#I also had a freak incident where I stayed up for like 40 hours

[floorpancakes]

somehow, beyond all human comprehension, circumstances and health be damned, i successfully submitted my first complete, on time project sekai design entry! i present to you… dashing daisy!

[soldrawss]

Sol i need headcanons for the brothers, please im begging you

BRUH I GOT YOU

I’m currently working on some little fics for them BUT I CAN GIVE YOU SOME DETAILS BECAUSE I’M DYING TO SHARE

(Warning, gets a little dark towards the middle, but overall fine. Sorry for the long read. I went for a DEEP dive on the Age Gap Au)

Ace was put into foster care 4 hours after his birth. His father died before he was born and his mother died during childbirth. Ace had nothing to his name but physical traits of the dead (Like his father's sharp eyes and his mother’s freckles) He grew up with a need to prove himself and to gain something that truly belonged to him all on his own.

Sabo was placed in foster care when he was 5 because of an altercation with his abusive and possesive parents, involving him having broken ribs and running away.

Ace and Sabo met in a halfway home for troubled youths when they were 6. (They both had issues with authority and past placements in foster homes, so they quickly bonded over that, and decided to stick together ever since)

Their bond was so strong that ‘honorary’ brothers didn’t really fit them. They were brothers. And they stuck together and stood up for one another like it was them against the world (which sometimes it was)

They would often run away from the halfway home they were at, trying to earn a living on their own on the streets, and often commit petty thefts in order to survive. 

These little runaway trips wouldn’t last long though, because they were always caught by Officer Garp, a police officer that happened to have a knack for catching little runaways.

However tough Garp acted though, he had an incredibly big soft spot for these two little brats that were only trying to make their lives better. These two kids, barely 8 years old, who had so much hatred for the world because of adults in their lives that failed them. Adults that hurt them, giving them scars and bruises on their hearts just as easily as the scars and bruises on the little frames. 

After a particular runaway incident, Ace breaks down and confesses about all the horrible placements he and Sabo had been in before. How social services always judge Ace’s sharp eyes and label in a problem child, how Sabo’s quick wit always get him in trouble with the adults, how they both have scars and bruises from past foster homes they were placed in, and that's why Ace and Sabo runaway. They’re tired of getting placed in bad homes. They’re tired of having adults try to separate them. Ace is all Sabo has and vice versa because that's the only person in the whole world who they trust to not hurt them. And Garp thinks that’s the last fucking straw.

Garp, much to Ace and Sabo’s but nobody else’s surprise, adopts both the boys, and takes them into his own home. Because dammit, if they’re just gonna runaway, they might as well stay with someone who will at least love them enough to always look for them and bring them back to a good home when they do.

And it’s weird at first, because Garp is the rough and loud and nosey officer that used to grab them by the scruffs of their shirts and drag them back to that awful halfway home kicking and screaming. But then it gets better. Because he still yells at them, but it’s with a tempered and fiercely protective love it when he does. He still grabs them, but it’s just to pull them into a rough bear hug that they fervently pretend they don’t like. And every dinner is spent with tears of laughter in their eyes and cheeks warm with delight at the stories he tells them. (They call him old man with affection and he’s their father figure even though they treat him like their grandpa.)

Sabo joins his school’s baseball team! Which is so freaking cool! He’s a really strong batter, can weild a bat like it’s an extension of his own arm, and Ace and Garp are always the loudest cheers on the bleachers every home run hit Sabo makes.

Garp makes Ace take up boxing, because the kid’s got a lot of pent-up rage and aggression, and he figures it’s a good constructive sort of therapy for the rowdy brat.

The two still get up to mischief every now and again, though. Nothing illegal, but Garp is still having to wrangle up his two little idiots before they do something stupid. (They get into a lot of fights with local gangs because they have smart mouths and are still a little reckless)

Garp has a biological son that Ace and Sabo never met due to Garp’s and Dragon’s strained relationship. Garp had always bad-mouthed him whenever his son was brought up, but it was always with words that had no heat behind them, and Sabo and Ace could tell there was a sadness behind his eyes whenever he looked at the picture of his son in his wallet.

The boys were 10 when they got the news of Dragon’s death a week after it happened. Garp had gotten the phone call when he and the boys were watching some late-night trash tv on the weekend, and he had all but strangled the phone in a grip that turned his knuckles white. He didn’t say what had killed his son, (he never did), but he had told the boys he needed to take care of something, told them to pack up some of their things, dropped them off at his friend Newgate’s house, and got the quickest flight out that night.

He came back 3 days later, and when he did, he had a tiny little baby with him.

Ace and Sabo were no strangers to babies. There was always some snot-nosed kid that would get dropped off at the halfway home (and then adopted that week, because everybody loved babies), and they were pretty sure this baby wasn’t gonna be any different. Because babies were loud and gross and never stopped crying, and Ace and Sabo were prepared for the absolute worse.

But then they stood over the baby’s crib to get a good look at him, and the baby looked back.

And smiled the biggest and happiest smile Ace and Sabo had ever seen.

And Garp had said “His name is Luffy,��� and Ace and Sabo had been hooked around his little finger ever since. 

Luffy was barely 6 months old, and was a bundle of chubby cheeks and contagious giggles. With big brown chocolate colored eyes that melted all the sharp corners and edges of Ace’s and Sabo’s hearts.

Because Sabo and Ace were the same age, and neither one of them felt like the older or younger brother. They were equals in every way. But it was different with Luffy. Because Luffy was tiny, and soft and could barely wrap all 5 of his little fingers around one of theirs, and it hit Sabo and Ace like a bullet train because oh.

 Oh this is what it was like to be an older brother. This was what it was like to have a little brother. And Sabo and Ace have always looked out for each other, of course. But Luffy was something they had to protect fully and with their entire being. His smile, his laughter, his heart. All of it. Sabo and Ace knew all the horrible things in the world, knew all the hatred and fear and heartbreak the world could throw at you and it was like a silent promise to each other they never verbalized, that Luffy should and would never have to go through the things they went through. He would never feel unloved. He would never feel unwanted. He would never feel like he had to prove his worth or reason for existing. (He was worth more than any price anyone could give anyway)

Sabo and Ace stopped getting into trouble. They got good grades, excelled in their respective clubs, and didn’t give Garp any reason to chase them down in his old cop car and bring them home. (They were always at home anyway, giving Luffy piggyback rides and teaching him how to ride a bike and do one-handed handstands and cartwheels, and basking in the warmth that was Luffy’s endless love) And they lived in peace like that for 5 years.

Then the fire happened.

Garp was a good police officer and an even better Deputy Chief, and for almost 40 years, he served on the Foosha County Police Department. He had put away a lot of bad guys and saved a lot of people in the process and was an honored and highly respected man. However, this also made him a big target and earned him quite a few enemies. He was 3 weeks away from retirement and spending most of those weeks staying at home, playing with Luffy, and ingnoring the last of his paperwork left on his office desk.

When the fire broke out, Ace and Sabo had just turned the corner from the bus stop on their way home from school. They had seen the smoke, but didn’t know where it was coming from till they saw the towering blaze of fire that used to be their 2 story home and the group of neighbors surrounding the outside. 

They managed to push their way to the front, hands shaking and eyes wide and absolutely breathless, because that was their house! That was their house that was one fire and where was gramps?! Where was Luffy?!

The only thing Ace heard Sabo whisper among the roar of the fire and the loud murmur of people around them was “Do you hear that? That... crying?” Before Sabo surged forward.

Ace didn’t have time to reach out and stop him, and by the time he could, Sabo had already disappeared into the open front door, which was covered in flames. He had screamed out, tried to race in and follow his brother into the flames, but the neighbors around him were quicker than he was and pulled him back. 

Edward Newgate, one of their neighbors and close personal friend of Garp’s was in the crowd, and he was holding Ace to his chest with an arm like an iron bar, as he was on the phone with the local fire department. (Newgate was also the Foosha County fire chief, and was shouting at his lieutenants to “get your asses out here now!’) But Ace didn’t hear a word he was saying. All he could do was struggle to get out of the older man’s grip, reach out for his brother and best friend, and scream his lungs out.

What felt like hours went by, and Ace felt like his heart was shattering into a million piece, the glass shards falling around him, as he sobbed into Newgate's chest, thinking he had lost everything. His home. His family. His only purpose and reason for living.

And then some of the neighbors were shouting again, only this time in surprised alarm and Ace looked up with hazy eyes blurred by tears, to see something was coming out of the front door.

And it could only be Sabo. Ace knew it was him before he could even register it, and bolted out of Newgate's grips that had slacked at the surprise and towards his brother.

Ace met Sabo only a few feet from the door, Sabo collapsing into his arms, and Ace had to pull him the extra few feet away because the flames were still too much to bear even at that distance.

And Sabo’s skin was hot and red and covered in smoke and ash alike. There was a giant welting red burn against the side of Sabo’s face that looked like it would leave a scar forever, but Ace was having a hard time focusing on it because he was too bust focusing on the bundle of blankets that Sabo was desperately trying to push into Ace’s arms.

And Ace was already crying before, but he began crying even harder when he removed the fold of blankets to reveal a muffled Luffy, covered in ash but unharmed, crying his eyes out. 

Sabo had a coughing fit that rocked his whole body, and burns that looked like they'd hurt forever, but he was smiling when Ace broke into a sob, clutching both Sabo and Luffy into his chest.

The firefighters and paramedics came a few minutes later, and they had to physically pull Sabo and Luffy from Ace’s arms to check and treat them. Luffy only ended up with a few mild burns and cuts on his arms and legs and some burning of his throat from inhaling so much smoke, but Sabo had to be taken to the hospital immediately for his burns, especially for the one on his face. Ace pleaded to let them all ride in the same ambulence on the way to the hosipital, and held on to Sabo’s shirt sleeve with a grip that would take the end of the world and then some for him to let go.

Sabo had to get some surgery and treatment to save his left eye, but he was all in all ok, and Ace and Luffy were allowed to visit his hospital room for as long as they needed.

When Ace finally confronted Sabo on why he had ran into the house in the first place, it was on the first night of their hospital stay. Sabo had a giant white gauze wrapping half of his head, and he looked at Ace with tired blue eyes that looked a little fuzy, still a little drugged from all the medication he was on to ease the pain. 

And Ace felt bad about it, he really did, because Sabo didn’t derserve to be grilled on the matter. Not after he had sacrificed himself and saved Luffy. Their little brother. Their little brother who they wouldn’t even have anymore if it weren’t for Sabo. 

But Ace had to know. He was so mad and heartbroken and scared out of his mind when Sabo had rushed in without word or warning. Because they had lost Garp. They had almost lost Luffy. And Ace could have almost lost Sabo too.

But Luffy was tucked underneath Sabo’s arm on the hospital bed, and Sabo just smiled at Ace with a patience that only Ace and Luffy could pull out of him, and patted the other side for Ace to join them. Ace climbed onto the bed beside him, and even with the two 15-year-olds and one little 5 year old, the bed didn’t feel too small at all.

Sabo explained that he could hear crying from the door and he just moved. Knowing it was Luffy before his mind could really think about the implications behind that. He confessed how the flames hurt at first. Hurt so bad, and it was so hot, and everything, from the floor to the ceiling, was on fire and he could barely see anything through the smoke. But he could hear Luffy’s little rough and horse scream, coming from one of the back rooms that used to be Garp's office, and suddenly all Sabo could afford to think about was Luffy’s crying.

Sabo would tell a watered-down version of this story to the cops in the morning, because they were Garp's friend and companions, and they only really needed the broad details for their report anyway. 

He’ll tell a heroic version of this story, lacking any horrific graphics, to an older Luffy whenever the eternally curious kid wonders and asks about it.

But he only ever told the whole story right then on that night, one arm tight around his baby brother in a toothed and protective love, while the other one gripped his best friend's hands with shaking and bandaged fingers hard enough to leave bruising.

Garp was long dead when Sabo found him. The smell of his skin burning off is something that will haunt Sabo for the rest of his life. (Sometimes certain smells will set him off. Uncooked bacon is not allowed in the house anymore after one traumatic morning when Luffy is six. Campfires are viewed and enjoyed from a distance.)

He was lying on his stomach, clutching something to his chest. Sabo knew it was Luffy by the cries, bundled up in a few quilts and one of this office rugs, and Sabo knew he had to get them out of there before the smoke killed them off like it had a personal agenda against them.

The heat was unbearable, Sabo had confessed, but it was nothing compared to having to drag Luffy from underneath Garp’s grip. The old man was built like a brick house, sure, but even in death, his grip on Luffy, protecting Luffy, like he was daring the world to take anything away from him, was steadfast and almost unbbreakable. 

It was the hardest thing Sabo had ever had to make himself do.

He didn’t look at Garp’s face. His body was burned black and bloody and raw, and Sabo couldn’t live with himself if his memory of Garp’s face was replaced by anything other than with the one of his scruffy beard and the shit-eating grin that he always wore.

When he pulled Luffy out, he didn’t look back, and raced out of the house as fast as he could. Something along the way fell and smacked him in the face, knocking him down at one point, but Sabo couldn’t pay it much mind. He got back up, and continued towards the door. He could barely see, barely breathe, with all the smoke and the ash, and the pain from the fire was almost numbing against his skin, but he didn’t stop.

All he could think about was Luffy, still struggling and crying against the blankets wrapped tightly around him. Next thing he knew, he was outside, and looking up at Ace’s snot-covered face.

Ace had never seen Sabo cry for the almost 10 years he knew him. He didn’t cry when he was 7, and the Anderson family had called him a freak and had sent him back after a failed foster home placement. He didn’t cry when he was 9, and broke his arm falling out of the tree in their backyard that Garp had told him not to climb, so of course he had to climb it. And he didn’t even cry earlier that day, at 15, when he was off medication and feeling the full extent of his painful burns.

So when tears started pooling out of Sabo’s pale blue eyes, falling down his cheeks and staining the cotton white blanket he was under as he told his story, Ace pretended not to notice, wrapped an arm around Sabo’s shoulders, and held him like it was the only lifeline in the world. 

Garp’s funeral was held the following week. Closed casket. All the police departments in the county, and even some outside of it, showed up to give him a full send-off. Ace cried for both Sabo and himself. Sabo spoke a few words for the both of them. And Luffy stood between them, holding both their hands. They explained the night before that gramps was gone, but they don’t think the notion of death really got through to Luffy. He was crying, but only because Ace was crying, and when he asked ‘can gramps come out of the box to give me a hug before he goes away?’ everyone has to clench their teeth and hold their breaths to stop their hearts from breaking. Sabo kneeled down to wrap Luffy in a tight hug. Ace covered his face with his arm and cried harder

(They never bother asking Luffy about how the fire started, or what happened that day. Luffy doesn’t remember, and they don’t push it further. The truth isn’t as important as Luffy’s mentality is, but Garp’s old squad promises that they won’t rest until they get to the bottom of it. And as much as Ace and Sabo want justice and revenge, they have Luffy to think about, so they leave it up to the police)

Sabo and Ace are almost 16, and they suddenly have no parental figure, no home, no anything, and suddenly they’re faced with the horrible notion that even more can be taken from them when a blast from their past threatens to take Luffy away from them too.

They’re no stranger to the foster care system, so when social services show up at the motel they were renting with Garp’s savings, they feel their hearts drop to their stomach for fear of the very real possibility that Luffy will be placed in immediate foster care, and possibly, so would they. 

Ace and Sabo jump into action then, because no way, no fucking way, were they gonna lose Luffy. They had lost everything else. They almost did lose Luffy. They weren’t gonna risk that chance again.

Ace was only a few weeks older than Sabo. Sabo hadn’t paused a second to jump into the fire, risking life and limb, to protect what little they had. It was Ace’s turn to be the heroic older brother. And on the day he turned 16, Ace petitioned legal guardianship and parental rights for Sabo and Luffy.

And it was hard, because of course the courts felt sorry for him, the grandson of one of the best police chiefs in the county’s history, begging the courts to let him keep what little family he had left together. The courts wanted to give it to him, wanted to help him. But Luffy was a child. And Ace and Sabo were practically still kids themselves. Asking kids to raise themselves was something no one should ask them to do. 

But Ace and Sabo fought for it. Ace was 16, and Sabo would be 16 soon enough. They could get GED’s, no problem. They’d get jobs, get a little apartment near Luffy’s school, attend any parenting and child service meeting required of them. They’d buy all the necessities over again and they’d love Luffy where no other foster family could even compare. They’d do everything, everything and anything, to keep Luffy. To let them stay together.

With a couple of vouchers from Garp’s old police squad, including one from an overly enthusiastic Edward Newgate and one from the boy’s homeroom teacher, Makino, the courts ruled in Ace’s and Sabo’s favor, and Luffy was officially theirs until they proved that Luffy was better off somewhere else.

Ace and Sabo were never gonna let that happen.

They got a little 2 bedroom apartment a couple blocks from Luffy’s elementary. They quit school, and worked extra hard to earn their GED’s within the following months. (With the help of their old teachers and a few of their overly enthusiastic neighbors)

Ace got a job at the local fire department, as a rookie in training under Newgate.

Sabo got a job at the local news station, writing reports on top of his interning duties. 

Ace eventually got a motorcycle that same year, which scared Sabo half to death and delighted Luffy to no end. It was cheaper than a car, and easier to travel to and from work on, and no matter how hard Sabo tried, he couldn’t come up with a valid reason why Ace shouldn’t use it to their advantage. So Sabo made Ace promise to always wear a helmet when riding it, and that Luffy wasn’t allowed to ride it until he was much older. (Which Luffy pouted about to no end)

And it’s hard at times, both of them working overtime just to make enough to support themselves and keep them afloat, but it’s good, and it’s theirs.

Luffy makes a friend on his first day of first grade named Zoro Roronoa, another kid that lives just across the street from them, and when Ace and Sabo know they’re gonna be late in getting home, Luffy goes over there and hangs out until they can pick him up (Which is totally fine with Zoro’s father Koushirou, a kendo teacher and single father of 6-year-old Zoro and 9-year-old Kuina. Zoro has a bit of a personality problem and often has trouble making friends (because the child doesn’t see a need to) so when little bright-eyed and endlessly joyful Luffy pops into their life, Kushirou jumps at the chance to have him over as much as possible, because the two small children seem to bring out the best in each other, and are best friends attached at the hip) Sabo and Ace are eternally grateful to the kind man)

A few years go by, and Luffy is 8. Ace is still working at the fire station and is now legally allowed to join them on calls and emergencies. (Fire used to make Ace nervous, because he almost lost everything to it. Now he has a personal agenda with it, to make sure it doesn’t take anything from anyone else)

Sabo has moved up the ranks now, and when he turns 18, confronts Ace with a rare job opportunity he was offered.

“It’s a year-long internship for this really cool company that reports and delivers high-class diplomatic information around,” Sabo starts, rubbing the back of his head like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “I’d be working as like, a cool undercover spy with diplomatic immunity and a messenger bag. It’s not dangerous at all, and pays almost triple my paycheck now, which would really help us out. But it’s overseas, and I’d be gone for a whole year. You’d be raising Luffy all by yourself, birthdays and holidays and skinned knees, with just the two of you, so say the word, and I’ll totally turn this job down on the spot.”

And it’s scary to Ace. Because he hasn’t been alone since he was 6 years old, and he can’t possibly remember a time when Sabo hadn’t been by his side. His best friend and brother. It was always the two of them. Two little runaways that found a home, lost that home, and then built a new home all on their own despite it all. And neither of them had ever been away from Luffy for longer than a weekend, so Ace was sure it would kill Sabo to be away from them for so long.

But he also knew that Sabo was only playing this off like it wasn’t a big deal, when in fact it was the job opportunity of a lifetime for someone like Sabo, a kid who breathed adventure and freedom with every breath. And that when he talked about it, his eyes sparkled with a joy that Ace would hate himself forever for taking it away. 

Sabo was giving Ace the choice, and Ace knew that Sabo would go along with whatever Ace decided without a second thought or complaint. But Ace knew that Sabo would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn't go, so he slugged Sabo in the arm, gave him his best shit-eating, confident grin, (the kind he used to give him right before they were about to steal some food as kids, or about to get into a fight when they were teens) and said, “You let me have a motorcycle. The least I can do is let you go road tripping abroad.”

Because Ace and Luffy would be fine. They’d miss Sabo like crazy, and Ace was pretty sure Sabo was like, 90% of his impulse control, but they’d survive. Sabo had the burn marks to prove how far he was willing to go for their family, and Ace had never thanked him for that. Ace was never gonna live that down, and was going to spend the rest of his life making it up to both Sabo AND Luffy, and prove just how good of an older brother he could be. This was the least he could do for them.

[howtosingit]

Fic: this space between us is weighing me down

Carlos finds out about TK’s life-threatening incident.

*

A missing moment from 1x08.

1.4K | Also on AO3

- - - - - -

It’s actually Paul who texts him. 

He’d been driving the Ackermans back home when he heard the call from dispatch, a report of shots fired at the location that he’d just left. Two other officers were already on the scene - the ones who had originally been called to the Crump’s house before he had unexpectedly come across Mrs. Ackerman and the two calls had converged. They’d agreed that Carlos should get the Ackermans home as soon as possible, for Mr. Ackerman’s safety, so he’d briefly watched the 126 gather their gear before he’d pulled away. 

And now, gunshots.

He waits with bated breath, listening for the call for backup, wondering if he should just turn around. He looks in the rearview mirror, taking in the distressed state of both of his backseat passengers. Carlos doesn’t want to take them back there, knowing that it could very well be another trigger for Mr. Ackerman. He turns to his partner, opening his mouth to ask what she thinks they should do, but before he can speak, the radio crackles to life again.

“Scene is secure, no backup required. Dispatch, alert the nearest hospital that we have an incoming adult male gunshot victim, through and through to the left shoulder.”

Carlos’s heart pounds in his chest, but he refuses to let himself consider the worst. There were so many people on the scene, and while he likes everyone that he’s met from the 126 and would hate to see any of them hurt, he can’t be sure that the victim is one of them. He really, really can’t be sure that it’s the one person he needs it to not be.

It takes another 40 minutes before he gets the text.

He’s at his desk, filing his report for the evening, his mind struggling to make sense of the truly bizarre sequence of events. He glances down at his phone, sighing at the confirmation that he still has a few hours left of his shift. Carlos rubs at his tired eyes, reaching over to grab his coffee from the corner of his desk, and hears his phone vibrate next to him.

It’s a text from Paul, and the message causes him to freeze, the blood draining from his face as a cold shiver runs through him. 

Hey, man. TK’s in surgery right now at St. David’s North. It’s looking pretty bad, so I thought you’d want to know.

The words roll through him, churning into a destructive storm in the pit of his stomach. His eyes prickle with the threat of tears, and he grips the edge of his desk tightly, trying to control his emotions. His breathing is shallow, the air pushing painfully through his lungs, and the room begins to spin slowly around him. He closes his eyes, trying to make it all stop.

He’s at work, he’s in the middle of a shift, and he cannot afford to freak out right now.

Somewhere beneath it all, he feels this huge onslaught of guilt and regret. 

It’s been four days since TK had come over and they’d gone for a run. Four days since his grief over losing Iris again caused him to step over the line that he had so firmly drawn and kiss TK. Four days since he and TK had last spoken to one another.

It’s his fault, the silence. TK has acknowledged him on pretty much every call they’ve responded to, his mouth pulled into a thin line as he waved across the scene. Carlos always waved back, hoping that his own expression might convey everything that he has yet to say. TK always responds with a nod, as if he understands that Carlos just needs time.

Time that he might no longer have, now that TK is fighting for more.

Carlos thinks back to the past few nights, sitting on his couch with his phone in his hand, his fingers hovering over TK’s number, daring himself to call the other man. He wanted to reach out, to be near TK again, to talk to him and touch him and make things right. But, every time he came close, the guilt would overwhelm him, and he’d decide that the right thing to do was to give TK space. 

The truth is, there’s a chasm between them, and it’s one of his own making.

More than anything, he wants to drive to the hospital right this minute and be by TK’s side. He wants to hold him and kiss him and tell him how sorry he is for pushing him away. He wants to tell TK that, while he knows things will be messy and hard and scary, that he wants all of that if it means that he gets to have him, too. 

He just wants to be with him, no matter what.

The reality is, he can’t leave. There’s three hours left of his shift, and his sergeant won’t just let him leave for a person who, to an outsider, is just a one-time hookup-turned-friend. Besides, if TK is in surgery for a gunshot wound to his shoulder, there’s no telling how long it’ll be before he can have visitors.

So, Carlos stays where he is, trapped at his desk with his heart somewhere inside St. David’s North Medical Center, miles away from the precinct.

The rest of his shift passes in a blur, with him pushing paperwork and filling out a number of forms that all begin to look the same after a few hours.

When he finally clocks out, locking up his desk and grabbing his keys, he doesn’t even hesitate before driving in the direction of the hospital. Paul had updated him on TK’s condition only a few minutes ago, letting him know that he’d made it out of surgery, but that his blood loss had been a major concern for the doctors. They’d apparently repaired the firefighter’s collapsed lung, but currently had no idea what kind of long-term damage may have happened to his brain before they were able to get him into surgery.

Paul doesn’t say it directly, but Carlos knows how to read between the lines, all too familiar with the dangers of blood loss from a gunshot wound. 

His heart refuses to believe that he’s spoken to TK for the last time, even when his brain tries to prepare for the possibility.

Carlos angrily wipes away the tears on his cheeks as he makes his way down the halls of St. David’s, the bright fluorescent hospital lights giving him no shadows to hide in. Nurses and doctors pass by, some looking worried as they stare up at him. He’s sure he’s quite a sight to see: a police officer on the edge of losing it. 

He can’t be bothered by their concern.

The moment he spots TK’s pale face resting against the pillow, he nearly lets out an anguished cry, his feet stopping in the doorway of the room. He swallows down the sudden urge to vomit, his stomach rolling around like a monster that refuses to be tamed. 

Captain Strand finally spots him, inviting him inside. Carlos responds, the polite lie coming after years and years of conditioning, though he can’t stop the way his breath hitches. His brain screams at him to run towards TK, to hold him tight and never let him go, but he pushes that thought down. He can’t lose it, not now that he’s so close.

TK’s dad passes him, resting a comforting hand on his neck. He wants to say something, possibly thank you or I’m sorry or something else that feels equally inadequate, but he doesn’t. Now that the room has been cleared for him, all he wants to do is be with TK.

He moves slowly towards the bed, taking in TK’s stillness. It’s not a trait that he associates with the other man, and it takes a moment for his brain to reconcile the person before him with the man that he’s known for months. 

Seated by the bed, he hesitates only a moment before reaching out, his fingers dancing across TK’s knuckles where his hand lays near his hip. He lets out a breath, the sound stuttering through him, as he drags his palm up TK’s forearm to gently grip his elbow, feeling the faint pulse of blood coursing through his veins. 

Another tear falls, but this time Carlos ignores it, his vision blurring as he stares at the blank face of the man in front of him. 

The man who holds him in his orbit, the man Carlos is pretty sure he won’t be able to handle losing.

The man he’s falling in love with.

It’s the closest they’ve been in days, and yet they’ve never felt farther apart.

[grimelords]

So since the last time I posted one of these the entire world has changed dramatically and hopefully 4 hours of music will tide you over in quarantine for a bit longer. Strangely I’ve been busier than ever, and what started as a personal challenge to listen to a new album every day in February turned into me listening to 116 new albums in March and 124 in April. I’ve got a stacked google doc full of star ratings and dates now and it’s really been a lot of fun, I highly recommend trying it yourself. This is my March playlist, because I accidentally took a month off, and I’m thinking of either switching these playlists to weekly to make them a little more digestible or just dropping them whenever. Who knows. Let me know what you think and drop album recommendations in the comments please.

Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0k1JjT8fXcUFO6VpM3kaez?si=gWSv88vdShKSnHhLJ_80pQ

If you’d like to receive these playlists in a more digestible email format, please subscribe to my tinyletter here: http://tinyletter.com/grimelords

On A Slow Boat To China - Bing Crosby & Peggy Lee: Ok first off it’s amazing this song isn’t more racist. I don't remember now how or why I came across this. I think I was just thinking about crooners and how as a genre it's now existed in common popularity as a nostalgic idyll of a mytholigised past far longer than it was ever actually popular which is interesting. The origin of this song, according to wikipedia, is also one of the most 40s ideas I've ever read: "I'd like to get you on a slow boat to China" was a well-known phrase among poker players, referring to a person who lost steadily and handsomely. The idea being that a "slow boat to China" was the longest trip one could imagine. Loesser moved the phrase to a more romantic setting, yet it eventually entered general parlance to mean anything that takes an extremely long time".

Fight Night - Migos: I saw that Offset had some new show on Quibi the extremely fake sounding streaming service and I thought "how did Migos get so world conqueringly large that they get to make 10 minute shows nobody will watch for a $2 billion venture capital funded app that will never make any money?" They seem to have this massive reputation without having much to back it up. The last thing I remember everyone talking about was how Culure II was two hours long in order to game streaming numbers and was simply not good. They seemed to have sort of settled into making background music for scrolling instagram. But then I remembered Fight Night and I thought: "oh wait, that's right, Migos are fucking great". Where their other big hits like Bad And Boujee and Walk It Talk It have this sort of laid back vibe where they've comfortably nailed the formula and relax onto it, Fight Night commands your attention. StackboyTwan killed the beat - it has this propulsive momentum where it feels like it's constantly ramping up, moving up from the sidesick and bassline in the verse, up to the claps on the beat, and the big gang chants on the offbeat once the full instrumentation kicks in - then it just goes around and around and around with the constant bassline the whole tim. It's a perfect all-rise production because it never actually explodes, it's all building tension held down by an unchanging bassline.

Do It Puritan! - El Hombre Trajeado & Sue Tompkins: I am extremely delighted to announce that Sue Tompkins of one of my all time favourite single album bands Life Without Buildings has broken a nearly 20 year musical hiatus to appear on this song by El Hombre Trajeado. It is so nice to hear how her voice has changed and her approach has stayed the same. Her style is so unique and so good and I don't think I'll ever get tired of it.

5 8 6 - New Order: Before 'the incident' I had tickets to see New Order at the end of March and so I embarked on a big listen through of their discography, which has now unfortunately made it feel even worse that live music is cancelled indefinitely.

Oom Sha La La - Haley Heynderickx: First of all I love songs where they talking about how they're writing a song halfway through. And I love songs that seem like a pretty normal singer songwriter indie thing where someone just starts screaming near the end. I love this song. A great staring at the wall and absolutely losing your mind because you haven't done anything with your whole life anthem.

Elektrobank - The Chemical Brothers: Can you believe I've never listening to a full Chemical Brothers album before this month? Can you believe big beat ever went our of style? It feels insane that we ever swapped this sort of energy for the beige algorithm of EDM. I think there's a real triumph in this album, and in this track especially of replicating the live feeling in studio. Giving it this much space to grow and change and get very hairy near the end is amazing, it feels like it was just recorded live.

My Mind's A Ship (That's Going Down) - Katie Pruitt: It feels very rare to me that this sort of extremely smooth Nashville prduction actually makes a song better. It has a habit of strangling the life out of a song and making it blend into a boring paste of soundalikes, but with Katie Pruitt it works amazingly. Her songwriting is so distinct and clear and her voice, especially near the end where it punches hole in the sky, is so strong and so her own that it doesn't need anything else.

Water - Ohmme: "What if Tegan And Sara were a noise band instead?" is a question I didn't know I needed an answer to. I love any band that has the guts to write songs like this that sound like pop from an alternate history, so off kilter and odd and noisy but with this undeniable pop heart that the duo vocals make sound like schoolyard clapping chants remixed by Lightning Bolt.

Lions, Tigers and Bears - SLIFT: A friend put me on to Slift and described them as French King Gizz and really, I'm inclined to agree. This is the traditional long last song at the end of their new album, and as usual I am advocating that every song should be the long last song at the end of the album. I love this style of jam where everyone else goes to space but the rhythm section just digs in and works hard as fuck for ten minutes. Then the whole last 3 minutes of the song are just fat drone riffs. This song's got everything.

The Pines - 070 Shake: This 070 Shake album is unbeleivably good and it warms my heart to see the dark energy of The Pines live on through another century in yet another permutation. I have more to say about it later in the Jackson C Frank version coming up but it feels like this 070 Shake album kind of came and went but I implore you to listen, it’s an aoty contender for sure.

Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On - Funkadelic: If you can stop thinking about the intro, which I certainly can’t (Hey lady won’t you be my dog and I’ll be your tree and you can pee on me.) there is so much goodness in this song. For a while now I’ve been thinking about how, for lack of a better word, ‘positive’ music is consistently underrated in the critical canon. Dance music, disco and funk especially are derided as empty sugar music, while every cookie cutter metal band absolutely demands to be taken seriously. In dance music this manifests as genres like tech house sucking all the fun and individuality out of music until it’s just an endless parade of producers working to a schematic of the barest essentials. It feels like you can’t have fun and be taken seriously at the same time, which feels like an obvious contradiction but shouldn’t be!

Spoils - Dry Cleaning: Dry Cleaning are my Lock Of The Month Band To Watch In The Future Because They’re Gonna Go Off. They have such a great sound and I’m desperate for an album because I just need more. This song absolutely knocked me down when I first heard it. I love any band where it sounds like the singer has just wandered in while the rest of them were rehearsing. There’s a very good talking-songs movement happening in the UK right now between these guys, Do Nothing and Fontaines D.C and i’m excited to see where it progresses. I might put together a playlist a little later to show you what I mean.

As - Stevie Wonder: I finally listened to Songs In The Key Of Life this month, which is an experience I would recommend to everyone. This shit goes for 21 songs over 105 minutes and absolute bangs the whole way. The original release of this album was a double LP plus a 7", which is yet another reason I am grateful for streaming that I don't have to buy a damn box set to hear this thing.

Sleep Now In The Fire - Rage Against The Machine: I am working on a very niche playlist called Songs Where The Guitar Amp Accidentally Picks Up A Nearby Radio Station For A Couple Of Seconds and it's only 3 songs so far. A Man A Plan A Canal Panama by The Fall Of Troy, Melody 4 by Tera Melos and Sleep Now In The Fire by Rage Against The Machine. In every single one of those songs it feels like a critical component even though it's just an accident that's been left in because it sounds good. Here it's the perfect ending as the rage dies down and the commercial world fades back in. Anyway, my other question about this song is about the great Michael Moore directed video where they famously shut down Wall Street for an afternoon. There's a shot of a guy for a second holding a sign that says Donald Trump For President in 1999. Which is odd but not out of the question, he's been famous for a long time and there's always been freaks. My question is why the fuck did he have that sign that day? Was he amongst the Rage Against The Machine Fans that showed up? A counter protestor? Was he, perhaps most chillingly of all, just walking idly around Wall Street with his Donald Trump For President sign like usual and stumbled upon this whole hoo-haa accidentally?

Applause (Purity Ring Remix) - Lady Gaga: Did you fucking know that Purity Ring did a remix of Applause? If there’s something I’d love to know more about and it’s Purity Ring’s forays into pop production. After their first album they did some production for rappers like Danny Brown in the great track 25 Bucks, which is a good fit really - their sound is witch house with the tempo pushed back up, witch house of course just being chopped and screwed reinvented by tumblr users. So it’s a natural fit to take that new perspective back into the world of hip hop. They also did this fantastic remix of Applause after their first album. Then, after their second album they produced 3 songs for Katy Perry’s Witness album, and one Katy Perry song for a Final Fantasy mobile game soundtrack (?) and feel like the long silence and delay between their second and third albums is because of more behind the scenes pop production work - but if that’s true, where is it? Is it, as I suspect, part of my own personal Pepe Silvia, Katy Perry’s scrapped 2019 album that has vanished into thin air? Or is it part of Chromatica? I think Purity Ring have solidified an interesting place in pop, paving the way for Billie Eilish and Kim Petras’ dark anti-pop and so i’m excited to see where they go after this new album now that they’re the architects of the new wave.

React/Revolt - Drahla: The smartest thing you can do is add a saxophone to your band. The whole first half of this song could go for 20 minutes of growling screaming saxophone post-punk and I wouldn't mind. Then when the second half of the song kicks in it's fantastic in the way this whole Drahla album is: it's tight and sprawling post-punk at the same time with a complicated structure that seems to just pile onto itself instead of ever circling back.

And I Was Like - Porridge Radio: I'm seemingly having a real thing this month for songs that open with a bizzare acapella chant. Between this and the Funkadelic one it's a genre I'm very interested in hearing more of. Isaac Newton was a virgin and it's important to recognise that. The thing I love about this song is how it's in 3 distinc sections: Isaac Newton was a virgin, she's a birthday girl in a birthday world, and mum no please it's grunge, and they all feel like the concentrated energy of a 14 year old's thoughts. She sounds like she's almost crying when she sings 'she's a birthday girl in a birthday world'. The concentrated confusing teenaged energy of this song is just overwhelming.

Dirty Mattresses - Mama's Broke: So much of contemporary 'traditional folk' either exists as pure nostalgia music or as music that's trying too hard to be 'authentic' and evoke a mythology of a bygone time, but Mama's Broke manage to make it feel new and modern but honest and  authentic at the same time. The super close harmonies and modern approach remind me of House And Land who I also love, but the songwriting is in another class entirely.

Building A House - CHOPCHOP: I don't know if you've ever seen Bad Boy Bubby but CHOPCHOP feels a little like the band that he ends up joining at the end. A musical ensemble built to enable the will of a very strange man. I think the band is from the UK and I'm not sure where the singer is from, but he has this incredible deeply accented voice that brings such a gravity to everything he sings in the way that anyone speaking english as a second language accidentally brings new weight to common turns of phrase.

Universal Soldier - Jay Electronica: It feels fitting, looking back, that Jay Electronica finally released his album right before the world ended. It was literally now or never. Some how Jay-Z is the breakout star of this album for me. He's got some of his best verses in years on here and he's a great opposition to Electronica's flow when they trade verses. I would also, as an aside, like to know the origin of the kids cheering sample throughout this, because it's the same one from AM//Radio by Earl Sweatshirt and Wish You Were Gay by Billie Eilish. So what's that about.

Sticky Hulks - Thee Oh Sees: I've been very slowly getting into Oh Sees and I love them a lot so far. Their unweildy, huge discography spread across a lot of variations of the same name makes digging into them very rewarding as well. There's a great line on their wiki detailing all the times they've changed their name that goes: Orinoka Crash Suite (1997–2003), OCS (2003–2005, 2017), Orange County Sound (2005), The Ohsees (2006), The Oh Sees (2006–2008), Thee Oh Sees (2008–2017), Oh Sees (2017–2019) Osees (2019) to give you some idea of what we're working with here. Basically it's just everything you could want from a pychedelic band like this: a history and discography as shaggy as the songs themselves.

Knife On The Platter - BODEGA: In reading about Bodega I learned that they don't have a drummer in the traditional sense. They have someone credited as a 'stand up percussionist', and in listening back I realised that's they key to the groove in their music. He's not playing a kit he's just slamming at a tom and a snare on a rack, while one of the singers plays hi-hat here and there. So all the drumming has this barebones caveman feel to it and I absolutely love it. The band feels a lot like The Fashion, and that whole mid-2000s dance-punk movement that I've been desparate to come back so naturally I love it a lot.

Against Gravity - Horse Lords: Horse Lords are one of the most incredible bands I've heard in a long time. Somewhere between a more analogue Battles and Laddio Bolocko, they make a kind of churning math-jazz that sounds like huge intersecting squares of rhythm slowly overlapping. It feels like there's an infinite depth in these songs, you can listen and focus on a single instrument and see it shifting in and out of place with everyone else, before you lose it again and it retreats back into the swirling mass.

Plain To See Plainsman - Colter Wall: I've been listening to this Colter Wall album a lot, and it's really beginning to rank among my all time favourites. I grew up around the flattest place in the southern hemisphere, so I love the plains and it's very nice to have a cowboy song I can relate to like that.

The Nail - Sarah Shook & The Disarmers: Sarah Shook has so much character in her voice I completely love it. She is also a fantastic songwriter that manages to make outlaw country punk that sounds authentic and doesn't have the rockabilly posturing that a lot of the genre suffers from.

Inner Reaches 慾望的暗角二 - Gong Gong Gong 工工工: The best thing about Gong Gong Gong is you can listen to this whole song before you realise they don't have a drummer. They're a guitar and bass duo that play and sing with such a layered rhythmic intensity between the two of them that they really don't need one. A drummer would just clutter the space already taken up by their ferocious rhythm.

Country Pie - Bob Dylan: I'm a big fan of Bob Dylan's dumb songs. He has a lot where if it's the first song you ever heard from him you would be mad at whoever told you he was the greatest songwriter to ever live for trying to trick you like this. What I especially love about this song is how abruptly it ends, like dad just came home and everyone panicked cause they're know they're not supposed to be staying up that late.

You Did It Yourself - Arthur Russell: It seems hard to believe that I've only just found out about Arthur Russel. He seems to be a mainstay of Music Guy lists and somehow I've only heard of him this month. I've been obsessing over the Iowa Dream album, which is a compilation of a lot of different (mostly extremely high quality) demos from the late 70s to mid 80s and what really shines through other than the singular strength of his songwriting is how readily and easily he bends from country style folk to romantic piano ballads, to groovy post-punk like this. What I love so much about this song is it's a great lesson in songwriting: sometimes a song can just be a vague review of a middling movie and still have emotional resonance. Incredible. There's a great NPR article about Arthur Russel and the process of assembling half-takes and demos into complete recordings that you should read if you're interested. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/20/779721417/which-arthur-russell-are-we-getting-on-iowa-dream

The Dogs Outside Are Barking - Arthur Russell: I love this song because it's such a perfect distillation of a teenaged moment: trying to find a moment alone with someone when you have no freedom at all to create one. The song cycles through potential situations but leaves the problem unresolved, existing in the moment of nervous romantic tension preceding an unasked question and it's just beautiful.

Men For Miles - Ought: I love the vocal melody in the verse here so much. Spiking up unnaturally at the end of the lines like a nervous and strange version of The Strokes. Even the way he cramps his words in in the chorus is so good, switching registers randomly like he's impersonating someone else.

Mister Soweto - Lizzy Mercier Descloux: https://pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/9828-lizzy-mercier-descloux-behind-the-muse/ Pitchfork has a great article about Lizzy Mercier Descloux detailing how she is continually undervalued and underappreciated. I found her though my Discover Weekly and became immediately obsessed with this album - a perfect mix of off-kilter 80s bass and brass that is so colourful and seems to move in a million directions at once like the songs can't even catch up with themselves sometimes. I'm excited to dig into her discography more and try to understand her more because she has a truly unique approach that I can't get enough of.

Sweden - Marilyn Crispell: I've been looking for a while for other pianists of Cecil Taylor's calibre, rare type that it is and I am so glad to have finally found out about Marilyn Crispell. She plays free jazz like Taylor, but in much less percussive and disonnant style. There's a New York Times quote that seems to follow her that says "Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano. She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz." and it's really very apt. She will move with seemingly no warning at all from mediative, colourful stokes to a mad descent unto uncertainty and beyond, then back again without a moments hesitation. Her music moves like a dream, linking a stream of unlinked images with an ease that only seems incongruous on reflection.

Twins - Gem Club: I have loved this song for a very long time and I come back to it over and over and appreciate it anew. What I appreciate about on listening to it this time is the strangeness of it's structure, following up the verse with an instrumental break, and then a long instrumental intro to the chorus gives it so much space to spread out and breathe, giving the beautiful gravity of the song even more weight. Then after the chorus it moves straight to a bridge and then the intro and first verse again. It's a fantastic song that makes it's small parts so large, where another songwriter or another producer would pare them down.

Grand Central - Paul Cauthen: Something I've learned in listening to a lot of cowboy music is that the number one thing that cowboys hate and fear is getting hanged. They hate it worse than cats hate getting sprayed with water. I found out about Paul Cauthen combing through Colter Wall's similar artists looking for more of this brand of new old fashioned country and I really found it here. Paul Cauthen comes from four generations of preachers and left the church to pursue country music instead, which feels like an extremely old fashioned position to be in here in 2020 but I guess lots of people in Texas still live like that, and thank god they do or we wouldn't have Paul Cauthen's big mournful Elvis voice to sing us songs about the railway.

Serafina - BAMBARA: I love this sort of spoken word leather jacket rock and roll. It's so extremely Cool in an old fashioned way. Like a more rock and roll version of Enablers.

So 4 Real - The Hecks: I love love love this song that sounds like a sped up Prince demo. The strange thinness of the mix and the way the vocals are buried just makes it sound so strange and great, like it was put together on some ancient 4 track recorder that can't handle the pure energy of the song.

In The Pines (Version 2) - Jackson C. Frank: There's a very good 3 hour compilation of Jackson C. Frank recordings that came out a few years called Remastered And Unreleased that I listened through the other day. It's just magnificent. This version of In The Pines is one of my favourite I've ever heard, the mournful vocals coupled with his churning rhythm guitar really brings out the darkness of it in a way I've never heard.

(Tumble) In The Wind (Version 1) - Jackson C. Frank: Another favourite from this compilation that is slightly hard to listen to. I don't know if there's a date on it but I'd guess this was recorded near the end of his life. It is so beautiful, but you can hear in his voice and breathing that he's unwell. In Horseshoe Crabs by Hopalong she sings a story from his perspective this song really seems to fit in the second half of that. "Woke from the dream and I was old / Staring at the ass crack of dawn / Walked these streets up and down / Looking for Paul Simon / All I found was myself, lost in time / I tried singing my songs / But I lost my mind"

Sludge - Squid: I'm thinking of putting together a playlist of all the great Black Midi-adjacent bands I've found out about recently and Squid is at the top of the list. This new breed of art-punk is so fantastic and goes in a million different directions. I'm just so excited it exists.

Straight Shot - Quelle Chris: I love this song and Guns is a phenomenal album but there’s one thing bothering me. The ‘who are you, what are you’ part at the end sounds so incredibly familiar to me and I can’t figure out why. As far as I can tell it’s not a sample, but googling reveals that the english voice on it is fucking James Acaster the standup comedian. So what’s going on? Quelle Chris himself is less than helpful: “Straight Shot is one of those ideas that reached out to me, we got along and I simply showed it around town. The chorus, poem at the end and basic piano progression literally came to me in two separate dreams”. Who knows. Great song though.

Levitation - Dua Lipa: What I really like about this song is that she says sugarboo. This whole album bangs and Dua is really reaping the benefits of being the only pop star with the guts to release an album while everyone’s in lockdown I also have a half-baked theory about the way this song is almost interpolating Blame It On The Boogie in the ‘moonlight, starlight’ part as a sort of aggressive takeover of Michael Jackson’s cancelled legacy. Which is smart really. The same way Taylor Swift is re-recording her albums, let’s just get The Weeknd in the studio for a couple of days and give the world back it’s bangers.

Another Crashed Car - Nine Inch Nails: I am so glad Trent Reznor put out another two volumes of Ghosts. Ghosts I-IV from 2008 seems to have been the bridge from his Nine Inch Nails work to his film score work, and now that he’s had such success with that it’s nice to hear him writing in this style without telling anyone else’s story again. It’s also interesting for him to go back to this project now that Ghosts I-IV has paid dividends in the form of the sample at the centre of Old Town Road but that’s neither here nor there. It’s hard to pick and individual track from these, because they work so effectively as long form albums and not individual tracks, but I chose this one because I put the album on as background ambient while I was doing some boring data entry at work and this track is the point at which I realised I was going out of my mind with stress from doing the simplest tasks because of Trent’s Damned Chords.

Lilacs - Waxahatchee: This is a perfect song. It makes me want to like, draw charts about it and go through it bar by bar to figure out how she did it. It’s perfectly put together. It feels like she uses every trick in the book and it just comes together flawlessly in 3 minutes. Amazing.

Cool Water - Hank Williams: I decided to properly listen to Hank Williams because his shadow stretches over so much of country music, and while a lot of his music really alienated or bored me, and a lot of his songs feel like they would read as novelty songs today (like Hey Good Looking), this is the song that made me understand why he’s so revered.

In My Bones (feat. Kimbra and Tank And The Bangas) - Jacob Collier: Jacob Collier generally irks me. He makes brain music for redditors that lose their mind when someone shows them chord inversions or odd time signatures. Youtubers whose whole personality is ‘y’all heard Giant Steps?’ But he killed it on this song. It’s great despite him. There’s still a lot of corniness to work through, mostly in the big yuck funky lyrics, but structurally it’s a kaleidoscope and a big chunk of its success I’m putting down to Kimbra and Tank who understand that performance is a bigger part of a song than composition in a way Collier maybe doesn’t yet. He can overload the bassline and stop-start the rhythms as much as he likes but without actual personalities driving it it’ll just sound like a Peter Gabriel midi played at 200%.

Earthquake - Graham Central Station: I learned something wonderful in researching this band. The leader, Larry Graham, who was in Sly And The Family Stone is credited with inventing slap bass. He himself refers to the technique as "thumpin' and pluckin' ".

Quand Les Larmes D’un Ange Font Danser La Neige - Melody’s Echo Chamber: Once again furious that I’ve known of Melody’s Echo Chamber for years but never listened to them until now. I have been missing out. This is a perfect sprawling psychedelic jam punctuated with a bizzare cut-up recording about shitting yourself when you die and being declared brain dead in the vatican. It’s got everything. I had to look up who the drummer was on this song because he’s just nailing it, and it turns out it’s Johan Holmegaard from Dungen which is really a perfect fit.

Murder Most Foul - Bob Dylan: I was thinking the other day about how Bob Dylan is doing in quarantine. The man who hasn’t stopped moving his whole life and who’s been on a never ending tour  since the 70s is now, I assume, just pacing a hole in a hotel carpet somewhere and jabbering to himself. The strangest part of Bob dropping this 17 minute song about JFK out of nowhere is that he hasn’t put out any original music since 2012. So a gigantic song like this is an even bigger surprise. I, already a huge fan of gigantic songs and Bob Dylan, unsurprisingly love it. I love the slow stirring of the instrumentation, like he hired Dirty Three as a backing band and I love that nearly the entire second half is just listing good songs that he knows. It’s a remarkable song and unlike anything i’ve heard before from Dylan or anyone else. It’s interesting to hear Bob Dylan step into being the great chronicler of the 60s like he’s been told he already was his entire life almost 50 years later, finally accepting the fate foisted on him. The other thing I love about this song is the line when he for some reason praises Lee Harvey Oswald’s shooting “Greatest magic trick ever under the sun / Perfectly executed, skillfully done”

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0k1JjT8fXcUFO6VpM3kaez?si=gWSv88vdShKSnHhLJ_80pQ

[poppyknitt]

The Most Average Collab (A JSE Egos Fanfic)

[I hope you all take joy in knowing that after this fic, which is the first ever chapter in the Chase Brody part of my fics, I will finally start attempting to do both the JSE and the Mark side of my fics, rather than just staying in my current comfort zone, since I figured out that the only way for me to create my own little headcanons about the egos and the ego lore is for me to make a bunch of fics and pretend they’re relevant-]

[Also, don’t worry, Anti’s first ever chapter will come soon, too. It’ll just be a while because I have quite a bit to set up for it before I actually make it.]

[September 18th]

Chase yawned, a bit exhausted, as he had woken up about an hour ago, and the sun was still barely breaching the horizon, so it was pretty dark out. He had decided to just walk to the Bro Average set today, so he had to get up a bit earlier than normal. It was probably around 6:40-7AM, and the majority of the others living in their neighborhood were either already at work or just asleep at this hour, with Henrik and Robbie being the only exceptions that he could think of.

He diverged from the sidewalk, deciding he wanted to go the scenic route today, since he would obviously arrive fairly early if he followed the road for the entire walk there. The path was used often, so even with its thick surrounding vegetation and woodlands, the lines of where the path ended and the forest began were very clear. He hadn’t brought his actual gun with him today, since they were filming a bunch of stunts that involved things like skateboarding, parkour, and probably even attempting to do a full, 360° aerial flip on a dirt bike.

He heard a twig snap, which was followed by computer glitch noises, and he turned, knowing exactly who was there. Anti.

“Oh, hey bro. Funny thing, actually- I was almost starting to miss your annoying, squeaky ten-year-old voice!” Chase mocked the glitch, even though he was fully aware of how stupid that was to try and pull off without any method of defending himself against the dark ego.

Silence.

Well, shit. If he wasn’t going to attack me before, he’s definitely gonna do it now. Chase internally facepalmed at his stupidity. He turned around, and continued walking to work, but quickening his pace this time, since he knew that if he managed to get to a place where there were witnesses that wouldn’t even stop to consider what they were gonna do before jumping into the fight and helping Chase, Anti would be less inclined to attack him.

It took him about 10-15 minutes to actually get there, and thankfully, Anti seemed to have just been watching the events of today unfold for now, since he didn’t hear anything to indicate the demon’s return. He clocked into work, and entered the studio, where he was greeted warmly by the few others whom tended to arrive early- The director, producer, and a few other high-positioned names in the crew.

The day went by quickly, and thankfully, they ended up finishing the recording process early on, and he was sent home around 5:46 that evening, so he had time to record a few videos for the channel. He had no idea what to do, though, so, since Mark was still going to be in town for the next few days, he messaged him, asking if he wanted to attempt to do a collab video.

After a few minutes, Mark messaged back.

Sure, we could give it a shot.

But, uh, you’re not gonna freak out like Jack did, are you?

He rolled his eyes.

No. Why would I? Not like I’m suffering from brain damage.

Mark took a bit longer this time.

You sure, dude? I mean, you did fuck yourself up pretty badly for a few months, back when you did that power hour.

He sighed in annoyance. God, when would Mark let that incident go? Literally everyone else had already done so!

Mark. For the love of god. That was nearly two years ago

This time, his asshole “friend” responded a lot quicker.

Yeah, I know. I was just checking. See you in a few.

The collab video went pretty smoothly, and, for once, they even ended up getting stuff done. They had brainstormed over what to record while Mark was on his way, and for about 15 minutes after Mark arrived. Actually, it wasn’t until Chase started editing the video to add in the audio and facecam that he realized the video wasn’t actually as normal as he thought. It was about 20 minutes long, which left plenty of room for things to have gone wrong.

About 2 minutes in, the facecam glitched, with that familiar, green static look that came with Anti’s presence.

6:03- RGB color distortion. The audio distorted as well, and all he could make out was, in a highly distorted form of Mark’s voice, “I̺͔̩͞'̭̹m̀ ̻ͦ͝s̡̱̰̳̙̮̰̊̂͊̈́ͬ͗̔ͅtͥͣ͗ͨ̂̇͐iͫͣ͋͏̬͓̞l͔̱̾͊l͇̙͚͈͓̣͞ͅ ̰̫͖̠̅̉̈́́hͣͩͮè͚r͍̗̞̰͇̔ͥ͗͋̈́e̯̳̦͟“, which freaked him out a bit, since he thought that only Anti was able to screw with the videos he or one of the other septic egos recorded.

15:24- What he could only assume was either glitched screaming or laughter was faintly heard in the background of the video, and he knew it couldn’t have been game audio, since the game they were playing at that point wasn’t at all glitchy or horror-based.

18:01- More RGB color distortion, however, this time, it extended past the facecam, and affected the gameplay recording too. The audio distorted about 15 seconds later, and the same voice was heard, but this time, it said, “Y̸̤ȯ̧͛ụ̰̝̲͈̰͙̋ͯ̿ͫ͆͛̚'͍͍r̙̦͉͓̻̒͐͐̒̒ě͐̓͟ ͪ̔̂͗͝g̰̳o̴͉͔̟i̮̻̫͓̤̳͐͂́̍ͣ̍n̔g̶ ̶t̝̹̙̹̙̍̏̈ͫ̾o͍̦̗͉̯̖̐̐̈ͩ̏͐ ̵̼͓͓̗ͦͨ̇̀r̖͓̻̰͔͚̄̊ͭ̚̚̚̚ͅe̷͖ͪġ̼̠͖̐ͩ͢r̞̣e͉͕̅ͥtͅ loc҉̦̠̦͓̫̳̝k̺̝͍͍͔̼͌ͦͣ̈́ͤ̂͡i̐͆̔̐ͩͤn͙̖͇̼̲̖̤̐͑͛̉̇ͭͤg͖̹̪ ̭̥̤ͣ̀̋m͟e̘̰̣̜̫̲̠͑̐͐͗͌ͭ́ ̢̲̙̙̋̿̐aw̬̼̜͓̪̫͕ä̃͋͑̓̓ͬy̛̱͚̞̯̮̫͈͐ͬ͆ͨͣ̈́ͣ.̶͌͑̄̄̿̆͑”. He felt chills run down his spine, because this meant that this wasn’t a joke. It was legitimately Dark this time- He knew that, because he knew Marvin had helped Mark trap Dark somewhere inside his computer, back in the beginning of the year, and, also, at Mark’s desperate demanding, had wiped all memory of anything related to the entity from his mind, which, was thus the reason why Mark was totally clueless about the situation with Dark and Jack.

21:04- The post-outro clip Chase and Mark had recorded was corrupted, and Chase swore he could hear Anti’s maniacal laughing in the background, as the video distorted beyond recognition, on all levels.

The recording autosaved itself, despite Chase’s attempts to prevent it from happening. He knew the video couldn’t go up on the channel, it was too dangerous to risk the community freaking out over the sudden, apparent team-up of the channels’ darkest egos, before the rest of them even had a plan formulated to prevent total chaos, death, and destruction raining down on Mark and Chase’s friends.

Suddenly, his screen went black, and he screamed when he saw the familiar face of Dark appear on the monitor.

“It was stupid of you to help them, Jack.” The demon said.

“I’m not Jack! I-I’m just one of his egos!” Chase protested.

“Now that I’m finally free again, we will come for you. Both of you.”

It immediately became obvious that Dark couldn’t hear him- this was probably a pre-recorded message- when there was no reaction to what he said.

“If you are really as clever as he says, then you should already know that there will be no stopping the chaos that we have ready for you.”

The lights in the egos’ house glitched off, and he felt nothing but pure dread as the recording went on.

“My advice to you? Repent your mistakes, and allow my ally to win at his game, and maybe, I will consider sparing you in my endgame.”

The recording cut to an end after that, and to Chase’s horror, he found that the collab video had been uploaded.

This was just the beginning to one gigantic nightmare.

[Chase #1/Darkiplier prologue pt. 2]

Henrik #1

Marvin #1

JBM #1

Sean #1/Darkiplier prologue pt. 1

JJ & Robbie #1

Anti #1

Chase #2

Markiplier connected egoverse, #1

@antis-loyal-puppet

@chaoticcrimsonrose

[emilyplaysotome]

Dating Diaries - Chapter 4 - One Day

Inspired by real events, Emi enters the dating world after her long term relationship ends. Determined to move forward, she starts dating and quickly finds herself in over her head.

In case you missed it, here are the previous chapters:

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3

I paced like a caged lioness in my now spotless apartment.

I’d cleaned every inch of it in anticipation of Kazumi’s arrival, and as our reunion became more and more imminent, the anxiety within me began to spiral out of control.

On this particular visit, we’d planned for him to stay with me in my apartment - rather than get a hotel room which seemed like a waste. 

I already regretted that decision seeing as how I was mentally preparing to ask Kazumi straight up how he felt about me. With no hotel room available, should the answer be the one I didn’t care for I’d be forced to suffer through a night with a man who had rejected me.

This would be the fifth time we saw each other in real life. 

It would be the third month of knowing each other as we communicated most days over TalkTime. I knew that my feelings were starting to become something real, and at times I felt as if I were on a runaway train with Kazumi as the conductor.

I’d taken the time spent away from Makoto (who was on holiday but still texted), before Kazumi’s arrival to reflect and had realized that our whole nebulous relationship had played out on his terms up until this point. 

Granted, I had not explicitly made any demands but it was obvious that he was in charge. We spoke on his terms - when he had time, not when I wanted to.

He made me wonder how he felt about me - if I was just a fling or maybe something more...

...and I needed to know if I could be something more because my heart was beginning to hope.

Hey Sunshine! I’m almost at your place - do you need me to pick you up anything?

No, that’s sweet but I’m really nervous. Just hurry up and get here already...

To that Kazu sent me a selfie of himself in the cab he was currently en route in, along with the caption, “How can you be nervous over such a simple guy with such a simple smile?”

You had to laugh at the fact that an award winning author with an impressive wikipedia page and tragic life story would dare call himself “simple”, but that was just another reason I adored him so much. 

He was full of contradictions and always fun.

You’re the least simple person I know. See you soon.

On our second date, Kazumi had made the trip from Kyoto to Tokyo under the guise that he had “meetings” to attend. He had gotten a hotel room for himself and texted me the day of to his arrival to ask if I was around.

His visit had come after 2 weeks of being apart and texting everyday. 

He’d told me that he missed my eyes, and hands, and smile the day after we’d met. From there he’d ask me about my day, or tell me about his, always letting me know that I was beautiful and that he missed me despite barely knowing me.

A few days before he’d arrived I had a sneaking suspicion he might try and visit as he covertly attempted to figure out what my plans were that weekend via TalkTime. When he did show up, the thing that surprised me most was when he bashfully admitted that the real purpose of this trip was not work meetings on Monday but to see me again.

I remember being happy and also incredibly freaked out that he would go so out of his way for me - a woman he’d only met once.

Mostly though, I was happy.

Neither Shizuo, nor any other man I’d ever met had done something so romantic on what seemed like a whim, and even though I made it clear that I was not going to sleep with him, I still ended up spending the night - talking and cuddling with him until I fell asleep in his arms.

We didn’t see each other for three weeks after that.

While apart, we continued to talk but he admitted that he was not able to keep up with my texting. What used to be in-depth, hour long conversations became a bit more infrequent but with that said, I didn’t mind.

I got used to his weird old-man texts.

For a writer, Kazu was pretty funny over TalkTime. 

Whenever he was upset he’d used multiple “!” and whenever I sent him something he liked (for example my corporate headshot for our company website) he’d use extra consonants to try and express that he thought I was pretty (”wowwwwwwww” he’d said).

These little Kazu-isms filled my heart with warmth, and I giggled over how pure they were in a sense, especially considering the fact that they were coming from a 40 year old man.

There was one night that we were talking when Kazu told me I’d become special to him. 

It had been out of left field to a degree - I’d told him that I’d read a book of his finally and as a result had gone down a bit of an intellectual rabbit hole which led me to an article that I thought he might appreciate.

Sunshine...I am so happy my words make you think like this :) I am looking forward to reading this article.

You don’t have to but you might like it. I thought it was a good “truth is stranger than fiction” companion to your murder mystery.

I will read it! I want to say this too...I know that I’m going to care about you forever and I hope that I’ll be able to keep you close to me in some way...even if you find some young man you like better than me.

I can’t see liking anyone more than you Kazu. 

I’d meant that too.

A week after that exchange Kazu came to Tokyo and it was during that visit when I’d learn about his “other lady” in Kyoto per my request. I respected and appreciated his transparency with me, and because it was obvious that he was honest despite the discomfort in having to be, I felt safe enough to sleep with him.

Before Shizuo I’d been with a few other guys, but being with Kazumi was like a completely different experience for me. It was passionate and animalistic, but somehow also kind and loving.

When he left I found myself feeling happier than I’d ever been in my life, and a week later he came back, noting that he “had to see me again before a month of [his] book tour.”

That fourth date was when he really started to open up to me. 

While in his arms he quietly told me about his childhood, and how at 7 years old his parents had died in a car accident. As a writer, he was able to go into detail about his grief and trauma surrounding the incident and I found tears quietly streaming down my face as he spoke.

He also told me about his first heartbreak (though not in detail), and how in some ways that was just as difficult as losing his parents. He quietly explained (and apologized) for keeping people at arm’s length for fear of growing too close and losing someone special.

“I’ve lost too many people in my life Sunshine...but I can already tell that I don’t want to lose you.”

Those moments are the reason why I held on to Kazumi in his absence. 

They’re the reason why I pined for him despite the fact that he was unable to be as “present” as Makoto had been in the week we’d been together.

They felt deeper...but at the same time words are pretty, but actions speak louder.

Knowing that there were many moments that Kazumi was in Kyoto or elsewhere using the app we’d met on (thanks to public geotracking) plunged my heart into darkness. I knew that it had only been four dates spread over 2 months, but if he had asked me to be his I would have said yes without a second thought.

Why did he feel the need to go out with others if I was someone he was sure he didn’t want to lose?

He was maybe lying...

...or just selfish.

These were the thoughts that plagued me while apart from him, and I knew that on this fifth date I would need to get answers - even if it meant that this would be the last time I’d ever see him.

The intercom rang and I could feel myself shaking with nerves as I buzzed him into my apartment building. I slowly unlocked the door, preparing myself to see him after a month.

What if he looked different? What if he thought I looked different? What if we didn’t -

“Sunshine...”

Kazumi looked at me with those kind eyes of his that were never quite the same in the photos we sent each other while apart. He held out a bouquet of flowers for me (tulips to be exact) and with a grin added.

“It came with flower food. Very advanced.”

“Kazu...”

I could feel myself starting to shake. 

My nerves were getting the better of me, and I could feel affection welling up to the point I wondered if I should tell him that I wasn’t just starting to fall for him, but that I had already fallen.

Kazumi gently rested the flowers on the small table in my foyer and closed the front door behind him before taking me in his arms.

“I missed you so much Sunshine. I missed this so much.”

“Me too.”

I don’t know how long we stood there, but I knew that I was the happiest I’d been all week. 

I knew that unless something went awry, I was just going to fall more hopelessly in love with the man in front of me and because of how deep I already was in, I needed to know how he felt or run the risk of setting myself up for heartbreak so soon after Shizuo.

I know it sounds dramatic, but that moment at my door I wished that time would stretch on in a way that allowed me to live in that moment for longer than I’d be able. 

I found myself so scared that the answers wouldn’t be what I wanted, and that this was the last time I would be near him like this. That moment of being able to feel him and hold onto him was a moment that let me love him and pretend that he might love me too.

However, time doesn’t work that way and before I knew it he pulled his body away from mine before kissing me gently.

“You’ll get a real kiss once I’ve eaten and your nerves have calmed.”

I nodded, unable to speak, still shaking from the anxiety.

“I found a curry place around the corner from here - is that ok?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah Emi. My sweet Emi. I really did miss you.”

The walk over to the restaurant was uneventful. 

I’d managed to stop shaking and had started psyching myself up to deliver a speech of sorts where I would tell Kazumi that I couldn’t figure him out and that I wanted him to be honest about what his feelings were towards me.

I prepared myself for my biggest fear, which was that he would say I was fun and cute and if this stopped being fun for me he would understand.

“Kazu...”

“Alright. I know what I want - do you know what you want?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh boy,” he said with a chuckle. “I know that look of yours...”

“I...”

“You’ve got all the time in the world with me today Emi - let’s order first and then you can say as much as you want, alright?”

He reached across the table and took my hand in his, rubbing the back of it gently with his thumb. It reminded me of our first date, when we’d sat together at a restaurant and he’d somehow managed to do the same thing despite the fact that up until that point I hadn’t let a man touch me since Shizuo.

For some reason that day, I’d let him and with a mischievous smile he’d asked me if I liked the way he touched me.

I did then, and I did now.

When the waiter had left us, I took a deep breath and delivered my speech to Kazumi.

I told him that I couldn’t figure him out. I told him that he hid his feelings too well behind his words and his playfulness. I told him that I was starting to feel a lot for him and that I was frightened - convinced at times that I was just a young plaything to him that was nothing more than an exciting fuck, which in turn helped him to feel youthful again.

I asked him what he wanted from me. 

What this was exactly and what his ideal scenario was with us.

And then I waited - my eyes glued to a spot on the table for fear of what his expression might be.

“Sunshine...”

“What?”

“Sunshine...look at me.”

Kazumi’s gaze was soft and sweet, and I felt myself relax a little under it. 

“I don’t take a train 6 hours just because you’re good in the sack. I mean you are...but that’s not why I do it.”

“So why then?”

“Mmmm why indeed...”

“Kazu stop - I’m serious. I know you’re seeing that...other lady and I’m just confused why you bother when you have someone in the same city. And that’s not even a jealousy thing - it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It’s simple. I really like you Emi. I want you in my life - I can already tell that you’re someone who is going to be really special to me.”

“But what’s your ideal in all this? Like...I know you’ve said you don’t want to know about if I’m seeing anyone but do you care if I am?”

“Of course. I don’t want to know because I think I’d go mad with jealousy.”

“But then...I just don’t understand what you want.”

“What I want...I guess...maybe one day when you feel more ready, and when I’m ready...you’d be my girlfriend. I’d visit you here and you’d come to Kyoto to see me.”

"But what about...”

“There’s no future there for me, just fun...but you’re not there yet anyway right? That ex of yours...you’re not over him.”

Kazumi was right, but in that moment it just felt like a bit of an excuse. That said, I had no real retort.

The waiter took advantage of my pause to deliver our food, and with a big smile Kazumi exclaimed, “wow this looks great!” before taking a bite.

We ate in silence for a bit before Kazu looked at me with a serious expression and asked, “You’re not satisfied, are you? Tell me Sunshine - what do you want?”

“Huh?”

“What’s your ideal? If you could have things your way - what would that be?”

It was obvious - a world in which Kazumi lived full-time in Tokyo and was committed to dating me and only me. However, that wasn’t reality and if I thought about it, I found that my chest tightened ever so slightly at the thought of rushing into another relationship so quickly after Shizuo, and with that my bottom lip began to quiver on its own.

“I don’t know. I feel so confused.”

“Emi...it’s okay. There’s no rush. I’m not going anywhere...”

“I just...I don’t know what it is about you Kazu. You scare me so much. In the past when I’ve felt this way it’s never been reciprocated and I just feel like there’s gotta be a catch or something. I’m so scared you’re going to break my heart and after Shizuo - I just don’t think I can handle it. So please, if you’re the good person I think you are, and if there’s any chance you’re going to hurt me let’s just say goodbye after today.”

“Don’t say that. That’s too sad - please, don’t say that. I’d be heartbroken if you stopped talking to me.”

I knew he was serious by the way he looked at me. He could tell that I was starting to pull away, tempted to cut and run, and he grabbed my hand the way I liked, lacing his fingers through mine and giving it a squeeze.

“Don’t go anywhere, okay? Let’s just enjoy this together.”

At that moment, something changed for me.

I think it was due to the fact that it was obvious that he meant what he said. At the very least I was not just some plaything and his feelings for me were incredibly real. 

I had a hard time believing that I consumed his thoughts as much as he did mine, but at least I knew I was there somewhat.

It’s hard to be in the presence of the great Kazumi Kagami and not enjoy yourself. The ease in which he brings people out, and to that point, the ease in which he allows me to feel comfortable as myself soon had me back to normal.

By the end of our meal I was laughing and grilling him about all his adventures on the road. 

I learned about the nights out with his publisher, heard funny stories, and got travel and restaurant recommendations as he happily disclosed what he got up to while we were apart without realizing that many of those nights I figured his silence meant that he was with another woman. 

Instead I learned that he often would drink with Kotoko (his editor) and the people who organized each event, often returning to his hotel room in the early morning and ending his day by reading whatever it was I had sent him via TalkTime.

With a playful twinkle he took my hand as we left the restaurant to walk around my neighborhood and whispered, “Reading your texts made me feel a little less lonely in that room every night.”

That sentiment alone made me feel loved, and soon all the concerns I’d had about continuing down this path with him had melted away. 

We were back to being our happiest, best selves together as we enjoyed the park near my apartment before watching a film, and finally heading home for the night.

Every moment was filled with affection from Kazumi who either held my hand, or my waist, or kissed my cheek as we went from place to place. He not only had an ability to get me to relax and be myself but to make the person I was feel special and loved.

And perhaps it was for that reason alone that come nightfall I felt in my heart that I loved him.

At the time, it wasn’t a scary thought but a nice one. 

I had been so skeptical that I could ever be capable of feeling something like that again after Shizuo had betrayed me so deeply, yet I found myself naked in the arms of a man I’d grown to love after a few short months and in a way far deeper, and more honest than I ever had with Shizuo.

From the second I’d met Kazumi I’d felt this instant spark. Nothing had to be worked on - it was like magic.

I thought that kerosine and fire feeling would quickly wear off yet every time we were together it was the same and it had stretched on far longer than I thought it possible.

For the first time in my life I wondered if it was possible to convert that elusive instant connection into something that could stand the test of time.

Kazumi nuzzled my neck and I squirmed in his arms until I was facing him again. Our eyes locked, and my giggles subsided and instead were replaced by a deep feeling of contentment I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. I stared deep into his eyes, which at the moment reflected back the same placid feeling I was experiencing. 

My hand acted on its own, cupping his cheek before gently stroking his hair, eventually pushing it back and off his forehead. I then lovingly touched the hair on the side of his head, and then the back of his neck as I brought his face closer to mine and kissed him in a way which I hoped would communicate my feelings without words.

I don’t know when it was that we fell asleep after that. 

We quietly talked for a bit about our past relationships and once more, Kazumi opened up about the loss of an ex girlfriend (in far more detail this time) who was the root of why he was so noncommittal. At the time my back was to him but I could hear the hurt in his voice and felt a tear trickle down his face onto mine.

“You deserve a guy with a lot less baggage Sunshine.”

“You know a very smart man once told me that every experience you’ve been through, good or bad, makes you who you are today. And I really like the person you are today so I don’t mind.”

“Emi...I’m not used to having my own words turned on me...”

Kazumi buried his face in my hair by my neck and I felt his body as it held me tight, letting go of all the quiet tears he’d been holding inside.

Intimacy is a funny thing.

Some people mistake sex for intimacy, but what we experienced that night was intimacy in its truest form. Both of us allowed each other to be fully naked in front of the other, and as we opened up we were relieved to find that the person beside us did not push us aside, but instead pulled us closer.

Having experienced real intimacy with Kazumi reminded me of how superficial my current relationship with Makoto was. 

This was not to say Mako and I could not achieve something deeper, but in that moment if I had to choose there was no real choice.

It was Kazumi.

It’s always been Kazumi.

That realization only made his departure that much more difficult. 

“I wish I could keep you,” I muttered sadly, clinging onto him in my foyer.

“I’ll be back soon enough. I can’t have you getting sick of me.”

“I’d never get sick of you. You’re too weird, and funny, and handsome.”

“Emi...my beautiful Emi. My heart - I’m so happy we met.”

He kissed me again for a final time before leaving. It was a long, drawn out sweet kiss that tricked me into believing he loved me as much as I loved him.

We had not said those words, both cognizant that it was far too soon to say something so serious, but my heart whispered them as we kissed.

“Goodbye.”

“Not goodbye - see you soon Sunshine.”

An hour later I was coming down from the high of seeing Kazumi.

In the middle of our movie date, I’d covertly checked my TalkTime in the bathroom and saw Makoto had let me know he was back in Toyko and was hoping to meet up. I told him that I had a friend from out of town visiting, but that I could meet him the following day (Sunday).

We quickly made plans and I felt like a bit of a player as I’d returned to Kazumi.

All this had occurred before we’d shared such an intimate night together, and now that I had another date in a few hours I found myself conflicted. 

I didn’t want to lead Makoto on, but technically we just started seeing each other.

Would I have to disclose what I’d been up to? He knew that since my ex (who cheated on me) I had rebounded with someone else and not gotten tested. Kazumi’s status was the same - one additional partner and protected sex.

Either way, I couldn’t in good conscience go on a date with Mako until I showered and changed my sheets...

...just in case.

I took my time getting ready and thinking things over. I was so in my head that I didn’t realize I had pending messages - one from Kazumi and two from Makoto.

I opened Mako’s messages first:

Hey! I’m looking forward to seeing you again :)

Do you still want me to come over around 7?

I wasn’t sure. Seeing Kazumi reminded me how much I liked him and it was so hard to think about shifting gears and seeing Makoto even though I knew we had something together as well.

Not wanting to decide in that moment, I opened Kazu’s text:

Thanks for being so sweet and kind and beautiful and funny.

It was sweet and ironically not super elegant for a man who was a brilliant writer.

For some reason, as my heart swelled, I found myself compelled to open the app I met Kazumi on. He was only in town for a few more hours and we’d been apart two at most.

I wanted to believe that after our weekend he wouldn’t need to log in. 

He would feel so full of love and affection that a dating app would be the last thing on his mind, however when I went to see his profile my heart sank.

He was on and only a few miles away.

I knew that he was not mine and that I was not his. 

I knew that I was a hypocrite, seeing as how I used the apps still and even worse, had another young man waiting in the wings to see me.

Despite understanding that logically, my emotions got the better of me. Not wanting to feel like the “loser” in the situation I found that fear gripped me in an uncontrollable way and I wrote back to Makoto:

I was just thinking of all the reasons why I’m happy we met. 7 works - see you then.

Read Chapter 5

So...I’m curious if you guys have experienced what our MC is going through. These apps seem to create the perfect environment for jealousy and paranoia to flourish. Has anyone ever confronted someone they were seeing about always using them? Do you think Emi should ask Kazumi why he’s always on?

As always, I hope you guys are enjoying them as much as my purely fictional works and that you’ll comment and share with thoughts.

If you’re feeling really generous I hope you’ll consider buying me a coffee!

Thanks for reading and if you want to be untagged just let me know!

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Thanks for reading and let me know if you’re not tagged and would like to be!

[littledonkeyburrito]

Some lint

1. Have you ever punched someone and broke their nose? Haven’t broken their nose but I’ve certainly hit a few in the face bc karate

2. What is the longest time you have gone without sleep? Forty-something hours without even a nap

3. Have you ever been someplace tropical? Several places

4. You see an ant on the ground, do you squish it? If it’s in my house, yes.

5. Have you ever baked a pie? I don’t think so.

6. What is your favorite social networking site? Instagram probably

7. Has anyone in your family fought in any of the wars? Dad’s dad was in WW2. Dad fought in Belfast in the 70s I think

8. Would you make any changes to your current bedroom? Yeah, I would like $100,000 to magically appear under my mattress.

9. Has a stray dog ever tried to bite you? Playfully. I stop playing with strays when they get boisterous bc rabies

10. When riding a bus, do you prefer to sit up front, down back or the middle? Middle-back generally

11. Have you ever been on a cross-country train ride? Yes, in a few places. I freaking love sleeper trains, I think they’re so fun with a group. On one of the sleeper trains I went on in China we accidentally taught the guy with the food/drink trolley the english word for beer because we bought more every time he went past.

12. Is there currently any caffeine in your system? No

13. Look around, are things organized? Yes, I keep my apartment very tidy.

14. Is there any TV show that ended that you wish hadn’t? Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23

15. Know what you’re planning to do after this? Attempt to kill time for a couple of hours until I can go to bed

16. How often do you update your Facebook status? I don’t really do statuses, just post photos from my instagram.

17. Do you even wear any jeans other than skinny anymore? All my jeans are of varying levels of skininess. From slim-fit to practically painted on.

18. Are you sensitive to caffeine? Yes. I would have a rum and coke right now but 1) I don’t have any coke, and 2) if I drank any it would take me a long time to get to sleep.

19. How do you usually get around? Walking or metro

20. Which languages do you wish you could speak fluently in? It would be nice to be fluent in spanish but if it happened magically overnight it wouldn’t be fun because I like the challenge. It would be cool to magically become fluent in arabic and/or mandarin.

21. Have you ever been accused of being too clingy? No

22. Can you speak any French? No.

23. Have you ever stayed in a hotel? Dozens. I travel a lot.

24. What is in your pocket? Some lint.

25. Is there a secret you’ve never told your parents? There are certainly some details of my life that I have omitted. Such as some experiences with sex, drugs and alcohol.  

26. Who was the last person to smoke a cigarette in your presence? People from that office I briefly worked at. Or probably more recently just random people on the street.

27. Have you ever lived with a friend? Yeah, a few.

28. What are a few of your favorite tv shows? iZombie, Brooklyn 99, Jane The Virgin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Club De Cuervos, Parks and Rec 29. What kind of socks do you like to wear? Brightly coloured ones with wild patterns 30. Do you have your own house key, and how often do you actually use it? Whenever I need to get into my apartment. (This question must have been written by a teenager)

31. How often do you eat chocolate? Not actually that often. I don’t have as much of a sweet tooth as I did when I was younger. 32. How often do you wash dishes at your house? Every 1-3 days depending on how lazy I am.

33. How much sleep did you get last night? ~7 hours 34. When was the last time you went to a cemetery and why were you there? Last year on halloween myself and a few other drunk people from the party I was at decided to go wander around the nearby cemetery. 35. What were you doing when you heard about the attack on the twin towers? I don’t remember specifically hearing about it. I was only 7 so I wouldn’t really have cared anyway. Mostly what I remember is that they took cartoons off tv to play non-stop news for at least a week. 36. Doesn’t John Mayer suck? I have no opinions on him. 37. When was the last time you saw the sun rise? When I was in Colombia. One night in Cartagena I stayed up with a swedish and a colombian guy chatting in spanish while we watched the sun rise over the river. Then the cops came over and told us to leave.

38. What was the last picture you took? It was of my DS because I started playing pokemon in spanish and I was sending the picture to a couple of friends to say that the pokemon names are still the same in this language.

39. Are there many traffic incidents in your area? I don’t drive anymore so I don’t pay attention. 40. Have you ever been for a ride in the back of a truck? Probably at some point during travels. I’ve done a lot of weird shit 41. Are you currently downloading anything? No. 42. Does your father have any facial hair? No

43. Have you ever played golf? My mum attempted to get me into golf when I was a kid (maybe young teen?) and I absolutely hated it. It was the most infuriating game I’ve ever played.

44. What was the last tv show you watched an episode of? The Defenders 45. Do you like beer? If so, what’s your favorite brand? Beer is fine. I’m pretty used to Moritz and Estrella Damm because they are common local brands. The fucking worst beer is Balboa in Panama. God it was so awful. Also not a fan of San Miguel which is common across all of spain. 46. Do you feel bad when you throw food out? Yes 47. When was the last time you waxed anything on your body, if ever? I’ve never waxed. I just shave. 48. What’s your favorite fast food place? I don’t have one. I don’t really eat takeout here. 49. When was the last time you went out for a meal? A few weeks ago. 50. Have you ever been in a car accident? A few minor ones but not while I’ve been driving. 51. What colour shirt are you wearing right now? Navy blue

52. Have you ever had a bonfire on the beach? Y’know I actually don’t think I have... I should get on that.

53. Are you skilled when it comes to working in the kitchen? I don’t burn anything. That’s a skill, right?

54. When was the last time you went to a campground? That would have been back in April, camping in the Sahara Desert.

55. Do you listen to music while driving? Yes, and I sing along Very Loudly.

56. When was the last time you hung out with people younger than you? I have absolutely no idea. 

57. What is the closest blue object to you? Box of tissues on the coffee table.

58. How much did you spend on your last shopping trip? Probably about 25 euros at the grocery store

59. Have you ever gone over your cell phone plan by accident? I used to go over my data limit pretty regularly at my old job.

60. Can you honestly say you’ve been drunk before? Very, and many times. (this question must have been written by a teen)

61. Where did you get your last bruise from? Probably that mystery bruise I got in my armpit in central america. I’m pretty sure I got roofied that night so I don’t remember anything at all but I am still sooooo curious how I got that bruise. Nobody I was with knew how it happened either but then again they were all pretty trashed anyway so even if they saw they might not remember.

62. Are you a person that likes to take chances? Depends. Sometimes I take calculated risks.

63. Would you consider your life to be great right now? Right now it’s pretty mediocre but a month ago it was freaking awesome.

64. Do you remember the dream you had last night? Not exactly but I think it involved me getting tattoos on my arm

65. Do you get emotional easily? I don’t really have emotions tbh

66. Do you get obnoxious when you’re drunk? Nah, I get fun when I’m drunk

67. Who was the first person to ever give you flowers? I’m not sure anybody has ever given me flowers.

68. What was the last thing you heated up in your microwave? Chicken and veggies to go with my baked potato the other day

69. Were you born somewhere other than a hospital? No.

70. What was the last flavor of ice cream you had? Mango. It was homemade by a woman in Comuna 13 in Colombia 71. When you go out drinking, what do you prefer to drink? Beer or rum and coke 72. Is there a trash can near you? Yeah

73. When and where was the last time you took a picture of yourself? I think I took a selfie in my kitchen a few days ago 74. When was the last time you stayed up throughout the entire night? Cartagena, Colombia. ~8 weeks ago. But I stayed up until 2 or 3am a few times after that.

75. Have you ever considered a foreign-exchange program? No, I just fucked off overseas on my own accord.

76. Are sex and sexual activities something you enjoy? Yep 77. What’s an interesting fact about the state in which you were born? I know literally nothing about the region I was born in.

78. What’s one aspect of your life that did not turn out as you expected? Well I definitely didn’t expect to learn spanish 79. Is there a subject about which you know a great deal? Probably, but nothing immediately comes to mind 80. What was the last thing that you put off doing? I should probably vacuum and mop my apartment 81. What did you do instead of that activity? Anything else.

Before and after: 3 years ago, today

82. What size is the last bed you kissed on?  - Double.  - A single bed in a twin room in a hotel. Tbh I probably could have swapped to a double room but at that point I didn’t realise he’d be staying with me

83. When was the last time you were sick? - I got the flu pretty bad in 2013. Probably should have gone to hospital but instead I only took 2 days off work. - I had a mild cold when I got home from my last trip. 84. Do you have any summer plans yet? - I ditched summer in favour of going skiing in Japan - Summer just ended. I don’t know whether my next summer will be here next June/July, or back in Aus in January. Will depend on whether I find a job 85. When was the last time you shaved your legs? - Probably within 2 weeks - Earlier today 86. Is there someone you wish you were closer with? - I think I had just started developing a crush on a guy that I later dated briefly and then he cheated on me, lied about it and broke up with me by facebook message while I was on holiday overseas. So, not the best idea really. - I’m all g. 87. Do you tend to waste a lot of money? - I made 1 or 2 poor decisions with money but I was earning enough to cover my ass. - It’s not a waste when it’s something I actively want to spend the money on. 88. What did you last drink? - Probably pepsi - Orange juice 89. Have you ever received an injury from a hook up? - Uhhh no? - Not unless that’s how I got that mystery bruise in my armpit. 90. Do you have any good friends of the opposite sex? - Yes - Yes, the same ones 91. When was the last time you had a crowd at your house? - Probably around this time 3 years ago was my housewarming - I have never had more than 2 people visit this apartment at a time. Last time I had a crowd would have been my moving out party (from the place I just moved into 3 years ago) which was a bit over a year ago.

92. How many cell phones have you had? - 5 - 7, if you include the work phone I had 93. Where do you get all your clothes? - JayJays - H&M, C&A, Mango etc 94. Have you ever regretted kissing someone? - Nah - Nah 95. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket? - No. - I got one just under 3 years ago 96. Would you rather sleep with someone else or alone? - Alone - Depends. Sometimes I wouldn’t mind having someone here 97. Do you think age matters in relationships? - To an extent - Not really 98. Have you ever lived with a girlfriend/boyfriend? - No. - No 99. When will your next kiss be? - Probably the next party I went to. I made out with a lot of people that year - No idea 100. Add up all the digits of your cell phone number. What do you get? - 40 - 50 101. When you lost your virginity, do you honestly feel like you were ready? - I didn’t regret it but I probably wasn’t emotionally ready for it. - Same as above I guess. You only lose it once.

102. Was the person you lost your virginity to younger or older than you? - Older. - ^^

103. Were you sexually experienced whatsoever when you lost your virginity? - Not at all - ^^

104. Have you had sex with more than one person? - Yes - Yes by a larger amount

105. Have you ever had sex with the lights on? - Yes. - Yes

106. Have you ever had sex on a floor? - No - Yes

107. When is the last time you had sex? - Probably like at least 6 months before - About a month ago (can’t believe my trip ended so long ago)

108. Do you care for that person? - Eh - I guess

109. Is this your boyfriend or girlfriend? - No - No

110. The first time you got drunk, how old were you? - 16 - ^^

111. Where were you located the first time you got drunk? - The afterparty of my highschool formal. It was in the backyard of a girl in my grade - ^^

[backroadblues]

May 26th, 2017 - Bellagio, Italy

The drive to Bellagio from La Spezia will be a little over 3 hours. Bellagio is a small lakeside village that sits on a spit of land that separate where Lago de Lecco and Lago de Como join into one giant lake. When you look at the two lake on a map, they appear to form a walking man. Bellagio sits right in the “crotch” so to speak. On previous trips Elisa and I have stayed a Como and we’ve taken the boat ride up to Bellagio, which we think is one of the most enchanting of towns that dot the steep sides of the lake. This time we thought we would stay in this little town.

Our trip from La Spezia proceeded quite nicely. The Autostrada is nice and wide until you get past Monza, home of a famous motor speedway. Then the highway begins to wind up and down through the mountains and the speed limit goes from 130 Kp/h to 90. When you reach the small town of Lecco, which sits at the base of Lago Di Lecco, the divided highway ends and you begin taking smaller roads to reach Bellagio. Once you get out of Lecco the road is now very narrow and you must hug the side of the mountain in order to accommodate the 2 way traffic. The closer you get to Bellagio the narrower the road becomes. Amazingly, here the speed limit is 70 Kp/h but what little traffic there is seems to go much slower owing to the narrowness of the road. Several times we encounter some crazy Italian driver in a beat up old work truck, who thinks he is Mario Andretti taking the hairpin turns at breakneck speed and in the process drifting into my lane. Often we have to break and swerve as close as possible to the side of the road contained by the sheer mountain cliff. Our two vehicles avoiding each other by mere inches. Yet the offending driver honks and sneers at me, as if I were the one committing the offense whilst they were zipping down the mountain using the entire road way. At one point along the way, we encounter a large Pullman sized passenger bus. It is making its way around a tight turn just as we approach. The bus and I must come to a complete stop. The bus inches over to its side of the road, I can now proceed to a point that is only to the midsection of the bus but with its tail protruding past its rear wheels, it extends into my lane and it is too narrow for me to get past. However, by my pulling forward, the bus now has a bit more room to complete the turn making enough room for me to get by the back end of the bus. The driver gives me a wave and nod of approval for undertaking the roadside “ballet” maneuver without incident.

As we approach Bellagio, with out incident we are relieved but our relief is soon wiped away as we begin to enter the tiny ancient part of the village. The road is now one way and barely wide enough for our mini-van, not to mention that it is also swarmed with tourists. This road makes the one in Positano seem like a super highway. As we approach the gate to the villiage, there is a small open space to the side of the road.. I pull over thinking that there is no way our mini-van will be able to make it through the sea of pedestrians and down the narrow lane. I contemplate turning around, but one of the residents tells me it is “Senso Unico” one-way. So, I press a button on my dashboard and the side view mirrors neatly fold in - that is how narrow the street is. As I inch forward the pedestrians begin to part - I’m feeling a bit like Moses, but with his followers in the mini-van. The ladies in our car are totally freaking, but undistracted and undeterred I press on. Pedestrians are having to step into doorways of shops as we make our way past them. Trent captures this on video - I’m not sure why, the sight of this will surely be burned into his and Carolyn’s memory banks for years. Finally we emerge at the bottom of the town. I’m pleased to say that no pedestrians were injured in the making of Trent’s video. We see our hotel up ahead, the little Piazza in front of the row of hotels is full of cars and we are wondering where will we park. Fortunately the space in front of our hotel is wider than when we were in Positano. If necessary, I can pull over and unload luggage without causing another international incident. However, Minerva, the goddess of hope is with us on this day. Just as we pull toward our hotel, a car backs out of a space that is directly located in front of our hotel. What luck, and it just so happens that Elisa had found a lucky 2 centissimi coin just this morning. I think she had to use all 2 cents worth of good fortune, one for helping us make it through the narrow roads and the other for us to score this prime parking space.

Finally parked and adrenaline filled from the drive down, we then make the 38 steps up to the lobby of our hotel, we are told that our rooms are not yet ready and that we can leave our bags here. Fortunately for us, Carolyn has packed a few days things in the giant handbag she purchased while we were in Cinque Terre, so we can leave Moby in the car. Neither Trent nor I had enough adrenaline to take Moby up the steps. We spend the day walking and shopping our way through Bellagio. Carolyn finds a few nice things in a store where they craft items out of local wood. The workshop is connected directly to the store. We end up near the bottom of a hill and we take a walk out to Punto Spartiva. There are some stunning villas tucked off of the narrow roadway. There are high walls that are ornately decorated, that hide the large villas from the prying eyes of the the tourist (like us) that make their way down to Punto Spartiva. When we emerge, the view is once again spectacular. There is a picturesque park there that opens up to lake Como. You can see all the way down one end of the lake to the other. There is a nice cafe / restaurant there, but we are full from the lunch we had after we checked in. We ate at a small cafe named Far Out. The food is good and fresh. We are all a bit tired of heavy lunches so 3 of us opt for the “small” cheeseburger with fries to change things up. We order some bruschetta and a charcuterie plate as a starter and Carolyn has the minestrone soup for lunch. After we make a lap of the town, Elisa and I decide to head up to the room to get some rest and Trent and Carolyn decide to make another lap around the town. Having seen all the stores, Carolyn decides to go back to one at the very top of the hill to buy a few things she had seen earlier.

Later that evening at about 8:00, we all get back together and walk the sidewalks at the bottom of the village that is adjacent to the lake. There is still a little bit of daylight but night is coming. There is music that fills the air of the town. Apparently there is a wild wedding party going on just down the hill from our hotel, in fact it’s almost directly below our room. We are concerned that if it goes as late as Alessio’s wedding party, we will be up all night. Interestingly, the Italian DJ at the party is playing a lot of 80’s disco and dance music. It’s a lot of fun doing the hustle in the streets of Bellagio.

We happen upon a nice restaurant that is part of the Hotel Metropole and it sits right on the water. We enquirer, but they are fully booked, they tell us to come back at 9:00. This means a 30 - 40 minute wait. We find a comfy spot at the cafe attached to the restaurant where we can sip some apertivos. Carolyn and I order the Passion Mojitos and Trent a beer. The passion mojitos are tasty and made with real passion fruit. If you order one of these in the states, it has some sweet sticky artificial passion fruit flavored syrup in it. Not these here. It is filled with real genuine passion fruit. Now, have you ever had real passion fruit. This tangy tropical tasting fruit is made up of hundreds, if not thousands of tiny seeds with a pulpy fruit. Sort of like a pomegranate but but the seeds are slimy and sticky. The it tastes really good but the only problem is that you cant take a sip of the tasty concoction without getting a mouthful of the sticky, pulpy seeds. They are gooey and sticky and difficult to get rid of us. Carolyn and I briefly contemplating using the seeds as ammunition for our straws, but we quickly decide that such activity might be frowned upon in this “classy joint” and it could elicit the “International Eye-roll”. So instead, Carolyn sticks out her toung that is now covered with scads of the little buggers so that Trent can take a photograph. I’m not so sure the pea-shooter idea wouldn’t have been a better option. While we sit there and enjoy our drinks a couple of ducks befriend us and Carolyn begins feeding them loads of potato chips. They seem to enjoy them.

Finally we are called for our dinner at 9:30. Our waiter seats us at a lakeside table and promptly disappears for 30 minutes. We notice that one problem with lakeside dining is that where there is a lake there are many ducks. The ducks who had befriended us at the cafe have followed us from the cafe to our dinner table - the fact that we were feeding them all those potato chips might have something to do with the companionship exhibited by these ducks. Well, we learned that potato chips and ducks may not get along because one duck decides to go potty right beside our table - practically on top of Trent’s foot. We are quickly overcome by the odor. Not the most appetizing thing. Fortunately we have some water left in our water bottles and Trent is able to wash it down into the lake - we hope its the lake and not another set of tables below us.. Now that we can breathe again it only take a few more minutes for our eyes to stop watering and we can continue enjoying the beautiful night air and the lake.

Our waiter finally reappears and Carolyn gives him the “International Eye-roll” and he apologizes profusely. Carolyn adds one additional eye-roll, as if silently telling him not to let it happen again. Finally, we place our orders. Elisa opts only for a salad. Trent and Carolyn partake in the ham and melon and I in the Bresaola - a raw cured and salted meat carpaccio served with arugula and a creamy goat cheese. It is yummy. For mains, Trent gets the lamb chops, Carolyn small shrimp cocktail and I get the lasagna. There is also a plate of grilled vegetables that Trent and Carolyn share. For once we are not totally stuffed as we head back to our hotel room. Throughout dinner, we are serenaded by such classics as, YMCA, Play that Funky Music, Brick House. It’s oh so romantic.

With dinner done we make our way back to the hotel and shoot for a 9:00am departure. We will be heading to Venice with a stop in Verona along the way. The trip to Verona is about 2-½ hours. We will spend a hour or 2 there then we will head on to Venice, which is another 1-½ hours away. But that will just get us to parking at Tronchetto and we will have another hour of travel by foot, monorail and water bus or taxi to get to our apartment.

We are excited and once again exhausted.

Ciao for now.

[hekate1308]

Rescue

More Season 12 AU. Basically, Mick Davies needs help. Also, this could be considered anti Mary... alright it is anti Mary. Enjoy!

Something is wrong.

In the past two months, barely any missions have gone the way they were supposed to. Monsters escape, hunters leave as soon as they enter a town, and they still haven’t wiped out all vamps.

Something is terribly, terribly wrong.

It doesn’t take Mary long to realize that this string of failures can’t be a coincidence, especially since things went so well in the beginning.

Her boys alone can’t ruin the Men of Letters. It’s impossible. There’s only two of them after all, plus the angel.

It doesn’t take her long to figure out that there must be a mole within the organization, warning monsters, alienating hunters.

There aren’t many who have enough intel to cause serious damage.

But there is one she’s been suspecting for a while now.

Mick Davies has been behaving strangely. He’s on his phone a lot (she’s heard him talk while passing by his room) and has obviously withdrawn from his colleagues.

Elton and Willoughby don’t think it strange.

“He’s always been something of a     “ Elton tells her. Willoughby nods.

“He’s an odd duck.”                            

That’s not a good enough explanation for her, though.

So she keeps nagging them. She doesn’t feel comfortable with computers yet sadly, at least not enough to hack them, so they have to do it.

And finally, Elton caves. He mumbles something about “calling Dr. Hess”, who Mary has yet to speak to, but eventually decides to wait until they have proof.

And they find it.

Right there in his... inbox. The first message is from –

Dean: Hey, thanks for the info. Got them out in time.

It’s far from the only email.

“What are we supposed to do?” Willoughby mumbles when they tell him.

“We have to inform Dr. Hess” Elton answers.

“And what then? We used to hand over such cases to Ketch, but...”

“We’ll deal” Mary says simply. She’s always done what needs to be done.

It won’t be a problem.

Willoughby shoots her a look she doesn’t understand, but nods.

“You’ll call Hess?” he asks Elton, who complies.

Once they have informed their boss, things begin to fall into place.

Because he has served the men of Letters for many years, he will not be killed immediately. Dr. Hess wants to come over personally and investigate just how bad the situation is.

All in all, she sounds like a sensible woman.

So, first they’ll arrest him and put him in one of the cells in their base.

Really, it should all work out fine, except that Elton moves too quickly, speaks a little too nervously when Mick enters the room they’ve been waiting for him in, and Mick notices.

She didn’t think he would. She’s never thought much of him since the Alpha incident. They’d have been lost without Sam.

But he takes one look at Elton and flees –

In his room?

Rather strange strategy, if you ask her.

They eventually break the door open and find Mick having utterly trashed his phone.

He even put it on fire.

Naturally, this makes them all the more curious what he’s hiding, but the data’s gone.

And he’s not talking.

Somehow, Dean immediately feels antsy the second his phone rings. And that’s not nearly as much the usual case it as used to be, so he immediately tenses up.

“Mick?” he asks.

“Dean. They know. I expect –“

He can hear someone hammering at a door, presumably Mick’s.

“You won’t be hearing from me anymore. Be careful.”

He hangs up. Dean knows better than to call back.

And to think Mick actually sounded like he believes they’ll do nothing.

He darts into the library where Sam and Cas are currently coordinating another hunt of Garth’s.

“Where’s Crowley?”

“Ah, Squirell, you do care.”

Of course as soon as he mentions him the demon is standing behind him.

“We need to get to the Men of letter’s place. Now. Mick’s in trouble.”

“What happened?” Sam asks.

“He just said “they know””.

“Do you think Mary will be there?” Cas asks calmly.

Dean shrugs carelessly.

“Whatever, we can take her. And we can’t leave Mick in there. Remember vampire spy?”

Sam flinches and nods.

“Good then, rescue mission.”

He turns to Crowley.

“As soon as we have all our weapons, you’ll take us as close as you can.”

“I think I almost heard a please there-“

Dean rolls his eyes.

“Then, please, your Majesty will be kind enough to wait until we either get rid of the warding or join you, so we can go home?”

“Of course”.

He’s surprised there’s no sassy comment to accompany his acquiescence, but even Crowley knows wghen time is of the essence.

And the Men of Letters don’t like to waste time. At all.

God knows they almost eradicated vamps within a short amount of months.

It’s remarkably easy to break into their base. Then again, Sam does know the place well.

“Thank God you know about the back door” Dean mutters as they slowly walk down another corridor (he couldn’t stay here for a week, it’s way too cold and impersonal. Give him their new home at the lake with the King of Hell playing pool at all times of the day he wants anytime).

“I’ll check out the holding cells”. Sam told them about them a few months ago. What really irked Dean is that they’re clearly built to hold humans as well as monsters – that is, there are some that aren’t even warded at all.

They nod and Cas draws him into a kiss before turning around.

The cells are easy to locate. 

The look on Mick’s face is freaking priceless. He has to remember it for later.

“Dean?”

“Hi, Mick. Need a hand?”

He can already tell the handcuffs are on too tight.

British bastards.

“What are you doing here?”

“Breaking you out.”

“But the – “

Dean is already working on the lock of the cell.

“How do you – “

“Practice. You do that six hours a day as a kid, you learn.”

“I studied something else at the time.”

“I bet. You can walk?”

He doesn’t look hurt, but you never know.

He’s already getting up.

“Ketch isn’t around anymore.”

Boy, does that have implications. He’s certainly not sorry for turning the psycho over to Crowley.

“They were going to wait anyway until Dr. Hess comes here.”

“Who?”

“My boss.”

“Ah, Mrs. Danvers. Got it.”

He gets the door open.

“Come on”.

He quickly checks his cuffs.

“Damn it”.

Mick’s hands are already red and swollen. Dean makes quick work of the handcuffs.

“Thank you” Mick says, rubbing his wrists.

“Yeah, thank me when we’re out of here.”

He gets a text.

“Cas and Sam have found eleven wardings so far. How many are there?”

“40.”

“Biblical number meaning death. Why doesn’t that surprise me” he mutters as he sends the answer, but tells them it might be unnecessary to go through with the plan since Mick is able to walk.

Meet us at the stairway.

“I wasn’t expecting you to be familiar with Daphne du Maurier’s work” Mick begins quite unexpectedly (must be the small talk imbedded in his blood), “although it can be argued the house does have an almost supernatural – “

“Yeah, look, can we get out of here first before we start nerding out? That’d be great.”

Mick nods.

At least he hasn’t been in that cell too long. Thank God for demon beaming.

Sam and Cas obviously didn’t run into any problems either.

“Sam” Mick says, “Castiel. It’s good to see you again.”

He makes no difference between his brother and his angel, for which Dean is grateful. He doesn’t want Sam to beat himself up over their association more than he already has.

Then, naturally, it all goes to Hell. Or maybe not. Hell isn’t much of a threat these days.

“What are you doing?”

“Hello, Mary” Dean greets their mother evenly. She’s holding a gun, but at least she’s not pointing it at them.

He’s shocked at how little he cares to see her. Just two years ago, when she came back, he couldn’t have been happier. Now he doesn’t even consider her part of the family.

For God’s sake, the guy they are breaking out has done more for them than she has.

“We figured we’d save Mick here before your posh friends torture him to death”.

“He’s a traitor” she hisses. Her eyes wander to Sam.

It’s easy to tell what she’s thinking.

Dean laughs. He can’t help it.

Cas steps closer to him, his warmth reminding him of all that he gained the day he finally said no to his family and let those who wished to join come to him for a change.

“Seriously? You only consider Sammy the traitor? I was never on your radar much, was I, Mom.”

What mother would let her kid comfort her after she and her husband had a fight, after all?

“You left” she says, “you left and then you manipulated Sam – “

“We didn’t even talk before I left!” Sam snaps. “If anyone manipulated me from the start, it was you! I should never have turned my back on Dean. He was always there for me!”

“It’s not my fault I wasn’t” Mary says softly and the fact that Dean can’t tell if she’s genuinely sad or just trying to get into their good graces again is horrifying on its own.

“But you could have been there for them later” Mick chimes in and Dean suddenly realizes he’s more qualified to discuss things with Mary because he’s spent the most time with her.

This is all so...

Cas gently touches his wrist at the same time he feels it.

They turn around, their weapons drawn.

Wonderful. More Brits.

“And who do you happen to be?”

“The Winchesters” snarls one of them, “why am I not surprised?”

“Elton and Willoughby” Mick introduces them.

Dean blinks.

“Are you kidding me? Like – “

Mick coughs while Sam looks confused.

“Yes. They don’t like to talk about it.”

“I bet.”

“Look, I think we all agree no one here wants to shoot anyone else. Why don’t you just leave the traitor here. We know what to do with him.”

“That’s why we’ve come to rescue him” Cas simply answers.

“And I don’t really think planning to kill us means we’re at peace” Dean points out.

“Davies” Elton begins –

“Don’t” Mick interrupts him. “Nothing you could say would change my mind.”

Huh. Dean underestimated him. And that impression is only going to strengthen.

As it turns out, they haven’t counted on Mary. Yes, Sam and Mick are both watching her – and thank God the Man of Letters doesn’t freeze like Sam.

Not that Dean blames. If he actually saw Mary raise her gun, God knows what he would do.

But Mick – still pretty high on adrenaline, Dean bets – manages to tackle her just in time.

And then all Hell breaks loose.

Literally.

Mary’s screaming “Why can’t you see I just want what’s the best for you – “ when Dean feels the floor vibrate.

It’s a familiar feeling.

A few seconds later, thousands of demons attack and break the wards.

It’s easy enough when you’re powerful enough as an army to tear down walls.

Crowley appears and flicks his wrist to throw Mary of Mick, although to his credit, he simply puts her gently on the ground while Elton and Willoughby get thrown into the next standing wall hard enough to crack their skulls.

“You were taking too long” he explains casually.

“Ready to go?”  

“Ready when you are.”

A blink later they’re at home.

“God” Sam sighs, sinking into a chair.

“She was going to – and I just froze –“

“Relax, Moose. It’s your mother. Everyone is a little soft when it comes to that subject.”

Cas reaches out to Dean.

“Are you alright?”

Dean nods.

“You are the King of Hell” Mick says dumbly, while Dean is checking up on Sam.

Crowley waves at him.

“Crowley’s the name. And you’re Mick Davies, I understand.”

“Mick Davies, Man of – “ he breaks off, looking confused.

Then, slowly, he says, “I guess I’m a hunter, now.”

“Don’t worry, you should have seen those three when I first met them. Hopeless, I tell you.”

Sam laughs at that. Dean and Cas, relieved, join him.

Looks like they found themselves another room mate.

[papermoth-bird-blog]

Nashville to Austin: The Freakiness continues.

So *signs* keep on dropping into my lap, and it’s starting to freak me out. Like big fat ‘!!!!’ signs. Yesterday, as I was gathering my things & packing them away, another one popped up. As I was puttering around my room, listening to Townes Van Zandt, I decided to open the drawers. Now, I hadn’t put anything in there the whole time I was in Nashville, but I got a huge urge to look. When I looked in I actually jumped back and kinda welped. Sitting in the drawer was a copy of “the three waves of volunteers” by Dolores Cannon. Dolores Cannon is the woman that invented the QHHT technique Mary Ellen uses. AKA the hypnosis session that kinda kick started this whole journey for me. I don’t know if that freaks anyone else out, but it certainly freaks me out. Of course, I immediately messaged Katie & Mare- and they agree that I probably should read that book, cause it’s clearly choosing me or something. I dunno.

Anyways, it was a rainyday in Nashville & I allowed that incident to be the main excitement for the day. I’ve been feeling guilty about taking slow days- which I suppose I shouldn’t because I’m on vacation. At the same time, I feel this rush to get the most out of every place I’m in. The rain showers help wash that guilt away. I went to the busstop a few hours early & sat with the copy of ‘Wild’ Victoria gave me for Christmas this year. Inside the front cover she wrote “Dear Zoe, This book reminds me of how brave and beautiful you are. I hope you keep going on adventures. Love Vic”. Every time I read that I get a little choked up. I actually have a secret stash of love notes tucked in my journal when I’m missing everyone. They’ve made me tear up in public on a few occasions- not that I care. 

Of course, as is the rule, just I was sitting in the true *bliss* of aloneness, a random strange man came & interrupted me. At first he just asked to sit down, which I of course said yes to, because I don’t need 4 chairs. Perhaps I should have known better, but he then took it upon himself to talk at me for hours. The cherry is that he started this talking-at-me by saying “Hey, you look young! You must be 19 or 20.″ I kinda just dead-panned him and said “no.” He continued “And you’re out here all alone!” “yup” “All the way, by yourself!” “Yup.” I could be a serial killer” he said “I’m not though. I’m really not.” In all honesty the thought had certainly run through my head. There was something off about him certainly, and it could have been something more than his obliviousness to the fact that I was not, in fact, wanting to have a conversation with him. With my luck, it turned out he was riding all the way to Austin, like me. Thankfully enough, I managed to worm out of several close calls in having to sit next to him. He did track me down at all the stops to come and talk to me- including asking me multiple invasive questions about my personal life. When we finally got to Austin in the morning, he caught up to me to say “Hey do you have facebook?” I said “yup” and walked away. It was the most asshole-ish I’ve been for a long while, but it kinda felt good. To be real, where do weird 40-something men get off trying to talk to young women, especially solo-travelling young women. Why would bringing up the fact that I am alone & vulnerable be a good lead into a conversation? It’s like they know they are cornering you in a conversation you don’t want to be in, but would act naïve if you were to say that to them. 

That being said, I am still glad I took the bus. Seeing the landscape transform between Tennessee, to Arkansas, to Texas was wonderful. Plus I was filled with a child-like squeal every time I saw “COWS!” I’m now well settled in, in Austin. For now, I’m staying with a girl named Brigeda & her foster dog Beans. I’ve already had my first Torta ft. grilled cactus. Life is pretty good. I’m basically working up a written strategy as to how I can eat Tex-mex for every meal- I don’t even think it’ll be that hard, honestly. I am looking very forward to it though. I am also looking forward to seeing ALL the music here. I’ve already got a list of four shows I’m going to see. it’s gonna be good. I can feel it. 

[starryforgetmenots]

Nightmare Vent

**Vent(?????) I had a bad night last night for sleeping. I just need to write it down somewhere. Below is what happened in my dreams and what not. For some reason I can’t add that little bar/link that is like “Read More” so, sorry for the long post. So for the past few nights I've been having bad nightmares. Yes, I have been listening to a lot of horror stories, but no; they don't typically give me nightmares. The first two nights, the beginning was about a doll. Her name is Molly. Molly and I are very close outside of the dreams soo... But in the first dream, half of her face was burnt. It was a dark place and sorta run down and monochrome. She just sorta stared at me. In the second dream in the beginning, the place was all in black and whites and burnt down and scorched. Molly was facing away from me. I was so happy to find her! I tapped her shoulder and then she turned her head to look at me. Her skin was burnt and polished clean, like a bone singed by fire. Her eyes and mouth were missing. She seemed worn down and like she went through a bonfire. She just stared at me. The malicious feeling felt so real... Like I wasn't even in a dream. I'm skipping the rest because I can barely remember and well, it's just not relevant. Tbh, this isn't even that relevant to last night at all. Fast forward to last night. Last night I originally went to bed around 11:40/50 PM. Ya know the normal for a school night. I fell asleep just fine. It was going fine until I woke up around 3 AM. I tend to wake up randomly around that time, so I didn't think much of it. I tried to fall back to sleep but I couldn't. A few hours passed. It must of been around 4-5 in the morning. I had been in that sorta half sleep and occasionally was actually asleep, like in and out of being awake?? I dunno how to describe it. So I DID sort of have dreams. Well, the first dream. It took place at my great grandparents' farm. They live out in the middle of nowhere on an almost century old farm. You literally have to walk like at least a mile before you get to the neighbours. Anyways, I was staying the night. There were, of course, my great grandparents (already asleep), my grandma, myself, and this boy I was friends with... I guess we were friends anyways. He didn't actually have a name, but he was subconsciously labeled as Jack. Jack was around my age (a teen) and was so kind and nice, even if he was a bit strange. He was pale and had black tuft-y hair. I never got to actually look at his face. It was always blurry. But He seemed to have bright green or hazel eyes. Anyways, my grandma told us to go to bed. So I went and got ready for bed, and my grandma went to sleep while Jack straight up disappeared for a while. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when I felt Jack's presence reappear. I had wondered where he went, but didn't go to ask. I went down the hall to the old bedroom we were using and went to go to bed. Well Jack was standing in the middle of the room, practically making the beds inaccessible (the room is small with the door at an angle and a bed on the right wall and a bed on the left wall. The space between the beds is in the middle of the room and is tiny.). He had a huge inhuman (almost) grin on his face. He seemed different. He stood stiffly and started to beg me to come outside. Outside it was freaking midnight next to the woods in the middle of fucking nowhere. I backed up, telling him it was time for bed, as he advanced towards me. He was acting very abrupt? and strange. Jack began to beg and plead even more. I turned away and walked down the hall to find my grandma or one of my great grandparents. I had enough of his creepy shyt already. Jack was no longer in the bedroom. I only knew this because of the same way I knew he had returned- the feeling of his presence. I walked out into the kitchen and for some reason I went towards the backdoor. Now, the backdoor. The backdoor is down like four steps up into the kitchen. There is a landing at the bottom of these steps. Facing down from the top of them, the backdoor is to the left. To the right is an empty space which leads to an open, unstable, very narrow, long flight of steps to the basement. Out of all my times visiting the farm outside of my dreams, I have avoided the basement like the plague. I swear to god, there is something down there. I don't care what others think. Anyways, I walked to the set of steps leading to the basement and backdoor and just peered down into the pitch black. Then Jack was there. He was wearing  a long/large pointed black hat and black robes. He just stood there near the basement and stared up at me. He had no face. I can't remember what happened next, but now I was crying and and Jack had forced me outside. His appearance had changed. He was now wearing rags and his arms were so long, the knuckles brushed the ground. He seemed hunched over as he lead me to a 'cult'. He said he was so happy I was going to join. I had the unshakable feeling that something awful was going to happen to me. I woke up. Now then. I tried to go back to sleep after calming myself. I have always had the fear of someone or something being in my room when I sleep. I would love to be able to lay on my right side or my back to make sure there is no one but my dog and I, but I normally only fall asleep on my left side (facing the wall) or my back. For that reason, I hug the wall as flat as I can and place a blanket behind/over my head and completely cover my body with another one. I know, it sounds stupid. But anyways, whenever I tried to sleep, this deep inhuman voice kept playing in my head... At first I recognized it as the voice of a creature from this horror story I listened to, but it slowly became different and more realistic... If you have read my profile, you'll know I'm VERY superstitious. So while you guys are probably scoffing and mocking me, I'm legit fucking terrified. Demons and I do NOT get along. (This also explains why I can feel presences and the following.) So I started running through all the mental things I can do to protect myself without actually getting up and getting the freaking salt and holy water (which I'm freaking out of adsf;dsk) when I fucking felt something STANDINGINMYFREAKINGDOORWAY. Like the voice, at first it seemed like the creature from the story (link above) but slowly felt worse and worse and more and more realistic. After what seemed like FOR FREAKING EVER I finally dispelled that feeling. So I closed my eyes and went to go to sleep... Now, realize that I tend to sense things that aren't there; visual and auditory hallucinations and what not. I first heard a great rushing sound... And then is got faster and louder like something was hurtling towards my freaking head. At it's peak, I heard a deafening crash and explosion. Now I wouldn't of mentioned this if I didn't actually feel heat and wind and debris(???? or something, small things hitting my face sharply) on my face. Don't even ask how it happened, it doesn't even make sense to me considering I was even facing the wall. I ALSO wouldn't of mentioned it if it didn't happen THREE. TIMES. After the third time, I opened my eyes and whipped myself up into a sitting position to look at my alarm clock. I can't remember what time it was. On to the third, and worst part of my night last night. I had started to drift back to sleep after what seemed to be an eon after the last incident. I wore a heavy shirt to bed last night and well, having two full blankets, and my dog curled up under them (she's a mini heater I swear), I was obviously getting a bit hot. More like VERY hot. Now I normally don't let my hands/wrists and feet/ankles out from under a pillow the blankets because of my fear of having them cut off in my sleep or just being dismembered in general (???? stupid, i know.) but I had thrown off on the blankets and had the top of my torso and my left arm/hand (my dominate hand) was resting on top of the pile of blanket near the open edge of the bed. I had started to fall asleep again, looking out my bedroom door into the hall. The light was on in the dining room (just outside my room and the hallway so it illuminated my doorway) and well, I still sleep with a nightlight (don't shame me). You know all that stuff about lucid dreaming and astral projection and what not? Yeah. Well. I was back in that half sorta sleep where you sorta dream again. But the thing is that everything faded to black and then slowly came back. I couldn't move. At all. No matter how hard I tried. Everything was in shades of dark greys and blacks with very little light. The light sources themselves looked... different. darker. I scanned the room, looking at how warped and twisted and dark everything now seemed. I could still feel my body, like you do when you're awake. After I finished, taking everything in, I rested my eyes to the edge of the bed. And then I noticed something. There was a top of a horse head. But like, much smaller. Maybe the size of a dog head. No, it wasn't my dog. She was beside me under the covers, snoring. And she didn't even look like that. The skull seemed bulbous under the tight grey skin. The horse ears were placed directly on top of the head and seemed tiny in comparison. Then a wet, reptilian looking hand/paw/whatever slowly came up and then grasped the edge of the bed. The thing was slowly pulling itself up?? I dunno. But the head slowly raised up. This demonic frog-reptile-horse thing was staring. Right. Freaking. At me. Its eyes were hallow and I never saw the bottom of its head. Its head was very long and seemed to get more and more skeletal as it went on. It finally stopped and in the lighting, I had noticed that it had long antlers? or horns. Idk. I guess that doesn't matter. But anyways, it started to climb onto the bed? Or get closer. Or reach its paw towards my hand. Or all three. Like I said, this place was very distorted and dark. I tried to move away, but I couldn't move my body at all. I know how these dreams/occurrences go down, it wasn't my first time. (A few years ago, I had a very similar event go on with a demon lady inches away from my face.) I should of known I wasn't going to be able to escape it. I started to wonder what I was going to do, what it was, where I was, if maybe I had somehow went to like a demonic plane of existence. I don't know. But thank fucking gods, right as it was about to touch me, I felt that dropping feeling sort of like part of yourself falling back into yourself?? Like idk your nonphysical self going back in your body or whatever. And like it was a magic switch, everything was normal again and I found myself awake, staring out at the edge of the bed. I could move again and the room was back to normal. Needless to say, I didn't even think of falling back to sleep until like 7 AM. I honestly don't care if anyone believes me or not, I just had to write this all down and/or tell someone. So here. Have this timeline of freaking chaos from last night.

[annanotherthing2]

Beijing

My trip to Beijing didn’t start out as a group holiday. My friend and colleague, the Legal Eagle, and I had discovered we were both interested in seeing China’s capital and decided to go for the long weekend at the start of May. We were both keen to see Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and of course, the Great Wall. I also wanted Peking duck. Lots of Peking duck. A week before we were due to depart, a couple who are mutual friends of ours also decided they were coming, and then a colleague of one half of the couple was added and voila! A group holiday hath appeared.

It all started out beautifully, with champagne in the Cathay lounge (regular readers- do I have those?- will recognise this as a pre-flight necessity) an on-time departure and arrival and a swift trip from the airport to the hotel. Our group met up in the rooftop bar of the hotel on an unusually clear Beijing night, had a couple of glasses of rose and off to bed.

The next morning we awoke to clear blue skies, unable to believe our luck. After breakfast we set off to explore Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

On the day we visited, there were surprisingly few people about, rendering both the city square and the former imperial palace even more imposing.

By 11.30 am we had walked over 21,000 steps in 35 degree heat. The Legal Eagle and I were keen to keep walking; he was engaged in a “shredding” challenge with a colleague, while I suspected that the notorious Beijing pollution would return before the end of our trip and wanted to make the most of the blue skies. Our friends were tired though and suggested getting in a tuk-tuk. This is where the metaphorical wheels fell off. Being a party of five (though not orphaned, unlike the seminal TV show of the 90’s) we needed two tuk-tuks and in the bustle of Beijing traffic, none of us thought to cover off the details- like negotiating a price or ensuring they knew where we needed to go. Weaving through the traffic, passing hotel cards written in simplified Chinese, we managed to align on our destination, not even suspecting that our tuk-tuk drivers were more in rhythm than we’d realised.

As we approached our hotel, the drivers near simultaneously pulled into alleyways that branched off the main road- one to the left and the other to the right. Our driver pulled out his rate card and demanded 300 RMB (or $40 AUD) unbelievably expensive for a short tuk-tuk ride. We paid the 300 RMB and then he demanded that was the price per head. We refused and started to walk away while the driver tried to bail the Legal Eagle up against a brick wall. As we edged towards the main road, a traffic police man appeared which cooled the tuk-tuk driver’s ardour and we made our escape. Across the other side of the road this scene was playing out simultaneously, the other half of our party trying to disentangle themselves without looking like they were dodgy tourists doing a runner on the hardworking driver.

Though we were a little shaken, these are the experiences that you laugh about- the things that got a little hairy, that could have been worse. Hold that thought.

The rest of the day passed without incident, some dumplings, some shopping, some chilling back at the hotel. The night with the 60% of the contingent being rabid AFL fans we found an Irish pub that had a game on. Ho hum. Having forced the crew in Guam to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs with me at TGI Friday’s I suppose I cannot complain.

On the Sunday morning we hired a car an set off for the Great Wall. On the recommendation of a friend we chose the Mutianyu section of the wall. It’s approximately 65 kms from Beijing (but takes around 2 hours to get to) is less crowded than the better known Badaling and is surrounded by breathtaking natural scenery. After a cable car ride to the start of the walk (a challenge for those of us who are terrified of heights, aka: me) you start to trek from watchtower to watchtower, climbing as you go. Some sections of this walk are quite steep but the views are worth the exertion. Its amazing that something can be exactly as you imagined or expected it to be and still blow you away. Ready to descend, we elected to take the luge, a fun way of winding our way back down the mountain. I may be scared of heights, but I’m a freak for speed!

That night we ventured out to Capital M, a European restaurant perched in front of the Qianmen gate and highly recommended by a foodie colleague. The Capital M terrace overlooks glorious views of Tiananmen Square and Mao’s mausoleum, lighting the night, and inside the restaurant is comfortably elegant. The food was divine, the highlight being the dessert platter which were shared between the five of us. Capital M is renowned for its fruit ladened pavlova and for good reason, but the rest of the platter did not disappoint. After a cocktail on the terrace- my passionfruit margarita was delicious- we returned to the hotel at a civilised hour.

Monday dawned and the team took off for more sightseeing at the Summer Palace while I worked from the hotel room and that evening we had dinner at the Beijing outpost of the popular Lost Heaven restaurant.

I had previously eaten twice at their Shanghai branch (the one on the bund) and enjoyed it, and the Beijing branch met the standard. The menu is huge, boasting dishes from Yunnan, Myanmar and Tibet. The cocktails are inventive twists on classics and I found a new favourite in their version of the Moscow mule.

On our last day in Beijing we did a little shopping, picking up souvenirs and wandering around the Qianmen district. The pollution had returned and we felt as though there was a film of filth covering our exteriors, dust invading our lungs. Seeking refuge we returned to Capital M for a pre-departure lunch ( we really had enjoyed it.)

Here I made an admittedly unfunny joke that referenced our earlier drama with the tuk-tuk drivers and one of our group took offence to it and stormed away from the table. It was a disappointing end to the trip, like the pollution, coating the experience in something unsavoury that belied the pleasantness that had come before. I never did get my Peking duck.

Annanotherthing’s Beijing address book:

Stay 

The Emperor Beijing Qianmen

87 Xianyukou St, Dongcheng Qu, Beijing Shi, China

We also hired a car and driver from the hotel to take us to the Great Wall.

Drive 

We used Blacklane for our airport transfers

Eat 

Capital M, 3/F, No.2 Qianmen Avenue Beijing, 100051

Lost Heaven, Service Hall by Qianmen Community of Dongcheng Administration Service Center, 23, Dongcheng Qu, Beijing Shi, China

[canaryatlaw]

Okay, well today was better than yesterday, and I was in a significantly better mood for most of the day, although I'm back to being slightly irked now with no real logical reason (you know, other than the obvious). But yeah. Woke up, ate breakfast (fucking cocoa pebbles not nearly as good as cocoa krispies) and caught the bus to work. Tbh I don't remember that much of what I did for the morning because I kind of ended up napping for a full hour....more on that later, though. I think I was mostly just sourcing stuff and building the timeline for the TPR prep. See, the issue with the sleep thing is like, I can't just push through it. I can't control my eyes closing. And I also can't fucking type. Like it takes me twice as long to type something because every other letter is wrong. I did 30 minutes then tried to get back to work but it wasn't happening so I did another 30 and I can get away with this because I'm an intern and for the most part nobody cares what I do. I took a lunch too because fuck it, I don't care. The interesting assignment of the day came in the afternoon from my boss, she wanted me to watch a VSI (I know I defined that yesterday but I'll be nice and do it again, it's victim sensitive interview) because her computer wasn't sound equipped or whatever and mine was because of the prison calls, lol, so she wanted me to transcribe it verbatim for her. The thing was only 13 minutes long, but obviously took me substantially longer to get through because I can't type on a PC in real time conversation, lol, so I ended up pausing after each line to type it, then generally play it back to make sure I got it right. I ended up with like 13 pages of transcribed notes, so like one per minute of the video. A couple things here. One, I'd never actually watched one of these before, so I didn't really have a context for it. Two, I had no idea what the circumstances were going into this interview- if the girl had made an outcry or what had happened (I'm avoiding giving details for obvious reasons when discussing child sex abuse) but I finished it with the impression that there had been an incident. Then my boss comes back and explains she had read the detective's notes and he said there wasn't gonna be charges and it didn't seem like there was anything there, which of course was not at all what I got from it. Apparently going into it wasn't based on an outcry but a weird hotline call that the little girl had been saying sexually explicit things in school but they unfounded the report as just nothing. So I of course relayed all of this to my supervisor, and she said she'd have to watch it now haha but had my notes as well. So that took me about to the end of my day. I had a 6:30 PT appointment because it was the only one available, and after last week's fiasco I knew there was no way I would make it on time if I took the bus, so I ubered, figuring I should have just enough time to get home, change, and go right back out. Uber was in a price surge so I ended up paying like, double the normal rate (ugh) for it but whatever. I liked the driver a lot, he said I was actually his first customer because this was his first day driving for uber haha so I was like okay, hopefully this will go well! But we started talking and I went into the cases and the reforms that have been populating the news (the more recent child death case that supposedly prompted the DCFS director into reforms that I was ranting about the other day had been pretty widely reported so he brought that one up) and I told him about my case and the ridiculous can't make this shit up facts of it all. And of course we talked the random stuff. We took the street my street is off all the way up because it's pretty much a straight shot, like the bus I take to work and back, except that one goes a few blocks over then shoots down. It had a fair amount of traffic, but I had tried to allocate enough time to make sure it was okay and I arrived at my apartment just at 6:10 which was perfect, I ran in and got changed and did a few other things then came back out at 6:20 to walk over for my 6:30 appointment. While I'm almost there, I get a call from a Long Island number, so I'm like okay, I answer it and it's my psychiatrist that I've been playing phone tag with for two weeks now. Of all the shitty timing!! But I knew because of my mental state lately I did have to have this conversation now, so I ended up standing outside the therapy place on the phone for 15 minutes while motioning to them that I'd been in as soon as possible. It was a good conversation though, I'm glad we had it, and it was definitely necessary. Apparently the deal with the phone tag was the secretary or whoever would take down my message that I needed him to call back, but somehow in there my name got substituted for my mom's, so he ended up calling her repeatedly and trying to figure out what was going on before someone realized OH, it's the daughter who's in Chicago and not Long Island, lol. So that made me feel significantly better than my messages weren't being deliberately ignored. So I told him my exams were over and my anxiety was through the roof, with the Xanax not helping. Then he asked about my sleep, and suddenly the light bulb in my head clicked on and I went OHHHHHHHHHH, YOUR MID MORNING NAPS HAVE BEEN BECAUSE YOUVE BEEN INCREASING YOUR XANAX DOSAGE YOU FUCKING MORON and suddenly that made a lot more sense. He asked some questions about describing the mind racing thing and asked if it was like hyper, and of course I knew where he was going with that so I said it definitely wasn't manic (because it's not) but more just anxiety based. So we ended up swapping out one of my regular meds for what I believe is the generic version of Zoloft, and he said to do whatever with the Xanax since they weren't helping anyway, so I'm gonna cut down on them a lot lol cuz I can't live like this. I do think I was on Zoloft at one point in high school and it wasn't terribly helpful, just one in a long line of antidepressants tried that resulted in a "meh" result, but the circumstances here are fairly different now that I'm on several meds and I have the Wellbutrin to actually treat depression, the Zoloft can potentially help the anxiety, which was definitely not really present in high school or even when I started with my psychiatrist back in 2012 (thanks, law school). I mean, it had started before law school, but that's what's really exacerbated it of course. Hey, it got my brother an OCD diagnosis after 22 years of only ever having super small tics like re-walking out of a room every so often. So hopefully those meds will get things figured out and it'll be better. So I finally got off the phone at 6:40 and of course was now very frustrated because I hate being late, but we just jumped into it instead of doing warm ups so it was fine. I keep getting asked if I'm feeling an improvement in pain, but the answer continues to be about the same, and in fact after PT it almost definitely hurts. It was actually bugging me at work today too, which isn't typical. But we had a good session anyway. Afterwards I walked across the street to Walgreens just because I wanted to grab a type of melatonin I know works for me to use as a control test for the Xanax- to make sure that's the thing that's throwing it off, not being unsure if it's the melatonin. Come home, get some dinner together and start Arrow. I wasn't totally thrilled with the episode given the plot was pretty weak, but it was of course strengthened greatly by the presence of Katie Cassidy and Katrina Law (though I would've liked more than 30 seconds of Katrina). Can I just talk about Katie Cassidy's acting skills though? I'm amazed as to how she's adopted completely different personas to the point where you can tell "who" she's supposed to be just by looking at her- that Laurel, Black Siren, and particularly black siren pretending to be Laurel, but not resembling either in any significant way but an entirely new image. I'm just like damn girl, that's intense. So things are set up for the final battle now, which has to happen on Lian-Yu because everything fucking happens on Lian-Yu, and I'll admit it does seem like it'll be a pretty epic showdown given everyone they've brought in on both sides. Back to that non-existent plot though- like really Oliver? Really??? That had to be the worst plan in existence of plans. You just handed him over and what, expected him to just let everyone go and go skip off into the sunset? Like dude, come on. That was really fucking dumb. So then it's just Oliver and fucking Malcolm, who has somehow managed to stay alive for another season, much to my annoyance. The moment with Nyssa coming in was pretty epic though, but I really hope they told her that besides her sister they were also facing off with E2 Laurel because those two got pretty damn close in season 3 and that could definitely throw her for a loop. Also, why the fuck had they not told Quentin at this point??? Like that was really dumb because you left him super vulnerable to exactly what happened. So yeah, I suppose I'm looking forward to the season finale, mostly for my two homegirls, but hopefully the rest of it will be good too. A tweet on my timeline reminded me that designated survivor was about to come on just as I finished Arrow, so I turned that on to watch live since I knew it was the season finale. Can I just say damn, I love this show so much??! It's so freaking well done in an era of totally overdone dramas, and of course this had the potential to do some incredibly shark jumping being that they blew up the entire government as the premise of the start of the plot. They've handled it really well. I think most of the episode was good and full of action, though I was sad to see Jason is actually dead (I mean, I think we knew he was, it just wasn't formally confirmed). I loved the scene between Kirkman and the reporter, because you can just tell how much respect the reporter gets from him because of how he handled the meeting, and I'm just left thinking whoever handpicked Kirkman as the designated survivor obviously massively underestimated his ability to be an incredible leader of our country. Damn what I would do for him to be our real president right now.....sigh. The speech was great and super satisfying, but I'm also watching the clock because I KNOW they have to leave some sort of cliffhanger disaster to predicate season 2 on, and of course that happened with them basically being like "we're fucked, they're fucked, everyone's fucked" which sounds like a fairly good premise to me. After this I watched Brooklyn 99 which was of course fucking hilarious. After that I got ready for bed, but for some stupid reason when I'm you know on autopilot for my routine I took the morning pills left in my "Tuesday" box instead of the evening pills in the "Wednesday" box (because I refill every Tuesday night) and took the wrong meds, then said well fuck, but my best bet is probably taking the meds I should've taken right now (none that should really interfere with the first) and just skip my morning dosage. And then tomorrow afternoon I can pick up my prescription for my new med so my body is just gonna be a psychopharmacological mess for the next 24 hours but hopefully it won't have any really bad side effects (it really shouldn't) (I'm also very impressed that psychopharmacological is an actual word and I didn't have to just make it up like I normally do when I want to use a form of a word that doesn't exist). Andddd it's past 1 am. I get to arrive at 9:30 tomorrow since we're going straight to a visit, so that'll be nice, assuming I don't fall asleep on the bus again like I did last time 😑. Anyway. Goodnight my little loves. Hope you had the loveliest of hump days.

[causewhy]

Mickey the Mouse strikes again

Vacation time again (September 2015).  After some back and forth I settled on another Disney Cruise.  They are easy and generally stress free...at least that’s what I tell myself when I start putting the down payment toward it.  I ran the numbers and did some logistical analysis and settled on a shorter cruise this time but for an added new bonus factor I would throw in two nights and one, solid day of Disney world. As far as these two were concerned there was only one Disney World park- Magic Kingdom.  I booked a room with monorail access so we could come and go as we pleased if a nap was in order but I had every intention of maxing out the $100 per ticket park price tag. They were so excited, and so was I.  They had never been to Disney world so this was going to be a treat.  

The day came and we set off for the friendly skies. I always tend to get the early flights so we arrived with plenty of time to enjoy the hotel pools at the Contemporary and also explore the other two hotels on the monorail system, which also gave us a chance to ride by the park so they could see what they would be in for the following day.  

Staying in a park hotel allows us early entry into the park so we woke early and made our way to Magic Kingdom just as the doors open.  I hadn’t really mapped out our magic route.  I think people spend weeks, months even trying to figure out the past logistical plan for hitting up all the necessary rides.  I don’t like to get bogged down with all that noise because, let’s be real, kids are wild cards.  They don’t like a plan.  They like to take your plan, squash it up into a tiny ball and throw it in the garbage disposal.  I had a general idea of what area we would hit up first, the one I deemed to be most popular.  We were headed toward the seven dwarfs.  As we walked, hurriedly in that direction I saw the stitch ride.  There was no one in the que so I rushed them through the maze of rails.  We are on and ready to go in less than two minutes.  The “ride” started and boy was I in for it.  The lights went out.  Stitch was running all around us.  Strong bursts of air and spritzes of water were hitting us from all directions. Addison freaked the F@%# out.  She was screaming to not only get off but that she wanted to go home.  We were stuck.  The lights were off, the chest rails were on.  we had to ride it out.  I felt terrible.  It was the longest 3-4 minutes.  Once it was over she was in tears and begged to be taken back to the hotel..  It took a lot of convincing to get her back to giving this another shot.  After I finally calmed her down I decided the tea cups would be a nice change of pace.  Sure enough it was incredible fun and Disney world no longer sucked...That was until we hit the seven dwarfs ride and found out it was a two person per car set up.  It was still early so the line wasn’t terrible (if you consider 20 minutes not terrible).  it took me nearly the entire 20 minutes to convince Gavin that riding with some stranger wouldn’t suck and he would have an amazing time on the ride.  He wasn’t convnced. In fact, it wasn’t until we finally got the front and Addison and I started boarding that he just got on with a really nice lady. In the end, it was one of the kids’ favorite ride. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the pictures of Gavin.  I think he knew the cameras were flashing and wanted me to know that sitting with strangers is not on his list of OK things to do.  

The kids did, in fact, love the seven dwarfs ride so I thought we were good to go with the rides.  I took us to the logistically sound ride choice based on proximity...Space Mountain.  Sounds like a solid choice ..right?!?!  I had never been on space mountain, but it was a 40 year old coaster.  it couldn’t be that bad.  HA!.  Good news was it was a three seater.  We hopped in and we set off. Did you know space mountain was in the dark?  I didn’t.  Had I known it may not have been my fourth choice of coasters (coming off that whole stitch incident).  But, yet again, it was too late.  Space mountain was fast..up and down...zig zagging all over with nothing but dimly lit stars to light the way.  Addison started yelling she wanted to get off again...”let me off...I wan’t to stop”.  Guess what?!  they don’t let you off until it’s done.  I reached back and tried to hold her hand telling her it would be over soon.  The whole ride lasted about 2-3 really intense minutes.  Even I was a little overwhelmed.  The unknown in the midst of darkness will do that.  Once we finished and all stepped off we made our way out and all looked at each other a bit dazed...”That was AMAZING”.  Gavin loved it...and then...Addison said “that was pretty fun. As we walked out we passed the TVs with the coaster pictures. What happened next we absolute hysteria..from that moment on I made an effort to stop at the TVs after every ride.  Her facial expression (as displayed in nearly every picture below) is sheer terror.  I laugh every time I think about them. Space mountain ended up being the crowd favorite and we went on it at least three more times that day.  

Disney world was exhausting.  We had an amazing time.  I am glad it was scheduled for the beginning of our trip and not the end.  The cruise was a nice respite from the madness.  We sunbathed on the Disney Island and chased down characters, ordered room service, and ate ice cream until we couldn’t move.  The cruise certainly did not disappoint.  

The last day of the cruise came too quickly as they always do.  We took our time getting off the ship because our flight wasn’t until dusk.  I rented a car so we wouldn’t have to stay in the airport for 9 hours so we set off to find something fun to do.  That fun thing was the Crayola Experience store/venue whatever you call it. I didn’t know what to expect but it was close to the airport and a lot cheaper than a Disney park.  We got in and for a small place it packed in a lot of activities. The kids carved their own crayons, made crayon splatter art, and car/dinosaur shaped crayons.  In the end they said they enjoyed that more than Disney world..wish I would have known that about $600 before. 

After a long day we made our way to the airport and on the plane  where they both promptly fell asleep.  We landed safely and toward the house we went.  Once we touched down and made our way home we walked in to a tornado of mud.  Our neighbors graciously offered to keep an eye on Molly in our absence.  Little did we know that a series of monsoon type rainstorms would make their way to our neck of the woods.  Molly is no ordinary dog (she’s a cleveland, why would she be).  She likes the rain. She waits for the rain and then stands in it like she has no sense.  my guess is she did that ..often..and then came back in to dry off and get a bite to eat from time to time.  When she did, she shook off, throwing wetness and mud all over, tracking it up and down the length of the house.  I stepped inside and my eyes got really big, my heart sank, and the kids  (I'm pretty sure) heard the sound of defeat as I exhaled gently.  I shook my head and walked what bags I could upstairs without saying a word.  I changed into something more scrub worthy.  When I made my descent back downstairs I found the kids, with paper towels and dish brushes in hand wiping away the mud from the walls and floor.  After what seemed like an eternity we got the bulk of it and all crashed in one bed, thankful for the fun times.  

It’s before dawn and we are ready to go. 

puppy dogs and hand holding to get us through the flight

 I can not stop laughing at her face in these pictures.  Every.single.one

He refused to have fun on this one because had to sit with a stranger

everybody smile...no really...smile

look up “photogenic” in the dictionary.  under Antonyms you will find pictures of the Clevelands 

let’s make the bad pictures look intentional

show all your teeth this time..

oh this one is decent

 the teacups were a safe bet after stitch

stop with the pictures already

pose?

knee high socks in summer seem like I a good idea

found a kind stranger

There's a story behind the printout of this picture.  It had to be rescued from between the walls

I post them because they’re funny

back when they still liked hugs

trading pins with an officer

pin trading is an expensive hobby for kids

Captain something or other

she emptied an entire bottle of cleaner