#Forget Malika- something is wrong with ME.

[luck-and-larceny]

Decency

It was too hot to sleep and her adrenaline was still too high to really consider it anyway. Malika rolled to her side and the springs of the shitty mattress she had stolen for this shitty safehouse squeaked and creaked under her weight. She'd never heard a mattress creak before, but that was absolutely what this one did.

Once situated adequately (if not comfortably) she stared at the evening's haul.

Pants.

Only pants.

So many pants.

The question "What in the seven hells is wrong with me?" floated momentarily in the air, but was dismissed as quickly as ever. Nothing. There was nothing wrong with her. There was something wrong with everyone else.

There was definitely something wrong with Hollaent Dennmhar–- namely that he didn't have any more pants because Malika had stolen every last pair.

She'd been on her way to another job, but found herself sidelined when she'd heard the Roegadyn snidely suggest that a girl, a stranger to him by all indications, was wearing a skirt that was too short for public decency and that she should 1) be embarrassed and 2) "Get some pants!"

If he had yelled this at Malika she'd have hiked her skirt up even further to spite him. But he hadn't yelled it at her, he'd yelled it at a girl who responded by full-body blushing (adorable) and stammering an apology to him.

An apology!

For wearing a short skirt!?

Anyone with any sense should have been -thanking- her for making the day a bit brighter, not scolding her into an apology for it.

Malika did not make it to her original job that evening. She'd have to try again the next.

She knew Hollaent– or at least of him. A modestly wealthy "decent" man (an oxymoron if Malika had ever heard one), he thoroughly enjoyed calling out people for their perceived "sins" in an attempt to "clean up the dirty streets of Ul'dah". Most were unaffected by him; he was just a weird man who loved yelling and that yelling changed nothing. Malika typically ignored him, too.

But today he'd gone too far!

He'd forced her to sneak into his home while he was busy berating the "trash" of Ul'dah. It was his fault that she carefully checked every closet and dresser she could find and stole every last pair of pants.

Likewise, it was entirely his own doing that kept her hidden nearby when he returned home and made her spirit away the pants he had worn during the day as he bathed, blissfully unaware that there would be no pants for him to change into whenever he should decide that pants were a necessity.

But she wasn't completely heartless. If she were needlessly cruel she'd be no better than he was, after all. Tsk. That wouldn't do. She couldn't leave him completely without options: she'd left him a short skirt he could wear in place of pants.

Now, Malika rested on her shitty, creaky mattress in an intensely shitty, run down room and reflected on the fact that she had not eaten the whole day, she was miserably hot, she had not even a single gil to her name, and that she'd pissed off her client by delaying her actual job by another day. All she had to show for herself was pants.

So many fucking pants.

And that realization made her smile.

"Fucking worth it."

[luverofralts]

Arkhelios University

“Just what do you think you’re doing here? Your mother told me that you’d go through my phone, but I didn’t believe her. I thought that I’d raised you better than that. It’s that Chun boy. Ever since he purposely got pregnant to trap you, all you’ve been doing is catering to his whims. The baby isn’t in your tarot readings; it’s probably someone else’s. I don’t know why you keep insisting on-”

“Mal, it’s far too late for your lectures. You agreed about what needs to be done. We can’t allow this to continue!”

Roman blinked, hoping that the scene before him was wrong. He remembered sitting on a park bench in Murder Park, waiting to hear if Abe was about to die like the message on his grandmother’s phone had warned him.

“What are you- Abe isn’t really hurt, is he? This is a trap.”

No no no no I’m not here again. I’m not seeing this again. I don’t want to remember!

Roman could feel himself removed from the scene in front of him. He wasn’t actually the teen sitting on the bench waiting to be betrayed. He had suppressed this night in his memories for years. He wouldn’t relive this-he couldn’t.

“For now,” Kamalani said, the familiar words ringing in Roman’s ears. “But his turn is next, don’t worry. You’ll be together again soon enough.”

“Kama! That’s enough! You’re not killing my grandson!

“Why are you doing thi-”

An echoing bang cut through the air, and Roman collapsed on the ground, slumped not too far from where Abraham’s body had been found.

“Oh my god, you actually did it! Kama, that’s your son! How could you? It was supposed to be his arm!”

“We planned for this, don’t be ridiculous,” Kamalani snapped quickly.

Roman watched himself stare at the blood on his hands, unable to process what had just happened. He could remember being that young and horrified and convinced that he was about to die. All the time he spent repressing his memories of this night were for nothing. He could still remember the metallic smell of his blood as it spread across his chest. He could feel the burning pain tearing through his chest all over again. He wanted to forget this night more than anything in the world, but someone or something refused to let him.

“Roman! Keep breathing! I’m here!”

Malika sounded lost and panicked, hovering over her grandson’s body with remorse. Kamalani on the other hand was beginning to lose her patience.

“It was a clean shot. If you call Adam now, Roman should be fine. He’ll never disobey us in the future and this will bring both fear and sympathy from the other families. The trauma will either keep Roman from remembering our parts in this scheme, or if it doesn’t, he’ll rightfully be more afraid of what we are capable of and obey us. “

Roman could feel the blood pool around him on the ground. It had been so long ago, but watching the image of his past suffering had thoughts, feelings and horror come flooding back into his mind. He couldn’t be here, watching himself bleed out, hoping that Abe would somehow save him..

“Please, I don’t want to be here anymore!” Roman cried out out loud, hoping that someone, somewhere would hear him and free him from the torment of these memories. He didn’t think that his school books had mentioned that a hell existed, but if did, this was surely where he was.

“Please!”

From behind Kamalani, a glimmer of hope appeared out of nowhere. Some kind of sigil spread across the sky, calling to Roman. He didn’t need any more encouragement; he started running towards it the instant it stabilized. He didn’t even care where it led, as long it led him away from this memory.

Roman heard the crash of waves first, followed by the familiar smell of salt air. He recognized the place instantly. This was Adrian’s estate. Why would he be here of all places?

A familiar man sat on the shore, watching the waves roll up and then gently retreat back into the ocean.

“Adrian?”

Roman assumed that this was another memory or some trick being played on him by his mother. He stood, waiting for some horrible specter of their life together to begin playing to torment him, but none came.

“Roman? What are you doing here?”

“You can see me?” Roman asked incredulously. “No one’s been able to see me before.”

“A man as handsome as you? I doubt it. No one can miss you.”

Roman felt a tingle of pride at the compliment but was afraid to trust this specter of his dead husband. His mother could be making him seeing whatever she wanted to if she were behind this.

“You’ve lost the beard, I see,” Adrian continued. “Too bad, I really liked it. I really liked all of you actually, not that you could ever see that.”

Roman frowned. He didn’t remember this from any moment in his life and he’d shaved his beard off after Adrian had died, or so he’d thought. Was this really a memory or was this place somewhere different from before? Did that sigil he ran through have something to do with this?

“Are you...real?” Roman asked, completely dumbfounded. “Do you know me? I talk to you in my dreams sometimes, but this feels different. Is that really you, Adrian? Is this the afterlife? Am I dead?”

Adrian chuckled at the questions and pat the sand beside him to in invite Roman to sit.

“Sit down,” he laughed. “We’ll figure it out together.”

[harry-styles-sunflower]

Meeting You In The Hallway Part 4

a/n: HII lovely people! I hope you are all doing well today! This is part 4 of Meeting you in the Hallway.

What it is: You move into the apartment across the hall from Harry and you begin a friendship which you both want more from but can’t communicate that want.

Word Count: 7.1K

Warning: cursing and smuttt ;) let me know if I forgot one.  

Pls reblog if you like it 😊 Thank you for all the support so far! Means so much to me! Also really hope y'all like this chapter! It’s the last one 😫

~~~

Harry wasn’t looking at you, he was bouncing his knee up and down. There was a knock on his door and he stood up quickly.

"Must be the pizza."

You nodded and watched him go. When Harry opened the door he saw the pizza guy but also saw Derek knocking on your door. He finished paying the delivery guy and watched him for a bit. He had a "to go" bag around his wrist.

"Mate?"

"Oh um Harry? Right?"

"Yeah?"

"Y/n isn’t answering I guess maybe she fell asleep or something. She forgot her leftovers in my car."

"And you had to bring them tonight?" Harry looked at him confused.

"I don’t see a problem with that, do you?" he stepped closer to Harry.

"Mate, look. I'll take the leftovers and give them to her in the morning." he says as he shakes his head.

"I know you have a thing for he-"

"Derek?" you questioned as you appeared in the doorframe.

"Y/n? What the hell are you doing here? Why didn’t you answer your phone?"

"Hey, is that a way to talk to a lady?” Harry stepped in front of you.

"Harry," you moved him out of your way a little, "I can defend myself thank you."

"Y/n I told you, I told you he had feelings for you."

Harry looked between you two. You guys had talked about him on your date. Fucking ace. He could barely hide his smile.

"Derek, I can be wherever I want to be. We aren't boyfriend or girlfriend. Remember that. I didn’t answer my phone because I left it at my place."

"Shit, you have a thing for him too huh? Don’t invite me up so you could hang out with this, this nothing."

"Derek shut up, that is my best friend you are talking about. Forget tonight even happened because now you’ve really lost any chance with me. Just go." you left and walked back into Harry's apartment.

With a grin, Harry did a little tsk tsk and closed his door behind him. He set the pizza on the coffee table and went to his bathroom. He looked himself in the mirror and had the biggest smile. You just told Derek off, you defended him. He did a happy dance and then walked out looking much more cool. Except, you were gone. His shoulders slumped and he decided to give you your space rather than run after you. You laid on your bed, desperately trying to clear your head. You didn't want to think about Derek or Harry. You wanted to run away from both of them. Derek had apologized but you just left him on read. You didn't care. You texted your nursing manager and asked if you could do some over time tomorrow. They're frequently short so she said yes and you went to sleep since you had to be up early.

 ~~~

That morning you went to work and actually felt super excited. You hadn't seen your kids in like 3 days. You were off for 4 but you needed today. As you got report from your work buddy Chris. He was the typical dad that gave all the great dad jokes. He made the kids laugh and feel better. You had one patient you definitely favored. It wasn't supposed to happen, but you couldn’t help it. Her name was Malika and she was four years old. She had been in the hospital for about a year now.

"Good morning beautiful" you said as you walked into her room.

"Nurse y/n! I missed you." she said as she got up on her knees to give you a hug. You hugged her and kissed her head. Yes, you were very attached to her. Her parents loved you too. You were each other's favorites.

"I missed you! I'm sorry I was gone. But I came in today."

"I'm excited for today. Do you have a lot of patients?"

"Just you and lil David down the hall."

"David had a rough night. I saw doctors go in and out a lot."

"Yeah, he did.." You hated what these kids had to go through. Malika was only four years old but could tell you everything that was "wrong" with her.

"Well, Dr. Stevens said my body is ready to go outside."

"Hmm, did she?"

"Mhm, last night"

"Where do you wanna go? Playground? Or the jungle room?"

"Jungle room is just a bunch of plants, I wanna go on the playground."

You laughed at her answer and said okay. You changed all her dressings and brushed her little bit of hair. It made her feel more girly. Your morning went by fast and you got your sandwiches for you and Malika. You wheeled her out of her room and grabbed a sweater before leaving her room. You settled on the playground and moved her to a bench. You know how much she hated her wheelchair. She ate her sandwich and you had to remind her to slow down. Her stomach was very sensitive with all of the chemo treatments.

"y/n?"

"Yes?"

"Do you have a prince?"

"No, I don’t have a prince." you wanted to tell her prince's weren't real but you couldn't do that to her.

"Are you sure? I have one"

You tried not to laugh but asked, "Oh really? Who?"

"Dr. Evans"

"Oh yeah, he's a good looking prince." you said as you walked her over to the swing. You lifted her up and tied her in and swung her lightly. You had to face her front to see if her body showed any signs of sickness.

"You know who's a good looking prince?"

"Who?"

"That guy" she pointed towards someone behind you.

"Malika don’t point its rude," you put her hand down gently. You turned around and saw Harry with his hands in his pockets. You took a deep breath and turned back to Malika.

"Hey, I think its time we go up. You need to take your medicine and rest a bit. Today was big day, going outside."

"Okay" she said with a pout.

You helped her off the swing and back into her wheel chair. You mouthed to Harry, "I'll be back". He nodded and sat on the bench. You walked and wheeled Malika into the elevator. You jumped a little when she spoke up.

"You knew him, didn’t you?"

"I did."

She turned around slightly, "Prince?"

"I don't know," you shrugged, "he's my Kristoff right now."

"Kristoff and Anna end up together."

"I know," you wink at her and wheel her out.

You get her settled back in her room and tuck her in. Going outside always exhausted her body. Especially if there was a lot of sun. You put on Frozen 2 because she claimed that now you made her want to watch it. You dimmed the lights and walked out. You checked on Dave and the NA in his room said nothing new so you let her know you were going on your lunch break. You took the elevator down and took deep breaths. You tried to run away from Harry but he ran after you anyway. Pretty much prince material. You saw him sitting on the bench before you walked out the door. He was wearing sweatpants and a workout shirt. His hair was pushed up in a little pony. You walked out and slowly walked towards him before settling down beside him.

"Har, what are you doing here?" you played with your fingers in your lap.

"You left last night."

"I had to work"

"No you didn’t, you sent me your schedule. Did you forget?"

Fuck.

"I'm doing overtime, they needed more people today" Not a total lie.

"We never got to finish our conversation"

"And you think my job is the place to do it?"

"No, I thought maybe after work we could go somewhere."

"Why?"

"I've finished a book. Short story thing. To celebrate"

"I won't ever get to read it will I?"

"I don't know. Would have to think about."

You sighed. You just wanted to know. Did he like you or not?

"Yeah okay, text me the details. I've gotta go. Break is almost over." you stood up and felt his fingers wrap around your wrist. He stood up and pulled you closer towards him.

"Y/n.."

"Har.. Just say whatever it is"

"I won’t like you if it'll ruin our friendship.."

You looked in his eyes and saw them full of worry. You couldn’t help but grab his face in your hands.

"It wouldn't"

"Promise?"

"I promise."

He searched your face before dropping your wrist and wrapping his hands around your waist pulling you closer to him. He slammed his lips onto yours and you felt as if you melted in his arms. You pushed the back of his neck closer to you and one hand stayed on your hip while the other brushed against your cheeks. You felt everything, sparks, fireworks, everything. You pulled away briefly but he closed the gap quickly and you smiled against his lips. He pulled away soon after and mumbled a low 'sorry.' he was blushing and you figured your cheeks were red too.

"its okay," you leaned up on tippy toes and kissed him slowly. You couldn’t get enough. "I really have to go though."

"Yeah," he cleared his throat. "I'll pick you up. Um, we don't have to go out if you don't want to… but I would love to take you out."

"You can pick me up, we can go on a small date." you smiled up at him and walked backwards towards the door.

He nodded and let you go. You turned around to start walking inside but he ran up to you and kissed you again before actually leaving. You went back upstairs and checked on Dave then Malika. You saw her crawl back into bed and make believe she was half asleep.

"I saw that"

"You have a prince! I saw it!"

You giggled and sat next to her. "I know! I wasn’t expecting that!"

"Who is he?"  

“I think he might be my Kristoff” you say as you tuck her back in. “Get some rest”

You continue charting and check on Dave. Before you know it it’s 6 pm. You give report to Chris and check your phone.

H: I’m outside :) hope your day was easy.

Y/n: I’m coming down now.

You walked down and saw Harry standing outside. He had a sunflower in his hand and smiled at you.

“Hi,” you smiled up at him as he handed you the flower. You loved sunflowers; he knew this.

“Hey” he kissed your forehead.

“How was your day?”

“Good. Might’ve wrote a song, finishing up my short story book”

“Sounds productive,” you walked and he grabbed your hand pulling you into the inside of the sidewalk. You noticed how gentleman like he was. “Will I ever get to know who that last song I heard was about?”

“Meet you in the hallway? That was about you love. Pretty obvious if you ask me.”

“Well I didn’t know if you were talking to anyone else maybe before I moved in or something.” You bit your lip preparing yourself for the worst.

“I’ve been alone for quite a bit now,” he squeezes your hand, “it’s only been you”

You bit your lip and regretted that you couldn’t say you were on the same boat. He put his hand up to your cheek and gave you a soft yet sweet kiss.

“Did you wanna still go on our “small” date?”

You nodded and gave him another kiss. You felt like you were floating with each kiss. He walked you to your favorite pizza parlor. You two sat, talked, and grabbed a few slices before calling it a night and going home. You both went to your respective apartments and agreed to shower before meeting at your place. You wanted Harry no doubt, but he didn’t seem like the type to take you without making things official. After you both finished showering, you settled on the couch and watched the vampire diaries until you both felt sleepy.

“Love, lets go to bed yeah?”

“You’re going home?”

“If you want me to”

“You can sleep in my bed if you want, you don’t have to though”

“I wouldn’t mind that”

You both got up and walked to your bed. You turned your fan on and got under the covers.

“I uh usually sleep without a shirt, if you mind I’ll keep it on.”

“I don’t mind. I usually sleep without pants… would you mind?”

Harry was a little shocked you felt comfortable with him enough to do that but you would be under the covers anyway. He wouldn’t really see much. He wasn’t some creep to look under after you had fallen asleep.

“No I don’t mind”

You shimmied out of them under the covers and settled on Harry’s chest when he joined you in bed. You both soon found a comfortable position and fell asleep.

~~~

You woke up with Harry cuddling you from behind. You felt it. It was poking you in the ass. You scooted a little further away from it so you didn’t provoke anything. It was 4 am and you had to go to work. You left Harry a note on your pillow and gave him a kiss on the head before leaving. You weren't assigned Malika because you were floated to the NICU, but you visited her on your lunch break. Harry had texted you around 8 am,

H: Good morning love ❤️, woke up a little later than I expected lol. Your bed is just so comfy. Who would've known?

G: Good morning☺️, you’re always welcomed in my bed 😚

You felt like you were back in high school, you wanted to go home and kiss him and cuddle with him.

H: Sounds amazing, I'm going on my run love. Talk later Xx

G: Okay xx

Harry went on his run and only thought of you. He couldn’t believe that he was lucky enough to not only have you in his life, but have you as someone who likes him. He wanted to do something special for you everyday. He didn't know how but you had all of his heart already. When Harry fell for someone, he fell hard. He wanted to know more about your feelings for him but didn't know how to ask. You hid everything so well. Flirtatious yeah, but he didn’t know if you actually wanted to date. He decided he was going to make you a dinner and try to talk about it. After his run he walked to a liquor store by your building and bought your favorite wine. The day flew by rather quickly and you had a message from Harry to meet him at his apartment. You wouldn't lie if you said you weren't disappointed he couldn’t walk you home from work. You just missed him a lot. You made it up to your apartment and showered quickly. You were used to dressing pretty comfortable around Harry but you wanted to impress him a little bit. You put some ripped jeans on and a cropped sweater. You may have also put a lace bralette underneath. You also decided that you would tell Harry about your feelings, you reflected throughout your day and realized you were never really vocal about it. Harry had been the more vocal one. You walked across the hall and walked into his place, he had texted you that the door would be open. You walked in and his back was to you. He was looking in his fridge and you snaked your arms around his waist. He jumped slightly but still gently squeezed your arms. You let him go so he could turn around and face you.

"Hi," you said looking up at him

"Hi." he held your face in his hands.

"Smells good," you leaned up and kissed his cheek.

"You smell better." you laughed and gave him a hug before settling onto one his stools in his kitchen.

"How was your day?"

"It was good, um are you free Friday night?"

"Yeah, I'm off Friday why?"

"Got a gig"

"Ooh okay. Does that make me a groupie?"

"Not even that famous so no, never" he laughed.

"I'll be there. Did you finish your whole book thing Mr. Mysterious."

"Takes a while to process, I'm still working on the end. Didn't like the original."

"Can I read something you’ve written?"

"Maybe later," he winked your way before putting some mushrooms in a saucepan.

"Okay," you felt nervous, like your stomach was doing cartwheels, "Har, can I say something?"

He wasn’t facing you so you couldn’t see how his eyes widened or how he nervously bit his lip. He began thinking that maybe you were going to take it all back and say you just wanted to be friends.

"Yeah, what's up?" he stayed cooking, back towards you, this helped you express your feelings so you didn’t mind

"I just wanted to say, um because I haven't yet, that um I do like you. Um like more than a friend. I have for a while, I know I hid it well. I didn't want to lose you as a friend though. But um yeah just wanted to say I'm not trying to waste your time…" you breathed out. You just rambled, god, you put your head in your hands embarrassed.

Harry walked towards you and lifted your head up, "I feel the same way. I was perhaps a bit more obvious. But I'm not trying to waste your time either,"

You nodded, "so we're dating? I'm sorry but I'm a labeler I like to know exactly what we are and-"

You were cut off by his lips pressing against your yours. You kissed back because how could you not. He pulled away and you pouted.

"Ever since I tucked you into bed that one night, I've wanted you to be mine."

You smiled up at him but it quickly turned into a frown, "Har, I think the saucepan is on fire"

He let you go quickly before putting the mini fire out. "Um so how about some penne with some tomato and shrimp?"

"That sounds fine," you laughed.

You rolled your sleeves up excited to eat. He serves you a plate and a glass of your favorite wine.

“Look at us, who would’ve thought?” You giggled as you drank your wine. You were not trying to get tipsy tonight. You drank extra slow.

“I know right,” he smiled at you, “do you mind if I shower after we eat? Feel sweaty from cooking.”

“Yeah that’s fine, I mean you are a lil stinky” you scrunched your nose.

“Oh really?” He finished his plate and got closer and towered over you. You turned around and opened your legs so he could step between them.

“Mhm” you looked up at him innocently.

He moved your plate to the side from behind you and lifted you up onto his island. He was standing in between your legs and looked like heaven.

“I take it back,” you kissed him hard and wrapped your legs around him. He kissed you back for a few minutes but pulled away.

“Too late, I’m still gonna go shower.”

“Fine” you gave him a quick peck before he left.

After he was gone you finished your plate and wine and decided to clean up the kitchen for him. It was only fair since he cooked. You wanted to clean up all the papers on the floor too but you knew he understood his mess so you didn’t want to mess it up. You walked around his living room and reviewed his bookshelf. Any of these books could be his. Damn pseudonym. You accidentally stepped on a piece of paper. You looked around before picking it up. There were random sentences on the paper. But then a small paragraph towards the bottom.

I don't ever tell you how I really feel

'Cause I can't find the words to say what I mean

And nothing's ever easy

That's what they say

I know I'm not your only

But I'll still be a fool

'Cause I'm a fool for you

There was a date on the corner. It was the same day you went on your date with Derek. Your heart broke a little that these words were about you. You wanted to read more but you also didn’t want to invade his privacy. You heard his bathroom door open and you dropped the paper on the floor. You turned around to review his bookshelf. When he came out he saw the kitchen was cleaned up and smiled at your gesture.

“Hey” You turned around to face him. He was wearing a plain black t shirt with some Nike sweats.

“Hey, I like your collection of books.”

“Trying to figure out which are mine?”

“Maybe, but I don’t wanna know until you feel ready to tell me.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah no problem. I know it’s personal”

“A lil bit.”

“Harry, were you really crying over the vampire diaries that night?”

“Umm, no. But it doesn’t matter anymore.” He grabbed your waist and pulled you close against him.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“It’s fine. I’m just happy we’re together now.”

You blushed just hearing him say it.

“Me too. Any new songs for the gig Friday?”

“Eh, idk. Maybe.” He didn’t want to sing the last one he wrote because things had changed between you two.

"Can you teach me how to play guitar?"

"You wanna learn?"

"Yeah, why not?"

"Okay c'mere," he sits on the couch and grabs his guitar. He teaches you the basics like the body, the fretboard, and the headstock. "Okay now the first string is the thinnest of all strings, it’s a high E when played. And so when you play the opposite, the sixth and thickest string, it’s a low E" he played them so you could hear the difference. He continued to explain the different strings but you got lost in his voice and watching his hands.

"Y/n?"

"Hm?" you looked away from his hands and looked at his bright green eyes.

"Were you listening?" he smirked at you.

"Yeah I was," you grab the guitar and sit on his lap and put the guitar on yours. "Teach me how to play Girl crush, I love that song" he put his hands over yours and guided your fingers over the strings. The melody was barely there but you could hear it slightly. You adjusted yourself and earned a groan from Harry.

"Oops. Sorry"

"Its okay" Harry tried to not think of how good that felt. It'd been a long time since he'd been with anyone. He didn’t really like hookups. He wanted to do It with someone he genuinely liked and enjoyed. He wanted to do it wi-

"Har?"

"Yeah love, sorry. Got distracted. Was thinking about Friday's set"

"Maybe I can take your mind off of it?"

"Maybe you can."

You turned around and straddled his lap. He put his hands on your waist. His hands were warm and welcoming. They felt hot against your skin. Cropped sweater was a good choice you thought. You leaned in slowly and he closed the gap between you kissing you hungrily. You wrapped your arms around his neck and subconsciously moved your hips against him. He groaned and leaned down to kiss your neck. He left wet open mouthed kisses down to your collarbone. You grabbed his face again and kissed him hard while grinding against him. You couldn't help it. You needed some relief.

"Harry," you moaned against his lips before kissing his neck. You bit him lightly and left kisses all around his neck. He squeezed your waist and worked his hands down to your ass.

"Fuck, y/n. We should stop."

You pulled away quickly, "Stop?"

"Yeah, I don't know. If you don’t wanna do anything I understand. So I just think we should stop before we get ahead of ourselves." you watched him as he spoke. Getting more turned on each second that passed.

"And what if I do want to do something?"

"W-well then I wont stop you"

"Good" you smashed your lips against his.

"Bed?" you nodded and stood up but he grabbed you closer picking you up. You wrapped your legs around his waist and he walked you to his bedroom. He put you down gently and crawled in between your legs.

"I'm sorry it’s a fucking mess," he tossed a notebook to the floor while you kissed his neck and moaned instead of speaking. Your fingers played with the hem of his shirt.

"I want this off," you said lifting his shirt and he put his arms up helping you get it off. He lifted your crop sweater and took it off swiftly.

"Ah you really wanted this," he eyed your lace bralette.

"I did now hush," you pulled him down on top of you and kissed his lips down to his chest.

"Love, its been a while for me," he said in between kisses.

"Me too." you pulled his pants down and your feet helped you push them off.

"Why'd you wear jeans?" he questioned as he unbuttoned them.

"Wanted to impress you and not look like a hobo."

"You could never," he kissed you sweetly and you smiled in the kiss as he helped take your jeans off. He kissed down your chest to your stomach. You leaned your head back against your pillow. It was like he didn’t want to leave any spot of your body untouched by his lips. He lifted your leg up and kissed your ankle down your leg toward your thigh. His fingers wrapped around the sides of your underwear.

"Is this okay?"

"Yes," you breathed out.

He pulled them down your legs slowly and once they were off he was back to kissing your inner thighs. He ran a finger through your slit and you groaned at the touch.

"So wet already love," you felt his tongue on your center and you moaned at the relief. He sucked at your clit and put a finger in. you felt his rings, a cold contrast to his warm finger. He kept sucking and licking while pumping his finger in and out of you, "Feel so good around my fingers" you moaned at his words and squeezed your legs around his head. He put one arm across your hips to hold you down.

"Harry I'm not gonna last," you clenched around his fingers before he pulled away.

"Not just yet," he lifted his head up and crawled back on top of you.

"That was not okay." you flipped you two over so harry was on his back. You kissed down his chest to his stomach. Your tongue traced over his fern tattoos.

"Shit.." he watched as you rubbed him through his boxers and placed light kisses. You pulled his boxers down slowly and you were pleasantly surprised. He was bigger than you thought. You began pumping him and placing light kisses around his tip.

"Fuck I shouldn’t have teased you,"

"You shouldn’t have." you put the majority of him in your mouth all at once earning a loud moan from Harry. You bobbed your head up and down and handled the rest with your hand. You saw Harry's abs tense up so you slowed down and took his balls into your mouth. He grabbed your hair in his hand and watched you. You looked up at him keeping eye contact until he shut his eyes from pleasure.

"Love, I'm not gonna last if you keep doing that." You fit what you could in your mouth and sucked hard releasing him with a popping sound. He grabbed the back of your neck and kissed you hard laying you back down on your back.

"Gotta get a condom" you grabbed his forearm before he could get up.

"I'm on the pill," he looked at you a little confused. You had told him it had been a while. "Its for my period but it does work as a dual purpose. And I'm clean. But if you wanna use a condom I'm okay with that too."

"I'm clean too," he kissed you as he opened your legs and rubbed himself against your slit. "You sure this is okay?"

"Yes babe" It was the first time you called him something besides his name. He loved the way it sounded. He kissed you slowly and pushed into you slowly. It felt intense since it had been so long and from the groans coming from the back of his throat you could tell he felt the same. His thrusts slowly became quicker. You moaned his name when he reached down to rub your clit. You'd never had sex like this before, he was so attentive.

"Does this feel good love?"

"Yes," you kissed his cheek before wrapping your arm around his neck and moaned in his ear, "Har, can I get on top?"  

He moaned and nodded. He hooked his arm around your back and flipped you while remaining inside you the whole time. It was fucking hot. He finally took your bralette off. You put your hands on the side of his neck and began kissing him while bouncing up and down on his dick. He moaned a little louder each time.

"I'm close baby"

"Me too love" He took your nipple into his mouth and lightly nibbled.

Your could feel the tightness in your stomach and you clenched around him.

"Ugh that feels so good Har,"

You tried to keep your rhythm but it became hard once you found your release. You moaned while brushing your lips against his. You pushed his hair off his sweaty forehead and looked him in the eye as you came. He wrapped his arm around your waist tightly while his hips bucked up into you. It felt amazing and he kept eye contact until he came, shutting his eyes from pleasure. Your foreheads were stuck together as you rode out your highs. He grabbed the back of your neck and kissed you hard before slowing down. He grabbed the back of your thigh to flip you over on your back before slowly pulling out of you. You continued to kiss slowly until Harry kissed down your neck and laid his head on your chest. Your breathing slowed down and you ran your fingers through his hair.

"Har, I have to pee."

"Right," he kissed in between your breasts and got off. He adjusted his pillows and laid on one side of his bed waiting for you to come back.

You went to the bathroom, did your business and put your underwear back on and Harry's shirt you grabbed before leaving the room. Afterwards you fixed your hair in the mirror and went back to Harry's room. He was on the right side of the bed and his blanket covered his lower half. He looked so good you couldn’t help but run and jump onto his bed and sit on his lap.

"Hi" you smiled at him.

"You look good in my shirt," he rubbed your sides.

"Its soft" you blushed a little.

"Look y/n," he looked down, you became a little nervous, "I just wanted to say I usually have a bit more stamina," He laughed lightly.

You laughed and kissed him. "I mean for someone who supposedly hasn’t done it in a while I think we went on for pretty long."

"I'm saying I could get a few rounds out of you on a normal day," he kissed you again and bit your lip.

"Are you trying to go again right now?"

"I would but we have to be up early tomorrow," you furrowed your brows at him, "oh did you forget you have work tomorrow?"

"No but why'd you say we?"

"Well since you're my girl now I gotta walk you there," he said as he placed his head in the crook of your neck.

"Your girl?"

"Mhm"

"I like that,"

"I like babe a lot,"

You blushed remembering when you called him that, "Oh so you heard."

"Course I did, it was music to my ears"

You giggled and you guys eventually then switched into spooning.

"I set our alarm already" he said as he kissed the back of your shoulder. His arm was around your waist and your legs were tangled. You yawned and let out a thank you. You drifted off into sleep and so did Harry. Next thing you knew you heard the blaring noise of his alarm clock. He leaned over you to turn it off. You felt his morning wood again and giggled.

"Don't laugh, it hurts."

"Oops. Sorry." you smiled into his pillow eyes closed.

He kissed your cheek and got up to use the bathroom. You stretched into a big X on his bed. You remembered you never brought your scrubs over last night.

"Harry," you said loudly enough for him to hear, "I forgot my uniform!"

He came out with his toothbrush in his mouth and mumbled, "Go and get ready at your place if you want and when you're done I'll have breakfast ready."

"Okay. I'm keeping this shirt by the way." you said as you got up and pulled your jeans on.

"Sure you are."

"I am," you leaned up and gave him a kiss on his cheek before bending over to pick up your shirt. He took advantage of this and slapped your ass playfully. You shook your head before running out of his apartment and into yours. You would be lying if you said you didn't get ready a little faster this morning because you were so happy. He made you over easy eggs and home fries with a side of toast. He really loves to go all out for you.

"Thank you for breakfast babe" you grinned at him.

"Of course, can't have my girl go to work hungry" you laughed at how lovesick you two were.

~~~

It was Friday and you were getting dressed for Harry's gig. Against Harry's wishes you agreed to just meet there if you agreed to take a cab and not walk. You straightened your hair pin straight and wore a white tank top with beige high waisted dress pants. They flared out on the bottom. You wore them with nude heels and carried one of Harry's dress coats in your hand just in case you got cold. You walked into the small café, there was light chatter and dim lights. It was different than his last gig but you liked it. You weren't in the mood for the bar scene anyway. Since the weather was getting colder as New York City transitioned into fall you were in the mood for hot chocolate. The stage was lit up and you saw Harry's guitar standing against the wall.

Y/n: hey just wanted to let you know I'm here. Its packed though so I'm gonna stay near the back corner.

You can see he read it but doesn’t answer. You don't take it to heart because he's probably just busy rehearsing. He comes out on stage a few seconds later and greets the crowd. His set starts off the same as last time and you watch the crowd watch him. They seem to enjoy his covers and original "meet you in the hallway". You liked that he took his time to write a song about you but you hated that it was basically about how sad you made him.

"Next song I'm gonna sing is an original as well, its called treat people with kindness."

The song was more upbeat and the lyrics were happier. You were so proud of him. You wanted him to keep doing this, strive for more. Maybe he was a writer, but he could do damn well as a singer too. Once he finished and the crowd cheered for him he went backstage with his guitar and then came out shaking hands with some older man. You figured that maybe he was the owner of the café. He walked over to you and put his ring covered hands on your face and kissed you.

"Guess what?"

"What?" you kissed him again.

"That guy I was just talking to? His name is Jeff Azoff and he walked in here for a coffee and heard me. His dad is Irving Azoff, wants me to go in a studio to hear me properly"

"Woah no way. Doesn't Irving Azoff have like a whole management company?"

"MHMM"

"I'm so proud of you baby" you hugged him tight.

"Think you can stick by me through it?"

"I'm here now," you kissed him, "and I'll be there at your retirement party"

"Already thinking of me getting old?" he grinned at you.

"Oh yeah," you put your arms around his neck, "gonna be a silver fox" you winked.

He shook his head at you and kissed you again.

"C'mon, I wanna go home." he grabbed your hand and dragged you backstage to grab his guitar. You make it out of the café and walk hand in hand.

"Har, you sure you don’t want to celebrate?"

"I do, but in one of our beds"

"That's um that's.. I got my period this morning" you gave him a frown.

"Eh that's okay. I don’t see a problem" he shrugged.

"Harry!" you hit his arm.

"What! I'm serious! Just put a towel under you and I'll use a condom" he shrugged again.

"How about a blowjob and we call it a night with some wine in bed?"

"Sounds good to me but consider period sex for the future" he laughed lowly at you.

You simply shook your head at him and just kept walking by his side.

You walked up to your apartment and you both got ready for bed. When Harry got in your bed he put his arms around your waist began kissing at your neck. You knew what he wanted but you weren’t sure if you were comfortable with that yet.

“Har,”

“I know I know,” he laid back against your pillows.

“It was your big night. You deserve the special treatment” your hand rubbed over chest and downwards.

“Yeah but I love pleasuring you more” he pouted.

You hopped on top of him and kissed his neck.

“How very selfless of you” you kissed down his chest and rubbed him through his boxers. He groaned and put his hand under your chin for a kiss.  

You kissed him hard and took him out of his boxers. You moved your hand up and down slowly, teasingly.

“Y/n” he breathed

You moved in between his legs and kissed down his naval still moving your hand. You lightly kissed his balls and he sucked in a breath. You smiled and took all that you could of him in your mouth. He looked down watching you before throwing his head back against your pillow from pleasure. You sucked hard and focused a bit on his head. You spit on it and then repeated what you just did.

“Shit” he cursed.

You kept bobbing your head up and down and picked up your pace as you went. Your other hand massaged his balls. He bucked his hips up and it made you gag slightly.

“Fuck I’m sorry that just felt really good,”

“It’s okay” you said a little out of breath. You went back to what you were doing and steadied your breath. You slowly attempted to take all of him breathing through your nose. Once your nose was touching his pelvis you stayed there for as long as you could before sucking all of him again and releasing him. You used your hand afterwards and sucked on his balls a bit.

“I’m close love”

You attempted to deepthroat again and that’s when you heard his mumble of curses begin. You felt his cum hit the back of your throat and you began sucking at his head. Sucking all you could out of him.

“Fuck me holy shit” he grabbed your hair and tugged lightly. Once you were sure there was no more cum and felt him getting a little softer you kissed around his hips and laid back onto his chest.

“That was amazing. Thank you.”

“Of course baby, you deserved it” you kissed him and you two soon fell asleep.

~~~

One Month Later

"My love! I have a present!"

You had barely seen Harry. If he wasn't in the studio, he was at the publishing house. You tried to be understanding but it did get to you on somedays when you missed his company.

"Hey, what's up?" you dried your hands as you had just finished washing dishes. He had a big smile on his face and there was a box in front of him.

"This is for you, its for everything. For being my friend, girlfriend, support system, and for all the late nights I wasn't able to sleep in the same bed as you."

Your heart warmed at his words and you gave him a kiss. You pulled the box closer towards you as you were standing across the small kitchen table. You lifted the top off and it was a book. The front cover was a picture of your door, 17G boldened. The title was "Meeting You In The Hallway" by Harry Styles. You felt your eyes get a little watery.

"N-no pseudonym?"

He shook his head at you and walked to you and put his arms around your waist.

"No, because this is the one story I'm proud of"

A tear fell and you kissed him hard.

"Look at the last page"

You grabbed the book and flipped to the last page quickly. Typed was "I love you y/n. Lets change meet you in the hallway to meet you on the patio?"

"You wanna move in together?" you looked up at him.

"I want to buy a house together" he smiled down at you.

"Okay"

"Okay?"

You nodded quickly and brought him down to your height to give him a kiss that said all you needed to say.

[dvplicities]

A LITTLE BIT NEEDY / a mix for malika noor simmons. for a girl made of opulence, luxury and need. listen here.

HOMECOMING QUEEN  by  thelma plum ❝ i’ll be my own homecoming queen... as long as it feels good to me, i'll be the voice of this town / you'll be your own homecoming queen, forget all the shit that you've seen... put on the crown ❞

HOTEL  by  kita alexander ❝ someday you'll find me, where the champagne is always free.. when you check into the hotel where the skyline meets the sea / one day you'll meet me and you'll know it's not a dream... it won't be hell or heaven ❞

LISTEN TO SOUL, LISTEN TO BLUES  by  safia ❝ every other time, i  was there for you, every other time i was right on cue...but i just don't get you / why don't i get you? i listen to soul, i listen to blues ❞

LIFE IS A GAME OF CHANGING  by  dma’s ❝ when you're finding out another but you know you're recovering / i don't know just how we got here, but i see that you've been struggling, dear ❞

SOMETHING COMFORTING  by  porter robinson ❝ oh, there must be something wrong with me, and getting made you want more / and hoping made you hurt more, someone tell me something comforting ❞

CUT THE ROPE  by  ninajirachi ❝ i will stand up and cut the rope / mama it looks clear enough on top ❞

XS  by rina sawayama ❝ cartier set, tesla X's, calabasas, i deserve it / call me crazy, call me selfish, i'm the baddest and iI'm worth it ❞

DELICATE  by  taylor swift ❝ this ain't for the best, my reputation's never been worse, so / you must like me for me ❞

BETTER IN BLAK  by  thelma plum ❝ but if i just keep quiet, i'll be the one who's lying too / why should i keep hiding, always crying / tell me, what did i do? ❞

[heartslogos]

the declassified texts of the inquisition’s elite [86]

(336): Hello! Time means nothing. Good morning! I have a vague idea of what day it is.

(832): It is Muednethiday, March 34th, in the Year of Our Lord Joe Exotic 3099.

-

(253): No offense, but I don’t think I would want to see him in anything skimpier than a hazmat suit.

-

“I thought it was just the elder Hawke twins that were like that,” Max says, “I was wrong. All of them are. They’re all just running at maximum sass, wit, sarcasm, barely disguised eye rolls, and bad humor at all times. Even Bethany. God, you don’t even expect it from Bethany. Every corner you look it’s just more merciless taunting. I bet you if you told any of them there’s a hornet’s nest in a tree they’d go and kick the tree for fun.”

“Untrue, Bethany would use a slingshot from somewhere with cover, and probably with someone she doesn’t like nearby enough to take the sting for her,” Varric says. “I don’t know why you’d think that the asshole thing isn’t a Hawke family trait. It’s like their motto or something, handed down from their ancestors since ancient times. Also they’re half Amell. You know the Amells right? Take one look at that family and tell me that they didn’t get fucked with the asshole genes on both sides.”

Maxwell grimaces. “Alright, fair point. The Amells aren’t that bad, they’re just — is there a word for what the Amells are? I mean. They’re nice. It’s just that — “

“They come off like licking sandpaper,” Evelyn says. “They’re drier than dust. It’s like if you took Mahanon and removed his incomprehensible fear-instilling aura and just left the dry wit, flair for the dramatic, and penchant for revenge.”

“Alright, but that’s not one word,” Max points out. “I’m looking for one singular word. Hawke’s are assholes. Amells are…what?”

“Buttholes?”

“Cousin. You are terrible at this. It’s like you’ve never learned how to insult someone. Which is, of course, false because I’ve heard you cuss out some of our own relatives very creatively. You’d make a Warden blush.”

“Thanks, Max.”

“What happened that you’re suddenly realizing that the Hawke’s are universally assholes?” Varric cuts in. “I thought everyone know that. It’s not like I didn’t write an entire best selling book about it.”

“Bethany and I were just texting and she hits me with this,” Max shows them the text. “Maker, go ahead and hit me with that punch. I didn’t need to read all of that and feel it viscerally in my stomach. I needed affirmation time was passing not that time is fake. If I wanted that I’d go talk to a Lavellan. Or Malika.”

“Sounds like she was just playing along with you,” Evelyn says.

“Keep reading.”

Evelyn scrolls down, eyebrows raising. “Oh, wow. Maybe Bethany should start writing books. She’s got this existential horror thing down. It’s like those popular podcasts that everyone listens to in text form.”

“I don’t need that first thing in the morning,” Max says. “And she knows it. She’s doing this to mess with me and it’s working. I never should have told her about how I get freaked out about absurdist humor when it spirals out into the abstract and profound.”

-

“That’s harsh, isn’t it? I mean. I’m sure that underneath all of that military flack and his old man clothes Blackwall cuts a nice figure. The man trains with the Chargers and he’s been in the army for years. And then pretended to be in the Wardens for years after that. Sure, he’s lived a harsh life and he could invest in some personal care products, but he’s a healthy guy,” Edric says.

“Um. Excuse me, but who are you to be talking about old man clothes?” Malika shoots her uncle an incredulous look. “You and Blackwall have the same wardrobe in different colors. You don’t get an opinion on this one.”

“That’s also harsh,” Edric says. “I don’t get an opinion?”

“Not on this you don’t,” Malika wrinkles her nose. “Anyway I’m pretty sure Blackwall isn’t comfortable with people seeing him with any portion of skin showing greater than like twenty five percent. That’s just arms, by the way. He’s good with arms.”

“The man needs a tan.”

“The man needs you all to stop judging his physical appearance,” Evelyn says, lightly hitting Malika upside the head as she stands behind their table. “Why are you all gossiping about Blackwall? Doesn’t he get enough grief?”

“Because it’s been made known that we’re going on a summer retreat for bonding purposes and the idea of Blackwall dressed in shorts and a tank is giving me white flashes in my vision,” Malika says. “I don’t think Blackwall’s had someone cut his hair — like, you know, someone who knows how to cut hair, someone who’s trained in cutting hair, someone who does that for a living — since he went off the grid a million years ago. I’m also imagining his skinny pale legs reflecting sunlight like beacons.”

“Stop imagining it then,” Evelyn gives her an odd look.

“What if he gets sunburn?” Malika moans, “He’s going to look like a walking strawberry with a black mop.”

“Stop thinking about it,” Evelyn makes a face that clearly means she’s thinking about it too, now. Except instead of reacting like Malika, finding it weird and eye-searing, she thinks it’s funny. “Just think about how half of us are going to get sunburn and it’s going to be hilarious watching us all shuffle around like hypersensitive zombies.”

“Do you get sunburn?” Malika asks.

“I’m hoping not to,” Evelyn says. “I’ve asked for two pounds worth of sunscreen just in case.”

“Ancestors, you need that much? What’s wrong with you?”

“It’s not just for me!” Evelyn protests. “it’s for Max and Cullen and Sera also! We figure a bulk order would be easier than all of us ordering two or three bottles. It’s also for whoever forgets they need it.”

“Wait a second, Cullen’s a farmer he can’t burn.”

“I’d ask you to explain that logic, Malika, but I’m not sure I want to know the exact details. Anyway, focus on what we’re doing on the summer retreat instead of what we’ll all be wearing, alright? We’re not pulling half of our best teams just to play. It’s an actual training exercise.” Evelyn makes a face. “Actually if you could distract the Chargers and Lavellans by telling them your concerns that would be great. I think they’re taking this too seriously. I think they think that this is going to be a survival boot camp and they’re getting way too excited about it.”

[inky-thoughts]

5, 11, 18, 25!!! For you main OCs

I’m just gonna assume you mean the main cast from HttC because otherwise it’s gonna be way too many ^^’

I’m gonna take Endres, Malika, Caspar, Mae, and Sahid.

5. What’s your OC’s first memory?

Endres’ first memory is how his nurse is singing a song to calm him down after he hurt himself, he must have been around the age of 2 by that.

Malika isn’t sure whether it’s her memory, or she just “remembers” because she got told the story so often. When she was around 1.5, she tried to catch the palace cats and stumbled around without seeing the servants who had to walk slalom around her as she had escaped the nursery.

Caspar’s first memory is probably fighting over a toy with his elder brothers, also around the age of 2 or 2.5.

Mae’s first memory is from the summer when she was 2, where she stuffed as much strawberry cake into her mouth as she could. She still thinks strawberries are the best about summer.

Sahid’s first memory is actually how Malika fell downstairs and hurt her knee. He cried because he hated when other people cried. He was roughly 2.5.

11. What are your OC’s hobbies?

Mae does archery and hunting (hunting not so frequently and only in season for bigger game) because 1) it’s tradition and 2) she likes the precision and fatality of it. In addition she’s also a quite decent rider. She also likes reading about folk tales, other cultures, and mechanical constructions, and likes to meddle with people’s lives.

Endres loves riding, and as a boy was very fond of caring for his falcons (currently he doesn’t have access to them so…). He enjoys poetry very much, and dancing, he’s quite good at fencing and likes swimming probably even more, though he’s definintely not the best, so he sticks more to fencing.

Malika doesn’t really have time for any hobbies, but she loves watching plays that are performed usually at her court. As she tries to perserve traditions, she of course leads some obligatory hunts, but at feasts she’s more a quiet observer (because of several reasons). She prefers to talk things over in private with Sahid, it gives her another point of view and a bit of security.

Sahid, in first place, enjoys his time with Malika very much, and is glad to be of service. Then, he really loves the fine arts and if not a master, at least is quite decent in each discipline, and he caters to it quite frequently. He is the philosopher among them and really enjoys reading about it, and debating.

Caspar - doesn’t really have hobbies. He basically doesn’t know what to do when he isn’t on duty, or simply can’t be (usually, he just sleeps). If you count his brutal trainign regime as hobby, he likes riding, sword fighting, kick-boxing, and the more delicate fencing. He’s okay at knife-fighting and archery, but definitely not top-notch. Not to forget swimming, climbing, running, plus muscle training like push-ups etc. During his time of injuries, he goes back to knitting, though.

18. What are your OC’s greatest fears? Weaknesses? Strengths?

(It’s really long so I put it under the cut, I hope it doesn’t bother you ^^’)

Endres’ biggest fear is to be basically irrelevant and doesn’t matter (to anyone), or being abandonned (again). Another thing that is creeping him out is to unconsciously not make his own decision but actually just play into someone’s hand like he was some kind of chess piece. Not following his true self, in essence.His weaknesses are at one, basically his fears (he will fall into an existencial crisis if he senses that something might be wrong in those matters), and if he doesn’t see a point in doing something, he won’t do it. He can sometimes be very passive if other people don’t push him vehemently.He can also be very vulnerable through the people that are closest to him, and might not think things through clearly.His strengths are his ability to adapt quickly to a new environment, and having a good gut feeling on whether something might be bad for him. Endres knows how to pick his fights, and his kindness makes him unsuspicious in most people’s eyes. He’s also quite clever and knowledgeable due to his natural curiosity. He is caring and supportive of those he loves, and a good advisor as he brings up several options how to act on it, or brings together other views on the matter.

Malika’s biggest fear is failing her duty and not keeping her vow (appart from the fear of her immediate death).Her weaknesses are losing sight of what is right instead of “just pragmatic” and efficient, and often ignoring people’s sentiments, first and foremost her own. She’s also frequently disappointed as she holds high standarts for herself, and expects other people to be the same though they are not. At some point, she also grows more and more paranoid, and her panic-attacks due to PTSD throw her off as well. However, she refuses help on that and tries to cope on her own.Her biggest strengths, still, are her pragmatism, her devotion, and being a good strategist, knowing how to provoke actions that benefit her and her agenda. She’s good at puzzles and finds the small detail to the big picture faster than others.

Mae’s biggest fear is propably being denied her destiny, finding out that her destiny is not what she wants it to be, and losing her father while not being able to help him. Generally having her hands tied and watching things to uncoil is not her thing, and make her feel horrible.Her major weaknesses are that she can’t stand inaction or passiveness, so she tends to jump into action or conclusions as fast as possible before properly thinking it through and paying attention to consequences. On the other hand, she will be severely depressed if she’s forced to be passive and she got past the state of restlessness. She also blames herself a lot for failiures, when her actions “weren’t enough” and didn’t prevent a negative outcome.Her biggest strengths are her compassion, her will to help those who are in need, and her readiness to jump into action and leading others if necessary. She also knows about her weaknesses and tries to compensate through practices that require perfect focus.

Caspar’s biggest fear is similar to Malika - to fail his duty, and to be a huge disappointment to his family.One of his biggest weaknesses is his loyalty and his ability to stick to orders without doubting them much. This may cloud his ability to judge whether something is reasonable or morally right. He often doesn’t know how to express his feelings or what to make of them in first place, and sometimes can be a bit dense when it comes to reading others. At some point, his world view becomes more and more cynical.His strengths are, in first place, his physical abilities. He is a man for combat and constantly risks his life to protect those under his care. He is loyal and trustworthy, and doesn’t withdraw from a mission.

Sahid’s biggest fear is to not do his best in making the world a better place, and to eventually betray his principles.His biggest weaknesses are that he sometimes can get lost in what could be, in his concepts and ideologies, and doesn’t get back to the ground. He tends to passiveness, and sometimes ceases to see the problems of the present.However, being perceived as an airhead makes him underestimated quite often. He knows how to make people reconsider their decisions and question themselves and their actions. He is great at reflecting and showing options and possibilities. As a pacifist he also reminds people to be diplomatic for the objectively best outcome.

25. What inspired you to create them / how did you create them? Were they originally a fancharacter? What was their personality / design like when you first made them?

I think I’ve told a lot of how I created Endres and Caspar, though I actually could show you the first picture I drew of them back in 2012 (??)

Endres actually had a different character, he was much more demanding, seductive,  and this “brat of a prince” who is using his power to his own advantage. Caspar didn’t really have a character I envisioned for him back then, but he didn’t change much.

Neither of these characters was a fan character before, and I think I didn’t change their appearance much. With Malika, it was mostly that I couldn’t decide where she would have her mole. I don’t count hair-lengths to changes in appearance as this story will be over the course of several years, including flashbacks and such, and there’s always a special meaning behind them having longer or shorter hair.

So far, I think their characters mostly just fleshed out more, but their first characteristics (except for Endres) pretty much stayed.

With Malika, I pretty much wanted a) someone who is a girl, b) who is devoted to her purpose and actually finds joy in the traditions, c) takes no shit, and d) is definitely better at the job than her little brother would be.

Mae kind of is the “more regular” person who shows the well-known every-day struggles, and who gets thrown into the whole game unsuspectingly, much like the reader themselves. She is more the Benvolio figure (with the best chances to stay alive throughout the entire story), and serves as Endres’ best friend and confidante, and pushing especially him into action.

Sahid is to Malika basically what Mae is to to Endres, and helps her compensate for her shortcomings. By the time, he got more fleshed out, but I guess it will be nothing compared to when he finally appears for the first time.

Shoot me an ask for the OC ask game!

[dawnajaynes32]

Mike Wasilewski on Purpose, Clarity, and Making Cool Things

Mike Wasilewski, Co-Founder and COO of Frank Collective, is in the business of branding and making cool things. His thoughts on design trends, inspirations, and projects are covered here.

Name: Mike Wasilewski, Co-Founder & CCO of Frank Collective Location: Brooklyn, NY Design school attended: The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY

How would you describe your work? Can you talk through the design philosophy of Frank Collective?

It’s branding. Everything I do is some sort of brand building—whether that’s evolving, creating, or maintaining a brand through strategy, identity, web, packaging, marketing, etc. I aim for my work, and the work my team makes at Frank, to be clear, emotive, smart, and honest. Clear work is immediate. It isn’t nuanced, abstract, or understated with messaging—it communicates clearly in a way that isn’t hard to get. Clarity is so important, especially today when you have to fight for people’s attention. They aren’t waiting around for your work, nor are they endlessly nit-picking it in meetings like we do all day. When you get their attention, you only have a split-second to grab hold of it — it’s best to be clear when you do.

Honest work resonates with your target audience. They see something in it and recognize that you see them. Branding is empathy when done right. It goes beyond trends, demographics, and yourself to a big simple core truth. So don’t impose your own designer/creative/marketer viewpoint, know how to get out of your own way and get in to your audience’s mindset.

Emotive work evokes a response from your audience that no logo-generator-thing-a-bobber can create. When you elicit an emotion from someone, good or bad, you’re creating something meaningful.

Smart work is interesting. It makes you think a little and give that head nod of appreciation. That “you’re in on the joke” or the “ah that’s so cool they did that” type of acknowledgement that makes your work memorable.

If all of the above is in place, everything else should follow easily.

Where do you find inspiration?

I don’t have a single source of inspiration. This might sound cliche, but just getting out there and living life is the best kind of inspiration. Doing that allows you to build a catalogue of experiences that you can draw upon when thinking about work. And depending on what you’re working on you can find it from almost any source. That and Pinterest.

With that said, my first inspiration was my teenage obsession with freestyle BMX bikes, and I wanted to find a way to work within the industry. I thought if I was a designer I could get a job working at a bike magazine because I would be better at setting type than riding a halfpipe. While I do enjoy the work I do today, I’m still holding out for that bike magazine.

Who are some of your favorite designers or artists?

Wow. I have so many that I straight up idolize and reference constantly to my staff and students. Currently, Scott Dadich is one of my favorite designers/creative directors in recent years. I remember being so amazed by the pages of Wired when he was at the helm. I would pour over every page of it — oftentimes just gawking at the page for 1 minute saying “Damn thats amazing” then another minute going “man, I wish I did this” then another minute of “gah this is so smart! This is the stuff I want to make!” … and then I would read the article.

I also really love Aaron Draplin’s simple and entertaining explanation of his work and the total apparent joy he gets from it. He knows what he likes and does it his way unapologetically — and for good reason — he’s so talented! Read his book and its apparent that that man lives his truth.

I always liked Tibor Kalman’s wit and conceptual approach to everything. Michael Bierut’s clear and simple rationale and scalability to all his design systems. Caleb Owen Everitt’s distinct and dusty all-American style. Malika Favre’s illustrations are beyond smart and masterful – I can look at them all day long.  

Do you have a favorite among all the projects you’ve worked on?

I don’t actually. And that’s because I don’t have a single favorite project. I like many projects for many reasons.

I really love when we work with entrepreneurs who are passionate about what they’re doing, and we can bring it to life for them. These are people who are betting the farm on an idea they have and have a lot of pressure to deliver on that idea from investors, family, friends, and themselves. Giving shape and form to a brand for them is very fulfilling for myself and my team. We really get invested in their vision.

I also always dig a project if I’m working on it with great people that I want to be around. It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be a crazy last minute deadline, a simple revision to a brand guideline, or a pro-bono project for a friend. As long as I’m working with people that I enjoy being around it’s all good in my book.

Is there a project that stands out to you as having been the biggest challenge of your career so far?

This isn’t necessarily something that is remotely a challenge today, but back when I was getting started, it was a really tough thing for me to learn — and is something that I hope I never lose sight of. And that is: anything and everything can be awesome.

I was in my first year at Radical Media and it was time to review with our creative director. When I start showing him the comps of the same logo over and over again at various sizes on all these t-shirt mockups, he just says “Would you wear this t-shirt? Do you think its cool?” 22-year-old me just says, “it’s what we designed though.” He asked me again “yeah but is this the coolest t-shirt ever? Would you wear this out tonight with your friends? If you don’t think it’s cool then how will I? And then how will our client?”

This was the first time that I realized that everything and anything can and should be awesome. And branding is a way of surfacing that innate awesomeness. It’s a challenge to do this but you can make anything interesting if you try. A few years ago you wouldn’t care much about a meal prep service, but you care about Blue Apron today. Socks, have you ever heard a more boring word such as socks? But what about Bombas? They’re awesome! Why? Because they aren’t just socks – they’re Bombas, a better sock both functionally and ethically.

I understood what had to be done in that moment and went into a t-shirt designing fever dream. And made the coolest t-shirts I could with the elements I had to work with.

What’s your best advice for designers today? Should designers follow “best practices”?

Don’t follow trends blindly. Acknowledge them, critique them, understand what works and why—then take that into account as you make something that works for your task at hand. Just because it worked well for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you.

You’re a consumer too. Step back often and ask yourself “If I never saw this — does it make sense?” So many times I’ve done this with my own work and its been for the better.

If you’re in a meeting debating the color with someone, you’re having the wrong conversation. What I mean by that is everything you do should have purpose and intention. You are a designer, so nothing should be a flippant design decision. You chose that typeface for some rational reason. You made the very specific color palette because it evoked an energy. The tone of voice you selected is relatable. As the designer you know why you made these decisions, but it’s often hard to put them into words or we forget that not everyone is a designer.

Find more Frank Collective here and more Mike here.

Interview by Daniel Schloss

The post Mike Wasilewski on Purpose, Clarity, and Making Cool Things appeared first on HOW Design.

Mike Wasilewski on Purpose, Clarity, and Making Cool Things syndicated post

[alexdmorgan30]

When Love Is Not Enough: How We All Failed My Sister

My sister had 765 “friends” on Facebook. I don’t think I even know that many people. But I can count on one hand how many of those friends came to visit my sister during her four-month hospital stay. So apparently they were friends, but not quite that close.I believe that if regret had a smell, it would be the smell of something burnt and visceral, and sharp in your nostrils. I think of that every time I listen to the last voicemail that my sister left me. It was so normal, absolutely nothing special about it, like the countless other messages we had left each other.“Hi baby girl, it’s me. Call me back. Love you.”Sometimes I listen to it just so that I can hear her voice, but often I find myself straining to hear something that I must have missed. Did she know that she was dying? Was there some sort of resolve in her voice? Or was that loneliness? But mostly what I hear is regret. Mine, of course, not hers. Because no matter how much I loved her, I couldn’t save her. I am painfully aware that I failed my sister. Sometimes I think that we all did.Malika and I were two years and 10 months apart, and about as different as two people carved from the same parents can be. She was always the pretty one, the free spirit, and she had the goofiest sense of humor. The boys simply didn’t see me when we were together—she shone that brightly—and we could fight like nobody’s business. But above all, she was amazing to me.My sister was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in high school, which apparently is a common age for that to rear its ugly head. We both shared a sort of rebellious streak borne out of a sometimes-tumultuous home life and an ugly divorce between our parents, but she never really grew out of hers. She had a self-destructive side but it was always directed inwards—she never set out to hurt anyone but herself. I can see clearly now that for years, she was self-medicating.There were many times over the last few years that I had no way of getting hold of her. She often changed her phone number, and she and her boyfriend moved around a lot, either by choice or necessity. That was the thing about my sister: when she was healthy enough and able to be around people, she was great. Absolutely great. But often, and particularly in the last several years, when she didn’t want to be found, she went completely off the grid. I had heard rumors that at one point she was seen in the city begging for money for drugs. Another time I heard she was staying in the house we had grown up in while it was empty and in foreclosure.I ask myself all the time what I could have done differently, or what I should have done. But you cannot save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, and you certainly can’t force them to get help. If you give them money, you know where it’s going to end up, but do you do it anyway? I’ve been on both sides of this, and I know that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And when you don’t, they hate you and disappear again—proving that it was the only reason they resurfaced in the first place.I don’t even know how many times my sister tried rehab over the years. I do know that she tried. She had been in a day treatment program and was on methadone when she was admitted to the hospital last August. She was confused, bloated, and had no idea where or who she was, and she didn’t recognize me when I first came to see her. She had every drug you can think of in her bloodstream. They said that the confusion was caused by a bacterial abscess on her cervical spine just below her brain that had developed from repeated IV drug use with a dirty needle, and they started treating her on a wide spectrum of antibiotics. About a week in, she started coughing up blood and spiked a fever. Despite being on so many antibiotics, the infection in her bloodstream had attached itself to a valve in her heart, and every time her heart beat, it scattered more of the infection throughout her bloodstream. She slipped into a coma at that point and ran a fever that ended up lasting for weeks.Watching her go through that was a special kind of hell, wondering if she was ever going to wake up. She went in and out of consciousness and agitation as the doctors wrote things down like acute respiratory distress (ARDS), MRSA, MMSA, endocarditis, pneumonia, and acute pulmonary edema. All the while her fever kept climbing and I sat with her completely helpless, watching the numbers climb and her cooling blanket sweating into a puddle on the floor. Eventually they had to do a tracheostomy because she wasn’t breathing properly on her own.At the end of October, they finally managed to keep her fever below 100 degrees for a full 48-hour window and were able to take her into surgery to replace the heart valve that by now had been completely destroyed. The surgeon very kindly and very gently told me to prepare for the worst because even in a very healthy patient, open heart surgery brings significant risks. In Malika’s severely compromised state, the odds were not at all good that she’d wake up from surgery.But true to form and consistent with her defiant and rebellious spirit, she did. Amazingly, I began seeing my sister come back to me. Despite all the odds, she started to bounce back and gradually brought her spunky personality and wicked sense of humor with her. I’ll never forget the day I walked into her room and she simply smiled and said “Hi Shawn,” like it was no big deal. I remember that I actually stopped walking and that when I tried to speak, I was so caught off guard that it came out in a strangled sob; just that morning, she was finally improving enough that the doctors were able to take her trach out, and she was able to speak for the first time in I don’t even know how many weeks.I wish I could say at this point that her story became a fairy tale and she walked out of the hospital and into a brand new life with the second chance she was given. But addiction is not all sunshine and roses. The truth is, the better she got, the more she simply wanted out, and all the talks we had about rehab gradually fell away. She made up her mind that she was fine and just wanted to be free of all the IVs and round-the-clock medical care. What everyone involved in her treatment overlooked was that during the entire four months she was hospitalized, there were no concrete plans being made for her recovery, no drug treatment, no 12-step program, nothing to work on the addiction that had been slowly killing her since we were teenagers.This realization fully hit me for the first time when she was caught by one of her nurses trying to drink the alcohol gel beads inside one of her ice packs. The nurse told me that she had been asking for them on a regular basis and had apparently been hoarding them for just this purpose. Up until that moment, I'd never understood why they took away perfumes and mouthwash and anything else with even trace amounts of alcohol when you check into rehab. Malika was not clean or sober during those four months she was hospitalized. She was simply separated from her addiction.Which is why, after seeing her nearly every day for those four months that she was in the hospital, she quietly pulled away from me after she was discharged at the end of December. She never did check into the rehab or residential facility that she promised she’d go to when she got out. Gradually, she stopped returning my calls and texts.So I wasn't that surprised when the hospital called on May 25, 2018, just five months later, to tell me my sister was admitted back into the ICU and that, as her healthcare proxy, they needed my consent to treat her since she was wasn’t coherent. This time, the doctor said that the spots on her arms were a sign of heart failure, and an MRI showed that the confusion was caused by scattered spots of bacteria throughout her brain. That beautiful, robust new heart valve that had given her a glorious second chance at living just a few months before was now infected from a dirty needle again. And when the doctor said that her fever this time upon admission was 109 degrees, I was sure I heard him wrong. I didn’t even know that was possible, and that was while she was wrapped in a cooling blanket. They watched her around the clock for seizures and told me she would likely have brain damage when she woke up. When her fever finally broke and she came to a couple days later, I remember thinking that the light in her eyes had dimmed. She never really bounced back this time.When I went up for my daily visit with her at lunchtime on June 5th, we had one of the best visits we'd had in months. I remember very clearly telling her how much I loved her hair short, and how she was sitting on the side of her bed swinging her feet like a little kid. I remember her telling me that she was so sick of being in the hospital and that there was never anything good on television. But for the life of me, I cannot remember how we ended that visit. Every single time I left the hospital after spending time with her—every single time—she made me promise that I’d come back to see her. And I’d always laugh and tell her of course I would, I always do. It had almost become a ritual: I knew she’d say it, childlike and sweet, and she knew exactly how I’d respond. Maybe it was reassuring to her and she just needed to hear it. Or maybe I just wanted to remind her that I’d always come back. But I have replayed our conversations from that day over and over and over again, and I cannot remember her asking me to make that promise to her on that afternoon, or what I said to her when I left. And it haunts me.That night, just before midnight, I was woken by someone banging on the front door and the dog flipping out. My husband opened the door bleary-eyed. A friend of my mom’s stood there, frantic, saying that we had to come right away to the hospital; they had been trying to call me and couldn’t reach me. She said my sister’s heart had stopped and she was dying. I couldn’t comprehend her words. I told her I'd just seen my sister that afternoon and we had a great visit and she was fine. We don't have time, she said. Just come. When I grabbed my phone, I saw I had seven missed calls from the hospital. Seven. We got to the hospital in record time; a nurse was waiting for us and waved us to her room.Malika died a few minutes before we got there. Minutes. I will always believe her death occurred after one of those seven calls, and that I was too late to save her, again. They told me that the overnight nurse came to check her vitals and found her in bed, unconscious with foam on her lips. They think she must have had a seizure, and her heart, which had already been through so much, finally gave out. One of the nurses rode the gurney doing CPR all the way up the elevator and into the intensive care unit, but they were never able to bring her back. She was 43.Most of that night is a blur, stretched out unnaturally long in some places and disjointed and quick in others. But what I remember most clearly is the look on my sister’s face, and I carry that image with me, especially on the hardest days. I had come into her hospital room countless times when she was sleeping, and sometimes I just sat with her while she slept, while other times she woke up to talk with me for a while. But in all of those times, she kept this tiny wrinkle in her brow while she slept—like she was trying hard to remember something important. That night, though, that little wrinkle was gone, and she looked relaxed, peaceful, even. I realize that sounds so cliché, but it’s the only way I can describe it. She was finally, finally free of the demons she’d been running from for most of her adult life.These are the ugly, dark parts of mental illness and drug addiction that no one talks about, and by not talking about it, it stays hidden, and shameful, and powerful, and deadly. And I am not ashamed of any of this—just unbearably sad for what my sister went though—and I am so angry at myself for not having done better. For not knowing what to do, or what she needed, and believing that she wanted me to stay at an arm’s length when she must have been in so much pain. In all the days since my sister passed, I’ve promised her that I would do something on her behalf, so that what she went through wasn’t in vain. I am still working on this.But for now, I will continue to take my sons to the memorial bench that we bought for their Aunt Malika in the middle of a wildflower garden at a nature park near our first house, and I regularly talk to them about their goofball aunt who loved them more than life itself. I want to be sure they remember her at her best, while also understanding in no uncertain terms that if she could have beaten this horrific addiction, she would have, and she’d still be here to watch them grow up. I want to share her story because she was so much more than the addiction that claimed her life in a horrific and painful slow-motion free fall.Malika was beautiful, wickedly smart, funny, kind, and free-spirited. I want people to remember her as the girl who followed Phish for a month one summer with her old boyfriend and their dog in a piece of crap van that they took across the country. Or the girl who wore her long, curly hair in pigtailed knots while she danced with my sons in the kitchen to Christmas songs in July and would do absolutely anything to make them laugh. Or the girl who could talk to and make friends with anyone, absolutely anyone, with ease.It is that girl that I remember when I sit on her bench with the sun on my face and my eyes closed, remembering the sound of her laugh. I hope she knows how sorry I am that I didn’t do better for her, and how much I love her. And that even though I sat with her every day, I was ultimately no better than the 765 friends who did not. Because I didn’t know how to fix this.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://ift.tt/2HZw8S6

[emlydunstan]

When Love Is Not Enough: How We All Failed My Sister

My sister had 765 “friends” on Facebook. I don’t think I even know that many people. But I can count on one hand how many of those friends came to visit my sister during her four-month hospital stay. So apparently they were friends, but not quite that close.I believe that if regret had a smell, it would be the smell of something burnt and visceral, and sharp in your nostrils. I think of that every time I listen to the last voicemail that my sister left me. It was so normal, absolutely nothing special about it, like the countless other messages we had left each other.“Hi baby girl, it’s me. Call me back. Love you.”Sometimes I listen to it just so that I can hear her voice, but often I find myself straining to hear something that I must have missed. Did she know that she was dying? Was there some sort of resolve in her voice? Or was that loneliness? But mostly what I hear is regret. Mine, of course, not hers. Because no matter how much I loved her, I couldn’t save her. I am painfully aware that I failed my sister. Sometimes I think that we all did.Malika and I were two years and 10 months apart, and about as different as two people carved from the same parents can be. She was always the pretty one, the free spirit, and she had the goofiest sense of humor. The boys simply didn’t see me when we were together—she shone that brightly—and we could fight like nobody’s business. But above all, she was amazing to me.My sister was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in high school, which apparently is a common age for that to rear its ugly head. We both shared a sort of rebellious streak borne out of a sometimes-tumultuous home life and an ugly divorce between our parents, but she never really grew out of hers. She had a self-destructive side but it was always directed inwards—she never set out to hurt anyone but herself. I can see clearly now that for years, she was self-medicating.There were many times over the last few years that I had no way of getting hold of her. She often changed her phone number, and she and her boyfriend moved around a lot, either by choice or necessity. That was the thing about my sister: when she was healthy enough and able to be around people, she was great. Absolutely great. But often, and particularly in the last several years, when she didn’t want to be found, she went completely off the grid. I had heard rumors that at one point she was seen in the city begging for money for drugs. Another time I heard she was staying in the house we had grown up in while it was empty and in foreclosure.I ask myself all the time what I could have done differently, or what I should have done. But you cannot save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, and you certainly can’t force them to get help. If you give them money, you know where it’s going to end up, but do you do it anyway? I’ve been on both sides of this, and I know that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And when you don’t, they hate you and disappear again—proving that it was the only reason they resurfaced in the first place.I don’t even know how many times my sister tried rehab over the years. I do know that she tried. She had been in a day treatment program and was on methadone when she was admitted to the hospital last August. She was confused, bloated, and had no idea where or who she was, and she didn’t recognize me when I first came to see her. She had every drug you can think of in her bloodstream. They said that the confusion was caused by a bacterial abscess on her cervical spine just below her brain that had developed from repeated IV drug use with a dirty needle, and they started treating her on a wide spectrum of antibiotics. About a week in, she started coughing up blood and spiked a fever. Despite being on so many antibiotics, the infection in her bloodstream had attached itself to a valve in her heart, and every time her heart beat, it scattered more of the infection throughout her bloodstream. She slipped into a coma at that point and ran a fever that ended up lasting for weeks.Watching her go through that was a special kind of hell, wondering if she was ever going to wake up. She went in and out of consciousness and agitation as the doctors wrote things down like acute respiratory distress (ARDS), MRSA, MMSA, endocarditis, pneumonia, and acute pulmonary edema. All the while her fever kept climbing and I sat with her completely helpless, watching the numbers climb and her cooling blanket sweating into a puddle on the floor. Eventually they had to do a tracheostomy because she wasn’t breathing properly on her own.At the end of October, they finally managed to keep her fever below 100 degrees for a full 48-hour window and were able to take her into surgery to replace the heart valve that by now had been completely destroyed. The surgeon very kindly and very gently told me to prepare for the worst because even in a very healthy patient, open heart surgery brings significant risks. In Malika’s severely compromised state, the odds were not at all good that she’d wake up from surgery.But true to form and consistent with her defiant and rebellious spirit, she did. Amazingly, I began seeing my sister come back to me. Despite all the odds, she started to bounce back and gradually brought her spunky personality and wicked sense of humor with her. I’ll never forget the day I walked into her room and she simply smiled and said “Hi Shawn,” like it was no big deal. I remember that I actually stopped walking and that when I tried to speak, I was so caught off guard that it came out in a strangled sob; just that morning, she was finally improving enough that the doctors were able to take her trach out, and she was able to speak for the first time in I don’t even know how many weeks.I wish I could say at this point that her story became a fairy tale and she walked out of the hospital and into a brand new life with the second chance she was given. But addiction is not all sunshine and roses. The truth is, the better she got, the more she simply wanted out, and all the talks we had about rehab gradually fell away. She made up her mind that she was fine and just wanted to be free of all the IVs and round-the-clock medical care. What everyone involved in her treatment overlooked was that during the entire four months she was hospitalized, there were no concrete plans being made for her recovery, no drug treatment, no 12-step program, nothing to work on the addiction that had been slowly killing her since we were teenagers.This realization fully hit me for the first time when she was caught by one of her nurses trying to drink the alcohol gel beads inside one of her ice packs. The nurse told me that she had been asking for them on a regular basis and had apparently been hoarding them for just this purpose. Up until that moment, I'd never understood why they took away perfumes and mouthwash and anything else with even trace amounts of alcohol when you check into rehab. Malika was not clean or sober during those four months she was hospitalized. She was simply separated from her addiction.Which is why, after seeing her nearly every day for those four months that she was in the hospital, she quietly pulled away from me after she was discharged at the end of December. She never did check into the rehab or residential facility that she promised she’d go to when she got out. Gradually, she stopped returning my calls and texts.So I wasn't that surprised when the hospital called on May 25, 2018, just five months later, to tell me my sister was admitted back into the ICU and that, as her healthcare proxy, they needed my consent to treat her since she was wasn’t coherent. This time, the doctor said that the spots on her arms were a sign of heart failure, and an MRI showed that the confusion was caused by scattered spots of bacteria throughout her brain. That beautiful, robust new heart valve that had given her a glorious second chance at living just a few months before was now infected from a dirty needle again. And when the doctor said that her fever this time upon admission was 109 degrees, I was sure I heard him wrong. I didn’t even know that was possible, and that was while she was wrapped in a cooling blanket. They watched her around the clock for seizures and told me she would likely have brain damage when she woke up. When her fever finally broke and she came to a couple days later, I remember thinking that the light in her eyes had dimmed. She never really bounced back this time.When I went up for my daily visit with her at lunchtime on June 5th, we had one of the best visits we'd had in months. I remember very clearly telling her how much I loved her hair short, and how she was sitting on the side of her bed swinging her feet like a little kid. I remember her telling me that she was so sick of being in the hospital and that there was never anything good on television. But for the life of me, I cannot remember how we ended that visit. Every single time I left the hospital after spending time with her—every single time—she made me promise that I’d come back to see her. And I’d always laugh and tell her of course I would, I always do. It had almost become a ritual: I knew she’d say it, childlike and sweet, and she knew exactly how I’d respond. Maybe it was reassuring to her and she just needed to hear it. Or maybe I just wanted to remind her that I’d always come back. But I have replayed our conversations from that day over and over and over again, and I cannot remember her asking me to make that promise to her on that afternoon, or what I said to her when I left. And it haunts me.That night, just before midnight, I was woken by someone banging on the front door and the dog flipping out. My husband opened the door bleary-eyed. A friend of my mom’s stood there, frantic, saying that we had to come right away to the hospital; they had been trying to call me and couldn’t reach me. She said my sister’s heart had stopped and she was dying. I couldn’t comprehend her words. I told her I'd just seen my sister that afternoon and we had a great visit and she was fine. We don't have time, she said. Just come. When I grabbed my phone, I saw I had seven missed calls from the hospital. Seven. We got to the hospital in record time; a nurse was waiting for us and waved us to her room.Malika died a few minutes before we got there. Minutes. I will always believe her death occurred after one of those seven calls, and that I was too late to save her, again. They told me that the overnight nurse came to check her vitals and found her in bed, unconscious with foam on her lips. They think she must have had a seizure, and her heart, which had already been through so much, finally gave out. One of the nurses rode the gurney doing CPR all the way up the elevator and into the intensive care unit, but they were never able to bring her back. She was 43.Most of that night is a blur, stretched out unnaturally long in some places and disjointed and quick in others. But what I remember most clearly is the look on my sister’s face, and I carry that image with me, especially on the hardest days. I had come into her hospital room countless times when she was sleeping, and sometimes I just sat with her while she slept, while other times she woke up to talk with me for a while. But in all of those times, she kept this tiny wrinkle in her brow while she slept—like she was trying hard to remember something important. That night, though, that little wrinkle was gone, and she looked relaxed, peaceful, even. I realize that sounds so cliché, but it’s the only way I can describe it. She was finally, finally free of the demons she’d been running from for most of her adult life.These are the ugly, dark parts of mental illness and drug addiction that no one talks about, and by not talking about it, it stays hidden, and shameful, and powerful, and deadly. And I am not ashamed of any of this—just unbearably sad for what my sister went though—and I am so angry at myself for not having done better. For not knowing what to do, or what she needed, and believing that she wanted me to stay at an arm’s length when she must have been in so much pain. In all the days since my sister passed, I’ve promised her that I would do something on her behalf, so that what she went through wasn’t in vain. I am still working on this.But for now, I will continue to take my sons to the memorial bench that we bought for their Aunt Malika in the middle of a wildflower garden at a nature park near our first house, and I regularly talk to them about their goofball aunt who loved them more than life itself. I want to be sure they remember her at her best, while also understanding in no uncertain terms that if she could have beaten this horrific addiction, she would have, and she’d still be here to watch them grow up. I want to share her story because she was so much more than the addiction that claimed her life in a horrific and painful slow-motion free fall.Malika was beautiful, wickedly smart, funny, kind, and free-spirited. I want people to remember her as the girl who followed Phish for a month one summer with her old boyfriend and their dog in a piece of crap van that they took across the country. Or the girl who wore her long, curly hair in pigtailed knots while she danced with my sons in the kitchen to Christmas songs in July and would do absolutely anything to make them laugh. Or the girl who could talk to and make friends with anyone, absolutely anyone, with ease.It is that girl that I remember when I sit on her bench with the sun on my face and my eyes closed, remembering the sound of her laugh. I hope she knows how sorry I am that I didn’t do better for her, and how much I love her. And that even though I sat with her every day, I was ultimately no better than the 765 friends who did not. Because I didn’t know how to fix this.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://www.thefix.com/when-love-not-enough-how-we-all-failed-my-sister

[pitz182]

When Love Is Not Enough: How We All Failed My Sister

My sister had 765 “friends” on Facebook. I don’t think I even know that many people. But I can count on one hand how many of those friends came to visit my sister during her four-month hospital stay. So apparently they were friends, but not quite that close.I believe that if regret had a smell, it would be the smell of something burnt and visceral, and sharp in your nostrils. I think of that every time I listen to the last voicemail that my sister left me. It was so normal, absolutely nothing special about it, like the countless other messages we had left each other.“Hi baby girl, it’s me. Call me back. Love you.”Sometimes I listen to it just so that I can hear her voice, but often I find myself straining to hear something that I must have missed. Did she know that she was dying? Was there some sort of resolve in her voice? Or was that loneliness? But mostly what I hear is regret. Mine, of course, not hers. Because no matter how much I loved her, I couldn’t save her. I am painfully aware that I failed my sister. Sometimes I think that we all did.Malika and I were two years and 10 months apart, and about as different as two people carved from the same parents can be. She was always the pretty one, the free spirit, and she had the goofiest sense of humor. The boys simply didn’t see me when we were together—she shone that brightly—and we could fight like nobody’s business. But above all, she was amazing to me.My sister was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in high school, which apparently is a common age for that to rear its ugly head. We both shared a sort of rebellious streak borne out of a sometimes-tumultuous home life and an ugly divorce between our parents, but she never really grew out of hers. She had a self-destructive side but it was always directed inwards—she never set out to hurt anyone but herself. I can see clearly now that for years, she was self-medicating.There were many times over the last few years that I had no way of getting hold of her. She often changed her phone number, and she and her boyfriend moved around a lot, either by choice or necessity. That was the thing about my sister: when she was healthy enough and able to be around people, she was great. Absolutely great. But often, and particularly in the last several years, when she didn’t want to be found, she went completely off the grid. I had heard rumors that at one point she was seen in the city begging for money for drugs. Another time I heard she was staying in the house we had grown up in while it was empty and in foreclosure.I ask myself all the time what I could have done differently, or what I should have done. But you cannot save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, and you certainly can’t force them to get help. If you give them money, you know where it’s going to end up, but do you do it anyway? I’ve been on both sides of this, and I know that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And when you don’t, they hate you and disappear again—proving that it was the only reason they resurfaced in the first place.I don’t even know how many times my sister tried rehab over the years. I do know that she tried. She had been in a day treatment program and was on methadone when she was admitted to the hospital last August. She was confused, bloated, and had no idea where or who she was, and she didn’t recognize me when I first came to see her. She had every drug you can think of in her bloodstream. They said that the confusion was caused by a bacterial abscess on her cervical spine just below her brain that had developed from repeated IV drug use with a dirty needle, and they started treating her on a wide spectrum of antibiotics. About a week in, she started coughing up blood and spiked a fever. Despite being on so many antibiotics, the infection in her bloodstream had attached itself to a valve in her heart, and every time her heart beat, it scattered more of the infection throughout her bloodstream. She slipped into a coma at that point and ran a fever that ended up lasting for weeks.Watching her go through that was a special kind of hell, wondering if she was ever going to wake up. She went in and out of consciousness and agitation as the doctors wrote things down like acute respiratory distress (ARDS), MRSA, MMSA, endocarditis, pneumonia, and acute pulmonary edema. All the while her fever kept climbing and I sat with her completely helpless, watching the numbers climb and her cooling blanket sweating into a puddle on the floor. Eventually they had to do a tracheostomy because she wasn’t breathing properly on her own.At the end of October, they finally managed to keep her fever below 100 degrees for a full 48-hour window and were able to take her into surgery to replace the heart valve that by now had been completely destroyed. The surgeon very kindly and very gently told me to prepare for the worst because even in a very healthy patient, open heart surgery brings significant risks. In Malika’s severely compromised state, the odds were not at all good that she’d wake up from surgery.But true to form and consistent with her defiant and rebellious spirit, she did. Amazingly, I began seeing my sister come back to me. Despite all the odds, she started to bounce back and gradually brought her spunky personality and wicked sense of humor with her. I’ll never forget the day I walked into her room and she simply smiled and said “Hi Shawn,” like it was no big deal. I remember that I actually stopped walking and that when I tried to speak, I was so caught off guard that it came out in a strangled sob; just that morning, she was finally improving enough that the doctors were able to take her trach out, and she was able to speak for the first time in I don’t even know how many weeks.I wish I could say at this point that her story became a fairy tale and she walked out of the hospital and into a brand new life with the second chance she was given. But addiction is not all sunshine and roses. The truth is, the better she got, the more she simply wanted out, and all the talks we had about rehab gradually fell away. She made up her mind that she was fine and just wanted to be free of all the IVs and round-the-clock medical care. What everyone involved in her treatment overlooked was that during the entire four months she was hospitalized, there were no concrete plans being made for her recovery, no drug treatment, no 12-step program, nothing to work on the addiction that had been slowly killing her since we were teenagers.This realization fully hit me for the first time when she was caught by one of her nurses trying to drink the alcohol gel beads inside one of her ice packs. The nurse told me that she had been asking for them on a regular basis and had apparently been hoarding them for just this purpose. Up until that moment, I'd never understood why they took away perfumes and mouthwash and anything else with even trace amounts of alcohol when you check into rehab. Malika was not clean or sober during those four months she was hospitalized. She was simply separated from her addiction.Which is why, after seeing her nearly every day for those four months that she was in the hospital, she quietly pulled away from me after she was discharged at the end of December. She never did check into the rehab or residential facility that she promised she’d go to when she got out. Gradually, she stopped returning my calls and texts.So I wasn't that surprised when the hospital called on May 25, 2018, just five months later, to tell me my sister was admitted back into the ICU and that, as her healthcare proxy, they needed my consent to treat her since she was wasn’t coherent. This time, the doctor said that the spots on her arms were a sign of heart failure, and an MRI showed that the confusion was caused by scattered spots of bacteria throughout her brain. That beautiful, robust new heart valve that had given her a glorious second chance at living just a few months before was now infected from a dirty needle again. And when the doctor said that her fever this time upon admission was 109 degrees, I was sure I heard him wrong. I didn’t even know that was possible, and that was while she was wrapped in a cooling blanket. They watched her around the clock for seizures and told me she would likely have brain damage when she woke up. When her fever finally broke and she came to a couple days later, I remember thinking that the light in her eyes had dimmed. She never really bounced back this time.When I went up for my daily visit with her at lunchtime on June 5th, we had one of the best visits we'd had in months. I remember very clearly telling her how much I loved her hair short, and how she was sitting on the side of her bed swinging her feet like a little kid. I remember her telling me that she was so sick of being in the hospital and that there was never anything good on television. But for the life of me, I cannot remember how we ended that visit. Every single time I left the hospital after spending time with her—every single time—she made me promise that I’d come back to see her. And I’d always laugh and tell her of course I would, I always do. It had almost become a ritual: I knew she’d say it, childlike and sweet, and she knew exactly how I’d respond. Maybe it was reassuring to her and she just needed to hear it. Or maybe I just wanted to remind her that I’d always come back. But I have replayed our conversations from that day over and over and over again, and I cannot remember her asking me to make that promise to her on that afternoon, or what I said to her when I left. And it haunts me.That night, just before midnight, I was woken by someone banging on the front door and the dog flipping out. My husband opened the door bleary-eyed. A friend of my mom’s stood there, frantic, saying that we had to come right away to the hospital; they had been trying to call me and couldn’t reach me. She said my sister’s heart had stopped and she was dying. I couldn’t comprehend her words. I told her I'd just seen my sister that afternoon and we had a great visit and she was fine. We don't have time, she said. Just come. When I grabbed my phone, I saw I had seven missed calls from the hospital. Seven. We got to the hospital in record time; a nurse was waiting for us and waved us to her room.Malika died a few minutes before we got there. Minutes. I will always believe her death occurred after one of those seven calls, and that I was too late to save her, again. They told me that the overnight nurse came to check her vitals and found her in bed, unconscious with foam on her lips. They think she must have had a seizure, and her heart, which had already been through so much, finally gave out. One of the nurses rode the gurney doing CPR all the way up the elevator and into the intensive care unit, but they were never able to bring her back. She was 43.Most of that night is a blur, stretched out unnaturally long in some places and disjointed and quick in others. But what I remember most clearly is the look on my sister’s face, and I carry that image with me, especially on the hardest days. I had come into her hospital room countless times when she was sleeping, and sometimes I just sat with her while she slept, while other times she woke up to talk with me for a while. But in all of those times, she kept this tiny wrinkle in her brow while she slept—like she was trying hard to remember something important. That night, though, that little wrinkle was gone, and she looked relaxed, peaceful, even. I realize that sounds so cliché, but it’s the only way I can describe it. She was finally, finally free of the demons she’d been running from for most of her adult life.These are the ugly, dark parts of mental illness and drug addiction that no one talks about, and by not talking about it, it stays hidden, and shameful, and powerful, and deadly. And I am not ashamed of any of this—just unbearably sad for what my sister went though—and I am so angry at myself for not having done better. For not knowing what to do, or what she needed, and believing that she wanted me to stay at an arm’s length when she must have been in so much pain. In all the days since my sister passed, I’ve promised her that I would do something on her behalf, so that what she went through wasn’t in vain. I am still working on this.But for now, I will continue to take my sons to the memorial bench that we bought for their Aunt Malika in the middle of a wildflower garden at a nature park near our first house, and I regularly talk to them about their goofball aunt who loved them more than life itself. I want to be sure they remember her at her best, while also understanding in no uncertain terms that if she could have beaten this horrific addiction, she would have, and she’d still be here to watch them grow up. I want to share her story because she was so much more than the addiction that claimed her life in a horrific and painful slow-motion free fall.Malika was beautiful, wickedly smart, funny, kind, and free-spirited. I want people to remember her as the girl who followed Phish for a month one summer with her old boyfriend and their dog in a piece of crap van that they took across the country. Or the girl who wore her long, curly hair in pigtailed knots while she danced with my sons in the kitchen to Christmas songs in July and would do absolutely anything to make them laugh. Or the girl who could talk to and make friends with anyone, absolutely anyone, with ease.It is that girl that I remember when I sit on her bench with the sun on my face and my eyes closed, remembering the sound of her laugh. I hope she knows how sorry I am that I didn’t do better for her, and how much I love her. And that even though I sat with her every day, I was ultimately no better than the 765 friends who did not. Because I didn’t know how to fix this.

[weasterned]

zongien.

1. Jo Oppanim ! He’s calm, but also funny ! And friendly, probably best friend material for everyone ! But sometimes I also get scared of him as well;;;; 2. Uh I don’t know this either— maybe because EXO has ended its promotion that’s why he didn’t update ? Or maybe I didn’t see him updating— 3. Jo Oppanim ! Christmas is near, 2018 is also neaar ! I hope you will be having a good year on 2018, and also for EXO itself ! Have a blessed year !

1. menel, menel, menel, kocak, bulliable 2. kamu straight apa yaoi? 3. jangan membuat hati para cewe dan cowo jadi galau

1. Bdh, Bdbh, Funny af. 2. Kak Jongin, apakah aku harus memberi tahu apa yang kurang dan lebih darimu? Kurang darimu adalah tukang neglect mention, sama seperti diriku. Lebihnya adalah moodbooster. Udh ya? Gausah minta lebih, gebet aja dulu Jung Soojung, baru minta lebih lebih. Emaap, aku begitu suka KaiStal jadi lupa bengad kalo kalian sudah jadi mangtan. 3. Since 2018 coming soon, I wish you to have a bless and great year ahead. Eventhough I’m bosen to see you, its not mean I hate you. Of course I love you, hyung. Semoga makin item.

1) Pervert 4x and weird 2) We’ve talked to each other before a lot and I think we should keep this up 😉 3) Happy holidays and happy new year to you, Jo. Please don’t explode yourself with a mercon and stay safe. Have a splendid 2018! 4) Plus : A lumayan game partner. Minus : Guess how many times I’ve typed ‘we rarely talk’ in this form. I’m getting tired 😥 so pls talk with me I’m desperate for having a friend…

#1 - Pervert - Like to tease others - Funny - Loves kinky topic - Cool #2 Talk more to other people you kinky head. Don’t ignore other’s mention. All you doing is only porn related. #3 Hi. It’s really nice to know you, but I was so surprised to know you’re such a pervert person. Anyway, I hope we can talk more. That’s all. Bye.

-1. Kind, warm, sometimes weird, boycrush, cool. 2. Talk with me more often! 3. Hello! I really want to get closer to you but yeah me is such a potato so please greet me HAHAHA. You’re so attractive, by the way. Enjoy your xmas and new year.

1. pervert, bobrokie, bodohie, but also nice and cool 2. tolonk y obba retweetannya dikondisikan, jangan membuat q triggeredddtttdttt :-) 3. Dear jongin obba, youre nice and friendly, i love it how you always jbjb me even tho its ngeselin kadang-kadang, but i always appreciate those who wants to get closer to me by talking to me even if its totally nonsense and random. i adore obba actually, you want to be cold and savage but ended up being dumb instead, its amusing to see :(

1. Modus people! Flirty namja! But he is kind and funny. And absurd sometimes. 2. Stop being soooo modus to people! 3. Keep doing your best oppa! I wish for your happiness and don’t forget to give me food. Actually I don’t know what I should write here.

1. Weird, weird, weird, friendly, good 2. Nope, he is weird apa adanya. 3. Hei weirdo! You’re kinda weird but good. A good-weird person. I dont know what to say but stay weird lah. If you’re not weird, it’s not you then. 😬

malika, pervert, cold outside fragile inside, pervert, pervert, the man who can’t be moved. hope u find another one lol but i think u have it already? lmao

Aish this people.. kurang2in gilanya ya jo wksk

1. awkward, kind, have a good vibe as jongin as well 2. - 3. i know you are a good person, but i guess  we haven’t talk muck each other, let’s make another convo and get along well as always in the future!

1. cool, handsome, kinda cold but very bobrok 2. don’t like or retweet porn at the day, you can do it at night or midnight, too much underage around us. and it would be great if you can share them with me /NO 3. hello jo sunbaenim!! it’s kinda weird to call you sunbae but you are really my sunbaenim so it’s okay lmao. actually you’re the first jongin’s rper that i have so it’s nice to meet you. and i really think you’re such a cold rper, but my though is broken itself as i saw you more. i want to be close with you. Please always be who you are right now. I hope you will have a nice day and keep healthy till 2017 comes to an end!A pervert, a pervert, and a pervert. But you are one of my best buddy here. Thanks for making me laugh with all your stupid jokes. Maybe those arent jokes, you are just stupid. PLEASE LESSEN YOUR THIRST, there are still some innocent souls :-)

1. dangerous, creepy, kind and cool 2. hyung please stay away from Jo hyung and the innocent hoobae of mine, a.k.a songso lol eh wait- jo hyung is gone tho. i bet he do damn plastic surgery and become oldie named christian? i’m sad. please take a good care of me then hyung! 3. just call that number 2 as a short message for him lololol happy christmas!

1. Crazy, smut instead of smooth, funny, kind, scary. 2. Stop being so extra would you? Hahaha. 3. Hello, Jo! Please enjoy the rest of 2017 happily.

1. friendly, crazy, playboy, love everyone 2. hope we love each other more 3. Marry christmas and happy new year, and lets get more closer next year so we can have fun year together.

1. Cool, weird, playful, fun, a bit zonk 2. Zonk-ien. Hahaha i hope youre less zonk because somehow i think youre a bit zonk lmao 3. Dear zonkien, lets talk more in the future so maybe i could figured out more zonkness from you or other things from you hahaha

He is nice, fun, easygoing and TALK A LOT I swear I saw him everywhere. Jk. But that’s good tho, I wish I could mingle well with others like he does. Keep that up, bro! To Kai, Happy early new year, Zongkai! Kurang-kurangin like tweets yang ahem ahemnya ya.

1. Fun? Idk. 2. I have some convos with him already hadeh hyong please sometimes likes rated vid and it appear on my timeline pls lees it :“) 3. hello, Jo hyong since 2017 almost over which mean new year will bring a new hope also. Please stay healthy because the weather is not so good lately, keep warm. Xx Loves♡

1. Jo 2. Let’s talk more with me ㅎㅎㅎ 3. Happy New Year , Jo!

1. flirty, cool, fun!, I kind of scared with him sometimes, chatty 2. Nothing but I kind of scared with him at times. :( 3. I’d hope for your happiness in the end of this year, may the force will ever be yours later in 2018 and may 2018 bring you good stuffs!1. Mr. Pabo Jo who stole my nickname as bear here, ugh! Jo is so kind, nice, SOOOOOO APPROACHABLE (i was shocked cz usually Kai’s rp is hard to approach but you is the other way around lol which is good!), He is not awkward at all and has a really good and warm personality. 2. PLEASE REDUCE YOUR TYPO AND BOBROKNESS. AND PLEASE DRINK AQUA A LIL BIT MORE EACH DAYS YA. 3. 2017 is coming to an end, i just wish EXO especially you will always be happy and more successfull. Maybe there is a surprise in 2017 that you finally have a opportunity as a good kdrama cast hahah

1. -pervert - pervert - byuntae - byuntae - kind 2. insyaflah wahai manusia, jika dirimu bernoda~ hehehhe kidding! i’m happy to have you here in WST as my korban bully. let me bully you more in the future dude. mwah ♡

1. [💌]  just wanna say, thank you for staying in WST. i’m happy that i have such a kind and caring members here. it might be pretty hard when you feel left out in agency, but i didn’t feel like this here. thank you ♡ thank you for being kind to me, let’s make another memorable memories in the future!

1) kind, friendly, funny, likes to flirt and joking around 2) more update about his chara? 3) let’s talk more in the future and get along well! + i hope 2018 will be much much better year for you! ✨

Funny,  ffriendly, look always on group dm, cool, look zonk too. Idk… Let’s talk more int the future bruhJo oppa ini beda banget dr perkiraan. Liat accnya sih kyknya kalem tp tryt enggak. Apalagi kl ketemu seongso, ian oppa sama chanyeol. Haduu. Messagenya: Apapun yang terjadi selama setahun ini, semoga bs jadi pembelajaran utk ke depannya. Aku berharap akhir tahun ini bisa dinikmati (?) dengan rasa bahagia hehehe. Dan semoga keinginannya cpt tercapai ya. Amin

Oppaaaa —! Moodbooster of the day/? Entah karena me yang receh atau oppa nya yang bobroqeu , , , i can laugh only at his plesetan/? He is pervert 🙈 okaaaaay— if you know who am i , don’t labrak saya oyaaaaay !

1. JO. CRAZY AF. STOOPID HOOMAN BEING. IDK AH. LOUD AF. 2. I’M KINDA AWARE WHEN YOUR'E STILL ON TIMELINE AROUND 10-12pm. MY TIMELINE BEING SO NOT SAFE. YOU’RE SO PERVERT. HOW COULD IT BE? I’m looking forward to our interactions much in the future. Keep up the good work! 3. Happy new year! Santa claus is coming to town~ *chuckles* You should take a good care of yourself, keep smiling widely, and be happy as always.

1. Funny, Receh, lawak, lawak, lawak lol ; 2. Please reply to my greeting ; 3. You’re such a funny person. I want to get closer with you as a same-age friend

1. quiet, unpredictable, sometimes weird (very very weird), sometimes awkward and definitely a cold saram in weast :|. 2. - Don’t too often delete your tweet bcs it’s not good - Don’t do something stupid - Talk with me (i mean more than before) - I know you like me but we have no chemistry (HAAHAHAA). 3. Hey bro. Don’t get me wrong when I said "You like me”. I mean I think you like me as weast member but we have no chemistry till we never had proper conversation. well, I know you are a good person and very fun. but tbh I dont know how to get close with crazy saram like you. I hope you always stay healthy and be better person. good luck!

1. Kinda cold, hard to approach, funny, bigos aka biang gosip, talk nonsense 24/7 2. You can make a warta wst acc or maybe lamtur wst 3. -

1. Low sense of humor, ngeselin, nyebelin, lemot, suka telat bales 2. fast rep juseyo. 3. I don’t even remember the last time we talk. And I also wonder why you thought I’m someone else- but, looking forward to talk more with you.

1. Mesum 2. Seram 3. Perverted 4. Also kind 5. And full of attention Jongin hyung, hello. I wish you’d appear more like a setan timeline because one thing, I enjoy talking to you. It’s the New Year’s soon and we’re gonna pass the 2018 together I hope. With this sentence I hope we can be more closer in the future! Lessen up the kemesuman, it gets scarier by time.

[squidmag]

Can you believe it? We’re already halfway through the second week of May. Boy does time fly! The first week of May – let’s make that weekend – 2017 was beautiful for comic lovers the world over thanks, especially to Diamond Comic Distributors’ Free Comic Book Day initiative.

Here’s a brief rundown of what happened over the weekend as well as news we’re excited about in the growth of African digital arts manifested within comics, games and animation. 

Free Comic Book Day 2017

Free comic book day happened not long ago on Saturday, May 6 across the world. What’s free comic book day? It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s an annual promotional effort effort by the North American comic book industry to help bring new readers into independent comic book stores according to Wikipedia.

What that means for African comics? Seeing as everyone pushing for the growth of our industry is an independent publisher, it’s a chance for our creators to market themselves (and in effect the African comic scene) by riding that wave, and boy did they; we applaud them. The big two, Comic Republic and Vortex Comics who already offer their comics online for free took the opportunity to remind everyone about their superb titles. Vortex rewarded a fan with physical copies of their titles who correctly named Ajagbeja‘s sword in Spirit Wars #1. CR meanwhile will reward one lucky fan this weekend who’s able to convince the publisher s/he deserves three hard copies of CR’s titles. Let’s not forget Roye Okupe’s YouNeek Studios either.

The company announced weeks ago that it’s successfully funded title, Malika: Warrior Queen would be made available for free at the event. What’s more? We’ll get a chance to snag a digital copy exactly a week after FCBD. That’s this weekend people, this weekend! Who doesn’t like free goodies?

"Duality" Eru cover photorealistic zentangle mix hope you like it . if you download the comic and look at the cover closely you can see the names of his siblings written on the zentangled portion . uploaded before but i guess it didnt go in art by oz ezeogu digital colors by me #duality #multiplepersonality #blackandwhite #africanart #zentangle #art #instaart #insta #digitalpainting #disneyland #fearitself #fear #nightmare #slenderman #eru #comicrepublic #rageagainstthemachine #ocd

A post shared by Tobe Max Jaeger Ezeogu (@madmaxjaeger) on May 4, 2017 at 4:01pm PDT

The most exciting news over the weekend, however, revolves around Tobe Mad Max Jaeger Ezeogu’s Eru comic. Haven’t read Eru? Here’s an awesome review of the fear mongering African comic you should check out. Remember that black brother who played Torch in that horrible Fantastic Four reboot (I’m looking at you sideways if you think otherwise) and redeemed himself beautifully in Creed, Michael B. Jordan?

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Yeah, that guy. He recently expressed interest in Tobe’s work and that’s pretty wild considering:

The 100’s Isaiah Washington agrees with us that Eru’s cover is dope;

Michael is a Hollywood star;

Tobe thinks he makes an excellent Eru;

he doesn’t disagree and is curious; and

Hollywood needs to scoop newer, fresher and more diverse narratives across the world.

Who else is connecting the dots? Did I hear you say Eru the movie? Chale Tobe, make this happen oo.

Movie adaptation baby, movie adaptation!

Speaking of movies, Vortex also recently announced that,

film director David AnGa from WhiteFox Films is being sponsored by Go Global and The University of the West England (UWE Bristol, UK) to work on a short film adaptation for one of (their) characters (come) AUGUST.

I suspect Agbara is the character because that’s who the announcement came with. Yaay African comics!

Agbara

Jumping over to Zimbabwe, Razor Man creator, Bill Masuku shared an update of activities at the Harare International Festival of Arts (HIFA) that put a smile across my face.

Until Bill, I had no idea about HIFA. What’s more important however is something he shared in the update:

A new instalment this year saw the introduction of comic books and comic book workshops organised by Bill Masuku an up and coming name in the local industry. The Comics on sale were all of 100% Zimbabwean creation; while the comics on display were marked for teens they were of particular interest to the older generation who have begun investing so as to springboard the market in Zimbabwe.

We need more gigs like this across the continent to push the growth of the African comics industry.

AV 21 I don't know what this is, I know what it kinda feels like but that would be wrong… Anyway warmups done, now where are those Rovik pages #characterdesign #africanstyle #afrika

A post shared by salim busuru (@salimbusuru) on May 4, 2017 at 9:34pm PDT

What else is new? Salim Busuru promises to release new Rovik, it’s been 3 months since the first issue and it was supposed to be monthly, but we can understand. After all, writing, pencilling, inking, lettering, the entire comic process really takes time. Just don’t take too long Salim. It’s been well over 3 months since that first Rovik issue and I’m hungry!

Let’s wrap this up with Ghana, the gateway to Africa, but a country that hasn’t churned out much animation or comics compared to the rest of the continent. We’re getting there however. This year has been particularly vibrant for the former with more than three animated music videos released. That count is about to go up thanks to Bertil Toby

That count is about to go up thanks to Bertil Toby Svanekiaer (Chaskele) and the Indigene BROS collective’s beautiful work on Jayso’s mellow party jam, Have A Party. The video will officially be Ghana’s first 3D animated music video. It will be premiered online on Saturday, May 13th. Do check it out; I promise, it’s a fun geekfest. Look out for a curiously irresistible dance move in the video. 🙂

Wait for it……live launch with @jaysoskillions . The best animated music video you have ever seen! Produced strictly in Ghana! Dont miss out on the social media live launch ! #jayso #haveaparty #bestanimationmusicvideo #waawolo #indigenebros #ootostudios @sarkodie1

A post shared by Indigene B.R.O.S (@indigenebros) on May 10, 2017 at 5:32am PDT

There’s one last bit of news I’ll save for another post. Just know this, May is off to a really good start and I can’t wait to see all the brilliant ideas African creatives will bring to life. In the meantime, don’t forget to support your favourite artists’ work by either buying from them or sharing their work.

Peace, and Squirt Creativity!

By KaDi Yao Tay aka Avonome’s true love and  June XII’s best friend…nah, I’m playing.

For the latest on African comics, games and animation, do check us out on social media:

Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest

Here’s What You Missed in African Comics Over The Weekend (And Then Some) Can you believe it? We’re already halfway through the second week of May. Boy does time fly!

[heartslogos]

the declassified texts of the inquisition’s elite [64]

(218):I tried making my own red bull with crushed up caffeine pills, bubbley water and flintstones chewable vitamins. The ER doctor sead I'm lucky to be alive.

-

(805):You left your phone here

(805):Wait...

-

“I don’t know how to explain to you that you aren’t a young person anymore. Frankly, even a young person would probably suffer long term damage from this kind of thing,” Stitches says. “Rocky, I’m not kidding. who was the attending when you went to the medical ward?”

“The other one,” Rocky answers after a moment to think about it.

Stitches stares at him, waiting for further explanation and getting none.

“The other one? What other one? What do you mean the other one?” Stitches prompts. “Rocky, please tell me you got a name. You didn’t just forget which doctor was taking care of you did you?”

“The one that isn’t you, genius. Don’t you work in the medic division? Can’t you just check my file to see who was taking care of me?” Rocky asks. “Come on, I was tasting time. I could hear colors. My heartbeat was going so fast I felt like I was getting internal bruising. You can’t blame me for not remembering who my doctor was.”

“Rocky, the Inquisition has over twenty full time doctors working several different shifts at this base alone. Not to mention the nurses, nurse practitioners, and the part timers. You can’t just tell me it was the other one. There are dozens of other ones it could be.”

“Stitches, if it isn’t you I don’t know who they are. Years of going to you and being conditioned to listen to you — “

“You listen to me? When? When have any of you ever listened to me?”

“ — have rendered me pretty much instinctually going to you for everything. I didn’t even go to the Inquisition’s medical wing by choice. Krem carried me there against my will. Ask Krem who my doctor was, he wasn’t fucked up. He’d probably remember.”

“Rocky you are a walking disaster and I don’t know how you survived this long,” Stitches groans. “Can you just promise me you aren’t going to do this again?”

“What am I? Stupid? Of course I’m not going to do it again. It didn’t even work,” Rocky rolls his eyes. “Now, if I switch out the chewable vitamins for — “

“Nope. We’re not going down that road. Not now, not ever,” Stitches cuts in, punching Rocky in the arm. “Rocky? No. Stop. Just stop that shit right now. Rocky listen. Listen, Rocky, no. I need a fucking spray bottle or something, it’s like I’m watching untrained dogs.”

“That’s rude, Stitches. I know how to pee in a toilet and everything.”

“The fact that that’s your standard brings me great concern. Please, raise your standards by just a little bit. I’m begging you. And do not attempt to do this again. Seriously. Aren’t you a chemist? Don’t you know how terrible this idea is based on basic chemistry and self preservation?”

“And that’s where you’ll be wrong, Stitches. I may be a chemist, but my self preservation was thrown aside to make room for ambition.”

-

“Does anyone know where Ellana is? Any hint? Any clue? Any vague idea or gut feeling about it? Premonitions, maybe?” Max asks. “She left her phone with me and now it’s impossible to find her, because as we all know, the only thing tethering that woman to the known coordinate plane was the GPS on this thing. She might as well be in the fourth dimension now.”

“There’s four dimensions?” Edric asks. “Wait, are there supposed to be more than that? Less than that?”

“You’ve picked up on the wrong part to focus on, my friend,” Maxwell says, giving Edric an odd look. “Have all of your years of working in the Carta given you an inability to focus on the things that would make people concerned and skip straight to the irrelevant flavor text? Are you that inoculated against dangerous and somewhat ominous messages of ill portent?”

“Why are you talking like that all of a sudden?” Malika asks. “Is it because you went to private school? It can’t be, because Evelyn doesn’t talk like that. And you didn’t sound like that before.”

“I talk like this because on one hand I’ve got Leliana and on the other hand I’ve got Cassandra Pentaghast and then the Lavellans coming in at all sides,” Maxwell replies. “My common parlance had to evolve at some point. I’m surprised all of us aren’t talking like this, honestly.”

“That’s fair,” Edric concedes. “Another point to bring up is why did you have Ellana’s phone in the first place?”

“I don’t know, she just handed it to me. Either her pockets weren’t big enough or something, does it matter? How do I get this back to her?”

“Did you try calling all the people she’s normally with?”

“Do you honestly think Mahanon Lavellan would answer a phone call from me? For me?”

“What about the Iron Bull?”

“He’s a troll, he’d lead me in the wrong direction. Or he’d lead me somewhere I’d get in trouble.”

“I mean, why don’t you just dump the phone on Bull? Or head by her apartment?”

“What, and chuck her phone in her mailbox? That’s hardly secure. Then I’d really be in trouble, despite the fact that it’s Ellana who left her phone behind in the first place. And I can’t find the Iron Bull, either. I checked his usual places. He might have left base, in which case I’m fucked.”

“Kaaras? Dorian? Evelyn?”

“Evelyn left this morning so she’s definitely off base. Dorian’s been away. Kaaras is leaving in about an hour so it’s not like he can pass it to her.”

“Leliana?”

“Ellana and Leliana hang out?”

“No, but if there’s anyone that can find her it’d be Leliana,” Edric says, “She knows where everyone is. I think she pretends she doesn’t know where Mahanon is out of courtesy or something. But she definitely does. Mostly. I think.”

“Don’t question her,” Malika whispers, “What if she hears you? Or senses it? I don’t want to get in trouble because I was witness to you questioning her abilities.”

[heartslogos]

newfragile yellows [576]

Ellana slowly comes awake, cold, air stinging her face. Ellana frowns into the darkness, stretching her arm out, confused when her fingers don’t come across a patch of warmth. The Iron Bull must have already gotten up. She can’t remember if Evelyn had a mission for him today or not. But the bed isn’t warm at all, how early did he leave?

Her palm presses against the bedding, she can’t even feel an indent from his body. But he was with her, wasn’t he? She remembers his mouth on her hair and the feeling of being moved the mattress sunk with his weight. She doesn’t sleep easy without it. It’s only once she feels him next to her that she falls into a true, deep sleep.

She stretches her arm out more, and startles when her fingers touch the edge of the bedding. And then — dirt?

Ellana sits up, confused as she looks around.

She’s in a bedroll? And now that she can see, she feels the hard packed earth through the cloth. She turns her head and stares at her brother sleeping in the bedroll next to her. They’re in a tent.

Ellana slowly raises her eyes upwards and sees the familiar patches, lines of stitching, and faded stains of her childhood tent. The one she and Mahanon shared until the Inquisition, until Haven, until Bull. The one she knows went up in flames when her clan was run out of the forests of Wycome, barely surviving with their lives.

Her heart pounds in her chest as she raises a hand to her neck, fingers searching out the familiar and coming up empty. Ellana looks down, grabbing at the neckline of her shirt, heart racing even faster as she pulls it out and sees nothing. There is no tooth against her chest. There is no leather cord.

Feeble gray sunlight peeks through the tent flap as Ellana scrambles out, pulling on her boots, afraid and mind-numb.

She is standing among a familiar circle of tents and aravels. She can hear the halla rustling in their pen. She can smell breakfast cooking.

And the faces. The faces she knows are dead because she helped bury them, and the faces that survived with shadows in their eyes because she had to ask them what shape those shadows were. They smile at her. They wave. They say something that Ellana cannot parse because it feels like she’s been dunked under water. Like she’s fallen off a ship at sea and is being tossed around by furious waves. No up, no down, no left, no right. No sound that isn’t a roaring terror. No feeling that isn’t a pulse-pounding heavy gnawing that numbs the extremities and hollows out the core.

She dives back into her tent, reaching for her brother.

He swats at her as she shakes him awake, she can’t hear herself saying his name though she knows her mouth is making the word.

Finally he gets up, eye cracking open and giving her a concerned look.

“What’s wrong?” He asks, and there’s something wrong with that. The way he says it. His voice. It doesn’t sound right. He sounds…young. He sounds…he just sounds off. Did he always sound like this? Or did he only sound like this before? When did the language between them change that Ellana thinks that he sounds wrong now? “It’s too early. I don’t have to do a patrol until later.”

Mahanon doesn’t do patrols. Mahanon is reconnaissance and extraction. Occasionally clean up. But he doesn’t do patrols.

But he did here. As a regular hunter. Not a Hunter of he Inquisition. Just…a regular Dalish hunter.

Ellana’s throat feels dry and her voice cracks, “Mahanon. I. How old are we?”

Mahanon frowns, reaching up to gently touch the back of his hand to her forehead. That’s wrong too. The Mahanon she knows is brisk. Sharper. Her Mahanon, who went with her to Haven, who trudged through the Frostbacks, fought dragons, assassinated Venatori sympathizers, who exchanged blows with slavers, who did all those things and more.

Not this one. Not this strange forgotten memory of…a child.

“Did you eat something strange?” Mahanon asks, puzzled. “You don’t feel hot. Should I call mother?” He’s sitting up now and his loose sleeping tunic shows parts of his arms and chest. Narrower arms. Thinner. Not as strong as she remembers. Missing scars. Missing burns. Missing so many things.

And his hair — it’s shorter than she remembers.

“I had a bad dream,” Ellana whispers. “Just. Tell me?”

“We just turned nine and twenty,” Mahanon answers. “What kind of dream makes you forget how old you are?”

Nine and twenty.

The Conclave happens six months after their birthday. Six months from now the world changes. Or it should, if Ellana hasn’t gone crazy. She didn’t dream seven years of war. Did she?

“Are the mages and Templars still at it?” Ellana asks.

Mahanon’s concern grows tenfold on his face and that’s so…Mahanon was so much better at keeping his emotions limited to a slight change in his mouth, a fraction of a tilt of the head, the faintest raising of an eyebrow. This Mahanon who openly looks at her with such worry —

“Yes. But there’s rumor that the shem Chantry leader is going to try and call for a truce,” Mahanon says. “Remember? The hahren from the different clans have been sending messengers around trying to coordinate a group to go and spy on it if it happens.”

And ultimately they don’t send a group. They send two people. A hunter. A first.

Mahanon. Ellana.

Ellana looks into Mahanon’s eyes. He doesn’t remember any of this. Ellana didn’t dream it, either. She’s…she’s gone back in time. Seven years. Somehow. She isn’t Dorian, she doesn’t know how to parse this. She doesn’t know the science or the mathematics or the theory. She just know it happened and she’s possibly alone.

No Mahanon — not the version that’s grown with her through war, at least —, no Dorian, no Evelyn, no Max, no Kaaras, no Herah, no Malika, no Edric, no Cole, no Varric, no Josephine —

No Bull.

Ellana quickly and violently shoves that thought aside because if she has it now she might break down completely.

Right now, Ellana can stop this. She’s worked with the Left Hand of the Divine, she’s worked with assassins, saboteurs, bards, the greatest minds of Thedas. She can manipulate everything so that their clan lives. She gets them the hell out of Wycome and somewhere safe. She and Mahanon don’t have to go to the Conclave. Neither of them have to go through what they did.

Or.

She can make sure they get there. Ellana doesn’t think it’s possible to stop Justinia’s murder. As they are, and even if Mahanon believed her if she told him, they aren’t strong enough to do that and there isn’t enough time to find the people who are.

She can make sure they get there, though. Ellana can make sure they get there and that they join the Inquisition. She can stop the minor mistakes from happening. It won’t be like…it won’t be like before. When she did this seven years ago in her mind. But she can get it close, and then she can get it better.

And maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

She can regain what she’s lost. Or…well. Earn it again.

(Vhenan, Ellana thinks, closing her hand and imagining a well worn tooth. Vhenan, please find me worthy of you once more.)

[heartslogos]

newfragile yellows [488]

Bull gets the notification, a soft buzzing chime, on his earpiece and waves his arm in the air as he finishes choking the life out of a guy with his other arm, “Alright, guys, Wrap it up. The Ambassador has a new mission for us. Collection will be here for clean up in about five.”

Jenny groans through the coms, he sees her do a flip and tumble off the second story of a parking structure onto some cargo trucks, arrows notched as she fires at the armored trucks Trevelyan is ripping into. “Ugh. Agent Lavellan? I hate them. They’re so…creepy. In their suits and shit.”

“You’ve worked with them longer than anyone else here has,” Bull says.

“I like Agent Lavellan,” Malika says. Bull blinks away as the light from the early morning sun gleams off of her metallic red armor. He can hear the whine of her thrusters as she brings herself level to the building the extremists have holed themselves up in. She starts melting an opening the window. “This is risky. I mean, for all we know they’ve got guns leveled at me. I can’t really tell with my scanners. I mean, I can, but I could be wrong.”

“Get me up there,” the Seeker says, tapping on Bull’s arm.

“If you wanted to be thrown,” Bull says, “You’re better off asking Trevelyan.”

“She’s focused on other things,” the Seeker says, the eye on her shield glinting like it’s rolling at him. “You’re our second strongest. Get me up there.”

“Hawke would be offended.”

“Hawke is off world doing whatever it is that legends do in their alien planet worlds,” Sera says. “Wait. Is that what the Ambassador is calling us back for? Hawke?”

“I don’t think so,” Malika says, “I have a notification set up for any energy readings that would signal Hawke coming back. I haven’t gotten any. Are you really going to throw the Seeker up here? Seems kind of dangerous.”

“I’ll be fine.” Bull bends down as she prepares to get a running start. “I’ve been through worse during the war.”

“I meant for the people inside,” Malika says. “Jenny, how come you don’t like Agent Lavellan?”

Bull grunts as the Seeker’s boot hits his palm and he pushes her up. She sails over the armored trucks and the mess Trevelyan is making out of them. Malika moves out of the way in time for the Seeker to crash through the melted and cut glass, shield first. Let the punishment commence, he supposes.

“I don’t like any of the agents,” Sera says.

“You are an agent.”

“Yeah. But I was like. Recruited for this when I was sixteen because it was either this or prison and I happened to eventually like doing this better. Don’t you think the agents are creepy? In their suits and their sunglasses and all that Big Brother, government agent shit?”

“I mean…when you put it like that. What do you think Bull?”

“Don’t ask him. He has a thing for Agent Lavellan.”

“Which one?”

“Both.”

“They’re both hot,” Bull says. “I’m a man of good taste.”

There’s a soft chime that signals someone entering their frequency.

“Pew pew.” Bull looks ahead and sees that some of the extremists running out of the building — running from the Seeker — go down before they can attract Trevelyan’s attention. He can faintly see the red of a tranq dart in each of them.

Above them there’s the sound of one of the Inquisition’s heli-craft.

“Seeker, I’m giving you five minutes to wrap up whatever it is you’re doing in that building before I send in agents to clear it,” Agent Lavellan says. “The rest of you get ready for extraction. We’ve received a request from the Circle for assistance.”

Bull groans. “Fuck.”

“Oh come on, not the Circle, they’re such boring douches,” Sera says.

“Someone help me get the doctor back to normal,” Malika says, landing out of reach from the large, green woman who’s currently shredding armored trucks like paper.

“The Circle never asks for a team up,” Bull says, “What’s their deal now? They want to use us as bait or some shit?”

“Probably. I mean, I’d go for your hot ass,” Agent Lavellan says. Bull turns around to see where the earlier shots came from and he sees her about a block and half over, past the three story parking garage Jenny had been using earlier. She waves. “Hey, babes. That strangle hold you got earlier? Magnifique. I would’ve said something earlier but I was calibrating my scope. Can you believe Agent Lavellan didn’t pack my normal scope? Unbelievable.”

“I’m not responsible for your gear,” Agent Lavellan snaps. “Besides, we were already late. We’re on a schedule, Agent.”

“Oh, well if you want to play it that way, Agent, we wouldn’t have been so behind if you weren’t so picky about aircraft.”

“Like you would be willing to fly a craft that was previously piloted by Agent Trevelyan. It smells of cheese.”

“It doesn’t matter! Suck it up, buttercup!”

There’s a soft groan and Bull’s attention is drawn back to the fight in front of him, as Doctor Trevelyan shrinks down to her normal size, the color of her skin fading from green to a light tan. She wobbles a bit before sitting down on the ground. And then lying down.

“Ugh. I want to throw up,” Dr. Trevelyan groans. “Why didn’t anyone stop me sooner?”

Malika bends down, helmet clicking open and retracting from her face as she rubs Dr. Trevelyan’s back.

“Good news is that our prototype fabric works. You aren’t naked!”

Dr. Trevelyan groans louder.

There’s a loud thud as the Seeker jumps out of the window and lands heavily on an armored vehicle.

“Let’s go,” the Seeker says. “We’re done here.”

“Nice,” Agent Lavellan says as the other Agent Lavellan starts to land the aircraft. “Guess it’s just me doing clean up then. By the way, the Ambassador told me to tell you, the Iron Bull, specifically, not to mess with anyone from the Circle.”

“Unfair. She only said that because she knows I sometimes listen to you,” Bull says.

“Attempt it for me, babe? Come on. You can play nice with them! Remember that one time in Antiva? You. Me. The romance. The mystique. The mood lighting. The violin. Those newbie Circle recruits. The meteor. The possible Uranium leak.”

“How could I ever forget Antiva? Fine. No promises.”

[heartslogos]

newfragile yellows [921]

“Look, it doesn’t count if you’re already planning your defeat. What happened to going in with a positive attitude?” Dorian’s actions betray his words, though. He’s worrying his lip and fiddling with the ends of his sleeves as his eyes rove across the maps and papers scattered across the table, like some kind of divine mystic searching for answers in the tossing of bones or the settling of tea leaves, but coming up empty.

“I’m being realistic,” Cullen says, looking very solemn as he rests his chin over his folded hands, eyes downcast as he surveys the battlefield. “I have to plan for our losses. If we lose here but manage a safe retreat we can regroup and possibly find another way to succeed.”

“There’s always a solution,” Sera protests. “Come on. There’s a brain underneath all that frizz. Use it. This is not the worst situation we’ve been in. We’ve gotten out of worse with less on our side. Ellana, what do you think?”

Ellana’s in a similar posture to Cullen, but she’s staring straight across the table at the Iron Bull, who is as unreadable as ever. He’s giving nothing away. He meets her gaze with a calm quirked eyebrow and otherwise impassive gaze.

“Bull wouldn’t make a level that we couldn’t get past. He’s sneaky and mean but he’s not that mean,” Ellana says. “There’s a solution to this. We just need to find it.”

“You guys are going real hard at this whole thing,” Mahanon says as he steals some food from one of their snack bowls. “It’s just a tabletop game.”

Everyone at the table shoots him affronted, if not outraged, looks.

“Nerds,” Mahanon mutters as he retreats. “I’ve got to go out and run some errands. I’m expecting something in the mail so I need one of you to sign for it. Not Malika. The person’s got to be of legal age.”

“What exactly did you get?”

“Alcohol.”

“They can mail alcohol now?”

“Only in some provinces,” Mahanon replies. “Don’t forget. If the doorbell rings or if someone knocks you go answer it and sign. I’m not having this be returned to sender, I’ve been waiting all week for this wine to arrive.”

“What’s wrong with the wine we have?”

“I’ve had it before.”

“Oh look at you, being all bougie,” Sera says. “You and Trevelyan gonna start a yacht club? Play some tennis on the weekends?  Get matching charm bracelets?”

Mahanon ignores the blonde elf and fixes his gaze on his sister before turning to her boyfriend. Judging them to be lost causes he turns to Dorian. “It’s going to be up to you.”

“I am also over twenty one,” Sera says.

“As am I?”

Mahanon points at Sera, “Spiteful brat.”

He points at Cullen, “The only brain cell among the players capable of understanding tactics. You aren’t leaving that table.”

He turns back to Dorian. “I’ll give you first pour if you sign for it. Deal?”

Dorian holds out his hand for Mahanon to shake, “Deal.”

“I’m going to start a timer if you guys take any longer,” Bull says, holding out his hand. Malika, eager to learn and eager to get the game moving forward by any measure, hands Bull an hour glass filled with black sand.

“When we asked you over to observe and see if you wanted to play it wasn’t so you could help the DM ruin us,” Sera complains.

“I think I’d really like being a DM,” Malika says, “I’m learning so much. I feel like I’m also picking up life skills for running group projects. This is great.”

“This is awful.” Cullen covers his eyes. “Damn. Alright. I can’t think of anything else. Everyone we need to retreat. Save and gather as many NPC allies as we can. Sera, do you still have your teleport spell? Um. The tree stride?”

Sera double checks her character sheet. “Yeah. But that’s my last spell. After that I’m toast. I’m just cantrips.”

“Dorian, how are you doing?”

“I’m alright. The rage is really helping me manage my hit points,” Dorian answers, “But with the enemies up in the air there isn’t anything I can do to actually help aside from hope they continue to target me instead of the rest of you.”

“Can you be the last of us, then? Bring up the rear and keep a guard up?”

“As long as they don’t pull out some heavy spells — which they probably will — then for now yes.”

“Ellana? How are you doing?”

“Not so hot on the ki points. Not going to lie. I kind of used most of them because I didn’t think there was a secret part two to this fight,” Ellana replies. “My health isn’t exactly at its best, either. That last round took a lot out of me. Like, a lot a lot. And I didn’t even get anything useful.” Ellana doesn’t break eye contact with the Iron Bull. “What secrets are in that beautiful head of yours? What are you planning?”

“Take your turns and find out,” Bull replies sedately as he slowly stands up to start moving pieces. “Alright. Times up. I hope you’ve got a plan.”

“We’ve got a plan. It’s not a good plan. It’s essentially run away very fast and find somewhere to hide,” Dorian says. “I somehow felt better prepared to fight the elder dragons from the last story arc than this. I felt better fighting the undead lich when we were level five.”

“If I question how well you balanced this game out loud will you penalize me?” Sera asks as Bull starts putting down new enemy figures onto the board. “Fuck off. That’s too many. That’s too many. Ellana, why the fuck did you let him buy that many?”

“He’s been hiding them. He must have been buying them in small installments so I wouldn’t notice,” Ellana replies. “This is a long game. You’ve been planning this encounter for months. What for? What’s your motivation? Talk to me, Bull.”

“The time for talking is over. We’re back in initiative order with the addition of some new NPCs.” Bull points at a cluster of figures arranged near Dorian with one hand and starts rolling dice behind the DM screen with the other. Malika takes up her pencil to take notes on damage and movement. “Start rolling some constitution saving throws, Pavus. You’re the only one this cluster can focus on right now and this kind of attention isn’t a good thing.”