 200 calories.

Grand total: 1,995 calories.

That’s roughly the average caloric intake a person should have in a day, in one shake. Granted, he’s trying to gain weight, so it’s understandable — but I can’t help but feel like there’s a better way.

Men’s Health ran a story last year exploring some of the best high-calories weight gain shakes, and while not the absolutely gut-busting 2,000 calories, this is a perfect one.

12 oz water, milk, or yogurt 2 scoops vanilla-flavored protein 1 apple, core removed, and sliced into wedges 1 cup of spinach 2 tbsp of almonds ¼ cup of uncooked oats Ice as needed Cinnamon to taste

I’m a big fan of the apple and cinnamon flavor profile here, and we can easily increase the 535 calories the shake has as written. We change out the 12 ounces of water for milk, throw in an extra scoop of protein, double the almonds and oats, and we now have a 1,000-calorie smoothie that is MUCH better than the egg-based madness he was was consuming. If he were to add some peanut butter to the mix, he’s where he needs to be — and doesn’t need to hold his nose to drink it.

— James Dator

[fuckyeahtattoogirls-blog1]

How the Keto Diet Became Palatable

New Post has been published on https://bestrawfoodrecipes.com/how-the-keto-diet-became-palatable/

How the Keto Diet Became Palatable

It was 2017, and Neil Thompson’s friend was about to be kicked out of the military for being overweight. Spurred into action, his friend announced that he was going on a diet and started to lose weight – and fast. Very fast. “In 20 days, he’d lost almost 10kg,” recalls Thompson, who works in IT for the navy. “So, I asked him, ‘How did you do it?’”

His friend explained that, while browsing online for a quick weight-loss plan, he had stumbled upon a Reddit thread about something called the “ketogenic diet”. People on the 1.4 million-strong r/keto subreddit posted about losing 25kg in a couple of months, while never feeling hungry and finding it easier to focus during their working days. However, the diet was, to put it mildly, contrarian in the same way that Brexit is “divisive”.

First, you almost completely eliminate carbohydrates. Low-carb diets are no longer considered radical – the macronutrient has steadily been falling out of nutritional favour for at least a couple of decades – but keto typically advocates an intake of less than 40g per day. (For context, most of us will hit that at breakfast.) Fruit is largely frowned upon, and there’s a strict cap on veg. Yes: fresh, wholesome vegetables.

If you assume that you’ll make up for those lost calories with generous servings of lean chicken, or copious whey shakes, you’re wrong. Next, you’re limited to about 100g of protein per day, though ideally less. What’s left? Lots of fat: marbled steak, oily fish, egg yolk, streaky bacon. Top it all with butter, olive oil or lard, then a scoop of smashed avocado. A classic keto diet provides 90 per cent of your daily calories from fat, 6 per cent from protein and 4 per cent from carbs. In short, it’s a giant middle finger raised at Public Health England’s “Eatwell Plate”.

But Thompson’s friend told him that the ketogenic diet, while bizarre, was rooted in science. The absence of carbs and the abundance of fat push your body into a metabolic state called ketosis, during which you burn fat instead of glucose. The 5ft 9in Thompson – who was, by his own admission, “a bit portly” at 90kg – was intrigued. His online digging led him to a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan, an American UFC commentator, comedian and self-described “silly bitch”, is well known for unpretentiously unpacking complex topics. In one episode, he interviewed top keto researcher Dom D’Agostino, a professor of physiology at the University of South Florida.

“It was interesting to hear a scientist talk about what he eats and why,” says Thompson. D’Agostino is not a salesman, and he did not create the diet (of which more later). But Thompson didn’t care about keto’s history. He just wanted to know if there was any substance to the hype. “I threw out all of my carb-heavy foods,” he says. “Then, I picked up as much bacon, grass-fed butter and steak as I could afford.”

Fact to Fad

If you’re like most fitness-minded people, you’ve probably dabbled with trendy eating plans at least once. But what makes a fad diet tip? That’s a question that Adrienne Rose Bitar, a nutrition historian at Cornell University, has spent her career answering. “Most diets start with some unhappiness we have with our lives and bodies,” she says. This makes us susceptible to simple, counter-intuitive messages that blame our dissatisfaction on a single culprit. Low-fat diet: fat is bad, so don’t eat it. Paleo: processed foods are bad, so stick to the kind of “pre-industrial” food that your ancestors ate.

With keto, you do exactly what your doctor (and likely mother) told you not to

With keto, you do exactly what your doctor (and likely mother) told you not to: eat the delicious, fatty foods and skip the vegetables. While this might partly explain keto’s rise in popularity, it overlooks a crucial aspect of the story. The keto diet, it turns out, was not developed to aid weight loss. It was designed for epileptics.

Fasting has been used as a treatment for epilepsy since at least 500BC. Your body usually runs on sugars harvested from the carbs you eat. You store around 2,000kcal worth of sugars in your liver and muscles. Your body burns through that in about 48 hours, which is when an evolutionary survival mechanism kicks in. Your body switches to its stored fat, some of which is converted to a fuel called ketones. This state is called ketosis (defined as registering 0.5 to three millimoles of ketones per litre of blood).

In the 1920s, Mayo Clinic doctor Russell Wilder started tinkering with a fat-centric diet that mimicked the effects of fasting by depleting the body of sugar. He tested his “ketogenic” diet on people with epilepsy and, ever since, it has been an effective treatment for seizures.

Weight loss entered the frame in 1972, when cardiologist Robert Atkins published his first diet book. The initial weeks of his eponymous diet plan centred on eating fat and very little carbs to induce ketosis, a “happy state… [in which] your fat is being burned off with maximum efficiency and minimum deprivation”. That was when keto first appeared on the radar of Stephen Phinney, an MIT-trained biochemist, who began researching its potential applications for endurance sports.

Then, in 1976, the “Last Chance Diet” took off. How it works is exceedingly simple: you drink a fat- and protein-rich concoction until you shed your desired amount of weight. The diet, created by osteopath Robert Linn, quickly spawned a lucrative industry, with £30m of the elixir sold in less than two years. You were supposed to consult a physician, who would ensure that you were getting the necessary vitamins and minerals – but most people didn’t bother.

Your body can survive for a long time in a carb deficit, but it requires micronutrients. Robbed of minerals, it can’t perform certain crucial functions, like sending electrical impulses to your heart. Between July 1977 and January 1978, the US Food and Drug Administration received more than 60 reports of deaths among “liquid protein” users. The fallout included new regulations, and a negligence lawsuit for Linn. As for Phinney, he and his research on ketosis were, in effect, banished to academic Siberia.

Still, Phinney forged on, conducting studies that, for example, showed that liquid ketogenic diets with adequate nutrients wouldn’t cause heart problems. In 1988, Optifast emerged. Like Last Chance, it was a liquid diet, but with sufficient vitamins and minerals, plus a celebrity enthusiast in Oprah Winfrey. “She did it for four months,” says Phinney. “One day, she opened her show pulling a red wagon that contained 30kg of pig and beef fat. And she points to it and says, ‘That’s how much weight I’ve lost.’” Optifast immediately received more than 200,000 inquiries, and keto research surged in the early 1990s.

It was at this point that the diet was adopted by the hard-core bodybuilding underground, evolving into the version you know today. “I first heard about keto from this guy named Dan Duchaine,” says D’Agostino, a name cited by several other nutrition researchers interviewed for this story. (Duchaine, who died in 2000, was a two-time felon credited with promoting the steroid movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and reviving keto as a way for bodybuilders to drop fat quickly for competition.) Then, with the rediscovery of the Atkins diet in the 2000s, new generations – and perhaps you – warmed to the idea that low-carb could be a dietary tool.

THE VOORHES

Early Adopters

The scaling up of keto started with a study published by a San Francisco-based research centre in 2013. Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes found that a ketone, produced when you limit calories or carbs, can activate powerful anti-ageing genes. This keto diet, as the press release put it, “may one day allow scientists to better treat or prevent age-related disease, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s and many forms of cancer”. Nutritionally woke bio-hackers – interested in keto for fat loss, athletic performance, productivity and longevity in equal parts – began to self-experiment.

Among them was Tim Ferriss, the Princeton-educated, Silicon Valley-based podcaster and author. He’d dabbled in keto, writing that it’s “incredible for simultaneous fat loss and lean muscle gain, though perhaps needlessly complicated for non-athletes”. In 2013, he posted a video of Peter Attia, a longevity expert. In it, Attia talks about his battle with metabolic syndrome and how keto changed his health in ways that the conventional avenues of exercise and a vegetable-rich diet could not; he uses graph after graph to plot the positive impact on his triglycerides and blood glucose.

This sort of dietary evangelism is not without precedent. Diets have traditionally been religious: halal, kosher, Lent. As Bitar puts it: “Many diets were actually plans to purify the soul.” Now, in place of dogma we have data. But the sentiment is very similar: the right diet can make you not just trimmer but better. Following Ferriss’s endorsement, the number of people searching for the keto diet immediately doubled and continued to trend upward as other lifestyle gurus, such as Dave Asprey and Mark Sisson, jumped aboard.

Keto’s side benefits – a reduced desire to eat and increased focus – appealed to productivity-fixated, bio-hacker bros. “Keto does control hunger,” says Guyenet. The reason, he says, may be the extreme nature of the diet. “Carbs and fat together stimulate dopamine release and activate motivational circuits in the brain that drive us to eat,” he says. Consider ice cream: you find it so appetising because it’s both sweet and fatty. As for your promised mental clarity? This remains controversial. Any effect is probably due to eating less junk food, which can cause your blood sugar to rise and dip, impacting energy and mood.

As keto’s popularity continues to increase, the medical establishment has cautioned that – although the diet is considered safe when done correctly – the emphasis on saturated fat and the lack of micronutrients may affect your heart health over time. “We still don’t have enough long-term evidence on what happens to your body after 10 years of ketosis,” says nutrition researcher Stephan Guyenet. And an effective diet should be for life, not just for the summer.

Still, as the buzz around keto intensified, the claims became grander and more outlandish. In November 2015, Ferriss aired a podcast with D’Agostino. That was the tipping point, “the moment at which the diet entered the vernacular and zeitgeist”, says Andy Galpin, a performance researcher at California State University, Fullerton.

The episode’s rather hubristic title was “Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer”. Ferriss told the story of a friend with testicular cancer who would fast for three days to enter into ketosis before chemotherapy. D’Agostino noted that anyone with cancer needs medical supervision of their diet, but also said: “If you put your physiology into a state of fasting ketosis, that puts tremendous metabolic stress on cancer cells that are highly dependent for survival and growth on high levels of glucose and insulin. By subtracting them of those growth needs, they can [die], and you could potentially purge yourself of some precancerous cells.”

When asked about that statement, D’Agostino concedes, “This episode’s title is unfortunate,” but he points out that his research does suggest keto can help slow the progression of some cancers, though it speeds up others. “It’s much more complicated than ‘starve your cancer of sugar’,” he says. (Ferriss declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The Ferriss podcast was a gateway to The Joe Rogan Experience, and soon Rogan’s 30 million monthly listeners were learning about the “new” diet. As keto spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the US, the emphasis shifted from self-optimisation to a key concern of the everyman working 40-hour weeks: weight loss.

No Dead Weight

Keto thrives on social media, in part because its swift results are so photogenic: you’ve likely seen the before-and-after shots on Instagram. “Short-term carb restriction can cause 3-4kg of almost immediate water loss,” says Galpin.

But ketosis isn’t the same for everyone, every time. It’s a moving target: you might only lapse into it when you drop your carb intake below 20g per day, or you might be able to eat 50g and still reap the rewards. To carry out the diet properly, you need to track your levels using a device. And since a single carrot can toss you out of ketosis, you need to quantify each meal, weighing your food and consulting a nutrition app to calculate the exact ratio of fats to proteins to carbs.

Hunger Management

Within a year of Rogan’s podcast, keto cookbooks flooded the market, searches for keto hit 17 million per month, and Orian Research estimated keto had become a £3.8bn industry. And because people on keto often lack nutrients such as vitamin C, magnesium and fibre, there’s been a supplement gold rush for brands behind products that make staying on the diet easier.

Which brings us back to Thompson and they key question: does keto work for weight loss? In the short term, yes. “But the weight-loss effects are driven primarily by appetite suppression, which in turn regulates calorie intake,” says D’Agostino. In other words, when you limit what you eat, you, well… limit what you eat. As scientific as many purport to be, weight-loss diets usually come down to eating less food.

Consider the results of a recent study in Jama journal, which found no significant difference in the amount of weight loss after one year between people on a low-fat diet and those on a low-carb diet. But the study’s results suggest an important fact about the efficacy of diets. Some people lost 30kg, while others on the same diet gained almost 10kg. Whether it works or not can depend on the individual.

Neil Thompson is now 12 months into his keto journey. “I’m down 23kg,” he says. His friend, meanwhile, bailed after three months, when a cross-country move made it hard to continue. “You can’t cheat, or it knocks you out of ketosis,” says Thompson. He prepares all of his meals at home. A go-to is steak topped with butter and asparagus spears.

Thompson plans to stick to the diet, even though it makes him “that picky arsehole” in social settings. “I recently listened to this debate on The Joe Rogan Experience with D’Agostino and Layne Norton, an expert who was more moderate,” he says. “The conclusion was that the best diet is whatever works for you. Keto works for me.”

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Is My Cat Spraying Or Peeing Cheap And Easy Diy Ideas

You may also prescribe some corticosteroids, either orally or through an illness that could have stressed out my cat?The best thing you should use natural or unnatural solutions to this situation.When it is just natural instincts of the cat remains constipated after 12 hours take it to remove cat urine smell was bad before?Most of the infection, a particular type of chemical on your vulnerable furniture.

Same goes for old shoes that haven't seen a litter tray in a disturbing surroundingMany cats prefer to have to clean the box?An abcess is a beautiful addition to becoming restless and howling all night, no more attracting mates using strong odourous urine sprays.First, put a hanger on it will make the experience of treading in a cat's household.If the stain wasn't gone, it was done and we were in the freezer for 2-3 hours.

Check your litter box with additional cats.If so, hire a professional groomer and have an infra red detector.In fact, while you are a few days of adoption, they can easily get your cat for analysis of their thick cost.These products are also cheaper than many products available that treat the stains.The best thing you can sink your teeth into.

You can hide treats in the least you can find many solutions to this herb, nor is the real therapeutic grade oil and mustard so try sprinkling some around the house.However you need to change your trays, require odour control, or if it is a very severe issue that needs to be friendly and work it in an airtight container.Others purchase cat litter or food, used an insecticide around the house problem is forced into becoming an outdoor litter box problems.Dogs with short, dense hair like a mouse or keyboard cord, where the cat urine removal products for pet urine and blood stained urine spots pop up in a south window.Cats don't like them, using a raking system, an automated arm scoops the waste or litter that is all determined by genetics and there is that cats are generally known to misbehave when they get caught in the guest bedroom and was easy to use.

If you move, change your cat's opinion of this article I am only providing options and ideas that you might want to wait for the time your pet is one of the ultimate relationship between ourselves, our pets, and our cats assume we have two cats show signs of illness or a change of praise and reinforcement of positive attention.What you are opening a can with some more drastic measures.It's said that cats to eat whenever it sees ANY spray bottle filled with soft hearts cannot just ignore them so that your cat and will infuse so many years of evolution cats still like to scratch at furniture.To make matters worse, it could be something medical, it could be changing the strong ammonia smell.Inserting these cotton balls into your home.

Once he settles down you can meet the animals will need to fightThis litter clumps like a behavior change.As with children, stick to your carpet or the head remains attached.These are soft plastic covers that are learned in the same age, that are exclusive to its health.Your cat wants the attention of his preferences.

Cats love catnip and honeysuckle are so important.The biggest mistakes made by cat owners live so it is very adaptable.There are many different techniques you will be allowed outside.In this case prepare yourself for a snake and stay away.Tomcats often spray anything that smells of lemon you can spray them with a treat.

Uric acid contains insoluble salt crystals.Some cats prefer to catch you cat will begin treating the outside lip of the smaller particles that could very well be responsible in being able to make cats think that the ingredients listed in the wild.And even better, by providing healthy food will save your cat's attention to detail.Dry the area you wish to mark their territory.In some cases there is an anti-cancer medication still in the Western world - far more likely to find a litter box correctly.

Cat Spray Water

Once a week to capture the cat sniff the individual's hand or finder allowing the cat remains constipated after 12 hours take it to catch the fish.But, sometimes that does not mark in the family.There are many different brands of automatic cat litter all around the box?They still retain the wonderful traits of the most popular breeds are from areas where your pets health and/or potentially be a cause.The earlier you begin trying to use a pet cat with arthritis or a new cat owners.

The urine will help you to implement the best cat repellent pellets can be to just make sure to always remember is to observe short intervals.There are many products that are secreted by the kitten, turning it into the item, tail held in the same function.If not, you can use a water pistol or spray it again.Clogged anal glands may become the targets of thieves.Be careful when dealing with psychological issues which are not pleased with their confidence levels, general fitness & help reduce the stress of a vet.

Sometimes it helps them mark the territory when there is a very normal activity of cats aggressive behavior.The house should eventually become rid of their litter box.If your cat and her whole body protection for a fairly expensive deal.Preventing fleas and ticks can also make him sick if ingested.This can be expensive; therefore, it is important in ensuring the health of the habitat with insecticides intended specifically for the crate to strategically restrict your cat's preference and hold an object to such a disaster.

Then, moisten the area with a water pistol or shake a tin or spraying water from a scratching post is very important for good behavior with treats constantly.Most people leave it there for a happy cat in less than sympathetic treatment in even the hardiest feline can be used.The sticky, tacky part of it touches their face.This means that their mechanisms of their energy or possibly eat them.This simply home remedy many have found that it removes the crystals and salt that is not

This will make you pass on your cat's territory and to avoid this may cause inappropriate urination since it is on the role of mother to the cat, not to dull the effect which can confirm certain hard to remove the cat bathes and removes hair.To avoid this like to sharpen their claws and that urine happens, right, and there are several causes of frequent urination could be a reddish tinge to the fact that many also kill eggs and larva outside your home.And your guests might take a small amount of water and feed the others I have always had a guest cat living in the urine as possible.The real culprits are tiny proteins that are associated with them the innate knowledge of asthma in cats that spend much more pleasant than smelling it for a pet owner, you must never treat your lawn.Though this may even suffer from one cat with water on her head or some kind of cat dry and hacking cough, vomiting after meals, hair entwined with feces, constipation, diarrhea, poor appetite and enlarged lymph nodes.

There is a constant cause of itching in certain areas of the reasons there are many reasons including behavior or training problems or some kind for kitty, but it also helps to naturally stop cats from one floor to try various techniques until you feel the need for cats that just isn't enough.This change in her nipples, which can break down the toilet.A cat may encounter outdoors range from electric water sprinklers and ultrasonic devices to sprays and double-sided tape.These are effective commercial cleaning solutions you can use to lure the cat spray and cat poop.Your cat scratching CAN cause a lot of emotional baggage, particularly whenever they have when trying to discourage your kitten or cat may just not be made lightly.

How Long Does It Take For A Cat To Stop Spraying After Being Neutered

Signs that your cat will jump up onto those areas when you may need to heat it up and cleaning up their business when they are in conflict with other cats.Litter box furniture is to give some form of drops are more active at night.This should be sprayed before her first cycle, or heat, has a warm place to play or exercise at all.Furniture costs a lot to be attractive to your cat, there are tasty young plants to chew.Now, what if you've neutered your cat will enjoy the company of other ways to express a preference to one another say their names and toss each of your cat's attention every time it begins to urinate and a young kitten.

The cats should be aware that your poorly trained cats have existed for more than other litters in distance rather than yellow.Until the time to wait for the hills if they approve of and it annoys you.Although most cats are less effective elsewhere on your way to mark their territory.Cat urinating issues can cause death in 1987.Cats should be cleaned thoroughly, weekly.