#I knew both of them were highly likely to be finalists at the start but don't think I thought it would be both of them

[minorcharactertournament]

WHO IS THE BEST MINOR CHARACTER?

[yourdesertsunflower]

Chunin Exams: Shikamaru vs. Temari

So this will be long, so be ready for some deep diving. I’d been thinking this for quite a while so let’s go. 

One of my favorite Chunin Exams’s match has to be Shikamaru vs. Temari. This may not be much of a surprise for any of you, but maybe the reason why it is between my top 3 will surprise more than one. 

Obviously the ship factor made me like this battle even more, but it’s not even a primary or secondary reason for why I love this match. This battle stands out to me as being one of the most truthful ninja fights of the whole arc. Why? Because a ninja fight, as Kakashi would day during the Zabuza’s arc is about always plotting, to know when to do certain thing, to know when to not to do them and just hide and to work with the tools you have. 

It’s a battle were the brains out beats the brute force, where the strength is the last resource and the strategy primes as the best thing a ninja can have. It about deciphering our opponent, carrying out the best strategy and ensuring the win as much as possible and both Shikamaru and Temari excel at being this masterminds. They make the most out of their battle and, in my opinion, they both shine through as not only capable but highly advanced strategists, specially for their short age. 

That’s why when I hear people going like “No, she’s not.” when Asuma says that Temari she is bright and that she thinks like Shikamaru (she thinks ahead) or say that “Shikamaru could have easily beat Temari if he wasn’t that lazy” I just feel like crying. 

However, it’s not people’s fault after all. The direction of the match in both the anime and the manga makes Shikamaru’s strategy the wow factor. I am not saying his tactic is not genius, I would be pretty lame if I said that, nor that Shikamaru is not more intelligent than Temari (He is the most brilliant person of his generation, specially when it comes to strategy) and he deserved the recognition because the tactic he carried through was slick af. It’s one of the many reason why Shikamaru is my absolute favorite character in Naruto (I love him so much). 

However, I think that Shikamaru’s genius shouldn’t by any means diminish Temari’s wit. Because she was also delivering quite a good fight, she was a good match for Shikamaru (which ain’t easy) and (I personally think) had a pretty accurate strategy. 

So, I gave myself the job of being Temari’s Asuma and explain in full detail what I think, through my reading, was Temari’s strategy. Because my girl deserves more recognition. She is a strategist and a really good one.

1. Context

One thing I think it’s important to mention before anything is the context of the match. 

If we come to think about it, it wouldn’t be that far-fetched to say that Temari couldn’t waste that much chakra nor show new abilities in her fight against Shikamaru. Let’s remember that the Sand only participated in the Chunin Exams because of the attack, to execute the Konoha Crush. A plan for which the Sand Siblings, specially Gaara, were crucial. Even we get to see Kankuro forfeiting of his fight against Shino in order to keep his techniques a secret and wait for the time to make the move. 

However Temari didn’t had the same luck. It would be suspicious if the two of them just gave up. My reading of the situation is that actually neither of them expected to fight their respective matches as Gaara’s match against Sasuke was before theirs. Still, if someone had to fight Temari knew that would be her because, 

a. Kankuro was against Shino who had shown to be a beast, and hence, it was more likely that he would have to use higher tier attacks. 

b. Temari showed to be quite confident of her skills and Shikamaru, though he had shown to be intelligent (not to the extent of this match but intelligent nonetheless) he was the weakest of the finalist in terms of raw strength. 

So, Temari had to be the one to fight. Otherwise the plan would fall apart, and although she wasn’t sure about attacking from the start, she was extremely loyal to her village and would never do something to hurt it. However she couldn’t be imprudent, hence, she didn’t had to waste that much chakra in order not to tire herself that much and couldn’t show new wind style techniques as that would only weaken the surprise effect this might have (let’s remember she was in a stadium filled with highly capable Shinobi, Chunin and Jonin Level)

But although she couldn’t be imprudent, she also couldn’t let herself be defeated. After all, she is Temari. She had figure out a way to win despite the limitations she had which brings us to the fight itself. 

2. First Movement: Gaining Information

The first thing Temari knows is that she needs some information about the match and the rival so she starts off by trying to get an action or a least a reaction from Shikamaru, which proved to be quite draining due to his usual unmotivated behavior. 

The frontal and direct attacks of Temari at the beginning of the match serve that purpose. 

Unlike her match against Tenten, where she could just start of in complete defensiveness she quickly realized that that wouldn’t work with Shikamaru. I am pretty sure Temari is one of those fighters who don’t like to make the first move but to wait and recollect information from her adversaries (after all i  her battle against Tenten, in which she always seemed comfortable she did just that) but as she knew that couldn’t be the case as while Tenten is someone active, Shikamaru is more of reactive fighter she just attacked to get the necessary information to use with her previous knowledge (which I’ll also proceed to explain) to plan a strategy. 

She knew from Shikamaru’s fight against Kin (the sound ninja) that it was quite likely that the Shadow Posession Jutsu had: 

a. A range 

b. Short duration spam. 

c. Wasted to much chakra. 

After all, Shikamaru was always shown to be pretty cautious about how and when he used it. That’s why the jutsu doesn’t seem much of a threat at the beginning as if she could manage to identify the range of his jutsu she could just stay away from it and make him waste chakra. 

If to that we add that Shikamaru’s reaction was to hide she also gained a panorama of how the fight will be like. It’ll most likely be a long-lasting battle based more in indirect attacks and meticulously planning than in strength. 

This seemed to match quite well, which justifies Temari’s smile as Shikamaru hides. At first glance stretching out the duration of the battle and fighting long-range was just perfect for her as she could save as much chakra as possible, dodging the attacks of Shikamaru while making him waste as much chakra as possible. 

Hence, although Temari was overconfident (aspect I’ll talk about in more detail later) she had a reason to be so. She had a fairly strong plan,and everything seemed to be falling in the right place. 

2. Identifying the Range and the Sun

The first attacks of Shikamaru just seem to work on perfectly for Temari as she achieves to find out her shadow range, a jaw-dropping fifteen meters thirty-two centimetres (like she is also a mathematician in her own right). 

It’s then when Shikamaru shows her that there was one factor she hadn’t thought about before: the sun. When the shadow reaches a longer distance than it had already done she quickly deduces that as the sun sets the shadow of the wall was getting larger, hence elongating the shadow making his range bigger. 

And Temari quickly adapts to the situation working out several plans she could use. She decides the better was keeping up with the angle and the direction from which the sun is hitting the wall and the growth in his shadow in order to be able to calculate an equation that would keep him away from his shadow. 

This is good because while some may just freak out and try to use brute force to finish it, as seemingly stretching the match no longer holds any sense, Temari takes her time to think and finds a way to use her skills and knowledge in battle. This is no easy task, as we see that a lot of highly talented shinobis on paper had a tough time in practice. But she is so great that she comes up with a way that doesn’t directly throws the entire plan she had come up with to the trash. 

3. Surprise Attack 

Well I got to say this. I don’t like that Kankuro warns Temari about Shikamaru’s  home-made parachute because I easily think that she could have realized by herself. She had shown all through the battle to have great observational skills and to be quite focused so I think that Kishimoto could have easily come up with that. 

Still, I understand that Kishomoto through this fight tries to justify that Shikamaru was the one that would become a Chunin, so nerfing Temari isn’t the worst thing out of all. I don’t like it but isn’t that bad if we take into consideration the other thingd that were done in the manga. 

However is through her ability to dodge this attack we get Asuma’s and Shikamaru’s reaction and recognition of Temari’s skills. She is a really good shinobi, quick, intelligent and competent. 

Yes, Shikamaru had just gotten her in the position she wanted but what he said he truly meant it, which means a lot given his chauvinistic behavior at the begging of Naruto. She is fast learner, she is capable to dodge attacks that no regular genin could or as Shikamaru said in Naruto Ninja Storm 4 (yes, I usually hate most of the scenes in this game but this one ShikaTema scene was so sport on) that she was the first person of his age to be able dodge that many attacks from him, which leaves me to another point. 

4. Moves Ahead

It’s almost a meme that Shikamaru has a 200 IQ and that he is 200 moves ahead everyone else but what I really think that people don’t understand is that for Shikamaru each an everyone of those moves, from the first one to the the two hundred, could be the last one. When Shikamaru plans out a strategy he may use some moves that are feints but those feints may also work to end the match to less skilled rivals. Each move works as an individual move as part of a whole. That is other level, is genius. Prove of the overtly exaggerated 200 IQ, almost everyone could seem dumb beside him.

However, the complexity of the strategy he used against Temari shows us that how knew that he needed to come up with something good in order to be able to beat her. She wouldn’t fall for something straightfoward because she showed to be several steps ahead also. 

She had shown to easily decipher his jutsu’s range, she had found elements that could have served him as an advantage and she had been skillful enough to move around the field avoiding his jutsu with ease. And he knows that because 

a. He had seen it, 

b. She had told it to him, which I think was one of the biggest mistakes of Temari derived from her over-confidence.

That’s why his plan had to be slick in order to win which brings up the end of the match. 

5. Checkmate

After seeing that Shikamaru’s shadow range was almost unlimited and that her chances of measuring it were incredibly low she then decides to end it once and for all because; 

a. If she extended the match much longer it was almost inevitable that she will end up being caught by his shadow paralysis jutsu 

b. She couldn’t risk to waste a lot of chakra since, I have already mentioned, it was indispensable she was in good conditions for the Konoha Crush. 

But it’s interesting the movement she plans out in order to beat Shikamaru since it shows that she is very aware of her own tools and abilities and of the abilities of her rival. One clone will take the attention of him, falling in his shadows paralysis while she just bluntly beat him with her crushing wind style. Fairly simple, but also extremely effective. 

When Shikamaru caught her and shows her his strategy Temari quickly understands what he had done. She had underestimated both his jutsu and his mind and that added with her over-confidence in her analysis was what gave Shikamaru the necessary information to caught her. 

She is genuinely surprised as the rest of the crowd but they are even more when he gives up. 

That was just a masterful decision of Kishimoto, I got to give him that, because it not only make Shikamaru be cool af for the audience, but also for two things that are lest often touched upon: 

a. In terms of Shikamaru it showed the genius he is, the smartest person of his generation by far, capable of examining the situation and choose the best option to execute. He was running out of chakra while his rival was safe and sound. In a real life mission the best option is retreat, and that’s what he does. This is shows to Temari than he and Shikamaru are actually much more alike than she had thought. They both are rational thinkers, who measure cons and pros and are able to come up with a logical analysis but they are also pretty conscious of themselves and others. That’s what Asuma means when he says they think alike, that why they always seem to work along together despite their seemingly clashing personalities. 

b. In terms of Temari she gets the bittersweet victory. She archived what she wanted, making him run out of chakra, but not how she wanted to do so. It is deserved and undeserved at the same time which conflicts her. If the battle had continued it was more than likely she had won as she wanted to but it didn’t which let her thinking that, if he could he could have easily beat her even though he states that not to be the reason. After all he had clearly outsmarted her, and that was what was the most important for her, despite her win was deserved in my opinion (not because she was more intelligent than him, because no one really is, but because, at the end, she managed with her wit and talent to make it impossible for him to continue). She thinks that her over-confidence and her analysis which she prides of, was the thing that took her down and that it’s quite important for her character and her relationships with others. We’ll get to see how this affected her in her following appearances, when we get to see her when she goes to fight against Tayuya she carefully listens to Shikamaru’s analysis, although at the end she decides to do it her way (an nails it), her decision was derived from her listing to his words and all he got to say. 

At the end Temari will always be her wonderful confident self (that’s only another reason to love her) but after this match she shows to be more cautious when underestimating her rivals, however you shouldn’t dare underestimate her. 

Because she is a f***ing boss.   

[ve1vetyoongi]

Mic Drop | myg

pairing: yoongi x reader

genre: smut, angst, fluff

au: rapper!yoongi, photographer!oc

summary: when underground rapper min yoongi uncovers the dirty secret behind his biggest rival, your brother and hip hop champion kim namjoon’s success, he is determined to take home this year’s mic drop contest trophy no matter who he hurts along the way. you’re behind the camera, content with capturing namjoon’s picture perfect persona from the sidelines but when his hard-faced enemy Gloss, makes you realise you could be more than just the point and shoot, you start to feel your loyalties shifting.

warnings: multiple smut scenes, dirty talk, dry humping, penetrative sex, fingering, oral sex (both m and f receiving), lots of orgasm denial, multiple orgasms, cum play, cum eating, but also tender fucking lol, very brief mention of death.

word count: 29k (rip)

rating: definitely explicit

playlist: visit my playlist page and select “mic drop.” (all links to be added later)

a/n: ahhh you don’t understand how happy i am to finally put this out into the world!!! i started writing this fic back in july and after a few rewrites (more on this at the end of the post if anyone sticks around until then) she’s finally finished eee <3 also!!! this fic is brought to you courtesy of the love yourself collab! this project has been super fun to be a part of n i wanna say thank you to everyone involved who made it such a welcoming experience! you can check out the masterlist here (link will be added later f u tumblr) to read all the other amazing fics from the incredibly talented authors in this project (literally so talented??? it’s sickening???) (im so excited to finally read them all now im done w this monster lol). all the love as always <3

Introducing Runch Randa!

The host is barely audible over the chants of your brother's name as the lights dim and the arena is sent into a haze of strobe lights.

The air is already heady with body heat and fragrant with sweat from the thousands of bodies smushed together in the pit and beyond that thousands more seated in the stands, phone lights twinkling in the darkened arena like stars. A girl in your peripheral clutches a sign with MARRY ME RUNCH RANDA scrawled in sharpie, torso clad in one of the cheap merch hoodies with your brother's face printed on the front, just like hundreds of others around her.

It's a full house. No one's surprised. The Mic Drop semi-final always creates a buzz of anticipation within the hip hop scene. But this year, with your brother Namjoon returning to compete for the trophy again, there isn't an empty seat in sight.

A buzz pulses through the crowd when the bass kicks in. It makes hearts beat faster, blood run hotter, a crescendo of screams crashing violently through room, the sheer volume enough to make the walls shake in time with the stamp of impatient feet.

It's infectious. Almost. If you hadn't been here a hundred times before, countless nights the same as this one that all started to blur into one somewhere along the line. Different crowds but the same energy, the same hum of anticipation that used to get your bones rattling, your skin hot with suspense. Now it's just routine. Now you feel nothing.

Besides, you're just here to do your job. The photographer. To take pictures, not to enjoy the show. Just like always.

Five seconds. You know Namjoon's set list like the back of your hand by now. Five seconds until he takes the stage and the crowd goes wild.

One, two, three, four...

Like clockwork, the stage lights up and there he is, face blown up in painful detail across every screen. Runch Randa. His stage name pulses through the room, a mantra, chanted until throats turn sore and mouths run dry.

Dark framed glasses cover his eyes but his stance is enough to tell you that he came here to win, his presence immediately filling the empty stage with an energy that makes it impossible to look anywhere else, even for a moment.

He is already damp with sweat, neck glistening beneath the white lights. Like routine you snap a few shots when he taunts the camera with a smirk, brushing a hand through his immaculately gelled hair teasingly, mouth turning up into a grin when the audience roars.

Runch Randa walks across the stage with the ease of someone who lives and breathes for moments like these. Grabs the microphone with two hands, shiny silver rings glinting on his fingers beneath the harsh strobe lights.

You can see his opponents in the front row, nothing but rookies, the intimidation etched into their features visible even from where you stand side stage as they swallow the bitter pill that they stand no chance against him.

Once upon a time you were the same as the wide eyed fans in the pit, filled with an admiration for your brother. He was everything you wanted to be; a whirlwind of fearless, brazen passion when he got up on stage. But things changed once Namjoon won Mic Drop, claiming the trophy at the tender age of seventeen. After that he started filling arenas. Then stadiums. And you were left behind in the ruins of his whirlwind, feeling the Namjoon you once knew slip further away as Runch Randa took center stage, viewing his perfect persona through the lens of your camera with the same sour resentment as the rookies.

Because when a familiar beat permeates the arena, you can't help but close your eyes and imagine the name the crowd screams is yours. That it's you out there instead of him. It's you pouring your heart into the lyrics that you find yourself whispering unconsciously in time with your brother.

Your lyrics.

The lyrics you wrote especially for this performance. The same lyrics that would be streamed by millions, top charts and win Namjoon another stupid trophy to add to his already elaborate collection.

The only reason Namjoon still kept you around was because he couldn't write them himself.

The track ends and the Mic Drop host crosses the stage with a grin. Namjoon's arm is thrust into the air triumphantly.

"And our first finalist is...Runch Randa!"

You snap a picture of your brother smiling victoriously.

"He's gonna win. I know it."

Namjoon's manager Jimin sidles up beside you, grin plastered to his face. It's nauseating.

"Does he ever lose?" You murmur

Runch Randa! Runch Randa! Runch Randa!

--

Mic Drop. The most highly anticipated event in the music industry for its ability to make hip hop artists stars; as well as its tendency to break them just as easily.

Fame. Money. Glory. Just a few of the reasons why rap rookies from across the globe are desperate to compete in the ruthless battle of blood, sweat and rap that is Mic Drop.

They all think they have what it takes. That they have that special something the judges are looking for. Unfortunately, most don't even make it past the auditions phase.

When your brother, Mic Drop legend Runch Randa, announced he would be ditching his celebrity status and stadium concerts to return to his underground roots and compete for the trophy again, it raised a series of questions

Why now? What did he have to prove?

Once the press got wind of the fact that your parent's, CEO'S of the most prestigious record label in the industry Big Hit Entertainment, had run into a spot of financial trouble, everyone assumed your brother's re-entry was a master plan to win the lavish cash prize afforded to competition winners. Sure, you couldn't deny that it was partly true --- Big Hit's stocks were plummeting and a lot was at stake.

Truthfully, though, you knew your brother well enough to see that Namjoon's motives were far more selfish; to put it simply, he was greedy. Fame was his drug. Once he got a taste he could never get enough.

Of course, a cheque signed and delivered by your father's hand shut any rumors down very quickly. Your parent's were good at silencing people if it meant protecting Namjoon's reputation.

Even you, their own daughter.

The name tag labelled OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER was nothing but a cover up for the true reason you spent so much time at Big Hit -- writing each and every one of Namjoon's hit songs. A secret you were forced to keep as you watched your brother through a camera lens.

Which is how you find yourself as his strictly-invitation-only after party, an attempt at building momentum for the big final in just a few weeks time, with a camera in hand.

You're sat in the corner of the A-list club Jimin rented out for the event, swirling the deep red liquid in your glass with a bored disinterest as you watch your brother shake hands with company investors and big buck producers, most of which you'd never even heard of.

These things always seem to drag on, the clock ticking slower with each agonising second spent smiling courteously to uphold the supportive sister persona. Your feet are starting to hurt in your heels and all you want to do is hide away in the Big Hit studio and scribble down the lyrics floating aimlessly in your mind. That's the only good thing about these events -- they give you time to think, a rare relief in between your brother's busy schedules.

"Well, well. If it isn't my favorite lyricist."

A cheerful voice jolts you from your thoughts and when you blink up through the flashing lights you're met with a lazy grin belonging to Hoseok, one of the producers at Big Hit. He's an ex Mic Drop contestant himself, coming fourth and just missing out on the semi-finals three years ago. He never had the stomach for it anyway, he always says, but you never miss the rejection in his eyes.

Hoseok is also one of the only people who knows about your secret. He was hired to help you work on tracks for your brother once he made it big after all, and although he would never admit it you knew he probably had to sign a hefty NDA. Still, you were grateful to have him around — you couldn't deny you made something of a dream team together.

"Mind if I sit?" He gestures with his glass towards the empty space beside you, and you move your purse so he can squash in on the leather couch. "At least some of us are having fun, huh?" You follow his gaze to Namjoon on the dance floor, hands all over some vaguely recognizable celebrity's hips.

You grimace and swig back the remaining alcohol in your glass. "Too much fun, apparently."

Hoseok snorts, wringing his hands. "Y'know, we could get out of here if you're as bored as I am..." His words slur just slightly and you figure his confidence is a result of the amber liquor in his glass. The shy Hoseok  you know well returns quickly though as he averts his eyes when you raise a brow. "Not like that! I just thought maybe we could get a drink or something...if you want to?"

You shift awkwardly, having to shout over the booming club music for him to hear you. "I should really stay here. People might ask questions if the sister of the host just...disappears."

"Right!" Hoseok smiles sheepishly then slaps his own forehead. "Right. Forget I ever asked."

You shake your head fondly and turn back towards the dance floor just in time to see Namjoon whisper in the ear of the DJ, music cutting as he takes the mic and hops up onto the small stage to address the party.

Finally! A sign he was going to wrap up the evening for good!

He clears his throat and the huddle of mingling bodies below him fall into an expectant hush.

"Uh, so I'm not usually very good at these speech things --" He pauses and the crowd laughs. You tap your knee impatiently. "But I just wanted to say thank you. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for your support. So, the next round of drinks are on me! I haven't won — yet — but its never too early to start celebrating, right?"

Namjoon raises his flute of champagne and the party-goers cheer just as a flurry of confetti drops from the ceiling. The music starts again and you're too busy picking the brightly colored paper out of your hair disgruntledly to notice the way the room suddenly quietens and the guests part down the middle like prey from a predator.

"Y/N. Look." Hoseok elbows you sharply and flies forward in his seat, whisky sloshing over the edge of his glass. "Shit! Is that--"

Is that really him? What is he doing here? He's back!

You look up just in time to see the commotion as a figure in a black hoodie weaves effortlessly to the front of the room. You don't recognise him but something about his presence gives you chills.

Namjoon is too busy throwing back his drink to notice as the man climbs the stage, his skinny jeans and high tops sticking out like a sore thumb against the sea of dress shoes and cocktail dresses. He clearly wasn't invited.

By the time your brother senses the change in the air, it's too late.

You feel your face pale, choking when the figure finally turns and lets down his hood, revealing a head of blue hair and a venomous smirk.

"Gloss?"

Namjoon turns and his smile dissolves. He just stares stiffly at the person in front of him like he's seen a ghost. In a way you suppose he has -- the ghost of his past. After all, the last time anyone saw this face was five years ago at the Mic Drop final.

It is him! It's Gloss! Why is he back?

The night that changed all of your lives. When Namjoon claimed the Mic Drop trophy and Gloss, his opponent, lost everything.

It's been years since the last time you saw Gloss but you still recognize the distinctive confidence in his gait, the way his eyes flash with something dark as he looks your brother up and down with a breathy laugh.

Namjoon is frozen, breathing heavily.

Gloss' voice is husky when he finally speaks. It makes you shiver.

"Runch Randa. Long time no see, huh?"

A beat of unbearable silence.

"What are you doing here?"

Gloss's chuckle makes Namjoon snarl. You see the way his jaw tenses and his fists clench. He's too wound up; he'll snap if you don't do something and fast.

You get to your feet but Hoseok pulls you back down sternly by the elbow. "Don't." You protest but his grip is too tight so you just fidget helplessly instead.

Something settles in the atmosphere; a nervousness that makes you itch, makes your heart pump into overdrive as you watch them draw closer, eyes narrowed like boxers in a ring, waiting for the other to make a move. Hoseok covers his eyes.

"I wouldn't start celebrating just yet, Runch. The competition has only just begun."

The crowd gasps when your brother's clenched fist swings at his smug opponent. The rapper ducks but not quite in time and you can't remember which comes first — the crunch that crackles through the speakers when Namjoon's ring-clad knuckles collide with Gloss' face or the ear splitting thump of his mic dropping to the ground.

--

The party ends abruptly. Your head spins with confusion as you watch the guests leave in shock. Seeing Namjoon up on that stage opposite his biggest opponent again makes your stomach sick, like you were reliving the events of five years ago all over again.

Deep down you had always expected this moment to come. For Gloss to return looking for revenge or something. After all, Gloss didn't just loose Mic Drop to anyone -- he lost to Namjoon, his former best friend and music partner. Namjoon and Yoongi. They were supposed to win together. But for reasons still unknown, even to you, Yoongi was disqualified moments before the final commenced, plummeting your brother into the world of fame alone.

After that, Gloss all but disappeared, his pitiful downfall nothing but a hip hop legend to those who heard it. No record deals or sponsorships or stadium tours like your brother. A legend in his own right, but for all the wrong reasons. Mic Drop banned duos from competing thereafter.

Eventually you gather the courage to head into one of the back rooms where the rappers had been hauled by security guards in hi-vis jackets after their scuffle. You can hear Jimin babbling before you even reach the door.

"What were you thinking? Punching him? You better hope the press don't get ahold of this or else you're in big trouble—"

"Let me go!" Namjoon grunts to Jimin whose face is almost as red as his own. "I'm gonna end this once and for all."

"You'll do no such thing," Jimin tuts, pushing him firmly by the shoulder so he slumps into his seat with a roll of the eyes, other hand pressing his phone to his ear. "Do you even understand the amount of damage control I'm going to have to do to? — hold on, yes, this is Park Jimin speaking..."

The room smells of disinfectant and medical gauze and you spot Namjoon instantly, surrounded by an abundance of medics. His breathing is still ragged, the vein on his neck standing to prominence, knee bouncing as he impatiently waits for his ruby knuckles to be bandaged, too engaged to notice your arrival.

To your left you're surprised to find Yoongi. He's the epitome of composure despite the heavy tension in the air. He grabs a roll of bandage and begins to patch up his own fist, eyes lighting up with something you can't put your finger on when you slide into the room.

"Well, look who decided to turn up. If it isn't Namjoon's little sister. Long time no see, Y/N."

You freeze. It's been years since you heard him say your name. It makes you feel funny.

"Yoongi." You swallow. "What are you doing here?"

His shit eating grin makes your blood boil. "I take it you haven't heard yet, then."

You roll your eyes. You should be checking on Namjoon not humoring whatever stupid motives his opponent has. "Heard what, Yoongi?"

"I'm re-entering the competition, too."

You stagger backwards. Yoongi? Re-entering the competition? Mic Drop?

"But--you were disqualified--I don't understand?"

"I was disqualified. Disqualifications are only valid for five years, according to the rule book. Who knew?" He smirks when your eyes widen. "And I think you'll find that my sentence is up. I'm gonna win this time, once and for all."

"I don't think you know what you're doing, Yoongi—"

"There's more." He licks his lips. "I know your secret."

Your heart stops, mouth running dry. You throw a glance over your shoulder. Namjoon is still engaged, swatting away a medic's ice pack with a scowl, thankfully too busy to notice when you draw closer, voice a harsh whisper. "W-what secret?"

Yoongi lets out a dark chuckle, wincing just barely when he touches a damp cloth to the cut in his lip, a red splotch forming on the fabric. "You know exactly what secret I'm talking about, Y/N. Wouldn't it be ironic if someone slipped a tip off to the judges panel about Namjoon's ghost writer—"

"Shut the fuck up Min Yoongi or I'll break your nose for real this time!" Namjoon's voice bellows behind you, making you jolt. He charges at Yoongi, lip quivering like he might make his threat a reality. "Leave her out of this!"

Yoongi's nostrils flare. "Everyone knows she's a part of this, Namjoon, whether she likes it or not!"

All eyes look your way, as if expecting you to say something, but Yoongi's words fall cluelessly on you. You hadn't so much as thought about him in years. What did you have to do with this stupid ongoing feud with your brother that he refused to let go?

You glance between them, settling for sending a blank look at Yoongi and shuffling over to Namjoon instead. Your brother seems prideful at your show of allegiance. Yoongi scoffs.

"Namjoon?" Your mouth is dry with the shock of the situation and it comes out sounding funny, like you're wary of him. A gash above his eyebrow starts to dribble crimson. "Shit, you're hurt..."

"Get off me." Namjoon shakes his shoulder violently and you gingerly remove your hand, brows furrowed at his rejection. He directs his attention to Yoongi. "And you. You want a fight? It's on."

"Joon!—" He waves you off. It's pointless anyway. When he gets this rash there's no changing his mind.

"You want to end this thing once and for all? Then let's do this. You and me. At the final."

Yoongi raises a brow. "Deal. I'd shake your hand but you might try and knock me into next week again."

Namjoon doesn't laugh.

A hoard of security guards bust into the room and head straight for Yoongi. "Finally. What the fuck do I even pay these people for?"

"Get off me!"

You place a hand on Namjoon's shoulder and find that he's trembling. Rage? Nerves? Adrenaline? All three, probably, if the vacant blackness behind his eyes is anything to go by.

You're already trailing behind your brother when you hear Yoongi's voice carry down the hall. "I'll see you at the final! When I win. Secrets always find a way to come back and bite you in the ass, Runch. You should know that better than anyone!"

--

Namjoon begs you to come as his plus one to some scummy gig Gloss is rumored to be performing at tonight. To check out the competition, he says, but you recognise the way he nibbles his lip as he does.

Fear. He'll never admit it but Namjoon is scared he’s going to lose.

You agree to join him because you think it may put his mind at rest.

As Namjoon's manager, Jimin has all sorts of connections, mumbling thank you's into the head set sitting around his ears like a permanent accessory and scribbling down the address of some club down town.

The driver your parent's hired to escort Namjoon around as a paparazzi safety precaution drops the three of you a block away; the car's black tinted windows and shiny number plate would be out of place in such a scummy part of town. The plan would only work if you went unnoticed. Namjoon couldn't risk running into a Runch Randa fangirl tonight. It was technically against the Mic Drop rules to have any intel on your opponents, after all.

You don't like to tell Namjoon that his disguise won't do much for blending in. He dons a designer cap pulled down low over his face, long black coat drowning his figure and expensive leather boots crunching against broken glass and cigarette stumps as you near the club. It's too put together to seem natural, a dead give away that he doesn't belong here among the sea of ripped jeans and septum rings and tattoo sleeves around you. Even with a patterned bandana covering half of his face, the sculpted cheekbones and piercing eyes smudged effortlessly with black eyeliner poking over the top scream celebrity.

Luckily for you, the plain dress and knit cardigan hugging your body doesn't alert the suspicions of the bouncers cross armed at the entrance.

Namjoon wrinkles his nose and prods a half empty solo cup discarded outside with his toe, Jimin practically jittering with nerves and barely avoiding a stumbling drunk as you approach the men who stand at nearly double your size. Namjoon said it was best that you acted as spokesperson tonight — the only reason he even brought you along was because nobody would know your face and your position at Big Hit allowed you to pull some strings.

Your fingers shake as you produce a photography license from your bag, heart pounding as one of the menacing bouncers raises his eyebrow beneath the deep red hue emanating from a tacky neon sign posted above the door.

Luckily the breath you're holding is leaving you in a relieved thank you as he nods, moves to the side and gestures for your entourage to dip inside with the rest of the crowd. Namjoon charges ahead into the darkness and you follow him with an awkward smile to make up for his rude demeanour.

No turning back now...

Music hits like a deafening wave, blasting from the speakers at a volume that makes the walls shiver and your head throb. The club is alive with reckless anticipation, a sea of sweaty bodies gyrating on the dance floor in time with the pulsing beat. The energy swallows you whole, knuckles turning white as you cling to Jimin's sleeve, letting him elbow through the throng of indistinguishable faces that glitter beneath the tacky disco ball dangling haphazardly from the ceiling.

The crowd eventually spits you back out in a quieter corner of the club, Namjoon already making a beeline for the seedy bar. "There's a whiskey sour with my name on it and it's the only thing that'll get me through this shit." He murmurs as he crosses the room and occupies a bar stool beside a couple mid heavy make out session, pulling the hat closer around his face.

With a sigh, you turn back to Jimin who is eyeing up the strip pole and the exotic dancers nearby with wide eyes. "I still don't think this is a good idea."

The italian leather couch you slump into is suspiciously sticky beneath your bare thighs. "He needs to get the apprehension out of his system," you counter. "Once he sees that there's no competition he'll be able to take him down."

"I hope you're right." Jimin is wringing his hands, not knowing what to do with them now his headset is sat on the backseat of the car a block away. "I'd hate for this to knock his confidence."

"What?" You snort. "You think Gloss might actually beat him?"

Namjoon is the best rapper around, there's no debate. Nobody could beat him. Not even Gloss.

"No." His pursed lips say otherwise. You raise a brow. Jimin lowers his voice. "Maybe. Namjoon's rash. Gets ahead of himself. If he doesn't pull it together he'll play straight into Yoongi's hands..."

"Shows starting." Your open mouth snaps shut when the cushions dip beside you and Namjoon throws his arms over the back of the couch, swirling his half empty glass with an overconfident smirk.

Jimin averts his gaze. He knows he probably said too much. Sure, you're technically his colleague but you're also Namjoon's sister, the daughter of his boss. If Namjoon had overheard his position at Big Hit could have been called into question.

You would have to grill him more about Yoongi's motives later. Namjoon was right; the show really was starting.

Lights send the club into a dizzying purple haze, a new beat rumbling through the club that makes your skin prickle. It's almost drowned out by the electricity in the air, the frantic stamping of feet, the brazen chants of a single name over and over that fills you with a funny tingly feeling.

Gloss! Gloss! Gloss!

Something about it feels dirty.

The crowd is packed tightly together in the pit now. Even from where you sit, avoiding club goers eyes on the opposite side of the room, you find your attention glued to the stage. The set up is nothing like the one your brother occupies every night; just a wooden structure, painted black at one point but scuffed and scratched by the soles of shoes that boast the history of the place. The speakers are propped on broken crates, no big LED screens or back up dancers like your parents hire out for Namjoon.

Though none of that seems to matter when your gaze falls on the sole microphone stand placed centre stage beneath a blinding spotlight. It's the only familiar parallel between the two performers. It's a symbol of an artist, of the passion that comes with being up on that stage — any stage. It belongs to a performer.

You have to peer through a sea of frantic waving hands on your tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the combat boots taking the stage in time with the music rushing in your ears, mouth dry at the silver rings glinting under the harsh lights as fingers curl around the microphone.

"Yoongi." Namjoon grunts beside you, back stick straight and alert now. The traces of his previous smirk have been erased, a line appearing at the bridge of his nose. "There he is."

Yoongi throws his head back, breathes in the stuffy air that carries the shouts and whistles of the crowd like it's the sweetest oxygen money can buy.

The stench of beer burns your eyes but you're scared you'll miss a glimpse of his messy blue hair, or the eyes drunk on the fierce energy pulsing through the club to stop watching even if you tried.

When his voice permeates the room it's husky, burning through you like a shot of dry whisky. Namjoon stiffens, loosens the bandana around his face so he can see better.

Is that Runch Randa?

"Namjoon..." You hiss. "People are looking."

"Shut up." He grits, jaw tightening as Yoongi's lyrics cut through the tension like a serrated knife.

The way he moves across the stage like he owns it is exhilarating, makes the blood in your veins pump hot, limbs turning to lead as the crowd hangs off his every word.

He's good. Great, even. His lyrics give you goosebumps and you realise you haven't felt like this about a performance in a long time. Passionate. Yoongi is exhilarating to watch and it shakes you to the core.

It's then that it dawns on you. The reason Namjoon feels threatened is because there is a real chance that he might loose everything.

Gloss might take the trophy once and for all.

You only rip your eyes away from the stage when you feel Namjoon stand up beside you, his body disappearing into the crowd.

You get up too. "Leave him." You watch Jimin mouth. "He's just angry, he'll calm down—"

You don't care about Namjoon, not when the air is suddenly too thick, too heavy to breathe. Not when your hands sweat and you heave with a desire to run from reality and the suffocating smell of stale cigarette smoke that made your throat burn, like you can't get your body to breathe.

"Y/N? Where are you going?"

You swear you're floating, feet never seeming to quite touch the ground as you battle against the hazy dizziness that makes the room spin, ignoring Jimin's exasperated shouts of your name as you push through the gaps between bodies and pray your sense of direction is still intact enough to pull your outstretched arms towards the exit.

--

It's dark outside when you spill out of the exit, spluttering and heaving for air.

The brick is cool against your back when you slide down a nearby wall, hugging your knees.

A deep breath. In then out. Your chest loosens, lungs begin to feel full enough again.

Until a gravelly voice rings out into the night, clearer than the thump of unintelligible music from inside the club that makes your head pound.

"So it was you I saw back there. Good to know I'm not seeing things."

Even before you lift your face from between your knees you know who it belongs to. The single person you want to see least in the world at this very moment.

"Go away." You grumble but all that follows is a low chuckle as Yoongi slumps down next to you, ensuring to leave a safe distance between your crouched bodies.

It's funny. You had been preparing yourself to see him all night but now he's actually here in front of you, your mouth is dry.

He looks the same as he always did; dark eyes that burn hot as they scan your face, cocky smirk turning up the corners of his mouth. His brow looks wearier than you remember though, too weary for a man of twenty three. The only indication that time has passed since him and your brother were best friends.

"I assume Namjoon sent you here, then?"

The mention of your brother's name offers you the courage you need to look at him directly. His forehead still gleams with sweat in the dim moonlight, hair slicked back with a red bandana. There's a ring around his eye now, black and bruised. He must have taken off the black hoodie he donned on stage, left now in only a white vest which exposes his arms and to your dismay makes your blood run a little hotter.

"He's inside. I just came along because I had to." You mumble. "I'm not his spy, you know."

"Sure as shit seems like it." Yoongi spits with an amused chuckle, head lolling on his shoulders to face you. "He worried I might tell everyone about his little secret? Or was he trying to find his own leverage?"

A hot anger boils beneath your skin, rising all the way to your cheeks. Namjoon wouldn't do that would he? He didn't play that way. He didn't need to get an upper hand on Yoongi. He just wanted to see what he was up against.

"What's your problem, Yoongi?" The smirk on his mouth never falters, something glinting behind his eyes that tells you he wants to get a rise out of you. Even so, you can't help the way your voice raises, staggering to your feet. He chuckles darkly in response. "You get off on being an asshole or something?"

"You're too naive. What's so bad about telling the truth?" He closed the space between you until he's hovering above you, breath warm against your cheek. Your heart starts to race."What's so bad about taking back what is mine?"

Your breath hitches when his hand presses into the wall beside your head, effectively cornering you beneath his chest. "You could ruin his career."

Yoongi snorts. "What? Like he ruined mine?"

A few beats of silence. His eyes scan your face and it makes your stomach feel funny. You push at his chest, sucking in a shaky breath when he backs off a little and you realise part of you is weirdly disappointed that he did.

"Yoongi I don't know what happened between you and Namjoon—"

"No. You wouldn't know." He scorns, slinging his hands in his pockets, face darker now at the mention of his feud with your brother. "Because Namjoon loves secrets right? Namjoon likes to use people, Y/N. Just like he's using you now, to get to the top. And then he'll throw you away just like he did with me, sweetheart."

"Namjoon wouldn't do that." You bite your lip, the words leaving your tongue sounding a little less sure than you intend.

"Why? What makes you think you're any different?"

"He's my brother."

"I was his brother once too, remember?" He swallows, shaking his head in disbelief at your denial. "The only blood that matters to Namjoon is the blood shed to get him to the top."

You wrap your arms around your torso instinctively. Yoongi's words cut too deep. Maybe something inside of you thought Yoongi was right?

No. You came here to protect Namjoon yet here you were allowing his enemy to get inside your head.

"Fuck you, Min Yoongi." You spit, enjoying the way his eyes widen at the venom lacing your tone. "I made a mistake coming here."

Before you could brush past him and escape the heat  running through your blood stream which feels fuzzier than hatred should, a hand curls around your wrist.

"Shit. Looks like someone's on your trail."

A quick glance over your shoulder reveals none other than Jimin, face hidden by the visor of his black cap but recognisable none the less. He speaks a few words to the bouncer, probably asking if they saw you come out.

"Oh no."

The bouncer gestures in your direction. Jimin's eyes pause for a second as they skim across your form stood rigid with shock and your heart falls out of your ass when he starts in the direction of where you stand way too close to Yoongi unable to move a single muscle as you brace for discovery. To pay for your betrayal of your brother.

"You coming or what?" Yoongi snaps you back to reality with a tug on your arm, feet stumbling over each other as he drags you behind him further down the alley and around a nearly pitch black corner, too far away from the street lights to be basked in their orange glow.

"What the fuck, Yoongi?" You try to shrug out of his grasp, heart beating faster when you see the flat look on his face. "Let go of me!"

Yoongi comes to an abrupt halt. "Listen, I'm trying to save your ass here. You want to get caught? Go on then! Not my problem."

You nibble your lip, glancing one way at the dark alley and the other at Jimin pacing up and down the street with furrowed brows.

"Just trust me, Y/N."

Jimin's footsteps get closer and closer. It's now or never.

Tightening your jaw, you turn back to Yoongi and nod. The words feel foreign as they pass your lips. "I...trust you."

With that, Yoongi grabs your hand and breaks into a sprint

Turning the corner, the alley meets a dead end. The back of the club is just as run down as the front, littered with cracked beer bottles and cigarette stumps. The sign above the door labelled NO ENTRY doesn't offer any light and apparently Yoongi doesn't listen to directions because he fishes in his back pocket for a key, sliding the bolt and pushing on the bar to hold the door open with a small nod for you to go inside first.

With a deep breath, you do.

The door closes behind you with a jingle of chains, cutting off the slither of moonlight it provided and sending you into complete darkness. You hear Yoongi slide the bolt back across and then he fumbles for you in the darkness, your body pulled down next to his with a yelp so that you're out of direct view of the window which looks inside the room.

"I think they followed us." His voice is silk but there's an underlying insinuation. Be quiet.

Yoongi's eye level now, knees squeezed up against yours in the cramped space beneath the window ledge. Your eyes slowly adjust to the darkness, able to see the way he scans your face when he thinks you aren't looking. The way he grumbles and looks away when you catch him.

There's not time to dwell as you hear footsteps turn the corner, tracking all the way to the door where the bolt rattles, a sleeve wiping the window and pressing a cupped face to the glass.

"She's not here, man. You must have seen someone else."

It was Hoseok. You'd recognise his voice anywhere. Countless all nighters in the studio together does that to a person. Had Jimin called him all the way down here to look for you?

Jimin chimes in quickly. "I could have sworn it was her..."

The voices trail off as they retreat back down the alley, around to the front of the club.

A sigh escapes you, head falling against the wall in relief. When you open your eyes Yoongi is looking at you again. There's something pained in his expression, unspoken words visible in the way he bites his cheek to stop them from spilling out into the darkness.

His fingers are still wrapped around your arm, an electricity buzzing through your veins when you feel him lean in closer, pulling you towards him just barely.

His lips. Chapped and so close to yours. God. You think you want to kiss them. Just to know how it feels. You've never seen them up this close before. Not close enough to feel his hot breaths puffing against your forehead. Not close enough that if you just lifted your chin a little bit...

Yoongi lets out an embarrassed cough, jolting you out of your thoughts. "That was a close one, huh?" The spot where his hand resided feels cold when he rips it away.

Yoongi's face is wiped of any emotion again. He's not completely slick though as when he finally speaks again he sounds husky, the betrayal in his voice surprising even him.

"Are you okay?"

What were you supposed to say to that? I almost got caught with my brother's enemy and then thought about kissing said enemy. No, I don't think I am okay.

"Fine. Thanks."

Yoongi offers you a hand, getting to his feet and pulling you up after him before he leans across your body to flick on the lights.

The yellowish stream burns your eyes but allows you to take in the room around you. There's a keyboard in the corner, piles of sheet music strewn across the wooden desk beside it. A pair of speakers hooked up to a worn looking sound machine. A mic and a pair of headphones slung over the back of the mismatch wheely chair tucked beneath a desk.

A studio.

He must notice the way you look around with wide eyes, redness creeping up his neck as he busies himself by kicking some of the clutter on the floor behind the desk. "Wasn't expecting guests."

It definitely wasn't the high tech producing set up you were provided with back at Big Hit, no hifi system or fancy computer programmes. The furniture was mismatch, like someone had collected a bunch of spare puzzle pieces and shook them up in the box until they made a picture.

Somehow of the pieces still manage to seem somehow inherently Yoongi; the basketball tee with GLOSS on the back draped over his chair, even the empty water bottles overflowing in the trash can. The tiny framed picture of a younger looking Yoongi next to a woman you think you recognise but can't quite put your finger on.

"Genius lab?" You snort, nodding towards the sign hanging haphazardly above the monitor.

Yoongi shrugs. "What can I say? It's true."

"Confident." You muse.

You share a smile. It's strange. Familiar. The way his eyes crinkle and even the husk of the chuckle that follows reminding you of when things were good, back when you considered Yoongi to be a sort of friend. Before things got fucked up.

"You'll take it back when I win."

Old habits might not die hard but the rational part of your brain registers the implication of his words, even beneath his playful facade. The studio suddenly feels cold. Nostalgia dissipates. You remember why you're here.

"Why didn't you just let them find me?"

"You know as well as I do that Namjoon risks getting disqualified if Jimin causes a scene and gets himself caught snooping around here."

You huff an exasperated breath. For all Yoongi's talk of  having the upper hand he sure did seem reluctant to use it. "Isn't that what you want? What's stopping you? Want to drag it out or something?"

Yoongi lets out a breathy laugh, crossing the room and ducking into a drawer in the far corner. He returns with two glasses and a murky bottle of something strong, already a quarter empty as he pours some out. He offers the second glass towards you but you wave it away.

"Suit yourself." He takes a swig of the dark liquid, squeezes his eyes shut. "Because I want to win fair and square."

You shake your head. "All of this. Just for a stupid trophy?"

He eyes you over the rim of his glass, swirling the liquid with an overconfidence that makes you grit your teeth in annoyance. "So Namjoon knows how it feels to lose something he loves." He looks you up and down then, coughing and turning his head when you notice it. "Yeah. I guess it's for the trophy."

Yoongi is despicable, you think. Is he really so fame hungry that he will destroy anyone standing in his way to get it? Even Namjoon? Sure, your brother has his faults but if there is one thing you know it's that he loves being on that stage. What happened between them that makes Yoongi think he deserves it more?

"So its a revenge thing, then. And what if you lose, huh?" The way your voice raises makes you wince. Yoongi slams his glass down and flashes you an are you serious face.

"Y/N don't you see? I have nothing to lose. Namjoon already took everything. My life, my family, my fame. Everything. You know how it feels to have it all dangled in front of your face? And then get it ripped away like it was never yours to begin with?"

Yes. You'd never tell him that, of course. But you did know. You had to watch Namjoon perform your songs every night through a camera lens. Snapping shots of him in his element and wishing those picture perfect moments were yours. What did Yoongi know?

"I see him on the big screen, on stages I dreamed of. Crowds screaming his name. It was supposed to be me, Y/N. Meanwhile I'm sat here," Yoongi gestures to the shabby studio you find yourself in, liquid sloshing over the edge of his glass. "In clothes I printed myself, making music in a shitty club for free because nobody will even listen to my shit."

He's panting by the end of his spiel, knuckles pressed to his eyes as he tries to regain his composure before he lets too many of his weaknesses show. Something resonates inside you, softening the anger towards him with what you recognize as sympathy.

"Then why do you still do it? Make music?"

"Because it's the only thing that never left me alone."

You sigh. While you're collecting your thoughts something catches your eye — a Polaroid picture, tacked onto the plasterboard behind his computer. It's of a smiling Yoongi and much to your surprise, a smiling Namjoon, arms wrapped around each other like nothing could ever break them apart. You briefly wonder why he kept it, if he hated Namjoon so much.

You turn to him again.

"Don't make me regret saying this but you're good, Yoongi. Like really good. Your performance earlier it was...amazing. I mean that."

Yoongi's stern eyes soften with surprise. He almost seems pained, like the simple compliment means more to him than you expected.

"So, you don't have to do this. Big Hit has connections, I could get in touch with a couple record labels--"

He stiffens again. "What? Are you my manager now? As if any record label would take a chance on the biggest Mic Drop loser in history, Y/N, don't talk shit."

You trail off. It's true and you know it.

He swallows hard. "You know what I think? I think you're here because you know that I might actually win this thing. As much as Namjoon knows how to play dirty he doesn't have the talent. He never did! That's why he's using you to write his material." His laugh makes you shiver. "How can he even call himself an artist? It's pathetic."

That's all it takes for your patience to snap. Is the way your blood boils with a sudden and insatiable rage because of the way he bad mouthed your brother? Surely you didn't actually believe him? No, everything he said was a lie -- it had to be.

Your hand curls into a fist, anger spilling over as you charge at him full force. Yoongi barley flinches, his fingers deftly curling around your wrist before it can meet his jaw and pulling you into him at the waist so he can slot his bottom lip between yours.

"Fuck yo— hmf?"

Your eyes widen as you register his slightly chapped lips moving against your own, remnants of the amber liquid he poured down his throat earlier sour on your tongue, a surprised gasp leaving you when Yoongi flips your bodies and slams your back roughly against the wall, settling himself between your legs.

"Gonna finish what Namjoon started, sweetheart?" When he pulls back you're panting, eyes trained to his parted lips with wonder.

He kissed you. Yoongi kissed you. For real.

His warm breath still mingles with yours as you try to choke a response, anything. Yoongi's eyes have a dark glint to them and god you should hate him for winding you up like this but being this close to him just feels too good.

Then, before you can think better of it, you grab his collar with your free hand and smash your lips together in a tangle of teeth and tongue that makes your entire body burn with relief.

The groan he lets out against your mouth tells you he wants this too. "Fuck, couldn't help myself." He pants. "You're driving me crazy."

You feel a dampness throb between your legs when his hands tangle in your hair, lips never leaving yours as he pulls you across the room and drops into his chair.

A whimper is pulled from your lips when his palms cup the flesh of your ass beneath your dress, though it's not in protest, dizzy with desire when he pulls you into his lap and bucks his hips so that his half hard cock brushes against your clothed heat.

"See what you do to me?" He pulls back to smirk at your swollen lips, a much needed breath entering your lungs, filling you with another bout of restless desire as Yoongi's eyes scan your face hungrily. It feels too good even though it should be so wrong.

"W-we shouldn't." Your mouth is dry, words coming out a little unsure which gives away just how much you want to keep going. "What if--"

A particularly harsh thrust of his hips makes you moan softly, head falling into the crook of Yoongi's neck. He growls when he catches sight of the growing wet patch on the front of his jeans, testament of his effect on you as much as you hated to admit it.

"What if Namjoon finds out?" His hand shoots between your legs, pads of his fingers tracing your clothed core, the coarse lace of your panties adding a delicious layer of friction against your folds. The delicate touch sets your body alight, skin burning to let go and submit to the feeling despite the voice in the back of your mind screaming no!

"What if Namjoon finds out that I make you this wet?" Your panties are sticking to your heat by now so it would have been futile to deny it. He smiles smugly when your legs shake and you throw an arm around his neck to keep your balance.

"S-shut up." It's meek and it only makes him laugh darkly, the husky sound sending shivers down your spine as he leans in closer to nibble on the lobe of your ear.

If you didn't know any better you would think he was unaffected by this. Your chest heaves with desire and your hands itch with a yearning to touch him but Yoongi appears the epitome of composure, maintaining sinful eye contact as he pulls your panties to the side. The only give away is the way his cock twitches against your leg with each jerk of his hips, a funny sense of pride erupting in your chest knowing that he wants you too.

Open mouthed kisses drag down your jaw, lingering at your neck. His teeth nibble at the sensitive skin, tongue laving out to soothe the sting and it feels too good to worry about the bruises his sinful lips leave behind as a reminder of your weakness Namjoon could never know of.

"Look so pretty marked up, sweetheart." The pet name makes your clit throb, head throwing back as his mouth attacks the sensitive spot on your neck like he knew it was there all along. It's almost concerning how quickly he has you falling apart in his lap. How easily he turned you into a shuddering mess, barely able to form coherent sentences in between breathy gasps at the sensation of him making you his for all to see. "Show everyone that you're mine, hm?"

When Yoongi removes his hand from your core you slap a hand over your mouth to stop a whine of protest from escaping. Yoongi's eyes narrow, palming his bulge through his trousers as he watches you writhe in his lap with amusement, every twist of your hips falling short and providing no relief for your pulsing clit, already missing the feeling of his hand cupping your mound and considering how it would feel skin on skin—

Oh god. What am I doing?

You let out a groan, but not the good kind.

"What?" Yoongi seems to read your mind, snapping you back to reality when he pulls your panties to the side. He circles your entrance teasingly and you can't help the way you whimper. "Don't act like you don't want to sink down on my cock, Y/N. You could ride me right here and nobody would ever know."

"H-how can I trust you?" It would ruin Namjoon if he found out. He was already stressed, already growing distant from you. This had to stop before it went too far. Before there was no going back.

"Because I can make you feel like this." A lithe finger slides into your heat, easy because of how you drip over his hand. "Think about how much better my cock would stretch you out, hm?"

Each drag of his finger against your velvety walls has you squeezing your eyes shut. The sensation is overwhelming, and when he adds a second digit  you feel your repose crumble. Lust seems to crash over you like a wave, clouding your thought with a hazy desire to just give in and let Yoongi take you, uncaring about the repercussions now as you push down to meet his thrusts so he hits deeper than before.

"Fine." Your words are slurred, too busy chasing the feeling between your legs to see the way it makes Yoongi's eyes light up. "J-just hurry up and fuck me Yoongi."

"Well well," Yoongi settles back against the wall, looking between your bodies to watch the way his fingers disappear into your soaking cunt with an expression almost primal, his own breathing ragged now as he tries to resist turning you over and fucking you into tomorrow then and there. "Never thought I'd actually get to hear my name on your lips like this. Say it again."

A sharp flick of his wrist has you falling against his chest, pulsing around him. "Yoongi!"

"That's right," He licks his lips, free hand unzipping his jeans to relieve the pressure on his length. "Me. Yoongi." The way he mimicks your breathless tone makes a hot blush rise in your cheeks, aware of just how fucked out you must seem right now but too horny to care. "Been waiting for this. Ah shit!"

You take it upon yourself to hurry along the process by reaching into the waistband of his boxers to wrap a hand around the shaft of his cock. It pulses at your touch, the pace of Yoongi's fingers in your cunt stuttering as he flies forward, knuckles on the hand gripping your thigh turning white as he tries to regain some control while you stroke him firmly.

"Fuck your hands. Sinful. Knew they would be. God you're going to kill me if you keep this up, I swear." The worlds tumble from his mouth in one heaving breath as you twist your palm around his sticky head, enjoying the way his thighs twitch with a want to buck into your fist and his nose flares with the effort it takes to resist.

His cock feels girthy in your palm, hot and heavy as you help him shimmy his jeans around his thighs. When his cock slaps back against his stomach, impossibly hard and leaking with anticipation you feel your mouth water.

"Like what you see?" He almost taunts.

You bite your lip. "I don't think you're gonna fit."

It must have brushed his ego because the tip seemed to flush an even deeper shade of red. "Wanna sit on it and find out?"

A nod is all it takes for Yoongi to slide your panties to the side, slapping your hands away to grip the base of his cock and line it up with your entrance.

You both groan in unison when he pushes into your heat, the stretch burning with every inch, fingers clutching the fabric of his tank top at the sensation of finally being full.

"Fuuuck." You see his tongue snake out to wet his bottom lip when his hips finally join flush to yours, hair sticking to his already damp forehead as he allowed you to adjust. "So fucking tight for me, princess."

His cock throbs impossibly deep inside you when you unconsciously clench around it, feeling your face flush as you whimper for him to get on with it and fuck you already.

"Shh, patience." His thumb pulls at your bottom lip, setting it free with a pop. "Move."

At his command you do, bracing yourself on his shoulders. You raise up, feeling every ridge of his length until just the tip remains inside your heat. Then you are slamming back down and flushing at the groan which tumbles from his chest.

"Such a slut, taking my cock so well." His palms feel hot on your hips, dragging you up and down through the motion that has you panting.

Yoongi looks utterly amazed at the visual of you sinking down onto his length, unable to stop the satisfied grin settling into his features when you cry out after a particularly deep thrust. "Imagine if Namjoon could see you now. Falling apart on my cock?"

"Can we — hnng — not talk about my brother when you're in my fucking guts?"

"Why?" A whine leaves you when he slips out of your cunt, grabs you by the ass, and hoists you to your feet, roughly bending you over the desk until your cheek presses against the cold surface. Yoongi tugs your hands behind your back, cock already sinking back into your heat before you can protest at the emptiness. "Worried he'll think you're a slut for taking my cock when I'm the one whose going to fucking end him?"

"Yes!" You cry, unable to hold back now as you feel his cock hit deeper than before with every ram inside you that fills the room with the slapping sound of his pistoning hips, brushing your sweet spot each time and making the coil in your stomach tighten.

God, this is so wrong and you know it. You know it shouldn't feel so good when Yoongi's hands tangle in your hair, pulling you so that your back arches flush against his sweaty chest. Know how many people would be hurt if they knew how much you love it, how you push back into his thrusts, eager for more.

"Shit, you're squeezing so tight." His voice sounds strained now, thrusts turning sloppy as you feel him shudder. "Close, shit. Where can I—"

"Inside me. Want you to f-fill me."

"Holy sh— always wanted to hear you say that. Okay, fuck."

A few more pumps of his cock and he's spilling inside you, the feeling of his release coating your walls enough to have you falling over the edge unexpectedly too, vision turning black as you cum with a cry.

The only sound that fills the silence is your heavy breaths mingling with his as your arms give out. You're silently grateful, as much as you hated to admit it, for the strong arm around your torso that holds you to him when your legs turn to jelly.

Yoongi slips out of you, admiring the way his cum leaks down your trembling thighs. The emptiness makes you keen, clenching around nothing.

"Made such a mess of you, kitten."

The sound of his zipper makes your heart sink, stiffening as he tucks his spent cock back into his pants. For a second you think he's going to leave you like this, shame caressing your cheeks as you envision how fucked out you must look.

But then, Yoongi's palms are back on your thighs as he kicks the chair from under his desk and pushes you roughly onto the cushion. "Think you can go again for me, princess?"

"Wha--?" His swollen lips make you loose your words, the way his tongue tantalizingly caresses your bottom lip drawing a choked whine from your throat instead.

"Fuck, always thought you'd make such pretty noises." It's mumbled gruffly under his breath, like he's confirming it with himself rather than addressing you. He pulls back to stare at you spread out for him, lidded eyes widening at the visual of your skirt pooled around your waist, legs kept open by the rough grip around your thigh that exposes your swollen slit. The way your arousal drips down your inner thighs along with his own release has him swallowing thickly. "Like being filled with my cum, huh? Such a slut."

Yoongi traces his fingers up your inner thighs, thumb applying a gentle pressure to your clit, legs struggling to fall shut around his hand to escape the over stimulation. "P-please Yoongi, I can't."

"You will." It's growled against your neck, hot breath making you shudder. "I know you can take it."

A knee slips between your thighs, holding them open so his fingers can deftly continue their brutal attack on your sensitive folds. Each drag of his knuckle up your slit makes you whimper, the way the pads of his fingers rub firm circles into your clit making it pulse. The feeling is more intense than before, borderline agonizing as a warmth builds in the pit of your stomach again.

Eventually the pain starts to dissipate, turns into something closer to pleasure when you feel a single digit slip into your heat, the slide made easy by the fact that his cock had already stretched you out and his release lubed you up nicely. Each pump makes a lewd squelching noise that has you biting your lip to stop from groaning unabashedly, Yoongi's gaze fixed to the sight of his knuckles disappearing inside you.

When you buck up into his touch again, desperately circling your hips to try and grind your clit against the heel of his hand, Yoongi lets out a dark chuckle. The muscles in your cunt tighten, skin damp with sweat as you fuck yourself on his hand in search of a second high that burns ever closer.

"Look at you, all needy again from just one finger. All fucked out again even after I stretched you out."

With that Yoongi removes his hand from your heat all together, leaving you gasping and clenching around nothing as your release falls farther away, unable to resist the groan of frustration that passes your lips.

"Don't stop!" Your head lolls back against the chair, thighs trembling with desperation to feel his touch again. "I was so close--"

"Suck." Yoongi raises his fingers to your lips. You notice the way they gleam, sticky and white in the studio lighting. The pads of his fingers smear the wetness across your swollen lips as he pushes for entry which you gave to him eagerly, humming around the digits. "Be a good girl, hm?"

He all but groans when your eyes flutter open and lock with his, tongue swirling around his fingers teasingly, enjoying the taste of your own arousal mixed with the saltiness of his cum, almost in sensory overload at the thought of how much better his cock would feel in your throat.

"That's it." A knuckle drags down your cheek possessively, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. "Good girl."

A sticky trail of spit follows Yoongi's fingers when they leave your mouth with a lewd pop, your breaths coming out shaky and desperate as you watch his eyes zone in on your aching core.

The sight of him dropping to his knees is enough to have you squeezing your eyes shut in anticipation, whimpering when his hot breath grazes over your throbbing clit. "Wanna taste you for myself."

And with that his tongue runs a rough stripe up your slit, eyes falling shut as he hums against your folds contentedly.

"Fuck Yoongi!" Your eyes roll back as he laps a few teasing licks across your bud, body turning to putty when his hands roughly pull you down the chair so that he can attach his mouth to your mound fully.

A guttural moan rises from his chest when you grind your core against his face, knuckles turning white as you clutch he chair like it's the only thing keeping you grounded, stopping you from floating away and losing yourself to the feeling of Yoongi's tongue teasing your already wrecked hole. An impatience rises in your stomach every time his nose grazes your clit, pushing your hips more forcefully to chase the relief it brings.

"So eager." You knew he'd have a smirk on his face if his lips weren't already occupied, wrapping around your clit and sucking with just the right amount of pressure to have your fingers tangling in the blue locks that spill loose from his bandanna now, holding him to your core so that you can rock against his tongue easier.

"Close sweetheart?" The way your chest heaves and little gasps spill past your lips as you chase your high must give away the effect he is having on you. You nod breathlessly and to your surprise Yoongi places a chaste kiss to your folds before pulling back all together, leaving you writhing and desperate for him to make cum for the second time. "Did I give you permission?"

Your heart beats furiously as your release slips away once again. Yoongi only stares at you intently. His lips glisten with a mixture of both of your releases and the thought alone makes your core ache. A loose shake of your head makes his eyes darken, licking some of the dampness from around his lips. "Gotta use your words, baby. Did I say you could cum?"

Dizzy with arousal, your words sound slurred and alien to your own ears. "N-no."

"Good. Now ask nicely."

"Please." It comes out whinier than you anticipate but Yoongi's hands twitch against the flesh of your thighs, giving away the fact that he likes it despite the way his mouth presses into a tight and unforgiving line. "Can I cum? Please?"

A deep laugh leaves his bitten lips. "I don't think you deserve it." His head dips back down between your legs, sloppy kisses pressed to each of your thighs as he edges ever closer to your dripping core. "I want you to count, okay?"

"O-oh, okay." He attacks your clit again, tongue swirling where his teeth graze across the pulsing bud. You're so sensitive that you're sure just the light brushes of his lips will send you over the edge if he keeps going.

"G-gonna cum if you--"

"Don't." The authority in his voice makes you gasp. "Didn't I say to count? One."

"Fuck!" Hot tears streak your cheeks when he pulls back so just his hot breath ghosts across your glistening folds. "I..I was so close!"

"Hey, hey." His hand reaches up to stroke your cheek, a strangely gentle action in comparison to the bruising grip on your thigh. "You're doing so good. Trust me, okay? Wanna make you feel good."

For the second time that night you nod, putting all your trust into him for reasons you are too fucked out to dwell on there and then.

When his tongue snakes out to tease your clenching hole again it draws an agonizing cry from you, the coil already tightening in your belly. You shut your eyes.

"Don't" The hand on your chin tightens, forces you to look down at where his face is buried between your legs, authority lacing his words again. "Keep your eyes on me."

As soon as you lock eyes he gets to work again, humming out a "good girl" before you're losing yourself again to his tongue and he has to plant your feet down roughly to stop your hips from bucking too much.

Before you know it your clit's throbbing again and you're about to fall over the edge but before you can even let Yoongi know he's pulling back with a pant, practically gasping for air but still flashing you a shit eating grin. "Didn't think I was going to let you, did you sweetheart?"

"Two." You manage to breathe. "Two!"

By now you're sick of the teasing, a hand coming between your own legs to finish yourself off, ready to come undone whether Yoongi likes it or not. Before you can get your way, Yoongi's swatting your hand away. "Desperate slut. Wanna cum that bad huh?"

"Please!" You practically whimper.

That seems to do it for him, his eyes glazing over with what you recognise as lust. As if the last of his self control just snapped. Anticipation makes your blood run hot.

"Then make it to three and we'll see if I'm feeling nice."

"Shit!" Yoongi's tongue plunges into your heat with a new found eagerness, thrusting in and out like a man deprived. You manage to maintain eye contact this time, falling apart at the way he groans in appreciation when he tastes himself, fucking your hole with his tongue mercilessly like he wants to get every last drop of his cum.

His thumb finds your clit and the coil in your lower belly tightens too rapidly for you to comprehend, tugging on his hair as you cry out. "Yoongi!"

"Cum for me."

His permission is all it takes to have you falling over the edge into a shattering orgasm that makes your vision turn black, mind wiped of any hesitation and guilt and replaced with a single word, over and over again: Yoongi.

When you finally take a gasping breath, he's there, rubbing encouraging circles into your hips and leaving kisses across your stomach that makes something in your chest warm, heart beating a little faster and not just from your orgasm.

"So fuckin' pretty when you cum." You're sure that's what he murmurs against your damp skin. "Can't believe I had to wait this long."

You furrow your brow. Yoongi sits back against his heels, wiping your arousal from his mouth with the back of his hand and flashing you a lazy but satisfied smile, looking awfully pleased with himself. Like this was his biggest dream come true.

It dawned on you that it probably was in someways -- what better way to get back at an old friend than by fucking his sister?

You suddenly feel like an idiot for letting him charm you, guilt washing through you, flying forward when your chest aches with regret.

Yoongi notices how you pale. "Are you okay? If that was too much then I'm really sorry--"

"Too much?" You suddenly feel exposed beneath his gaze, shuffling around to pull your skirt around your thighs, eyes roaming the room hurriedly for your panties so you can get out of here and quick. "This is all too much, Yoongi."

"What?" He puts a hand on your shoulder to stop you as you brush past him but the way you jolt at the touch makes him rip it away like he touched a live wire.

"I...shouldn't have come here. This was a mistake."

Namjoon's face was embedded in your mind. The way his eyes would crumple with betrayal if he found out you came here at all -- let alone let Yoongi take you so intimately. And you hadn't even tried to stop yourself from falling into him, gave in to your emotions too easily and allowed Yoongi to use you as a swipe at your own brother.

"Why? Didn't seem so upset when you were coming on my tongue." The scoff in Yoongi's voice makes you freeze.

"I can't stop you from hurting Namjoon," Your lip quivers and you have to press your nails into your palms to stop the tears spilling over. "But do you really have to hurt me, too?"

"Y/N, wait--"

Your hands shake as you grab your bag and head for the door. "Shit happened between you and my brother, I get it. But we were friends once, Yoongi. Doesn't that mean anything to you? We can't see each other again."

Your tears are warm in contrast to the cold evening air as you take off into a run, needing to get as far away from Yoongi and the evidence of your own betrayal as possible.

By the time you stumble back into the Big Hit company building, the studio is empty. To your surprise, words seem to flow out of you easier than they ever had before, a heart shaped stain appearing on the formerly empty page of your notebook.

--

Sleepless nights were becoming your norm. You had barely slept a wink since that night, not when every thought was plagued with guilt, the same name running circles around your mind, the same dark eyes and swollen lips and messy hair tauntingly appearing in your mind whenever your head hit the pillow.

Yoongi.

That night with Yoongi felt something like a dream, a hazy memory, the only evidence of it being real the fact that every time you closed your eyes you could feel the way Yoongi's hands burned your skin, how his lips moved perfectly in sync with your own.

As much as you knew it was a mistake, something that should have never happened, you couldn't help the way your heart throbbed every time you replayed it over and over in your mind, repeatedly, until you felt like you were going insane with guilt. It was eating you alive. But sometimes you would remember the way you felt when he was pressed up against you and every ounce of regret felt worth it.

You hated yourself for it, and you knew your brother would hate you to, if he ever found out.

He could never find out.

So, you take to avoiding Namjoon altogether. It wasn't that hard really, you knew his schedule well enough to be a step ahead of him at all times, and it wasn't as if he was enthusiastic about your company to begin with.

Of course sometimes your paths have to cross, but you still can't look Namjoon in the eyes when you slip into one of the Big Hit practice rooms where you know you'll inevitably find him.

The music hits before you even open the door. Namjoon is dressed in casual clothes, cap pulled down low over his face as he raps into a mic, the way his voice husks a tell tale sign that this was not the first time he'd gone over the same verse.

He seems stiffer than usual, all elbows and knees as he scrutinises his own form in the wall to floor mirror. You've seen him perform this choreography flawlessly hundreds of times so your brow furrows with confusion each time his feet miss a beat or his knees literally buckle under the pressure.

On the far side of the room sits a row of men and women in formal suits. Investors, brought in to bet on the contestant most likely to win. They watch Namjoon with intent eyes, some shaking their heads in disapproval, others whispering insults below their breaths.

Is that really Runch Randa? Pfft, he'll never win with footwork like that.

Jimin stands close by, hopping from one foot to the other and wincing with every mistake Namjoon makes. He's been making desperate phone calls for the last week, pleading with any investor he could get ahold of to take a chance on Namjoon which was hard to come by after the royal media fuck up the other day at the after party.

This was Namjoon's only chance at a do over — he needed their money if he wanted to win this thing. The judges were expecting a show from him. Smoke machines and good lighting are expensive, after all.

Namjoon, however, only seems interested in the reactions of your parents sat in the back row, expressions grave. He's chastising himself, self loathing evident in his eyes every time he stutters over a lyric. He knows how hard they worked to establish Big Hit and the disappointment in their eyes as it slowly slips through Namjoon's fingers like sand makes even you feel jittery with nerves.

For a brief moment you're grateful that you are practically invisible in this room, no eyes even glancing your way as you join them. You're glad that Namjoon takes the brunt of the pressure. You never were the strong sibling after all.

The music cuts, Namjoon coming to a stand still. He crumples at the knees, forehead pressed against the polished linoleum floor as he tries to catch his breath.

Jimin slumps into a chair, head in hands. That tells you all you need to know.

Investors leave the room, some sending apologetic looks towards Jimin with a shrug. Others deposit their cheque books back into their briefcases, taking pity on the pleading smiles and firm handshakes from your parents when they apologise for Namjoon's lacking performance. One even pats Namjoon on the back, following the small crowd as they leave the room. "Take a break, buddy."

Nearly everyone has filtered out before Namjoon gets to his feet shakily, slumping down into a seat beside you. You don't acknowledge him, afraid of what you might let slip if you do, fiddling with your camera as a distraction.

It's him who breaks the silence.

"How's the song coming along?" He seems disinterested, clicking his knuckles with no real intention of listening to your response.

"Fine." Another lie. It wasn't coming along at all, really, but now is probably not the best time to tell him when his nerves are already heightened by his failure to gain any crucial investments.

His eye is still slightly swollen from the fist fight a few days ago, a permanent line forming at the bridge of his nose that wasn't there before. You almost didn't recognise him. He stares at his own broken reflection in the steamed practice room mirrors vacantly, like he doesn't  even recognise himself.

A few moments of uncomfortable silence pass. Namjoon's heavy breathing slows to a regular pace.

"I know you went to see him."

It echos menacingly through the room and you stiffen, clutching the floor beneath you for support. Namjoon's hard eyes still don't look your way but you see him analysing your reaction in the mirror. The way your mouth gapes speechlessly tells him everything he needs to know.

"Not even gonna try and deny it?" His head shakes in disbelief.

You throb with guilt. "H-how did you find out?"

"I have people everywhere keeping an eye on him, Y/N. You're lucky the paparazzi didn't catch you, because it sure as shit looked shady. My own sister," He scoffs around the word, as if it tastes bad in his mouth. "Siding with him?"

You place a hand on his forearm, surprised to find him shaking beneath your touch. "I'm not siding with him, Namjoon."

"Then what are you doing?" He roars, ripping his arm away.

What was I doing? You don't even know yourself.

It takes everything inside you to keep the expression on your face neutral, to wipe away the regret and the sadness and the fear that makes your voice wobble.

"We just talked." You had to avert your gaze, scared that somehow your disingenuous eyes would give away what really happened with Yoongi — a little more than talking to say the least.

"About what?"

"The secret, okay? I wanted to protect you—"

"Protect me?" Namjoon pinched the bridge of his nose. "How is meddling in business that doesn't even concern you protecting me, Y/N?"

"Have you forgotten that what you're — we're — doing is against Mic Drop rules? That you could be disqualified or...worse! Get your trophy revoked?"

"Pfft. Yoongi won't say anything.."

"What makes you so sure?"

"It's me he wants to hurt. I know him, Y/N. He'd never forgive himself if you—" He eyes you carefully. "If anyone else got dragged into this. It's between me and him, that's it."

Your head is spinning. You remember a time when things weren't this way, back when Yoongi and Namjoon were friends. Partners. What happened between them that made them so hell bent on destroying one another?

"There are things about Yoongi that you will never understand, Y/N. Things he did that can never be forgiven."

It briefly crosses your mind that if Namjoon could cut Yoongi, his best friend, out of his life, just how easy it would be for him to do the same to you if he found out just how unforgivable your betrayal was. A funny feeling pools in your stomach, a distance settling between you and Namjoon as, to your dismay, you realise just how much you have in common with your brother's enemy.

"But what about you, huh? Why should he forgive you? You took everything from him! I'm not surprised he's back to kick your ass. If you ask me it's him who should be holding a grudge—"

Namjoon's hands clamp onto your shoulders and you recoil from the contact. You're breathing hard, the tears welling in your eyes threatening to spill over any second.

"Listen to me. He's trying to get in your head. You need to stay away from him Y/N. He's bad news."

"Tell me why! Help me understand!"

Namjoon's face is grave. "Some secrets are best kept that way. It'll only make it worse if I tell you."

Before you can protest he's striding across the room and hitting the play button on the boom box in the corner, music blasting from the speakers again.

"Joon—"

"Just stick to taking pictures and stop getting involved in business that doesn't concern you."

Then his body is twisting across the room in time to the music with an intensity he didn't possess before. Like a machine on autopilot.

You shove your camera into your bag and let the door slam shut behind you.

--

"We were a mistake."

The cursor flashing on the empty document on your computer screen feels like it's taunting you.

"Please don't tell my brother what we did."

You've been like this for the last week. Holed up in one of the tiny studios at the Big Hit company building, head swimming with beats and melodies and lyrics that just won't seem to fit together. Not when your mind is preoccupied with a more pressing issue.

"Are you thinking about me as much as I'm thinking about you?"

Yoongi.

God, how are you supposed to write this song for Namjoon when all you can think about is his enemy?

You don't know why you're still so hung up on Yoongi. It's not as if what happened between you meant anything. It was just a spur of the moment mistake. You were both tense and needed someone to help blow off some steam. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Right?

You'll never admit that deep down, a part of you wants to see him again. To check that he's real and that you didn't imagine the whole thing. To see if he is going as crazy as you feel.

That's when the answer hits you. The only way to make this right is to end things once and for all. Tie up all your loose ends and tell Yoongi that you and him were a one time thing. Make sure you were on the same page.

Then maybe you'll be able to concentrate on helping Namjoon beat his ass.

A sudden confidence grips you, standing up abruptly from your desk, alerting the attention of Hoseok who up until now has been quietly engrossed in the track he's producing.

"Where are you going?" He asks.

There's an address burning at the forefront of your mind. You have the route committed to memory. How long it'll take to get there. How long it'll take to get back before anyone else at Big Hit notices your absence.

The only place you knew where you might find Yoongi.

"I won't be gone long. Cover for me if anyone sees I'm gone, 'kay?"

Hoseok eyes you curiously and pulls his headphones to sit around his neck. "O-okay but don't you think you should take an umbrella? It's raining and you might catch a cold — oh."

You don't hear him, the door already slamming behind you.

--

In hindsight, Hoseok was probably right. You're soaked before you even get half way to Yoongi's studio.

Not that you care. Not when there are so many things you want to say to Yoongi. So many questions only he knows the answer to.

Not when you're about to see him again and you're giddy and nervous and scared of the way your heart feels like it's about to bust out of your chest.

You don't really know why you're doing this. For Namjoon's sake? To ease your own guilty conscience? Both?

You shake your head before your confidence can deflate and focus on putting two feet in front of the other instead, trying to take your mind of your destination by focusing on your surroundings. You always liked this part of town, with it's bustling roads and street vendors and buskers. Here it's easy to forget, to just close your eyes and let the buzz of cars and the melody from a nearby street guitarist and the torrent of ice cold rain whisk you away, like life is operating at double the speed but you're too caught up in your own thoughts to care.

So caught up in your own thoughts that you don't spot the guy handing out flyers on the side of the street until your face is colliding with his shoulder.

"Shit, I'm so sorry!"

The guy lets out a groan as you helplessly watch his flyers flutter to the ground like autumn leaves, disintegrating on the rain dampened street.

"Does nobody look where they're going any more? My boss is going to kill me..."

The guy gets to his knees and starts grabbing as many flyers as he can by the handful.

"I'm so sorry, at least let me help?"

You hear him sigh deeply but he doesn't stop you when you drop down beside him.

You stamp on a flyer before it can be whisked away by the breeze. It's ruined. The rain makes the ink bleed into a black blotch in the center of the sodden paper, but if you squint you can just make out the barely legible print.

Live Classical Piano - 7:30 - 9:30 Every Wednesday At The Coffee House!

A throat clears, shaking you back to reality, and a nimble hand thrusts towards you, palm up, waiting for you to deposit the pile of flyers you collected.

"Just gonna stand there all day, sweetheart? Some of us have a job to do."

Shame heats your cheeks. "I wasn't looking where I was going, I'll pay for these —"

Its then, as you let your hood fall down, that the boy stiffens. You look up slowly, meeting a widened pair of piercing grey eyes for the first time. The very same eyes you haven't been able to get out of your head all week.

"Wait...Yoongi?"

It's him. He's here? A coincidence surely but it sure as shit doesn't feel like one.

Just seeing him knocks the breath out of your lungs.

Yoongi blinks a few times, eyes wide with disbelief. Then he's ripping the flyers from your slackened grip and grabbing you by the wrist, dragging you behind him to the side of the street where you're just out of view from passerby's.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" He deadpans.

You take in the way his mint hair clings damply to his forehead, shirt darker in places where droplets of rain soak into the fabric. He's wearing one of those traditional pianist outfits with the funny tuxedo jacket and a little black bow tie strung around his neck that looks like it came from a bad Beethoven Halloween costume. It catches you off guard. No wonder you didn't recognise him before. Not exactly hip hop.

"What are you doing here?"

Yoongi glances over his shoulder warily. "Look, you can't tell anyone you saw me here okay? Did Namjoon send you?"

"What? No--?"

"Just leave, Y/N. Before someone sees you here and tells your precious brother that you've been hanging around with scum like me." He spits, drops your arm and starts in the direction he came from.

"Yoongi, wait!" You blurt, throwing your hands up in frustration. He freezes."Can we...can we just talk?"

Yoongi nearly does a double take. He's usually full of jibes but this catches him off guard. "Talk?"

He backtracks, though you notice the way he keeps a safe distance between you. It feels silly considering how much...closer you were just a few days ago. You wonder, as his eyes look you up and down, if he's thinking about it too. If you crossed his mind as much as he crossed yours.

"Listen, I don't have time for this, I need to go get some more of these flyers..."

Your heart drops, embarrassed for even entertaining the idea that he would want to see you again.

"Please?"

He hesitates. You're sure he's going to blow you off again but then his eyes fill with something scarily close to concern. "Shit, you're shivering."

Your hair hangs in heavy tendrils around your face, droplets of cold rain caressing your cheeks. Your knees knock, arms wrapped around the damp hoodie clinging to your torso to retain some warmth.

Yoongi shrugs off his jacket, despite the way his own teeth chatter. "You're going to catch your death dressed like that."

You stand there dumbly as he holds it out to you. He kicks a stone with the toe of his sneaker awkwardly when you finally wrap it around your shoulders.

"I thought you didn't want to see me again." It's almost accusing but you're sure you hear a trace of a pout in his voice.

"I...I didn't want to." Yoongi looks up. "But I think we should talk about you know...us."

Yoongi bites his lip, like he's having an inner debate. Like he's about to do something he knows he shouldn't.

"Fine. Let's talk. I, uh, guess I have some things I need to say to you too." He scratches the back of his neck. "But not here. Could I—would it be weird if we got coffee or something?"

Definitely weird. That's what you should say. But you don't.

"Okay."

You don't miss the way Yoongi's cheeks turn a little red.

--

The coffee shop Yoongi takes you to is a quaint little place, definitely not the sort of establishment you expected rough-around-the-edges Min Yoongi to frequent with its exposed brick walls and mint green espresso mugs with smiley faces on the side that give it a somewhat cosy appeal.

"I work here," He explains when he sees your eyes roaming. "Needed some extra cash."

You nod. Makes sense. The smell of pumpkin bread and coffee beans is still a welcome relief from the bitter chill outside.

The guy at the counter nods in greeting when Yoongi approaches, already grinding up coffee like he knows his regular order. Yoongi flashes him a tight smile. You figure they know each other, not that Yoongi seems the type to mingle within barista social circles but then again he is full of surprises today.

They share a few hushed whispers, staring not so subtly in the direction of where you sit hunched in one of the corner booths, but you just ignore it by watching a rain drop crawl down the window with rapt attention.

Words barely pass between you and Yoongi until you're both seated, him with a coffee you learn he takes black and you with a much too sugary frappe which you take to stirring with your straw nervously, chin in palm.

It's Yoongi who finally breaks the silence.

"What are you thinking?" He looks at you expectantly over the rim of his mug. For some reason it makes you nervous.

Guilt niggles at your repose. The cafe is alive with indistinguishable chatter, a coffee machine whirring loudly nearby. In reality, you merely blend in to the hubbub. But as you watch Yoongi fiddle with the rings on his fingers in anticipation of your response it's like a hush has fallen and all eyes are on you. Judging, like they know how wrong it is for you to be here.

He's been the only thing on your mind all week but now you're here in front of him it's like your mind is blank.

"Did you tell anyone?"

Yoongi blinks. "Namjoon's secret? I said I wasn't going to say anything—"

"No. Our secret. Us..." It feels foreign, referring to Yoongi and yourself as a unit. You hate to admit it makes your heart beat a little faster. "Namjoon knows."

Yoongi's coffee cup clatters to the table and words rise like bile in your throat, everything you've been bottling up inside tumbling out before you can stop it.

"Namjoon knows! He found out about us somehow and now everything has gone to shit and...I shouldn't even be telling you this! God I'm an idiot! I just don't know what to do—"

Your wailing is interrupted suddenly by a warm hand covering your own. Yoongi's hand. The touch is gentle, comforting, something about the squeeze of reassurance it provides calming your hyperventilating. It feels right.

Why does it feel right?

Yoongi must misinterpret the puzzled look you flash him as a warning he's crossing a boundary because he retracts his arm jerkily, a flush creeping up his neck.

He glosses over the weird moment hastily.

"Slow down, go back. He knows?" There's a lilt of surprise to his voice. Either he's a really good actor or he is just as panicked as you by this news. "And you think I told him?"

"Well, not exactly. He knows some of it — not everything! — he thinks that I just spoke to you after the show...I assumed you would have filled in the blanks by now."

Yoongi laughs breathily. Relieved. It flummoxes you. Shouldn't he be satisfied that his plan to get under Namjoon's skin was a success?

"Y/N, there were hundreds of people at the gig, anyone could have seen us. Jimin and Hoseok probably told him. You act like I tried to seduce you just to get revenge, or something." He gulps back the last of his coffee and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before his expression suddenly turns serious. "You don't think that right?"

"Isn't that exactly what you did?"

Say no.

Yoongi opens his mouth and then shuts it again. He doesn't deny it.

Something in your chest twists with disappointment. It scares you shitless and you know you have to end this — whatever this is — before there's no turning back.

"Look, it — we — were a stupid mistake okay? I need to know that you're not going to use this against him. It would kill him."

"Mistake?" Yoongi's face drops. "Didn't I say you could trust me?"

It sounds somewhat pained, like he wasn't expecting you to think so lowly of him. His eyes soften with a certain gentleness now and you almost feel bad for thinking they could ever look at you with sinister intentions.

"Do you regret it? What we did?"

You hesitate. You want to say no so badly. But that's not why you came here.

Pull yourself together!

"Yes."

He raises an eyebrow. "You really believe that?"

"Do you regret it?"

"No." His eyes glint. You can't breathe. "Which is exactly why I'll never say a word. I don't play that way. Fair and square remember?"

You're speechless. All you can get out is a measly oh as you stare at the coffee in your cup and process.

"What did Namjoon say anyway?"

Your fingers find the patterns carved into the surface of the wooden table top, feeling the grooves as a distraction from the embarrassment flushing your cheeks. "He told me not to come back and find you."

A wry smile creeps across his face. "But you did?"

Even Yoongi is accusing you now? God, you played right into his hands. He's probably enjoying this. That you broke Namjoon's trust again, all for him.

The worst part is that you can hardly bring yourself to care. Sitting with Yoongi still feels deliciously indulgent — seeing his face again, feeling the heat of his body where your knees brush under the table finally satisfying a craving that had been growing inside you since that night in his studio.

"He doesn't control me."

He just nods. "I get that." His fingers tap in time with the sickeningly happy radio tune that plays overhead, eager to change the subject, like he's aware that he already said too much. "How is Namjoon anyway? You written him a song yet?"

Not allowed. If any information gets leaked about Namjoon's Mic Drop stage the first person he'd blame was you. You had to keep your lips tightly sealed.

You shrink back into your seat. "You know I can't tell you that."

"Okay, then." Yoongi throws his arms over the back of his chair, a cheekiness in his voice, like he's testing the waters to see how you'll react. "Ask me something instead. I'll tell you whatever you want to know. Shoot."

That's allowed, right? Where's the harm. If it doesn't involve Namjoon then it can't hurt him...

"Okay..." You purse your lips, eyes travelling around the dimly lit coffee shop. "Why do you work...here?"

Yoongi nods to the stack of damp flyers beside him. Live classical piano. "I play piano here sometimes." He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. It's kinda cute. "Needed some spare cash and this was the only place that could take me at such short notice."

"You play piano?"

He nods and you follow his gaze to the grand piano stood unoccupied in the corner. You imagine how Yoongi would look bent over the keys. How his fingers would move across the instrument with concentrated precision. How the tune would mingle with the warmth of the coffee shop on a cold evening.

"I didn't know you like classical music?"

"I don't. Not really." He cocks his head, finding the right words. "Namjoon has investors right? People who just throw money at him?" You nod, somehow ashamed. "Teaching me to play piano was my mom's investment in me. She always said it might come in handy some day."

You nod. "And do you have to wear that stupid costume every time?"

"This?" A snort leaves you when he shoots you a look, a shy smile finding the curve of his lips. "Don't mean to brag but it's a huge hit with the older ladies."

You can't help but laugh when he smugly tugs at the bow tie around his neck, unable to miss how his eyes light up. You share a smile that makes you feel light headed.

"I'd have to see it to believe it."

"Well, you know where to find me if you're ever bored and need a good laugh on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday evening." He shifts in his seat. "Or you could just come back to my place, y'know if you wanted to —" You frown, the easiness that had settled between you dissipating as you both sense the inappropriateness of his suggestion. "I know I shouldn't ask, it's just I have a piano and—"

For some reason the rational part of your brain taps out and your heart says fuck it.

"I'd love to."

--

"So, where do you live?" You ask when you finish your drink and nervously copy Yoongi who is already getting to his feet.

"Oh about that...I live in the apartment upstairs actually." He chuckles sheepishly."Cheap rent, you know?"

It takes you by surprise but you don't press.

"Oh. Right."

Yoongi extends a hand towards you. The thud in your chest gets faster when you slide your palm into his and he pulls you behind him to the foot the stairway you had disregarded upon entry, the distressed baby blue door at the top labelled RESIDENTS ONLY seeming strangely inviting.

Yoongi gestures for you to go first and you've barely ascended three steps before a voice rings out behind you, making you freeze like a child caught in a mischievous act.

"Use protection you two! And close the door so that Odengie's innocence isn't compromised this time!"

The barista from before rounds the corner, a tray of empty mugs in his left hand and a cloth for wiping down tables in the other.

You suppress a laugh. "Odengie?"

"His goddamn sugar glider—" He says it more to himself rather than in response to your query, flashing the tousled haired boy an exasperated look. "Really, bro?"

The other man either doesn't notice or doesn't care. "What? He's too young to learn how baby sugar gliders are made." His eyes suddenly flit to you and, as if remembering his manners, he deposits the cloth onto a nearby table and reaches a damp hand through the staircase to shake yours with a friendly smile. "I'm Jin, by the way."

You take it cautiously, wiping your now wet hand on the back of your jeans. "Nice to meet you?"

"Come on," Yoongi is flushed red as he pushes you up the rest of the stairs with a pressure at the small of your back. "We'll be back down in a minute, chill okay?"

Yoongi shoulders his way into the apartment, pulling you across the threshold alongside him, but not before you catch a glimpse of Jin's teasing grin poking around the staircase, words reaching your ears before Yoongi could slam the door shut in time.

"Oh, so it's a quickie? Have fun!"

A laugh escapes your lips, Yoongi pressing his back to the door with a sigh of relief. "Sorry about him. He's my roommate. Kind of came with the apartment, you know?"

You glance around at the small maisonette that unfolds before you curiously. It feels more like a dorm room, a mismatch pile of shoes piled at the entry way, a pair of beanbags substituting a couch surrounding a small gaming set up littered with empty pizza boxes you presume belong to Seokjin.

"Ah. He's part of the furniture then."

The other corner of the room is littered with an assortment of vinyls strewn out beside a pair of speakers and a record player, the needle still hovering over the grooves of an album by an artist you don't recognise. Yoongi's touch to the decor, you suppose.

"Guess you could say that. He's not so bad once you get over the uh...small rodents."

You trail behind Yoongi into what you assume is his bedroom, if the frameless mattress which lay on the floor in the corner beneath the window with sheets unmade and strewn across the floor messily was anything to go by.

He flicks on the set of fairy lights tacked to the wall, a surprisingly homely touch that makes you think Yoongi isn't as cold as you believe him to be.

Yoongi approaches a clothes rack stuffed with a variety of stage outfits. "Here." He pulls an oversized hoodie from one of the hangers, throwing it at you from across the room. "You're clothes are still wet. Wouldn't want to catch a cold. You can wear this until they dry."

"O-Okay." You stand there dumbly. He isn't expecting you to strip right in front of him, is he?

He seems to sense your hesitance, turning around so his back is to you with wide eyes. He plays it off by grabbing a selection of clothing for himself, shuffling past you with eyes trained to the ground. "I'll use the bathroom. Tell me when you're done."

You are soaked through to your underwear but you leave them on since Yoongi probably didn't have a spare pair of panties laying around you could borrow. The fabric of his hoodie is soft and warm when it slips over your otherwise bare skin and you breath in the woody scent that seems to embrace your entire body, ignoring the way it makes your head dizzy, and roll up the large sleeves to free your hands before calling to him that you are done.

When he re-enters the room, pulling a grey beanie over his head haphazardly to match the much more Yoongi appropriate outfit of a simple white tee and sweats, his breath hitches at your bare legs peeking out from the bottom of the garment. His lingering stare makes you hug your torso self consciously, eyes never leaving you even as he grabs the pile of sodden clothing you discarded earlier and lays them neatly over the radiator to dry.

You practically hear the way he swallows awkwardly when his eyes lock with yours, caught in the act. He's quick to lighten the mood.

"Well...here she is."

You turn as he moves across the room to the piano occupying the opposite wall, wood stained dark but bleached slightly in places by the stream of sunlight which washes its surface from the opposite window. The stool beneath it scrapes against the scuffed floor boards when Yoongi makes enough space to seat himself on top of the blue velour cushion.

"I know it's not much — nothing like you're used to I mean, but it makes music just the same."

He must take the way you hang back near the door frame as a sign of your distaste which couldn't have been further from reality; it's simply to allow you to study the way Yoongi sits with his back perfectly straight, fingers lingering over the keys like he knows the piano as well as an old friend. And, though you'll never admit it, the way your heart thumps at the thought of being in Yoongi's most private space.

"Where did you get it?"

"It was my mother's." The breath you suck in is slightly too harsh. "Like I said earlier, she liked to play, before she..."

Died. The word never passes between his lips but it sits heavy in the air like a weight.

Yoongi's eyes avert yours so you don't press any further, instead focusing your attention to the pattern of scratches embedded into the piano's lid, unable to help the way your fingers trace the coffee cup rings littering the surface like rugged halos. "It's beautiful."

The side panel is littered with lines, carved deeply into the wood with a penknife; a makeshift height chart like the one you had on the back of your bedroom door as a kid. Your drop to your knees to squint at the nearly illegible words scrawled next to the markings that ascend almsot to the top of the instrument.

Yoongi aged 3...Yoongi aged 4...Yoongi aged 5...

All the way until Yoongi aged 7 where they stop completely.

You frown but he lets out a soft laugh, somewhat pained. "That's when she got sick. I grew up quickly after that."

Straightening up, you swallow thickly, unsure what to say, so you just settle for changing the subject instead.

"So, what can you play?"

Yoongi fiddles with the open sheet music book on the piano stand. His fingers tremble slightly as he turns the worn pages before finally settling on a sheet that is lightly crumpled and ripped around the edges and coffee stained and ferociously dog eared at the corners. Tell tale signs that he had played this piece before, over and over again.

His favourite, you perceive.

Sure, he had literally fucked you into next week already but your hands get clammy at the knowledge that Yoongi feels comfortable enough to share such an intimate tidbit about himself with you. Music means a lot to him after all. Anyone can see that.

You catch a glimpse of the piece over his shoulder.

Romeo and Juliet - Love Theme.

Yoongi notices how you raise a brow at his choice.

"I know I said I don't like classical music but this arrangement is different. You know the story right?"

High school had given you enough general knowledge about Romeo and Juliet for you to nod in confirmation.

"It's like you can feel the passion they have for each other in every note, you know? Like nothing could ever come between them."

His words are so earnest they make your heart ache. You hadn't put him down as the hopeless romantic type.

"I mean not really. They still die in the end." You counter. He frowns.

"But only because of their fucked up families. It's their feud that comes between them in the end. This piece comes before all the shitty parts. If you play it over and over again it's like they never stop loving one another."

His hands fold in his lap and he sucks in a bashful breath, nose scrunching with embarrassment at his dramatic outburst. "It's stupid. I know. Forget I said it."

"No, no I understand completely. Maybe if they weren't so busy fighting they could have listened to their hearts. Right?"

"Right." He scoots across the piano stool, patting the empty space beside him with an encouraging look. "Sit."

Like a magnet you find yourself drawn to his side, shivering when his shoulder brushes yours. His arms hover over the piano, poised and relaxed, concentration etched into the hard lines of his face.

"Ready?"

You can only nod. And then he starts to play.

Yoongi's fingertips eagerly caress the keys of his piano, eyes lifting from the sheet music to gauge your reaction while his hands carry the melody on autopilot, the pretty silver rings he dons glinting with every movement. His neck is bent slightly, allowing his head to bob and sway along with the rise and fall of the rhythm, eyes screwing shut as the composition reaches its most pivotal sequence.

He's practically raking the keys now, pure passion and violent emotion splashing every inch of the room. You shut your own eyes, hands clutching the bottom of the stool until your knuckles whiten, like you might float away with the beautiful tune if you don't ground yourself.

When he said you could feel passion with every note he wasn't wrong. You could feel his passion clear as day.

Slowly, he comes back down from his high, wrists coming to a standstill. All he can do is take in heaving, ragged breaths, body slumped down, spent with the sheer effort expelled in his performance. Oxygen is lodged in your own lungs as you take in how how his bangs stick to the beads of sweat prevalent on his forehead

You recover before he does, unconsciously fumbling around in your tote bag, hands curling around the Polaroid camera you bring everywhere just in case a photo opportunity arises.

They never usually do. Until now.

"Stay like that." The viewfinder raises to your eye and you snap a shot of him with precision, the soft click that emanates through the room making Yoongi's eyes snap open.

The picture dispenses from the camera, black square fading out to reveal a hazy image as you shake it back and forth. Yoongi, face relaxed, lashes pressed softly to the tops of his cheeks with a lazy smile.

It's the Yoongi you remember. Your Yoongi.

He smirks when you slide it into the back pocket of your jeans, cheeks glowing with a contentedness you hadn't seen for a long time. "You always did like taking pictures of me."

"Shut up."

When your hand tentatively closes over his where it still rests on the piano, it's his turn to shoot you a curious look. With a shaky breath you flip his palm, slotting your fingers together perfectly, and lean across the piano to press your lips against his.

His mouth is softer than you remember, not attacking with the rich taste of lust but rather caressing your lips gently, sweetly. Taking your time to commit each tickle of breath against your nose, each slide of his bottom lip between yours, to memory. Everything other than the dizzying sensation of his tongue tracing your bottom lip disappears. All your worries, reluctances, regrets,  just dissolving like the setting sun.

Everything feels safe here with him. Everything feels right.

It barely lasts a minute, not much more than a delicate brush really, but when he pulls back you are already breathless, immediately starved of the satisfaction that came from finally feeling him against you again, tasting the spearmint mixed with something so inherently Yoongi you didn't quite realise how much you were craving.

Yoongi sighs blissfully. You need more.

Your hands tangle in the front of his T-shirt but before you can pepper his mouth with a series of further eager kisses, his free hand plants on your shoulder and pushes you back carefully.

"About what you said the other night." His eyes are wide with concern, trained to your lips, resisting the urge to capture them again with all his self control. It made your heart flip. "I don't want to hurt you Y/N. We don't have to do this—"

"I want to. So bad." His thumb caresses your knuckles. "I trust you."

In that moment, it's true. You trust him more than you've ever trusted anything in the world.

"But Namjoon..."

His words fade out when you lean in for another reassuring peck. Namjoon's name falling from Yoongi's lips doesn't make your skin crawl like it usually did. In fact you feel nothing at the mention of your brother.

"To hell with Namjoon. I'm a big girl. I know what I want."

Yoongi grins, hand coming to cup your cheek tentatively, eyes crinkling with what you could only describe as liberation. "And what's that?"

Your eyes narrow in on his parted mouth again.

"You."

His eyes darken and then his hands are tangling in your hair and pulling your chest flush to his in a kiss that is far rougher than before. No more beating around the bush. Just passion as you crawl into his lap and kiss him like it's the first time — or perhaps, more accurately, the last time. Like the world will end if you part for a single breath.

Fingers find the hem of his shirt and you're pulling it up his torso greedily, heart beating a little faster when you feel his warm skin beneath your fingertips. His chest is softer than you expect, a perfect contrast to the strong arms wrapping around your waist to pull you back to his lips.

It's not long before you feel his pants fill out underneath you. The feeling is all too familiar, reminding you of how it felt to be above him like this in his studio. That night feels like a life time away as his hands grab your hips and press you roughly down onto his crotch.

You both groan out at the feeling, something intense, something primal, heating up between your legs as you circle his clothed length, want and need blending into one as your core dampens with every twist of your hips.

Yoongi breaks away from your lips with a gasp when your fingers reach between your body and find the sensitive head of his cock, a wet patch forming on his sweats. His eyes are shut, head thrown back against the piano top as he bites into his thumb to stop little moans tumbling from his swollen lips.

He shoots upright when you slide down his torso, hardwood cold against your bare knees, fingers fumbling with the strings of his pants. When you finally get them open and slip your hand beneath the waistband, Yoongi all but groans at the feel of your cool palm grabbing his hot cock skin on skin.

You shimmy his sweats around his thighs, mouth practically watering as you eye up his pulsing length, unable to resist stroking it firmly with your fist. A hand covers yours.

"Wait!" A strangled noise of agony rips from his chest when your grip loosens, desperate to buck up into your touch but managing to stay firmly planted to the stool in favour of gaining your consent. "Are you sure?"

You scoff teasingly. "Would I be on my knees if I wasn't?"

His laugh is breathy, half a moan as you pick up your pace again. "Just nervous — ah!" A soft kitten lick to the reddened tip of his cock has him flying forward, knuckles white as they grip your shoulder.

"Min Yoongi gets nervous?" The precum that coats your tongue is salty, makes you itch to take him into your mouth fully.

"Shut up." His breathing is ragged, hands hovering over your hair. "Didn't think this would happen again. Needs to be perfect — holy fuck Y/N."

You give no warning before you sink down on his length, his hands finally tangling in your hair and tugging lightly when your nose presses to his pubic bone, groaning around him when you feel the head of his cock pulsing in the back of your throat.

"So warm, shit."

You come up for air, lips wrapping around his head and enjoying the way his thighs trembled when your tongue runs teasingly along the underside of his cock. His hand pushes at the back of your head, forcing his length further down your throat than you're expecting until you gag around his girth.

"Shit, sorry."

The groan that follows doesn't sound very apologetic though. The visual of your drool coating his painfully hard length mixed with the sensation of your warm mouth engulfing him whole nearly has him blowing his load then and there, utterly fucked out and oblivious to the string of groans leaving his lips when you finally come up for air. Tears streak your cheeks and Yoongi wipes them away with his knuckle tenderly.

"God, look at you." He's breathless, amazed. "C'mere."

A hand cups your elbow, pulling you to your feet so he can connect your lips again, humming when he tastes himself on your tongue. His hands are all over you now as he wraps you in his arms and stumbles backwards your back is pressed to the mattress in the corner. It dips in the middle when he crawls over you, tucking away strands of hair that fan around your face like a halo before his mouth is on you again like he can't quite help himself.

A series of open mouthed kisses caress your jaw, then your neck, all the way down your chest. Yoongi's eyes flick up to watch your face, lips parted with want as his hands fiddled with the hem of his own much too big hoodie swaddling your body.

"Can I?"

Your hand threads into his hair encouragingly. "Please."

A gasp passes his lips when he finally pulls the fabric over your head, eyes following his curious calloused hands as they explore the expanse of skin exposed to him now you're left in just your bra and panties.

"So beautiful." He traces his fingers down your shoulders, down the valley of your breasts, across your stomach. The light and delicate touches have you shivering, writhing for more. Almost as desperate to feel him everywhere as he is to worship every inch of you.

His touch stops at the hem of your panties. You're already working on the clasp of your bra, a violent nod the only permission he needs to drag the fabric agonisingly slow down your legs, unhooking them from your ankles carefully.

When he looks back up you are completely bare, laid out beneath the stream of half-sun-half-moon bathing the room.

Yoongi pounces, lips wrapping around one of your nipples greedily, tongue swirling around the hardened bud until you're gasping his name over and over.

"Can't believe you're letting me see you like this."

Hands wrap around your thighs, legs falling open, the way he licks his lips as he takes in your glistening heat not going unnoticed.

Yoongi's head shakes in disbelief, mumbling words which sound an awful lot like so pretty and fucking gorgeous as his head dips and he continues his trail of earlier kisses, tongue laving over your inner thighs and edging ever closer to your aching core.

"W-wait." Yoongi freezes and comes up to meet your face. His breath is hot against your cheek, eyes scanning your face for hesitation.

"What is it? Are you okay?" He's frantic, swallowing nervously as his palms cup your face. "Want to take care of you this time. What is it? Tell me."

"I'm fine. More than fine." You brush your noses together. It makes him smile. "Just want to feel you, that's all. Now."

Yoongi lets out a dramatic sigh, voice high and whiny. "But I've been dreaming about how you taste for days, Y/N. Literally. Dreaming about it."

You don't mention how you've been replaying the visual of his lips wrapped around your clit and edging you over and over again since it happened, just stroke his cheek in mutual understanding.

"Too bad. You'll just have to wait until next time." His features light up at the promise of a next time. Another moment like this, just you and him.

His face falls into the crook of your neck, nibbling the sensitive skin teasingly as a hand trails between your legs. When the pads of his fingers circle your entrance you whimper, clit throbbing with want when his hand pulls away nearly as quick as it came.

The want only intensifies when he brings two of his arousal coated digits to his mouth with closed eyes, guttural moan vibrating your flush chests when he savours the taste of your arousal coating his fingers.

"Next time." He hums and you are sure you nearly came untouched.

"Need you. Now."

He wastes no time taking his achingly hard cock into his fist, placing a supportive hand on your hip as he lines himself up with your entrance. You whine when he drags the tip up and down your slit, giving some brief but much needed stimulation to your clit.

Before he can push inside though you place a hand on his chest to stop him. He doesn't have time to dote on you again though because without further ado you're whipping off the beanie that still sits snugly around his head, throwing it across the room with a smirk.

His eyes glint fondly. "Whoops."

The room has grown darker by now, only lit by the gentle sparkle of the fairy lights and Yoongi has to feel around in the sheets to find your hand. In the same moment he tangles your fingers together beside your face, he pushes inside with a gasp.

Unlike the first time in his studio, Yoongi is in no rush. He wants to savour it. He fills you slowly, so that you can feel every ridge of his length dragging against your velvety walls. When he finally bottoms out and your hips press flush together, you squeeze his hand. Tight. It's this small action that tells him everything he needs to know. Explains the funny feeling in your chest without ever saying the words.

Your legs wrap around his back automatically when his hips begin to rock, angling your body so that he hits so deep with every thrust it steals the breath straight from your lips. Arousal drips from your heat down onto the bed sheets, making each slide deliciously smooth.

"Yoongi I.." It almost slips from your lips. The deepest, darkest secret that you haven't quite admitted to yourself yet.

Yoongi just ups his pace, exchanging words for actions to show you he feels the same. Fucking you a little harder, a little deeper. More sincerely. It compensates for the words neither of you know how to say.

"I know." You feel so full, so warm when he places his forearms at either side of your head to press you into the mattress. "I know."

All the yearning inside you disappears. All that matters is you and Yoongi now, nails scratching up his back, his forehead pressing to yours so that your moans mingle together until you can't tell whose was whose any more.

With a fucked out moan against your lips he's spilling inside you, sending you over the edge with him, hissing as you clench tightly around his cock.

All thoughts are wiped from your mind. Apart from the sensation of his cheek pressed to your chest, hot breath against your collar bone. How you can't believe you lived in a world without Yoongi in it. How you never want to go without him again. How you don't think you can deny how Yoongi makes you feel anymore even if you tried.

The stars behind your eyes fade, and when you come back down, Yoongi is hovering over your body, lips parted and eyes blown out, mesmerised. He's sweaty and smiling and you can feel the way his heart beats in time with yours.

"You okay?"

"Never better." His smile stretches into a grin when your words slur together. "—'m so happy."

A soft, chaste kiss is pressed to your forehead and before you know it Yoongi is tangling your legs together and wrapping the sheets around your bodies, entwined as one.

Me too. You knew that's what he meant. You'd dwell on it another time. For now your eyes are falling shut, satisfied as you inhale Yoongi's scent on the sheets...

Before a blissful slumber could take you away, you're interrupted by a series of knocks against the bedroom door. Both you and Yoongi shoot upright, exchanging a puzzled glance.

"I thought you said it was gonna be a quickie. Come on man, I need to use the bathroom!"

Yoongi groans into the pillow.

"That's it. I'm getting a new roommate."

--

As the weeks go by you start spending less and less time at the Big Hit office, turning up late to your shifts or clocking out before they were up. The perks of being employed by your parents is that they can't fire you in good conscience, you suppose.

Instead you increasingly find yourself at Yoongi's apartment, writing lyrics at the piano when he was around (sometimes even when he wasn't) or down in the coffee shop, helping yourself to hot chocolate refills on your work breaks. Jin joked that you'd need to start paying rent soon.

Just like how you were able to pick apart each of the boys' influence on the apartment the first time you went there, your own presence was becoming ever apparent.

In the way you spilled sugar on the counter when making tea and always forgot to clean it up, much to Jin's dismay. How some of your own hoodies and pyjama pants had begun to smell like Yoongi's washing powder, ending up folded neatly in his laundry basket and stowed away on his clothing rack like they belonged there. The way his piano top was littered with open notebooks filled with your messy scrawl and pens with the caps lost and half empty mugs stained around the rim with your chapstick.

Yoongi seemed wary at first, cautious to let you get too comfortable around him, dropping you home late at night once the lights in your house switched out and you knew it was safe to go inside.

But eventually he started to crave the little things that reminded him of you, unable to stop the smiles which crept onto his face as he loaded the dishwasher with the mugs and carried you to bed when you fell asleep at the piano stool.

Your bed. That's what you'd taken to calling it now.

Yoongi hated to admit that he was weak. When he got up on stage he was Gloss, hard faced and brazen and ruthless. But here with you, the facade he tried to uphold seemed to crumble into nothing. And the worst part was that he loved it.

Even when he was performing at the club or practicing for the competition, his thoughts always ended up wandering back to you. There were times when your schedules clashed or it was too risky to see each other or times you were simply too exhausted once you got home, falling into bed as soon as you crossed the threshold. But the knowledge that you were always there waiting for each other became the only safe place he knew and that was enough.

Of course you still had to oversee Namjoon's Mic Drop stage, it was your job after all, but that never seemed to come up when you were together. Just watching movies on his laptop or laughing at ungodly hours while you filled each other in on anecdotes that happened in the time you were apart, retreating beneath the sheets when Jin banged on the wall because it was four in the morning so would you please shut the fuck up.

For the first time in a long time you felt happy. Like you belonged somewhere that was all your own. No more answering to Namjoon or your parents. Just your own heart. And it always seemed to lead you back here to Yoongi, straight into his arms.

And as much as you hated yourself for it, you could feel your resentment for Namjoon growing. You'd be damned if you let him take this away from you, like he'd taken everything else.

Eventually, you stopped crawling through your bedroom window like a goddamn teenager and your parents stopped questioning why you never came home anymore. The cracks between you became a chasm. And right now, Yoongi was the band aid holding you together.

--

When Yoongi returns home later than usual, he's not even surprised when he ascends the stairs and find you and Jin laid out on the bean bags, already tipsy on red wine and giggling at his disgruntled expression.

That is until you take in the weary lines that had etched their way into his forehead, how his eyes look sunken and puffy. How his hands tremble against your waist when you pull him into your arms, body swaying back and forth lightly in your grasp like he could topple over any second.

You know what overworked looks like — after all, you had tended to Namjoon plenty of times when he refused to stop at his limits, barraging through them instead, a habit Yoongi also seemed to possess.

Ordered to stay on bed rest, Yoongi slumps face down into his pillow, letting out a long groan of relief when the mattress cushions his aching limbs.

You're already tucking him in, half way to the door to prepare him a hot cup of honey and lemon to soothe the husk in his throat from rapping too aggressively when his arms loop around your waist and pull you down to snuggle into the crook of your neck contentedly.

"Yoongi, let me go." It's futile, his grip is firm and he is already kicking the sheets over your body and pressing his cheek to the left side of your chest where you're sure he can hear how your heart races, a pout evident in your voice. "I want to take care of you."

"Mmf you are.." Words already slurring with the beginnings of sleep, he smiles groggily when you fall slack in his grasp and press your cheek to the top of his head in defeat. "Stroke my hair please?"

As soon as your fingers tangle in his blue locks he lets out a sigh of relief, like he'd been waiting to feel the touch all day.

Watching his face relax as he drifts off, you bask in the warmth of fulfilment singing your very nerve ending and silently wish that you can stay like this forever.

Just you and Yoongi against the world.

At some point your own eyes fall shut.

--

You're awoken by the sounds of muffled sobs.

The dark room momentarily disorientates you, heart quickening as you realise you're not in your own bed. Eventually your eyes adjust to the blackness, taking in the piano stood sturdily in the corner, breathing in the scent lingering on the pillow beneath your cheek and you're washed with a wave of comfort.

"Yoongi?" You croak.

The sheets are ripped from your body as Yoongi's form shoots upright. His bare back is damp with sweat, visible in the moonlight creeping through the slanted blinds, mattress rocking slightly with every sob that wracks his frame.

"Go back to sleep." His voice is gruff , but forcibly so and you hear the tremor lurking below the surface.

You sit up beside him. His face is buried in his palms. The sight makes your heart ache.

"Are you okay?" You're still new to this. Sure you're tangled up in his sheets most nights but you're still learning the ropes, unsure how best to comfort him. You settle for gently patting his shoulder, wincing at how cold and distant the action feels.

"I said go back to sleep." When his face emerges from between his hands you see the tell tale tracks of tears streaking his cheeks. Even when he wipes his face with the back of his palm there's a steady stream of them dripping down his chin.

"Is that what you really want?"

Yoongi presses his mouth together in a tight line, eyes black and empty as he tilts his head back and takes a shaky breath. That's when he crumbles. "Please stay."

"Oh, Yoongi." It's barely a whisper, afraid that if you speak too loud he'll shatter into a million pieces. He's like a scared kid, knees hugged to his chest as he wipes the hot tears from his eyes with a hard rub of his knuckles.

Yoongi stiffens when you fumble under the sheets to find his hand. You think he might pull away as you link your fingers with his but to your surprise he pulls your interlocked palms into his lap and squeezes so hard you feel the circulation in your fingers cutting off. The way he chokes back another sob stops you from complaining though, already cupping his cheek and tilting his face towards yours with your free hand.

"Why are you doing this?" His eyes squeeze shut, fresh tears sliding down his face and doing nothing to hide the slight tinge of red beneath them that tell you he's embarrassed to be seen like this. Vulnerable, so unlike the hard faced Yoongi you had come to know.

"Because I want to." You squeeze his hand and feel him squeeze back weakly. "You can tell me anything, you know."

Pressing his forehead to yours, Yoongi leans down and captures your lips between his own. I know, it says.

This is different to the way he usually kisses you. There's no hunger, no hands on your neck and your thighs that set you alight with desire. Just a sense of yearning, like he wants to be closer to you, the plump flesh of his lips slotting between yours like a perfect puzzle piece, slightly salty from his tears. It makes you ache all over, like you're somehow connected and sharing his pain.

He pulls away, sharp exhales tickling your face as he scans your eyes for any sign of hesitation, any sign that you're going to leave him here alone. This is side of Yoongi that you have never seen before. He always said he isn't good with words and you know better than anyone that he hated admitting that he needed someone. This was is his way saying he needs you.

And in that moment you feel a piece of your heart flutter into his hands.

"Nightmares." He mumbles, swallowing thickly and tipping his head back against the headboard, expression pained "Just nightmares."

"Want to talk about it?" You sit back next to him, and when he rolls his neck to face you. He looks unreadable again. Eyes void. You half think he's going to push you away, turn over and fall back asleep and leave you to stare at the ceiling alone with the silence.

But he doesn't. Instead he lets out a deep sigh, shaking his head at himself as he pulls you into his arms, stroking your cheek fondly when your head comes to rest on his chest, burying his nose in your hair.

"Why can't I say no to you?"

"Guess I have that affect on people."

He snorts lightly, the first proper reaction he'd given you and you're pleased at his amusement. Pleased you were able to comfort him somewhat.

Unspoken words cloak a heavy silence for what feels like hours, just tracing mindless patterns on his arm and listening to the way his heart slows to a normal pace beneath your cheek, grip around your torso never faltering. When his breaths dwindle to soft puffs against your temple you think he's already drifted off.

Until, "Do you remember when I convinced Namjoon to sign up for Mic Drop the first time. The day after my mom died?" His voice is gravelly, both with sleep and a sign of his withheld tears.

"Of course I do." You swivel in his arms to blink up at him curiously. Sure you remembered. After the funeral, your parents had taken Yoongi in — a repayment they called it. For helping Namjoon achieve his dreams. Of course, that was before you realised just how much Yoongi would help.

Yoongi became a part of the family for a short while. An extra seat at family dinners. Another pair of shoes by the front door. Another bed in Namjoon's room.

"Back then, I was too trusting. I thought that they wanted to help me...I thought that they saw me as their son." He spits the word with the bitterness of a man who was stripped of the title of 'son' before he knew what it really meant.

You think back to how Namjoon and Yoongi used to be. Joined at the hip, everyone used to say. Brothers.

"I think they did—"

"No." He stiffens. You bite your lip. "Namjoon never cared about me. He just saw me as a way to get to the top. And it worked."

You feel a pang in your chest.

"I'm sorry, he's your brother. I shouldn't be talking about this with you."

Yoongi almost turns away but you stop him by pressing your lips to his briefly. Telling him its okay. You understand.

"The nightmares." You say with an eagerness to change to subject before you could dwell on it too hard. Before you could admit to yourself that Yoongi was right. "You didn't say what they were about?"

"I'm getting there." He lets out a strained chuckle and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. The action makes you shiver.

"The last time I saw my mother she said that she wasn't scared to die. She was just scared that she'd miss seeing me on the stage. She was the only one who believed in me." The next words come out choked. "She said that if she couldn't be there to see it then I needed to make as many goddamn people watch me lift that trophy as I could."

Mic Drop was never about the fame for Yoongi after all. It always ran deeper than that; a need not a want. A vulnerable promise left unfulfilled.

The realisation makes you blanch. All this time, all these years, you hadn't been able to see the real greed right in front of your eyes; your own brother.

The image of Yoongi, crumpled and broken on that fateful day all those years ago makes its way to the forefront of your mind.

The same anger flashes across his face now. "Namjoon took that from me. I don't care about the fans or the money or the trophy — none of that shit! He took my dream Y/N. Do you understand how that feels?"

You find yourself nodding, slowly at first and then with vigour as the dam inside you breaks and your own tears flood. "I do. I understand."

And you do. You understand why Yoongi is so determined to win Mic Drop. You understand why he hates Namjoon as much as he does. You understand how it feels to always fall second best to Namjoon, to be outcasted.

"I keep forgetting her face. I can't hear her voice in my head anymore." Yoongi's crying again now, heavy sobs no longer able to be contained. "But in the dreams she's so clear. The disappointment in her eyes, its so clear, Y/N." His words are interrupted by hiccups that leave him gasping.

"I'm sorry." You whisper once he calms. It's all you know how to say.

"Not your fault." He flashes you a watery smile, wiping away the tear on your cheek with his knuckle. It makes your heart flutter, even despite the guilt weighing on your shoulders.

You feel useless. It wasn't your fault directly but you couldn't help but feel like you wronged Yoongi. All of this happened right in front of your eyes but you were too blinded by Namjoon's broken promises to see it. All this time you had let Namjoon make you think Yoongi was the enemy.

"I'm here now." Hands plant on either side of his face, eyes meeting his. "I believe in you."

He doesn't need to say anything. The way he kisses you speaks louder than words.

All you can do now is hold him, tangling your legs with his and pulling the covers over your intertwined bodies, stroke his cheek with your thumb and pepper kisses to his strained forehead which relaxes beneath your affections.

"I'll make this right." You whisper into his hair after his eyes flutter closed and the sun starts peeking through the window, watching dust particles floating in a stream of light in the room's golden glow through lidded eyes. "I promise."

--

"I like this." Jimin nods enthusiastically along to the track playing through the headphones Namjoon placed over his ears. "Sounds like a hit to me."

Namjoon's face contorts into a scowl. He disagrees, obviously, if the disgusted shake of his head is any indication.

Mic Drop is just a few days away and Namjoon had decided to scrap his entire stage after Jimin scored a couple big last minute investors who suggested he do something new, something exciting. Something that pushed Runch Randa's limits.

It was a bold move, this close to the big day. But Namjoon was cocky, said that he had enough experience in the industry to win in his sleep. Practice was a waste of time anyway.

"Next one." He waves his hand, barely even glancing in your direction as you press a button that cuts off the track and makes another one start playing.

The bass is louder in this one and it makes Jimin startle backwards, the headphone jack slipping loose so the music plays through the speakers instead.

"Hoseok and I still need to put the finishing touches on this one but it's pretty catchy—"

Namjoon cuts you off with a sharp no, it was too upbeat for his Mic Drop performance. Said he needed something with grit, something that would make the judges feel something.

"Let me see that." He gestures for you to get up, slumping down into the chair you occupied and slotting himself beneath the studio desk to scroll through the open folder on the computer screen.

He skims through countless tracks, demoed and ready to be recorded at Namjoon's disposal — you were something of a writing machine, always scribbling down lyrics on receipts from the store or on the back of your hand and paired with Hoseok you were a dream team; he always seemed to find a beat that fit perfectly. Unfortunately Namjoon's straight face gives away his disinterest in any of them.

"None of these will work." Namjoon throws the keyboard down with a force that makes you wince, jaw tightening as he presses his knuckles to his eyes in frustration. "I'm going to fucking lose."

You are about to tell him to write the fucking track himself like everyone else if none of yours were good enough for him but Jimin flashes you a glance. Don't make things worse.

You settle instead for a hand on his shoulder. He tenses at your touch. It had been a while since you'd been in the same room for longer than ten minutes and when you take in the gauntness of his cheekbones you briefly wonder if he's been eating properly. He always did forget when you weren't around to remind him.

You suck in a breath to give you strength. "There must be one that you like."

His lips purse and he disgruntledly goes back to scrolling again, clicking on a couple titles that draw his interest. You and Jimin let out simultaneous sighs of relief.

"What's this?" Namjoon's eyes narrow as he presses play on a track that sends you flying forward, heart in your mouth and colour leaving your face as a song plays that you swore to never show to anyone.

Yoongi's song. The one you wrote after that night in his studio. Probably the best song you had ever written.

"That's not — I was supposed to delete that one." The heat in your cheeks as you push him aside roughly to wrestle with the pause button has you hiding behind your hair, as if he would somehow know this wasn't just an ordinary song. That it was a song about his enemy, for god's sake.

Namjoon's slaps you away from the computer, head bobbing to the beat and you fall back into your seat in defeat, fingers crossed behind your back that he would hate it as much as the others.

"I love it."

Oh no.

"This is the one!"

Shit shit shit!

"A-are you sure?" You're rambling now, words slipping out way too fast and Jimin seems puzzled at your lack of elation at Namjoon's decisiveness. "I'm sure I could write something much better if you just give me some more time—"

Namjoon's arms pull you into a tight embrace before you can finish, your nose ending up smushed against his chest as he practically vibrates with excitement. Your body goes stiff, hands dangling at your sides awkwardly. Considering Namjoon's coldness towards you as of late his sudden display of affection takes you by surprise. Mostly because despite your physical closeness it only makes you feel even more distant from your brother.

A sigh of relief escapes when he finally sets you free, only to be replaced with pure horror as you watch him stick a USB drive into the computer and load up the song before sliding it in his back pocket with a grin while you have no choice but to stand there helplessly.

"I'm totally gonna win!" His change in attitude is abrupt but seems to soothe Jimin who nods enthusiastically. You feel sick. "I can't wait to see the look on Yoongi's face when he hears this shit."

The smirk on his face washes you with dread. If only he knew.

Yoongi was right. Secrets always find a way to come and bite you in the ass.

--

Every rap of your knuckles against the run down studio door seems to echo ominously through the alley like an omen.

"Y/N?"

As soon as the bolt wrangles across and the wooden panel flies open to reveal a disgruntled Yoongi, a warmth seems to thaw through the icy evening chill that, along with your nerves, is making your knees knock together.

His chest is warm against your cheek when he pulls you into his arms, the smell of cologne and black coffee consuming your senses. It's enough to make your tense limbs fall slack, curling into his firm frame instinctively. Finally. You can breathe again.

"Hey." He mumbles sweetly against your temple, a trace of a smile in his voice like he was happy to see you. You silently wonder if he'll still be so happy once he hears what you have to say.

The studio is basked in darkness, the contours of his face barely visible in the blue glow emanating from his desktop monitor. There's a dent in the cushion of the adjacent chair, Yoongi's hair sticking up at the back where the pair of headphones slung around his neck had sat moments ago.

"I can go if you were working, wouldn't want to interrupt." As the words are leaving your lips you cross your fingers, selfishly hopeful that he would send you away and you could avoid the conversation that was about to follow. Blame it all on circumstance, leave saying that you at least tried.

But that would be keeping a secret. It would make you just as bad as the rest. And the thought of him finding out from someone else was enough to make your palms sweat and enough to keep your feet planted against the carpet determinedly.

Yoongi's hands find you like he can't bare to keep them away, dragging you across the threshold without hesitation. "S'fine. Work better with you here anyway." He smiles and you try to return it but your lips are pressed into a permanent line, like they're scared the daunting words you have to say will come spilling out before you were ready -- if you ever would be ready. As you slump into a chair and watch him wheel another one around to face you with his arms slung lazily over the back, you realise there is no going back.

Considering the countdown to Mic Drop was nearing its end, less than twenty four hours to go before Yoongi would be stood opposite Namjoon on stage in front of thousands, he looked the epitome of relaxation, unlike the nerves in your chest making you jitter.

"Jin's on his way with takeout, I would've asked him to get more if I knew you were coming but I'm sure we can share— babe, are you alright?"

Babe. The endearment had started slipping from his lips frequently recently. At first he tried to cover it up with nervous laughter but now he was brazen, enjoying the way the word tasted on his tongue. It would be so easy to force a smile, to push "the right thing" to the back of your mind and let the selfish part of your heart accept his affections, even knowing you're about to hurt him.

But the clock ticking away on the wall sounds deafening with every beat of silence that follows, twisting the rings on your fingers until you could no longer distinguish the sound from the sinister thrum of your heart.

You can't hold it in any more.

"I need to tell you something." It comes out a hoarse whisper, nearly unintelligible beneath the stream of hip hop from the hifi system in the corner.

"What is it?" Yoongi's concerned eyes never leave you as he reaches over to switch it off, the room now draped in a shroud of quiet. The reality of the situation seeps into every dark corner and right into your bones.

"It's about us. Kind of."

Yoongi rolls closer, stopping your teeth from nibbling your cuticles by slotting his fingers between yours like a perfect puzzle piece. It seems to ground you, like you're filled with helium and he's the weight stopping your feet from floating off the ground. For a second you think everything will be okay. Nothing, not even this betrayal, could come between what you had.

"Did Namjoon find out?" Even in the dim light you see the panic stricken raise of his brows. When your head shakes in a violent negative they smooth back down, relieved, as if nothing you could say next would be worse than that. No matter how hard you try to meet his eyes you can't.

His hand squeezes gently then. You muster up the courage to squeeze back. Perhaps it would soften the blow that was about to follow.

"His song. The one I wrote for Mic Drop...it's about you. I thought you should know. Before you hear it for yourself."

Nothing but an immeasurable silence followed. "Oh."

Yoongi is unreadable, almost as if he didn't hear the words hanging like heavy storm clouds over your heads. You expected him to be angry, to shout -- even cry, maybe. Not knowing how he was feeling was even worse than any scenario you had imagined. Made you feel like you were back to square one and he was shutting you out of the window into his soul you'd worked so hard to wriggle through.

For a second you think the sudden cold against your palm is a result of the numbness coursing through your veins like you were dunked in ice water, but then you see his hand retreat to his lap, eyes wide and staring at it in disbelief like he'd been scalded.

"I...I don't understand." He sounds choked, face contorting with pain. Like it does when he wakes thrashing in the night with a bad dream. Unlike those times though, he doesn't levitate towards you for comfort, just stares at you vacantly like he's far, far away despite being physically close enough for your knees to brush.

"It was written after the first time we...y'know...here--" You glance around, convinced your mind is playing tricks when you see a vision of you in Yoongi's lap across the room, lips attached like nothing else in the world mattered. It feels far away and out of reach when the real Yoongi gets to his feet, creating a distance between you that is foreign, his form staggering across the room so that you could see the way his back tensed beneath his t-shirt when he grips the edge of his desk for support, processing.

"I don't understand."

"I was emotional. It just happened--"

"No. What I don't understand is why you're letting him perform it?" Fists send a stack of sheet music flying to the ground. His lip trembles, face red, with anger or affliction, you can't tell which.

"Yoongi--" You reach for him, fingertips barely grazing his arm before he's smacking you away with a violent shake of his head. He'd never resisted you before. Not even in the beginning.

"You expect me to just sit back and listen to Namjoon of all people rapping the lyrics my girlfr-- that you wrote dissing me? This has to be a fucking joke."

"It's not that kind of track!" You hug your body pitifully. It's the only thing you can do to stop yourself from falling apart as his mouth spits a venom that makes your heart shatter. His eyes fill with one thing. Betrayal. "I'm sorry. I just...I can't keep choosing between you anymore, Yoongi. He's my brother."

"And what am I, huh?"

Every second that passes, every stutter or attempt at explanation that leaves your mouth makes Yoongi crumple. You see it in the way his adam's apple bobs, how his shoulders slacken.

For some reason you can't open up. Tell him he means more to you than anyone ever had. That you thought your heart might really break and bleed out on the carpet if he didn't feel the same way.

Instead you settle for, "Why are you so mad? It's my job! I had no choice."

Without warning he's rushing at you, trembling palms capturing your face and pressing his forehead to yours. His breaths shake, chest heaving as he battles internally with the words flying from his lips like a ghostly breath across yours.

"Because I fucking love you, Y/N! Can't you see it? I fucking love you and your bastard of a brother always finds a way to ruin things between us!"

His admission stuns you, the tears welling in your eyes spilling over in a silent stream down your cheeks.

He loves you. He loves you.

"Yoongi--" Words just won't come. Nothing feels right.

Because you love him too. It had taken you this long to admit it to yourself but it was clear now. Every breath, every beat of your heart, every fucking song you would ever write was for him. It scared you before but now, stood here in front of him, you know it's true.

Something hopeless niggles at the back of your head, stops you from spilling everything to him. If he loves you, how can he expect you to choose?

If words couldn't make him see the truth then you'd just have to show him the only way you knew how. Straight from your heart.

You're crying as you dig around in the bottom of your bag to retrieve a USB, pressing it into his curled fist firmly and begging him with your eyes to understand. "Just listen to the song. Please. It'll explain everything. I promise."

You begin to back up and his hand shoots out to stop you, pulling you roughly into his chest which only makes you cry harder, tears creating a wet patch on his T-shirt.

"Please don't leave me. Not again." It's a fragile whisper.

It's all too much.

"I can't choose any longer, Yoongi. This has to end."

With one last look at his crumpled face you flee from his studio with eyes just as watery as the first time you'd walked down this very alley. Except this time it takes all of your strength to resist running back into his arms.

Yoongi can only stand there and watch you go, the USB hot against his hand.

This has to end. The words make his chest burn and he hates it. Hates feeling weak. You always make him feel so fucking weak.

If he can't have you then he had no choice but to do everything in his power to make sure he got the next best thing.

Suddenly it all seemed clear. Yoongi knew what he had to do.

--

The arena is almost desolate when you creep inside.

Just a sea of empty seats stretching out from both sides of you where you sit in one of the stands, nibbling the skin around your thumb and watching Namjoon pace the stage below.

It's gone midnight by now. Most of the crew went home hours ago. Not Namjoon though. He stayed to practice some more. Said he couldn't get the choreography quite right.

You tried going home but you couldn't get the fight out of your head. Everything reminded you of Yoongi and your thoughts started to wander. Did he hate you? Was he listening to the song right now? Why hasn't he called? Why is your own bed not as comfy as the one you shared with Yoongi?

It all got too much eventually. Something told you that you weren't welcome at the apartment so you ended up heading towards the only other place you knew, surprised to find your brother had the same idea.

A single spotlight illuminates the stage as Namjoon twists his body in time with the one, two, three, four he unconsciously mumbles under his breath, face contorted with a stark concentration that flits to impatience when his foot slips and he misses the beat. Again. It just about sends him over the edge.

"I can't do this anymore!" A microphone squeals and hits the ground with a thump. It reverberates through the arena, your hands flying to your ears as you watch Namjoon let loose all his anger on an innocent amp stand before collapsing into a heap at the edge of the stage. "Fuck this shit!"

You're flying down the stairs to his aid before he can do any serious damage to the stage equipment — or worse, to himself.

Namjoon scoffs when he hears the stage creak under your feet. "Nice of you to show up."

It stings. You snap.

"What happened to you, Namjoon?" You look at his sunken cheekbones, his curled fists, the blackness behind his eyes. "I don't even recognise you anymore."

He just sniffs and says nothing. The distance between you feels bigger than ever.

"Can I tell you a secret?"

A secret? Since when did Namjoon abide by a policy of honesty?

He takes your shocked silence as a yes.

"I'm calling first thing and dropping out of the competition."

Your world stutters to a standstill, breath knocked out of your lungs.

Dropping out?

"Shit Joon...if this is about Yoongi—"

He waves you off.  "No. This is about me."

You can't breathe. This can't be real. "I don't understand..."

"I've made up my mind. I can't do this any more. I used to love being up here you know?"

You follow his gaze, out over the empty arena. The last time you were here every seat was filled. You were down there, part of the crowd, packed into the cramped space with barely enough room to breathe.

Imagining how it must feel to be up here comes easy. If you close your eyes you can hear the screams, feel the body heat. Smell the sweat and the anticipation. See thousand faces looking up in awe. At you. It makes your blood run hot.

You much prefer being up here, you decide.

Namjoon brings you back down. "Now it just feels like a chore. I look out and all I see is disappointed faces. I can't pretend for them anymore."

"People travel miles to see you Joon! No one is disappointed."

"Not the fans. They love me. Well, Runch Randa, at least." He cracks a half smile. "It's me whose disappointed. In Kim Namjoon."

You always thought your brother was sure of himself. He's cocky, confident and above all fearless. It's his biggest strength (and his most irritating quality sometimes) but it's what you always admired most about him.

Clearly you didn't know your brother as well as you thought you did.

You bite your lip. "Why?"

He turns to face you, leaning back into his arms while he searches for the right words and, little to your knowledge, gathers the courage to confide in you.

"Because I re-entered Mic Drop for all the wrong reasons. I just wanted to prove myself, you know? Win for real this time, not just by default." He swallows. "But then I saw Yoongi perform. And to be honest? I saw you. I saw how much you care about the music. How you come alive when you're writing lyrics or when you're in the studio." His smile is woeful. "Im supposed to feel like that. But I don't. I never did. It's like I'm always asleep, y'know?"

You did know. Every time you lifted a camera. Every time you pressed the shutter and snapped another shot of Namjoon on stage you felt your soul grow exhausted.

It makes the distance between you and Namjoon close a little. For once you understand each other and you don't have to hide how you feel any more.

"I can't stop thinking that it's your name the fans should be screaming. Not mine. They deserve better than me."

"But you're the best performer I know!" You rush. It always seemed like he wanted to keep you out of the spotlight at all costs. "Why now?"

He lets out a deep sigh. "I'm a selfish person, Y/N. I thought I was protecting you from... all this." He gestures around him. "The late nights and the paparazzi and the criticism and a fucking manager on your back all the time." His eye roll makes you snort, sharing a brief smile at the image of hardworking Jimin mumbling into his headset like a man posessed.

He's quickly serious again though. "Fame comes with a price. But I realize now that the price is worth it if your hearts in the right place and...what I'm trying to say, Y/N, is that mine never was."

You let your chin fall into your palm. Huh. "So that's the big secret?"

"Actually...there's something else." He shifts nervously. "I know about you and Yoongi."

You freeze, scrambling to your knees with wide eyes. "Wait, Joon, let me explain—"

"Let me finish!" Namjoon brushes you off with a breathless laugh, nodding to himself, as if finally coming to a solid conclusion about coming clean when his eyes meet yours. "He's in love with you."

This time it feels like the whole world goes into overdrive. You forget how to breathe.

"What...how...huh?"

It's Namjoon's palm squeezing your knee reassuringly that brings you back down.

"He always was. Even back before things got messed up." A deep breath. Something was coming, you could tell by the way his eye twitched nervously. "That's why me and Yoongi fought. That's why I...I lied and said that I wrote the song the night of the Mic Drop final...accused him of plagiarism—" Your mouth gapes. "I know! I know. Don't look at me like that. I can see the irony."

It all makes sense now. She's a part of this, Namjoon, whether you like it or not.

The reason Namjoon sacrificed his best friend wasn't for fame but for your sake?

You want to fly at your brother, scream at him for keeping this from you for so long. For turning you against Yoongi. For keeping you from the only person to make you feel safe. Feel Happy.

But his eyes are void of anything other than regret and you can tell his betrayal had been playing on his mind all these years.

"Point is, I didn't want you to get hurt." He shuffles awkwardly, not knowing what to do with your silence. "That's not an excuse, I know. Do you hate me?"

"No." Your voice sounds small. His chest heaves with relief. "I just wish you had been honest with me before. Saved us a ton of trouble."

"I thought I was doing the right thing. But I was a shitty brother in the end anyway."

It's strange. Even after all the fights and the resentment and the goddamn secrets, you don't think Namjoon is a shitty brother. Sure, his actions and intentions were shitty there was no denying it. But now it's like the puzzle pieces finally click into place and the full photograph comes into view, crystal clear.

All this time, he just wanted to protect you, when you should have been protecting him. He was hurting too, you just never knew it.

"It's not too late, Joon. Just be happy for me okay? I think..." If Namjoon plucked up the courage to tell you his secrets then it was only fair that you did too. "I love him too."

A pinkish tinge caresses your face when you finally admit it, both out loud and to yourself.

You love Yoongi. And now all the cards are on the table there's nothing holding you back from it.

Now you just need to tell Yoongi.

"I know. You think I don't know who that song is about?" The grin that spreads across Namjoon's features is sincere."And I am. Happy for you, I mean."

Now the truth is out in the open it feels like your wounds are already beginning to heal. You place your hand over his and squeeze it tight. It was time to forgive.

A thought suddenly strikes you. "So what are you gonna do now?

Namjoon fumbles in the back pocket of his jeans, thrusting something towards you. A polaroid picture. The same photo you'd seen at Yoongi's studio.

He kept it, too?

"This kid." His finger jabs at the innocent face of a younger Namjoon, arm wrapped around the shoulders of his best friend. "I didn't get enough time to live as him before I became Runch Randa. I think it's time to just live as Namjoon for a while."

"But what about Big Hit? It'll fall apart and mom and dad will kill you—"

"No it won't. They have you. I already talked to them, in fact. There's a stage with your name on it right here." He pats the ground. "If you want it, that is."

You blink, stunned. You? "I...I don't know if I can."

"I believe in you." Namjoon says. "And I'll be cheering you on from the front row."

You'd have to think about it long and hard but you can't help the grin that appears on your face. Things were going to be okay.

An urge rises in your chest to tell Yoongi this news. To see the way his face would light up as you started the journey to following your own dreams, like he always said you should.

You and Yoongi were going to be okay.

"Hey! Maybe I should try photography now I have some free time." Namjoon tugs at the camera strap around your neck, lifting his eye to the viewfinder and laughing when you cover the lens with your hands. "Damn I'm kinda good!"

You bump his shoulder teasingly, the belly laughter that spills into the arena feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

You're only interrupted by approaching footsteps. Jimin bursts into the arena.

"Namjoon," he pants. "I have some bad news."

--

It's compulsory for all competitors to attend the crowning ceremony. Even those who get disqualified.

RUNCH RANDA BLACKLISTED FROM COMPETING IN FUTURE HIP HOP COMPETITIONS AFTER PLAGIARISM SCANDAL SURFACES.

Just one of the devastating headlines that hit the media after the judges panel received an anonymous tip in the form of a USB stick that exposed Namjoon once and for all. The same USB that you pressed into Yoongi's hands just hours before Namjoon's disqualification.

RAPPER GLOSS TO SNATCH MIC DROP TROPHY IN SHOCKING REVENGE FOR HIS BRUTAL DEFEAT.

Namjoon reads it aloud in the back of the car. He laughs at the end but it does nothing to lighten the mood.

The windows are tinted but you can still see the hoards of fans lining the streets, eyes steeped in betrayal.

You should hear the way they boo as your brother drives past. You should hear the way they chant his name instead.

Yoongi! Yoongi! Yoongi!

But you don't. You don't hear anything. You don't feel anything. All you can think of is the same three words, throbbing in your chest over and over again.

I love you.

Did he mean them at all?

"Y/N? Did you hear me?"

"Hm?" You look up. Namjoon's staring at you with concern.

"Your phone's ringing again."

It's no surprise when you pull out your phone and see a contact picture of yourself and Yoongi gracing the screen. He's been calling all morning. It takes every strength inside you to tap the red decline button.

"Aren't you gonna talk to him?"

Another call lights up the screen.

"Not like this."

With trembling fingers you shut your phone off all together.

--

Paparazzi cameras flash brazenly as you step out of the black company car, following Namjoon with your hood pulled tightly round your face. A hoard of body guards usher you through a back door to the arena. The main entrance is reserved for notable guests only, you learn.

While Namjoon's presence usually makes the room buzz with an electric energy, there's no excitement when he enters now. An awkward hush falls like a shroud as he elbows his way past pitiful stares. It's like someone died. In a way it's true; there's no trace of Runch Randa in Namjoon's hunched stance. Here, the dead still walks for everyone to see.

Jimin's waiting by the stage door. No words are exchanged as he slips passes into your hands. Namjoon's has a big red strike through the word TALENT, "guest" scribbled all too generously below it to match your own.

It's nearing show time. They're just waiting for you to take your seats, Jimin says, though you barely hear him. You're too busy imagining what you would do if you bumped into him right now, heart pounding whenever you catch a glimpse of blue or hear a laugh you're convinced you recognise.

Deep down you know exactly where you have to go to find him. To find Yoongi.

"I'll join you in a second, okay?"

Namjoon looks nervous, the first time you've ever seen him with such a severe case of the jitters. His smile is empty when you rub his forearm reassuringly. "Don't be too long. If I'm gonna do this I want you by my side."

You manage a smile. "Always."

With that, Namjoon takes a deep breath and pushes out into the life of the arena and you find your feet numbly carrying you down back corridors you know by heart until you reach his dressing room.

Your heart is blind, you think. Even now the shattered fragments ache for him, beat a little faster knowing he's just behind this door.

Why can't you go back to hating him, just like you did before? Deep down you know it's because you never really hated Yoongi. You don't think you ever could.

Forgiving him, though? Some wounds never heal, no matter how badly you want them to.

You pause outside the door. The stupid gold star that used to be there has been scraped off, replaced with a new name tag. Gloss. You put your ear to the wood. Nothing.

A deep breath and you find the handle. Should you burst in and give him a piece of your mind? Knock and enter politely? You can't help but scoff. Shouldn't he be the one coming to find you?

He calls your name before you can do either.

"Y/N?"

Fuck. Is hearing his voice supposed to hurt this bad?

You don't know what you're expecting when you turn around. Something different about him perhaps. A sign that he isn't the person you had grown to know. Grown to love.

But there he is. All messy blue hair and bitten lips and eyes a little red around the edges. Your Yoongi.

Your arms curl around your body like a band aid, holding you together. You can't crumble. Not now.

He looks stony but his eyes flicker with tender remorse when he sees the tears staining your cheeks.

His hands reach for you instinctively. The same hands that make love to his piano in the shitty apartment above the coffee shop. The same hands that could make you fall apart with even a delicate touch. You want to run into them so bad it hurts. But now they're stained red with betrayal and he chokes when you recoil.

Seconds feel like hours as you just stand there taking each other in like it's been years. It's only been a day or two. Maybe three? You can't remember. They all rolled into one meaningless blur of angry tears and insomnia.

You had a whole speech prepared for the moment you finally faced him again. But there are no words that feel right. You just need to know. If he meant every touch and every inside joke and those three words that make your heart soar despite how badly you want to hate him. And there's only one way to find out.

"Why did you do it?"

Your voice sounds timid and scared, like you feel. He winces.

"Y/N, let me explain—"

"Explain what?" Your voice raises shakily."How you lied to me? How you used me?"

He rushes towards you and it takes all of your strength to draw back, especially when his eyes look so frantic, so desperate. Like he's having one of his nightmares. It tugs at your heart because this time the nightmare is real and you're living in it.

"It's not like that—"

"Did you ever even want me? What about all that fair and square bullshit you told me huh?"

"Of course I wanted you Y/N...want you." His eyes fill with pain. "This wasn't meant to happen. I know how this looks but I just panicked!"

You rush at him, fists curled like that day in his studio except this time he doesn't stop you when you start hitting his chest, vision blurry.

"He was going to pull out! Namjoon was going to let you win! So that I could -- we could be happy!"

"What I...I don't understand?" His mouth gapes, processing. "But you didn't..." He swallows, like remembering is painful. "When I confessed, you didn't say it back. I thought we were over! I thought I had nothing to lose, Y/N. He had already won..."

You remember your words. I can't do this anymore. A misunderstanding that would never have happened if he just—

"Did you even listen to the song?"

His face drops at the mention of the song. "No." He looks like he might cry. "I was angry! I...I acted impulsively. I never got the chance..."

You bared your soul in that song in ways you never thought you could. He wasn't supposed to find out how you felt about him this way. Not here, when you're falling apart and there's nothing you can do to stop it. But it all comes tumbling out before you can change your mind.

"I wrote that song because I love you, Yoongi!"

Silence. He has to grip the wall to steady himself.

"Y-you love me?"

"I love you." The words feel indulgent on your tongue and even now as they hang heavy in the air and you're overcome with an indescribable combination of grief and longing, you mean them with every bone in your body.

You rush at him. You can't help it. Can't resist how your head falls into his chest and how you cry harder when you breathe in his scent one last time, sobs muffled by his hoodie. But he hears them, you know he does, because his hands are trembling when they pull you closer like you're fragile enough to break.

"I love you. So fucking much it hurts, Yoongi."

You're weak. You're so so weak.

You don't know why you do it but you grab his face with both hands and then you're kissing him. Showing him how much you need him, how much you mean your words. His hand cups your jaw like always and his lips press back with a tender desperation and you believe him. You believe that he loves you. Whole and true. Because in that moment, with his lips on yours, everything is okay. He's your Yoongi and you're his Y/N and he loves you.

But then you pull back and he's crying too and everything's broken and your heart goes numb.

"I'm sorry. God, Y/N I'm so sorry. If I could take it back I promise I would."

You muster up all the strength you can. You know what you have to do.

"I'm giving you a choice, Yoongi. You go out on that stage and pick up that trophy and we're over. For real."

He tries to kiss you again, grabbing at you frantically when you turn your cheek.

"Y/N, don't do this. We love each other. That's all that matters right?" He musters up the closest thing to a smile he can manage, like he's convincing himself more than he is you. "You don't have to—"

"No." You pull away from grip. It feels cold and wrong. "I have to do this. If you love me like you say you'll...you'll understand."

You turn but he grabs your wrist, pins you in place.

"I can't lose you to him again, Y/N. I...I already lost you once and I don't think I..."

The hard faced Min Yoongi you once knew is gone. All that's left is the vulnerable man in front of you who holds your heart in your hands with a grip so tight it scares you.

"He can't win...please."

You suck in a final breath.

"Please what? Don't make you choose between me and that stupid fucking trophy? You did this to yourself, Yoongi." You turn and this time he lets you. "The only person pushing me away is you."

"Y/N please, wait!"

You don't dare turn to look at him as you walk away. Not even when he pleads or you hear him fall to his knees, a strangled sob echoing down the hall. You're scared you might run back to him if you do.

You don't let yourself break down until you turn the corner. Yoongi doesn't follow.

--

"I'm okay." You assure Namjoon as you take a seat beside him inside the arena. It's a lie, of course. No amount of cold water splashed on your face in the bathroom could prepare you for this moment.

You're just in time. The ceremony is already starting. The host is taking the stage and the lights are dimming but you're too numb to care.

You go out on that stage and pick up that trophy and we're over.

Your decision is final. There's no going back. You've cried all your tears. You've said all that needed to be said. All you're left with now is a sickly feeling in your stomach as you look down at the trophy sat in a display case center stage.

We love each other. A slither of hope tugs at your heart strings. You barely manage to suppress it.

"Sorry! Excuse me!" The empty seat to your left sinks under the weight of Hoseok as he clumsily stumbles into the arena, late as always.

He offers you a smile which turns to a frown when you only stare past him vacantly, straining your neck to keep an eye on the stage.

A hand covers yours. You freeze at the contact, only relaxing when you peer through the darkness to find Hoseok staring at you gently. His voice is a whisper. "Whatever happens I'm here for you, okay?"

A wave of emotion crashes through you and you think you might cry again. You can't make your lips sound out a response but Hoseok understands and you feel a little stronger when you turn your attention back to the ceremony knowing you have someone by your side.

"As you all know there have been some...complications with this year's finalists." The host coughs and fiddles with his tie awkwardly. "But we are glad to announce that we do in fact have a winner here with us today!"

The crowd chants Yoongi's name again. Namjoon stiffens. Your free hand grabs his and he squeezes it tight.

"So without further ado, I would like to welcome this year's winner, Gloss!"

The crowd goes wild but the sound is drowned out by a ringing in your ears. It's like you're underwater, holding your breath as you wait and wait for him to take the stage and all the oxygen to slip away.

One...two...three...

You get to ten seconds, then twenty seconds and then thirty and by the time you get to forty you feel yourself break the surface, take a heaving breath.

You're floating. He chose you.

He loves you! Yoongi loves you! He—

No.

You're seeing things. You must be. That can't be Yoongi's face lighting up every screen in the room. That can't be him crossing the stage and taking the trophy from the hands of the host with a smug grin. That can't be Yoongi holding it up in the air like a martyr.

That can't be your Yoongi. This is a stranger.

You crash back to reality when Namjoon wraps his arms around your waist and you realise your sobbing. Sobbing so hard it hurts your chest and your lungs burn with misuse and you're sure the tears will never stop.

"It's okay! Shh."

Nothing is okay. Nothing.

Yoongi's face is still blown up on the big screens in painful detail. The smile on his face falters when he looks out into the crowd and spots you instantly. Sees you crumple.

There are two things Min Yoongi ever loved in this world.

His music and you.

The trophy feels cold in his hands. The crowd gasps as he rushes to the edge of the stage and calls out to you.

"Y/N wait! I'm sorry—"

You hear his voice through the speakers but it's too late. You're already running.

Yoongi's mic drops to the ground.

--

Yoongi's nightmares are back. Except this time they're different.

When he closes his eyes you're there. Smiling and laughing like you used to. His heart warms and he reaches for you...

And then he realises it's not you. Just a picture, blown up on the big screen as you cross the stage at the front of the room he's suddenly aware he's in.

He glances around at the indistinguishable people around him, all smiling and clapping ferociously. Why isn't he happy?

The bottle in his hand is half empty. He's realises he's screaming. So hard his throat burns and his lungs beg for air but you don't even look his way. He screams your name, over and over again. Nobody seems to hear him.

Namjoon's there too. Bouncing a baby on his knee, maybe one or two years old if he has to guess.

"That'll be you one day," He whispers, but its deafening to Yoongi. "Only the very best for my niece." The baby giggles up at him, stubby fingers wrapped around his thumb.

She has your eyes. The very same eyes Yoongi would look into like they held everything in the world. The very same eyes Yoongi saw fill with pain on the last day he saw you before things got messed up.

She has Hoseok's nose. And his mouth, too, small and heart shaped. The resemblance is uncanny as Hoseok appears beside Namjoon, takes the baby girl into his arms and places a sweet kiss on her forehead.

Then there you are. The same old Y/N. The same smile that makes your eyes crinkle and the same laughter than makes his heart melt. The same girl who used to love him.

Though it's clear that that much is no longer true. Not when you lean up to kiss Hoseok on the cheek, Namjoon drawing you into a hug when you present the trophy in your hands to them with an elated laugh.

A family.

It feels like he's been punched in the stomach.

Yoongi always thought winning Mic Drop would mean he had everything. Fame. Money. Glory.

He didn't need family. He always got by on his own.

It took holding the whole world in the palm of his hand to realise none of it meant anything if he didn't have you by his side.

You were his everything. But he was too stupid to see it and he let you slip away.

It's too late now.

A hand appears on his shoulder. It's cold, grip bruising. The voice that comes next gives him chills every single time.

"So was it worth it?" Namjoon asks.

Yoongi tries to answer but his vision is blurred with hot tears now and he's on his hands and knees and he's screaming.

And when he wakes up at ass o clock, sweaty and gasping for air, he still finds himself reaching for your warmth beside him.

But all his fingers find are cold sheets and bitterness.

extended a/n: okay so if you have reached this far then you are a TROOPER. a trooper who i love and appreciate endlessly for reading 30k of my waffle lmao im so sorry <3 ksksksk so this fic has been in my head for the longest time and in my drafts for almost five months so im super attached to it and putting this out is like the scariest ever?? i really put my heart into this piece, like y’all don’t understand how many times it’s cropped up in my dreams and I’ve woken up like MUST WRITE. it’s far from perfect but i tried my best!! i can’t tell you how many scenes had to be rewritten until i was happy enough with them bc this fic is literally my baby in every sense of the word and i wanted to get it right :( although that just made the ending even more SOUL DESTROYING to write for me ugh i had the ending set in my mind before i even started writing but there were moments where i jus wanted yoongi and oc to be happy ever after :( but alas, I feel like this ending was far more realistic for them and i couldn’t go against my gut sigh. there may be a few drabbles planned in the future tho to make up for the angst :) Anyway!!! I’ll stop rambling. Thank you for reading this far, if anyone has. TROOPER. love you <3

updated 12/01/19: drabble #1 | drabble #2 | drabble #3 

[antique-teacups]

sunshine in L.A.

A/N: kind of an original character piece but also not entirely.  i just was having a great time writing! hope you folks enjoy!

word count: 3k

There was something about her twenties that never felt quite right, worn like a sweater a size to large. She watched as her friends floated from relationships and friendships seamlessly, while she felt caught. In what exactly, she wasn’t sure. Part of her hoped with time that feeling would fade, become background static instead of pumping along with her heartbeat. Going with the current, she did exactly what was expected of her. Attended college, albeit a community college, but college none the less. Part time work covered what financial aid wouldn’t, even scraping enough together to buy a beater car.

Time drifted on and the feeling stayed, haunting and hollow. Avoiding the problem didn’t lessen its size but it never grew. In the back of her mind constantly. Social media was the worst part, watching her friends flourish and flower, while it took everything in her to remain sane and present. Two years flew by in the blink of an eye and she were left with a tiny degree she was not sure she really wanted. When the opportunity did present itself, she knew it was one she could not possibly pass up.

She knew that even in L.A these demons could surface but maybe the constant sun could choke them out. Packing her meager belongings into the back of her car, she pointed it in the direction of L.A. Whether she actually ended up in the sunshine state wasn’t the point, but rather, it was to get out. Stop the cycle before it became the only focal point of her life. It took longer than it should’ve, she passed the days slowly. Each spent behind the wheel simply heading west.

L.A. was a zoo. She worked your way through the city with fascination and hopefulness. She was certain of one thing and uncertain of many. She hoped to write but was willing to do just about anything to make money. Well, just about anything, she still harbored some self-respect.

L.A. had of a way of worming its way into your heart, no matter how shitty people made it seem. Each self-respecting L.A citizen hated the city as much as they loved it. She found a decent studio apartment, managed to get a job as a barista quickly, and spent the first month slinging caffeine in the daytime and writing into the wee hours of the morning. Cash was always tight, considering she did live in one of the most expensive cities, but there was semblance of happiness. It was clawing it’s way in on the edges of her life.

The customers were not particularly strange, at least not always. There were a couple of memorable moments, but most days passed by in monotony. She knew customers by their orders, not names. These small moments between the register and picking up their coffee offered she a small window into their world. These hints they dropped left her wondering about their lives outside their order and these four walls. Who were these people who flocked to the shop like cattle to slaughter?

She certainly played favorites, every barista did, with both customers and coworkers. There were those who made the days a little brighter. The first was her coworker James. Somewhere in his twenties like her but an old soul. He came to work in sweaters, cooper rimmed circular glasses, and disheveled hair on the daily. He was welcoming and warm and chased away some of the darkness.

The two of them became instant friends. He would wait after work to hang out, get drinks on the weekend, and spend Sunday brunch complaining about his hangover. At first, she was confronted with the concern that maybe he was worming into her life in hopes of it ending in a relationship, but as soon as she met his boyfriend Scott, that fear was put to rest. In a way, she chose the two of them as family. She spent countless hours with them, at ease with the way things were.

In James, she confided most of her fears and a lot of her guilt. The backstory of her life surprising him but explaining the front she put up. Tragedy often bores the strongest soldiers. In the year she had been in L.A, James helped her pick up the pieces and put herself together, an unrepayable favor. Thanksgiving was right around the corner and she were destined to spend it with James and Scott.

“James, I’m running to the grocery store after work and if you play your cards right there might just be a bottle of Prosecco with your name on it.” she joked over the espresso machine, a sly smile on her lips. James and her always bantered at work, often to the amusement of the customers and other coworkers.

James matches her smile, “Oh honey, you act like I would actually need to play my cards to get it, I’ve got you wrapped around my finger.” He chuckles and turns back to the drawer. The day was getting late, closing time just mere hours away. She was practically counting down the hours till she could curl up on his couch and binge “New Girl”, the new obsession for the two of them.

“I like to pretend it’s the other way around, but I would admit you are right, James. But besides that, anything else?” she asked, hardly looking at him. There was unspoken communication between you two most days, a glance could tell a story. “I was thinking pizza this fine Wednesday night. But I’m certainly open to suggestions.”

“And break the Wednesday night pizza tradition, how absurd!” James feigns hurt, a hand over his heart and concerned expression painting his face. “The table is already set, we can’t go making changes now, silly girl.”

“Then pizza and prosecco it is. Perfect.” She giggled and sent a curt nod in his direction. The entire conversation was an open invitation for him to change the plans, but he never did. Wednesday night was always reserved for the two of them. They devoured pizza and whatever show they were working on. It was sacred to them both.

The rest of the day passed quickly, the sun just barely setting when she and James locked the shop doors. A brief hug and a quick exchange of words and the two of them were off in opposite directions. A pit stop at the grocery store and then to James’ place. He would order the pizza in, as per tradition. Tasked with grabbing the drinks and whatever bits she needed, she would be to his place shortly.

Her car sat tucked in the back lot, warm from sitting in the sun. Cranking the window open once she had climbed inside, turning on the radio, she set off to the grocery store. It was smaller than most that scattered around L.A, which is why it was her favorite. She did not have to fight the yoga obsessed mothers to get through the aisles or hope the hipsters didn’t pick through the all the good stuff before she got a chance to be there. The old man, who she assumed owned it, knew her by name. Often, he would gift products just a day out of date to her. He did save your ass more than once.

“Charles, what’s the good word for today?” She asked, swinging the door open and nabbing a basket.

Smiling, he gushed, “I beat the finalist in Jeopardy today, but I’m here and he’s there,” shrugging he went on, “I put some of those cookies you like in the back, they went out of date yesterday, Dandelion.” Charles had been using the nickname since she had started coming here. She was totally convinced he had to be her guardian angel. When she asked him where it came from, his response surprised her. “Like the weed, you always come back. You are full of fire and strong. I can see it.” She felt partial to this grocery store. She ended up here for a reason.

“Great, I was craving something sweet all day. Remind me, I have got something for you in my bag before I go. Don’t worry, nothing poisonous.” Jokingly she added.

Charles had a love for Jim Harrison. Often when she was browsing at old bookstores or garage sale’s she would stumble across one for him. He probably owned nearly every single book published by Harrison, but always acted thankful and surprised when she presented him with another. She wanted to make sure he knew how much she appreciated him in a way of more than just saying thank you.

She scanned the aisles looking for the familiar packaging of her favorites. She hardly noticed the boy till she had practically run into his back.

“Another one in Charles good graces, a rare species.” He teased.

Chuckling, “That must mean there are people on Charles bad side, which I highly doubt.” He was home strung, as far as she could tell. Clean cut and not looking for a lot of attention, judging by his all black attire. “I’m assuming you’re one of the lucky ones, too.” She implored.

“Thankfully, I have managed to make my way into one of his chosen few. Even without it, I would still come here. This is the only grocery store where I don’t have to cross my fingers and hope all the good stuff isn’t picked over. Charles seems to have a force field to keep this place hidden. Certainly, the best kept secret of L.A.,” he pauses, searching your face, ��you work at the coffee shop on Sunset, Eight-Fold Coffee, right?”

“Guiltily is charged, Mr. iced latte with almond milk,” tapping your temple, “steel trap. I only know people’s drinks, not their names, sorry. I was wondering if you looked familiar or if it was just the lighting.”

Extending a hand, cheekily responding, “David. The name’s David Dobrik, or iced latte if you please.”  His smile was easy and charming, you couldn’t help but stare. His entire posture oozed ease, you couldn’t quite decide if he was trying to flirt or simply be friendly. Of course, that wonderful friend called self-doubt started to crawl its way into your chest, so it was time to go.

Flashing him what you hoped was a friendly parting smile, “Y/N. Y/N Y/L/N. It was nice finally meeting in more than just an ‘iced latte with almond milk’ kind of way. I’ll see you around. I have promised the roommate a night in and if I don’t come through, the world might stop turning.” Turning on her heel, tossing David a small wave, she headed for the register. All the things she needed forgotten.

She set the single bottle on the counter and wait for Charles to ring it up. Silence elapses, you lost entirely in your own thoughts.

“Dandelion?”

“Huh, what?” she missed what he asked, cheeks flushing at him catching her in dreamland.

“Lots on your mind today?” Charles inquired, a knowing look on his face.

Smiling and rolling her eyes, “I respect the fishing for a morsel of mind but maybe when inquiring minds aren’t near.” she winks. Digging in your bag, she pulls the book for him, Returning to Earth, out. “I found it at a garage sale this weekend and thought you could add to your collection. But this one, is to expand your horizons.” She pulls The Pleasures of the Damned by Charles Bukowski out. “I’ll need it back but keep it as long as you need, I know where to find you. See you around Charles.” She pays and get ready to go, sneaking one last glance in David’s direction. Grabbing onto her bag with the prosecco and cookies tucked in, she heads for the doors. One last look to the aisles and she can see David still tucked amongst them, scouring for something in the sea. A shake of her head and she is out the doors.

Tossing the bag in the passenger seat, she meanders down the streets towards James. A stampede of thoughts about David comes and goes. It was just mutual acknowledgement that the two of them did in fact kind of know each other. Yet, she found herself wondering if she should tell James about him, see if he had any insight on the guy. The thought felt foolish considering it was just a run in at the grocery store, nothing more.

Charles knew more about her then he let on. He knew her heart was kind but had been through a lot, he knew you were loyal and strong, but he knew also knew when her heart would tell you who to let in. David did not need much from that grocery store, mostly some alone time. His inquiring mind also wanted some more information on the barista who stole his breath away. As he left that day, Charles told him something he would carry with him for a while. “People like her, they guard their hearts, but hers is golden. It won’t always be shut.”

Opening the door to James and Scott’s apartment, she could smell the pizza. Her mouth was already watering. James rounded the corner into view between the small kitchen and living.

“I was beginning to wonder if you bailed.” He poked.

“On you, never.” Rolling her eyes.

“I am almost flattered.” He made for the bag in her hand, noticing the cookies right away. “Charles treats you like your one of his own grand kids. One of the people placed on that golden list.”

“About Charles coveted list, I ran into a guy from the coffee shop. David? Iced latte with almond milk, dresses like an unemployed ninja. Do you know anything about him?” She asked trying to keep the hopeful tone from her voice.

James searches her face before continuing. “A sudden interest in a customer, more like prominent interest. I’ve noticed the favorites you play with him.” He flashes you a joking grin. “I don’t know much about him honestly. I’ve heard whisperings from the other baristas that he has some youtube channel, not much else. He seems nice.” Bumping his shoulder with hers, “It wouldn’t hurt if you tried to be friends with him. It’s not a crime to branch out. I would not be insulted if you did. I worry that maybe you don’t because I take up a lot of your time.”

“Certainly not, you take up a perfect amount of my time. I just, remember how hard it is for me to be friends with people, I guess. I am a lifelong hermit. Plus, if he’s doing that whole ‘social media career’, he might not be the kind of friend I want.” Socializing was never her strong suit and if David’s preferred choice was blasting his life across the platforms, maybe she would take a pass.

The two of you vegged out on the couch way past what was a reasonable time, both scheduled to open tomorrow. He was on her mind all night, the little she knew about him had her mind doing circles. He seemed innocent enough, a good guy if Charles liked him.

 The sun shown through the windows all morning, bringing a warming light to the coffee shop. All day you hoped he would pop in, yet, it went unanswered. Clocking out, she nabbed her notebook and a mug of coffee, making her way to the bank of windows along the window. She tried to keep her mind from wandering, yet it seemed impossible. Perhaps she scared him off.

“I figured you were a writer. Nobody suggests poetry books, Bukowski especially, unless they are a writer. Or terribly sad, but judging by the notebook, I’d say the first.” David said, standing next to you bathed in the afternoon sun. He looked as though he just woke up but in a delicious way. His hair was messy and his eyes warm. She could not help but bath in the light emanating from him.

A small smile spread on her lips, “You’re a fan?”

“I saw it on Charles counter on my out yesterday. A simple Google Search did the trick. Guy seems kind of dark for you.” A blush plays on David’s cheeks. “I was hoping to run into you today. Listen, me and my friends are going to this party tonight, would you be interested?”

“Uh,” glancing behind the counter you see James shaking his yes vigorous, “sure, why not?” It seemed in David’s presence, the hole in her chest seemed to lessen some.

[kingspoetrysoc]

Interview with Basmah Mohamed

Basmah is a first-year undergraduate student studying English at King’s. She writes spoken word poetry as well as free-verse poetry, publishing it on her Instagram account @basthepoet. Basmah is a SLAMbassadors Finalist and Speak Out Regional Finalist, writing for publications like Young Writers CW and Exposure. The King’s Poet’s Ishita Uppadhayay speaks to Basmah about her creative process, the ‘purpose’ of poetry, and more.

When did you first start writing poetry? Was there a specific moment when you felt it became an established interest?

I started writing poetry when I was in Year 8, so quite young. I had experience writing short stories prior to that. There was a defining moment, sort of. At my secondary school, we had an opportunity to do a 2-day workshop with Joelle Taylor, who ran the SLAMbassadors competition, and Deanna Rodger. I had never written poetry before. The competition was on the theme of ‘Identity,’ and we had to write a poem in a day, and then film our audition clips. Two other poets and I were chosen to go on to the next round. Then we performed at the Arts Theatre in the West End.

Can you imagine? At the age of 13, having never written poetry before, I got the opportunity to delve into it on stage. I remember going back to school afterwards and everyone asked, ‘How was it?’ I was just like, ‘I killed that.’ We ended up being highly commended out of three schools nationally, and after that experience, I knew poetry was something I wanted to pursue. I had the pleasure of performing my spoken word poetry for many years throughout secondary school –- moments I’ll cherish forever.

I started off writing spoken word poetry, but for the past couple of years, I’ve gone away from that and started writing lyrical and free verse poetry. As of now, I don’t have many opportunities to perform on the stage, so that’s also why I’ve switched my focus to written poetry. But yeah, I’ve been writing poetry ever since I was 13, and I’m 19 now.

Do you prefer spoken word poetry to written poetry, and do you feel there’s a different process to writing each one?

There’s definitely a different feel to writing each of them. I don’t prefer either one, but I feel more experienced in written poetry as of right now and wouldn’t necessarily say I’m exclusively a spoken word poetry artist anymore. I definitely believe they’re two separate art forms with different creative processes behind them.

I love watching spoken word performances – there’s something so special and unique about the form. I could listen to them for hours and hours. Joelle Taylor once said that spoken word poetry is about showing, and not telling. I think this is completely true – with spoken word poetry, there’s an emphasis on ‘showing,’ through gestures, emotions, or visual imagery.

What’s your creative process when writing poetry? Do you have any writing rituals? 

I tend to write my poems digitally, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Usually, I just sit down at my laptop and write whatever comes to mind. Over the years, I’ve compiled a sort of master document full of ideas, scraps, fragments, and shorter lines of poetry I’ve thought of. I split my computer screen into two, and on one side I have a fresh document, while on the other, I have these fragments to use for inspiration that I can just pick and choose.

If I force myself to write a poem, it just doesn’t work out, so I don’t set aside time for it. I just write whenever inspiration strikes me, or when I feel like it. I’ve collected quite a few poetry journals over the years, and write all my poems down to have written copies.

Is there anything you’ve studied while at King’s that’s inspired your writing?

In our first semester, we did the Reading Poetry module, which I absolutely loved. Not only were my tutor group so inspiring and creative, but I was also able to find my new style away from spoken word poetry through the module. It inspired me to write shorter, more powerful poems – a style I’m proud of.

Who’s your favourite poet?

I always get this question, and I never know how to answer it! I feel like I’m someone who writes more poetry than I read. One of my biggest inspirations is Poetcurious, he was my former teacher and writes a lot of spoken word poetry. Poetcurious was the one who provided me with various poetry opportunities throughout my time at secondary school and really helped me grow into the poet I am now. I couldn’t be more grateful!

Some of my other inspirations are Akala, Hollie McNish, Solomon O.B, Zena Edwards, Deanna Rodger, and Joelle Taylor – of course, this is also because I’ve had the pleasure of working with them and seeing them perform live. I’ve also been inspired by George The Poet more recently. I look up to Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes a lot, I really enjoy reading their poetry. I love Lucille Clifton as well. I read a lot of Middle Eastern poetry too, which has inspired my own poetry that I’d love to share in the future.

Do you think poetry is sometimes perceived as an inaccessible art?

I wouldn’t use the word inaccessible. I think poetry is very misunderstood. I think there should be more opportunities to learn about poetry in secondary school, as well as more of an emphasis on various styles of poetry – going beyond the canon and diversifying into teaching and learning about spoken word poetry.

Do you think poetry is meant to have a specific purpose?

There’s no one purpose of poetry – it can be anything you want it to be, which I find really inspiring and beautiful. Poetry is expressive for me: it lets me share my feelings with the world, and can also be a way of capturing a moment. The significance of poetry is subjective, so it truly can be anything you want it to be.

Does a poet need to have natural talent? How important is constant writing practice?

I think there are definitely good and bad writers. I know I said earlier that poetry is subjective, similar to how art is, but there are some boundaries. I don’t think writing poetry should be a tedious task where you have to write every day. If it helps you grow as a writer and a person, that’s great – it really is up to the poet.

Reading and thinking about what inspires you is the most important thing, across all different forms of media, whether that be painting, reading, listening to music… You don’t necessarily need to be very strict with yourself as a poet. At the same time, you need to edit your poetry and receive constructive criticism for it. Otherwise, your work won’t improve.

You publish some of your poetry on Instagram. Why this outlet?

I’ve been published before, and have done competitions. At a point during lockdown, I realised I had been writing more and wanted a way to showcase it. Instagram is the easiest way to do this. Using it as an outlet feels freeing, but also, I want to keep certain poems to myself. Sometimes poetry feels really personal and posting can feel like revealing aspects of myself.

I’m not looking to go viral. It’s just my hobby, what I love, and I’m really proud of it. I want to showcase it because I know people might feel how I feel, or even feel different. I love getting feedback from them too, it helps me improve my writing for the future.

Do you think publication in a journal or poetry collection is more intimate than self-publication on Instagram?

When I publish poetry online, I choose poetry I’m not too vulnerable about, and usually, work that I’m more open to criticism on. There is a different feel to both mediums. I do question using Instagram to publish poetry because of how exposed it feels. Instagram is freeing, as I said earlier, but it is also restrictive because I don’t want to expose all of my poetry – I’m not ready to share all these different parts of myself with the world.

What advice would you give to aspiring poets?

As cliché as this is going to sound, just write. Just keep writing. No matter how critical you are of your work, just write whatever comes to your mind. If inspiration strikes when you’re outside, or walking, catch it immediately and write it down. As passionate as I am about poetry, it’s not my future career. A lot of people think you can’t do anything else if you write, but you definitely can.

Also, always edit your work. It can sometimes be a difficult process, and no one really wants to do it, but it helps fine-tune your writing and gather inspiration for future work. Poetry is whatever you want it to be, and there are a lot of opportunities to publish or work with poets, so keep an eye out for these on social media. Just keep writing and keep going.

[anangelicday-mrwolf]

Wolfsbane : Noblesse Fanfic (post-ending)

(previous chapter)

Chapter 19 – To Be Like Me

“Welcome, Lady Seira. I’ve been expecting you.”

Deneb smiled at the newcomer, his face beyond dead-pallid thanks to the contrast his black outfit provided, stylized in a way commonly worn for events.

“I appreciate that you have come. Your presence tonight will without a doubt cast an all-revealing light upon this gathering and this very mansion, like a moon printed upon the cloudless sky. Now please, this way.”

Click, click. Tap, tap.

The corridor echoed with auditory frictions that clearly conveyed the difference in the levels of their heels.

As he guided Seira, Deneb repeatedly peeked at her.

‘Every time I see her, I can’t help marveling how beautiful she is.’

Seira donned for the night a dress composed in Lukedonian fashion, instead of a robe that she would wear as a head of her clan for meetings at the Lord’s Hall.

Not too extravagant, yet graceful enough thanks to laces and ornaments of perfect quantity and size, beautifully synergistic with her calm atmosphere.

She was like a flower sent from heaven.

And Deneb was dying to wrench the said flower to brand as eternally his.

‘If only I could make her mine and mine only. What a pleasure it would be!’

But he knew it was not the time yet to reveal what he has been nurturing within. Until then, he promised to himself, he shall keep his gardening knife as sharp as possible.

They soon arrived at the “party room,” and Deneb opened the door for Seira.

“Lady Seira J. Loyard has arrived.”

Seira’s eyes grew upon entrance; tables and sofas occupied with nobles filled the room, larger than she had thought.

The heads of non-octaclans, their wives, and their children old enough to behave in parties were all clutching teacups or delicacies in their hands, bringing about quite a friendly mood.

It reminded Seira of the time she had spent outside Lukedonia. And she was not anticipating this.

“I heard this is how humans often seek friendship and companionship.”

Seira by now would have usually questioned the source of his knowledge. Alas, her heart so far frozen in loneliness managed to thaw little, which was more than enough to blind it from a mysterious truth.

Deneb learned from Yuhyung during his stay at Lukedonia that Seira used to enjoy the company of her human friends every single day. Thus he calculated she would be suffering from loneliness ever since her return: a perfect condition for him to lay stepping stones before her, towards the arch he is longing for.

Of course, he was not the sole noble who sought to woo the Loyard.

Beneath the pacific atmosphere that meets the eyes of Lukedonians is an invisible tempest of power struggle among the non-octaclans, applicable to a lot, if not all or most of them. There have been – and there are – silent war cries and cacophonies of steels in their quest to nest in the Lord’s Hall, which exacerbated ever since the Tradio clan redeemed itself and reclaimed its spot.

To these challengers’ disappointment, their influences, menpower, and name values are much below those of the octaclans, like comparing a mere fly to a falcon.

So they naturally turned to plan B: securing a marital relationship with the last surviving Loyard on earth, who would be anxious to save her clan from extinction, and whose name would provide a spotlight brilliant enough to shed a light upon a new spot that has yet to be claimed in the Lord’s Hall.

Hence so many of the non-octaclans decided to attend. However, there was one thing they have failed to put into account; Deneb knew what would be brewing in their heads. And he invited them on purpose, to try to spark a relationship with Seira and demonstrate that none of them can speak or flirt like he can. He was so very determined to make Seira, the Loyard clan, and a new spot at the Lord’s Hall his.

True to his intention, he did not leave Seira’s side. Whenever a head or an heir of a clan dared to strike up a conversation with his prize, he ruthlessly thwarted him with his gift in speech and maneuvering of company. And so far he has successfully marked in everyone’s head that Illiness is the most supreme among the non-octaclans.

Everyone was thereby beyond displeased that their goal was right there for them to reach out, only to be barricaded thanks to a nuisance that prevailed whenever they attempted.

And then something changed.

“Look! Over there.”

“It’s Sir Rael.”

Sir Rael?

Seira’s hand trembled, as she was sipping out of her cup in a very experienced manner.

She knew what Rael was like. She would not say that she knew him as much as she knew Regis, but she had spent enough time with him under Frankenstein’s roof in Korea, enough to say that she now knows him better.

So she could swear that Rael is not at all a type to enjoy such a gathering. And she saw no reason for him to say yes to an invitation from a clan that had no connection with the Kertias whatsoever.

So she automatically darted her eyes at the door to witness the result of a highly extraordinary phenomenon, soon to blink with curiosity.

Rael was dressed in a social outfit, like any other noble in the scene. What captured Seira’s eyes, however, was the fact that he brushed his hair back, with his bang fixed at a side of his face. Which is why for a split second she mistook him for Razark.

Apparently she was not the only one.

“He looks like...”

“He resembles Sir Razark very much.”

“I guess bloodline never lies.”

Some female nobles were even blushing at the very handsome sight the new guest presented, and Deneb strode up towards him.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, sir.”

In reality, he was endeavoring to hide his fluster.

‘What is this? I can bet he was not on my to-invite list. Could it be that the patriarchs of Kertias did something about this?’

That was good enough for him to dissect what is lurking in the patriarch’s mind in the speed of light, and he began to come up with a solution even faster.

It was a widespread fact that Rael Kertia has been courting Seira for as long as anyone could remember. Therefore, most of the nobles at the place were not very happy to see him. In terms of the standing point, influence, and connection to the Loyard clan, he was the sure-finalist to this competition of their own to win Seira.

Knowing that too well, Deneb was not willing to welcome Rael into the battlefield.

But first he led Rael to an empty seat in the room, and much to Seira’s disbelief, Rael did not even glance at her as he passed her at close.

“I didn’t think I’d get to see you, sir. You see... Apologies. I mean no offense, but I’ve never taken you for a type to take pleasure in something like this.”

“...Time has passed. And it left behind a change.”

“A change? I’m not sure how you will take this, but this is marvelous. Isn’t that right?”

Deneb so very suavely looked around at the audience keen on their conversation. Nevertheless, no one was willing to take the leash from him.

The Kertias were still in tumult, and Rael has yet to find peace for his clan and his position. But there was no denying that he is a pure descent of Kertias; no one was bold enough to willingly challenge the prestige Rayga and Razark had built.

However, there is bound to be a person or two that has been born without the ability to get the hang of the mood. Two young nobles who would surely earn a thwack or two on the back once they go home took the risk for Deneb.

“You are absolutely right. Before you became a head of your clan, Sir Rael, you were so...”

“You were such a troublemaker.”

Appalled faces swung back and forth between Rael and the two speakers, but Rael’s face was as serene as it could be.

He had already told himself that he must not avoid what his past has been saving for him.

“You are more than correct. And I regret the fact at least thousands of times a day.”

Everyone seemed more than ready to smash their heads with the saucers or rinse their ears with the tea. THE Rael Kertia oh-so-gently responded to a comment that was by means nothing less than a mockery-slash-taunt.

If this happened to be a different situation, Rael would have basked in applause lauding his maturity and raked in praises like a farmer raking in acorns in autumn.

However, at this moment his action was nothing more than an assurance that no matter what they say to him tonight, Rael would never lunge towards their throats to “teach them a lesson” like he used to.

Feeling like breaking stuff or two because of their failure in approaching Seira, let alone appealing to her, the nobles gladly threw themselves at a new punching bag Deneb flung for them.

“It is completely understandable.”

“To tell you the truth, I remember lamenting more than a number of times whenever I heard news about you in the past.”

“It’s a shame that you have wasted your time so far.”

Flaunting his power like some stupid teenager to young nobles.

Pursuing a disgrace-of-noblekind-named-Ignes in the past.

These were just two of the dozens of weapons the nobles picked against him.

And Seira watch them. She watched how Rael stood steady on his ground despite the nobles’ comments that grew more vicious every second.

However, he started losing his ground when Deneb quoted something that touched on his trauma.

“But here you are, sir. Kertias would be ecstatic. If only Sir Razark were here to...”

Then Deneb stage-slapped his mouth with his hand, to pose that he made a mistake, and the atmosphere froze in an instant.

Which was, however, nothing compared to the ice exploding through Rael’s veins at the moment.

“Speaking of which, Sir Razark’s death was a grave tragedy.”

Rael’s hands covering the teacup, a measurement he took so he could buy his time to reply to the noble’s biting words while pretending to wet his lips, started to quiver.

He placed both his hands on his knees to stop the tremor, but Deneb’s eyes were too acute for him to fool.

His every word began to cut deep into Rael’s heart.

“Still, Sir Razark would be as contented as he could be to see you like this.”

Would he? Ever since my return, I’ve been nothing but incompetence.

“I haven’t been a head of my clan for that long, but if I were to give you a support as a more experienced one, just keep going. That’s good enough for you.”

That’s right. If I manage to stay out of trouble, that would be more than enough. My past was that disastrous. You are such a disgrace, Rael Kertia.

“And please, don’t be so disheartened. Sir Razark may lie in eternal sleep, but he is always with you in your soul weapon.”

Rael could not keep his face straight anymore.

The idea that has been tormenting him once in a while even after his return – the obsession that would return on a regular basis to torture his head as he lies in bed started to spasm.

Razark wouldn’t have died if I forfeited my Grandia for him ages ago.

The dam that has been securing his nightmare from awakening was crumbling. Rael ended up yielding his teacup a little roughly and stood.

“...I appreciate your invitation, but I would like to take my leave now. Please forgive me.”

The edges of his outfit left behind breeze as chilly as his heart as he rushed outside.

‘Just as planned.’

Deneb brushed his face with his hand, faking bafflement, as he smiled in secret. The other nobles looked pleased as well, the most powerful competitor now gone. They savored victory in their improvised alliance, until Seira’s teacup resonated against the table.

“Lady Seira?”

“Forgive me, Sir Deneb. But I must leave now.”

Every pair of eyes in the room instantaneously lost its focus.

“B-but why?”

“We still have time.”

“This gathering was reserved for you and you only!”

Deneb tried to stop Seira, more than ready to kneel if demanded, but Seira was smoothing out her dress for movement.

“My appreciations, but I believe this is not where I am required right now. Now please excuse me.”

Leaving behind a polite bow of her head, Seira did not even look back as she walked away, and dead silence wrapped the room.

One of the nobles threw an unpleasant stare at Deneb for ruining his chances, only to stiffen in surprise. Deneb was glaring at the direction that Seira took, his face immediately stony. His eyes were smoldering with dark rage and gluttony, terribly unmatching with his skin.

*****

“Sir.”

Rael started at a familiar voice.

“I see you are still here.”

Rael could not tell her why he was lingering. He had no place to go; the patriarchs would be more than dissatisfied to see him back so fast.

“Are you alright?”

In normal occasions, he would have softened just by her question. At the moment, however, he felt uneasy just by standing in her presence.

But he was not heartless enough to shut out a person caring for him, so he decided to come up with excuses good enough to send her away.

“I appreciate your concerns. And... My apologies for causing you concern.”

Seira flinched a little.

She has never looked for him before he did, save the day when she offered him her shoulders once they learned about Razark’s death.

It was much thanks to his have-it-all-my-goddamn-way personality.

Nonetheless, right now she felt it would be so much better to see him like his past self. In spite of his glamorous looks, he could not appear more devastated. He was obviously on the edge of his seat, like a child scared that he will get scolded at the slightest thing.

This is not Sir Rael.

“Please, don’t mind what they said.”

“I should do that, but...”

Rael unleashed the heaviest of a sigh.

“My former head of Kertias would have been much wiser and more assertive with his responses.”

“Please don’t blame yourself like that, sir. Nobody would have left the scene unscathed back there. Right now, this... This isn’t like you, sir.”

That moment Rael felt something breaking within him.

The dam that was crumbling was finally down to the mantle.

“Not like me...?”

Rael growl-whispered with his head drooped.

“Not like a noble. Not like a head of a clan. Not like a Kertia. Not like the brother of my former head of Kertias. Not like the son of my former head of Kertias.”

Seira gaped in surprise as his voice whipped up an increasingly violent emission of emotions.

“So what am I supposed to do? I’m reaping what I have sowed. Yes, I know that. That’s why I’m trying. But nobody is realizing that I’m trying. What more am I supposed to do from here? Just... Just......”

Rael’s head frantically spun towards Seira, and she was stunned the moment she met his eyes.

She could detect not the tiniest hint of tears, but Rael’s eyes were weeping.

“Just what more am I supposed to do from here? What do you want me to do? What in the world do you want from me? Just what am I? What am I supposed to be to be like me?!”

After a rushed cry, Rael was breathing harshly, his fists balled into a tight globe.

As a brief silence passed by, Rael’s face turned gray, upon noticing what he has done.

“...Lady Seira, I...”

Seira said nothing as he fumbled with his words.

“I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I swear. I wasn’t blaming... I... I wasn’t... I...”

Eyes lost at what to do, Rael soon gave up and let his shoulders slouch.

“I’m sorry I was what I wasn’t supposed to be. I’m... I’m terribly sorry.”

Seira still said nothing.

“Allow me to take my leave now. I wish you a pleasant night...”

With his final remark, Rael’s entire body vanished, not even leaving behind a breeze.

There was no way for Seira to catch up to him; the noble fled the scene, even putting at work the speed and elusive body coordination endowed to the Kertias.

And Seira had no intention of catching him.

Standing still to gaze towards his back that she lost already, Seira removed herself from the forest, like a lifeless ghost.

(next chapter)

For this chapter, I wanted to show what Deneb’s goal is and what the hierarchy and power struggle of Lukedonia are like. The majority of Noblesse’s plot centered on the heads of clans and their clans during chapters that feature Lukedonia, and I wanted to show Lukedonian population and system outside the Lord’s Hall.

And I feel bad for Rael in this chapter :’( Sorry, Rael - but I promise this won’t last forever!

[haughtlikeme]

Waverly Earp: Who Your Daddy & Mommy?

So this is just a super long post about who could and couldn’t be may or may not be Waverly’s Earp’s parents. It started so small and simple. Then grew.  And grew.  (click the ‘continue/read more link for actual color coded spreadsheets (OMG))

General thoughts on why Ward is/is not the dad:

· He couldn’t even look at her after Mama Earp left.  This implies that he had no attachment to her at all and thus was not her father. OR, that she reminds him only of his failings (an affair he had that produced her) and one of the things that drove his wife away and so is the father.

· In Willa’s diary, she said that “Mama told Daddy that ‘we have to do what is right’.” This is *we* have to do what is right, not *I* have to do what is right. To me this implies that Ward has a responsibility of some sort to this child (like he’s the father) or at least Mama Earp thought he did.

General thoughts on why Mama Earp is/is not the mom:

· At no time was language used indicating Mama Earp was ever pregnant.  Bobo said, “and then there was a baby” (as if it magically appeared). Willa said, “they brought the baby into the house” (as if they hadn’t been preparing for it for 9 months in Mama’s belly). Even Wynonna said, “I remember them bringing you home from the hospital NOT “I remember Mom being preggers”.

So, basically, I’ve convinced myself Mama Earp is not the mom; but I haven’t convinced myself entirely that Ward is not the dad.

Obviously, since I’ve come to various conclusions, those conclusions will be blown up, put through a Dyson vacuum (one of those spiffy new ball ones that you’d see infomercials on during late night TV if you were awake for late night TV), emptied onto the floor, eaten by Calamity Jane, spit up as a hairball, Doc will think it’s a demonic hairy slug and shoot it.  In short, any conclusions I have are just wrong and I love it because this show just surprises me at every turn. But I still love trying to guess anyway.

So, here we go.  The color coding is as follows: BLACK = Impossible* (the * is because NOTHING is impossible in Wynonna Earp). RED = HIGHLY UNLIKELY  YELLOW = somewhere between unlikely and probably not but...?  GREEN = A possibility

 Round 1 Eliminations: Let’s start with some “easy” ones:

Jack (Daddy): His row is entirely black because I figured that any women he encountered would not survive to give birth. Also, all those knives are very Freudian and I’m not sure he’s capable, if you know what I mean. So while him being the dad would be a SUPER creepy twist, I’m going to go with Impossible*. (Also, Jack, if you’re reading this, I totally didn’t mean that Freudian thing, I’m sure you’re awesome, please don’t come after me, thanks.)

Doc Holliday (Daddy): His row is (almost) entirely black, too. I don’t recall him mentioning a bordello down in that well and I also think he might have mentioned by now that he had a conjugal visit some 21 years ago. I do allow, however, that some angel (that he was 100% consensual with but which he attributes to a dream) visited him, thus that square is red (Possible but HIGHLY unlikely).

Rosita (Mama): MUCH NO.  For a lot of reasons. Hot tub being the primary one.

The Blacksmith (Mama): So, when I informed the Blacksmith I was putting together this spreadsheet she said, “I better not be in it.” I told her she was in it. She said, “Perhaps I wasn’t clear. I won’t be in it.” (yes, I speak to the characters in my head and they sometimes speak back, your point is?) In any case, ultimately the Blacksmith scoffed at any possibly she was the mama except when it came to Juan Carlo and some unknown Angelic Male, at which she didn’t utterly laugh or puke, thus her column is mostly black (aka Impossible*). I then brought up to her that, but you know, I totally believe Constance Clootie and you could conceive under the right circumstances…  I said it as a joke to her, but she seemed, like, crackfic intrigued and she didn’t entirely shut it down. Thus I’m slotting that into the Probably Not, but Maybe?.

Constance Clootie (Daddy – yes, DADDY): See above for The Blacksmith for that explanation.

Constance Clootie (Mama): Sure, it’s *possible* she’s the mom. But she had SUCH LOVE for her boys, that I don’t believe she could be Waverly’s mom and then sic zombies on her. I just don’t. So her column I’m marking RED (Possible but HIGHLY unlikely)

Mama Olive (Mama): Okay, I know she’s literally known as ‘mama’ but like, no. Because…no. HOWEVER, I can imagine a poor truck driver coming through town that Mama Olive ‘befriended’…and then ate. And I can imagine Ward discovered this and had to go all Peacemaker on Mama Olive but waited until the baby was born; and then took the baby in.

Either of the Widows (Mama): They were trapped in a box for the last 130 years and in a box 21 years ago. I’m going to to therefore mark their column black (aka Impossible*).

So, now the chart looks like…

Round 2 Eliminations:

Uncle Curtis (Daddy) or Gus (Mama): I just don’t think either of these two had an affair 21 years ago that would result in Waverly. I think they were true to each other. As such, I marked both RED across the board, again *possible* but HIGHLY unlikely. HOWEVER, it is interesting that Uncle Curtis does seem more wrapped up in the curse than just a good neighbor, so there is that.

Shorty (Daddy): I feel like he’s just an honorable guy that would have stepped up if Waverly were his.  So, while it’s possible he’s the dad (like, I don’t think he was a monk), I’m going to go with HIGHLY unlikely across the board simply because he would have been more involved.

Unknown Human Male (Daddy): Okay, sure. Possible but also, eh, this doesn’t feel wackball enough.  But as I type this…I’m second guessing myself.  Maybe the twist is there is no twist! Ahhh.  Still, going to eliminate the dad being a random human dude we haven’t met yet. Unless… the “other person” that visited Willa making promises in the night…?  Okay, I’ll stop going round in circles on this now.

Sheriff Nedley (Daddy): We’ve found him to be a pretty decent guy and actually the perfect kind of Sheriff for Purgatory. But, he does not appear to have a wife. Did she die? Did they divorce? Am I reading way way way too much into a secondary/tertiary character? Probably yes to one of those three questions. In any case, I could see him, unattached, and having a relationship with Mama Earp (who was in an abusive relationship?) or some other female. I do think, however, if he *knew* Waverly were his daughter he’d step up. But maybe he didn’t know. In any case, marking him unlikely to HIGHLY unlikely to be the daddy. (*whew* because that would just be some super awkward family barbecues for so many reasons).

OKAY, so now we’re HERE.

Round 3 Eliminations:

Unknown Revenent Male (Daddy), Unknown Angel Male (Daddy), Unknown Angel Female (Mama): While these are all Probably Not to Highly Unlikely, since they’re all so unknown it’s hard to even speculate (except in specific instances which I’ll discuss in the next section). As such, eliminating these rows and column.

Robert Svain / Bobo Del Rey (Daddy): Wow. Robert. We meet here in the third round of elimination, who would have thunk it. There have been SO many clues that Robert/Bobo had a special relationship with Waverly. But I feel that’s been explained as something different than father/daughter. And while, yes, I accept that Bobo appears to be whom Waverly thinks is her father… I am not ready to embrace that belief yet.  So I don’t rate him being her father as HIGHLY unlikely, I still rate it unlikely.

FINALISTS:

OKAY. So, here’s my further assumption: I’m assuming Waverly knows she’s Wynonna’s Half-Sister (that’s what the DNA said). It *seems* like she’s assuming/knowing that she and Wynonna share maternal DNA but have different paternal DNA. I’m going to ignore her assumption and just say that Wynonna/Waverly share either maternal or paternal DNA but not both.

THUS:

Ward Earp could be the daddy: Now, why do I give the edge of the mama being a revenent rather than a human female?  Well, we do know revenents can disguise themselves enough to have a fling with the Heir without the Heir knowing. Also, once Ward found out his baby-mama was a revenent, he’d have to Peacemaker her; thus his wife saying they have to do the right thing and bring Waverly into the house (since her other parent was sent packing to Hell by Ward). This would also explain why Ward couldn’t look at her…perhaps he was afraid to break the curse, he might have to kill Waverly at some point since she’s part revenent.  Hmm….

Juan Carlo could be the daddy: I don’t think that Mama Earp was ever pregnant, but on the other hand, if she was, Juan Carlo I can imagine being the dad. His kindness and gentleness in counterpoint to Ward. And Juan Carlo is cursed with not being able to take part in the goings on, just observe, so he wouldn’t have been able to raise Waverly himself. And Waverly would have a bit of an umbrella of protection via JC from Ward (but Ward wouldn’t like her very much). Also, Juan Carlo did literally say he was “Father Juan Carlo”.

Ward Earp’s Older Brother could be the daddy: And this is my whackballs theory. Ward could be a second child, like Wynonna is. Something happened that prevented his older brother, let’s call him Wilson (whom I just made up, there’s no evidence there actually is another brother, I accept this) from being the Heir, so Ward inherited it. But then Wilson got someone pregnant and neither he nor the mom could take Waverly in so Mama Earp, knowing the child was family insisted they take her in. Note, this would mean that indeed Waverly would share paternal DNA with Wynonna (at least if Ward and Winston were twins!) So now, Ward, who has been training Willa to be the Heir, now has a new baby in the house who is actually the real Heir (since she’s descended) from the older Earp. So they never celebrate Waverly’s birthday because that’s an acknowledgement / reminder to Ward that he isn’t the Heir and neither is Willa.  And, while I marked this green…. I don’t really think it’s that likely.  But it’s my favorite theory, so there.

[jokerepair74-blog]

The Never-Ending Journey: In Search of Product-Market-Fit

Intro

Many potentially great companies fail each year because, while they have an incredible product, they don’t figure out how to get it to market fast enough. Figuring out how to reach customers and break through to Product-Market-Fit remains one of the hardest parts of building a successful startup.

This post introduces a four stage framework and checklist for founders to use when searching for Product-Market-Fit (P-M-F) and exploring the early phases of finding a repeatable sales process. It will help you 1) initiate understanding of the market landscape and the pain point you’re solving, 2) learn how to gain access to initial customers and start to understand your machine, 3) prove out the market and underlying components of the machine, and ultimately 4) scale to gain market share. It also provides a measuring system to determine whether you have reached Product-Market-Fit.

For this post I interview Guy Cohen, the CRO at a New York startup called Wonder, to talk about their search for Product-Market-Fit (P-M-F) and the checklist he built along the way.

Like many companies, Wonder had a product that could be used by many verticals. But to find P-M-F, Guy knew that they would have to go vertical by vertical, as the buyer persona, business benefits delivered, positioning, messaging, pricing, etc. would need to be different for each vertical. In itself, this is one important lesson to be learned in the journey for P-M-F, and it follows the highly regarded recommendations of Geoffrey Moore’s book “Crossing the Chasm”. (If you are not familiar with Crossing the Chasm, I recommend that you read this short summary.) To cross the chasm, Moore recommends that you focus on a single market, a beachhead, to win domination over a small specific market and use it as a springboard to expand into neighboring markets.

As Guy searched for P-M-F he developed a framework to make the process for all future verticals more scientific and repeatable, so as to not repeat the same mistakes twice. This framework can be applied to many different companies, across verticals, so that you can more systematically approach and define what P-M-F looks like for your company.

David: Tell us about Wonder and how you approached getting to P-M-F?

Guy: Wonder is an on-demand research service that gives you instant access to the intellect and fact-finding skills of a distributed network of thousands of analysts, at the push of a button. Throw any project at us, large or small, and we’ll turn around answers in 24 hours or less (example: “How are Millennials incorporating technology into their healthcare decisions?”). We help you collect the dots so you can spend more time connecting them.

In our search for P-M-F, we’ve always adhered to this mantra: “you want to be a painkiller, not a vitamin – vitamins are nice-to-haves, but people can’t live without painkillers.” We had a product we believed solved a real pain point, we just didn’t know who felt the pain most, and how best to reach them. Wonder is ubiquitous both vertically and horizontally — it’s used by everyone from teachers to consultants to lawyers to recruiters. This presented us with the difficult challenge in that we had endless verticals and roles to explore, and lack of focus generally leads to failure when there are so many shiny toys to chase. We had to be laser focused on 1-2 verticals to gain initial traction.

David: How did you go about selecting the first verticals, and what factors did you score, to help decide the finalist?

Guy: The first thing we did was build a list of 15 different verticals we thought had this ‘pain’ and then cold called hundreds of firms in each to ask every question they’d be willing to answer. We learned about their day-to-days to see how we might fit into their workflow and after stress testing the various markets, 2 quickly stood out. We then put ourselves in a box and sprinted towards figuring every part of the machine for those verticals. We’re almost 2 years in and the learning never stops.

There were hundreds of factors for us to score each vertical on, but we ultimately boiled the selection process down to 3 primary criteria:

Frequency & magnitude of pain: those who felt the pain most and most often should have the highest propensity to pay for a solution.

TSAM (total segmented addressable market): a non-negotiable we answered before exploring any of the verticals was: “Is this market big enough?” We dug deep to find out how many companies there really were and how best to reach them… we tried to avoid looking for a fluffy number that would normally be used to impress VC’s. It didn’t matter if there were five million Biotech firms globally, if we could only find contact info and details for five thousand that was our TSAM until we found more tangible leads we could add to our CRM. This question is crucial because if there are only 300 companies in our TSAM, it wouldn’t matter how much of a pain point we were solving — unless we were selling 8 figure deals the market wouldn’t be meaningful and we’d be lead poor in months.

Inelastic demand: pricing, as we’ll discuss below, is a fickle art and because we had no idea what the right strategy was we wanted to ensure we had a market that was relatively inelastic. Like most other startups, we were guilty of underpricing in the early days and wanted to avoid getting locked into markets that wouldn’t be able to afford future increases.

Then we used targeted outbound selling to reach these verticals. Some startups begin by selling to inbound leads but we chose not to — inbound is an incredibly effective engine (if perfected) but because we wanted to reach a very particular kind of prospect (targeted, and in a particular vertical), outbound was far more effective.

David: How did that evolve into your spreadsheet framework?

Guy: As it became time for us to start thinking about our next vertical we sat down and wrote out all the things we learned from the first market and that’s how the spreadsheet was born.

Disclaimer: There is no panacea — every company has a different product, with a different vision, and a different strategy to achieve that vision. What we’re about to describe is a generic and repeatable framework for anyone who is trying to find P-M-F in the early days of building a B2B SAAS company. Only fools would try to compress years of learning into a few pages of conclusions. We proceed.

Click HERE to access the Google Sheets document.

This living and constantly updating formulae is the amalgamation of learning through mistakes, observing, reading, and speaking to people much further along and more intelligent than we are. We initially built it for ourselves as our checklist manifesto for things we had to know before deploying resources into each new vertical (to ensure we didn’t scale prematurely). After speaking with David I realized what we built is actually a standard checklist other B2B startups can use before scaling a sales team or dipping into new markets. We’ve borne witness to so many startups repeating the same mistake: following a round of funding they immediately think the sliver of P-M-F they have is repeatable and has the same funnel metrics and go-to-market strategy as every other vertical they want to tap. So they hire 50 reps only to realize that the HR function at private equity firms is completely different from HR in the Fortune 1000.  We’ve tried to dose ourselves daily with Munger’s salient advice: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent”.

Amazing companies fail each year because they have have an incredible product but don’t figure out how to get it to the market fast enough. We hope this checklist helps you expedite your process.

David: Tell us about the framework.

Guy: Our checklist is divided into 4 phases:

Initiate

Gain Access

Dry Run

Deploy

Below you’ll find the timelines, goals, and key learnings from each phase:

1. Initiate

Timeline: Days 1-90

Goal: Understand basic market landscape, what pain point your product solves most, and who your initial targets are.

David: Here are two slides that I like as they show where you are at the start of trying to figure out a predictable and repeatable sales process, and what things look like at the end:

What I like about your Initiate Phase is that coming out of it, you have clarity on the following:

Who to call on initially

What is their use case

What messaging will best work for them

And some initial thoughts on how to go about reaching them

2. Gain Access

Timeline: 91 – 180 days

Goal: Land initial clients & start to understand the machine.

Key Learnings: Gaining access will bring about some of the hardest days but you finally start to hear the golden word (‘Yes’) and it makes all the ‘No’s’ worth pushing through. The main goal of this phase is to have enough confidence to know that it’s worth pouring more fuel into the machine to see where it will break. At this point you’ve only tested your hypothesis across a small sample size and you should be able to solidify the following before testing with a larger n:

Funnel metrics that make economic sense (even if you have to extrapolate)

What’s the average and median CAC, LTV, and ACV across your first cohort of clients

What kind of quantifiable business benefit they get from using your product

What kind of price point they are likely to accept

What cadence structure ensures highest access and close rates

3. Dry Run

Timeline:  181- 365 days

Goal: Prove out the market and the underlying components of the machine.

Key Learnings: We found the Dry Run phase to be the rockiest part of the journey and at times can feel like you’re in a raft barreling down a class 5 rapid ping-ponging from river bank to river bank while you iron out the kinks. This is where the real calibration happens. While the waters are tough pedagogues they provide some of the most valuable lessons along the journey.

By the end of this phase you should gain significant clarity on the early mechanics of your machine:

How accurate were your hypotheses across all components of the machine?

Was the sales cycle closer to 7 weeks instead of 3 weeks?

Do companies with legal teams have extended sales cycles?

Which funnel metrics have the greatest areas for improvement and what levers can you toggle to move them in the right direction?

What did you miscalculate and what’s the best workaround?

What does the post-sale hand off and onboarding process look like?

What are you hearing (qualitatively) on pricing relative to the value of your offering?

4. Deploy

Timeline: 365 days +

Goal: Scale the sales team to execute and gain market share in this vertical.

Key Learnings: looking back from the peak of the Deploy phase will leave you with an entirely new level of learning. At this point you should most importantly be able to determine your ability to scale, and at what rate.

The biggest ticket items you’ll walk away with clarity on:

Size of the market: after hearing from thousands of prospects and gaining a better understanding of what exact pain you’re solving and who’s willing to pay, how big is the actual segmented market?

Ideal user / buyer: you’ll also have a better idea of what type of firm (size, specialty, jargon used, etc.) fits the perfect profile as they’ll have the highest close / usage rates.

Hiring / Training: what do your machines look like for hiring & training and what types of candidates fit your ideal profile? More importantly — what types of candidates should you stop hiring more of?

How do you shorten the learning curve for new hires to ramp them up faster?

Pricing: what have you heard? Are you getting pushback 10% of the time, or 90% of the time that you’re too high? (they generally won’t tell you if it’s too cheap)

Further certainty (or uncertainty) around machine mechanics: are the deviations from your hypothesized funnels getting closer to where you’d like them to be?

*you’ll notice many of the steps / questions are repeated at each stage of scaling as your sample size increases and your job is simply to re-evaluate and prove or disprove your original hypotheses.

Measuring Product Market Fit

David: How did you think about measuring Product-Market-Fit?

Guy: It felt strange to us that there wasn’t some quantifiable way to measure how good (or poor) a job we were doing at figuring out Product-Market-Fit. Out of all the articles we’ve read most don’t address the fact that P-M-F is a 2-part equation: the first side of the equation addresses Pre-Sale, and the second is for Post-Sale. Both are vital and if either is neglected you risk a great deal (we made that mistake). One thing we’ve witnessed is companies hire amazing reps who can sell a ice to an Eskimo so accounts are flying off the shelf, but they don’t find out until much later (weeks /months) that nobody is actually using their product as utilization and churn are lagging metrics. Because of this we’ve struggled with and have tried to create a framework that allows us (the community of bold entrepreneurs) to have the best shot at leading indicators for whether or not we are walking the line for P-M-F on the Post-Sale side (we believe this is in fact more important than the Pre-Sale equation in the long run).

Click HERE to access the P-M-F (Directional) Calculator

This is still a work-in-progress and will be different for every product and every vertical. To keep things simple, we chose what we believed to be the most important variables in the early days to avoid churn (growth and virality were luxuries for phase 2 — step 1 was making sure we didn’t lose clients we worked so hard to acquire). The thinking here is that if you’re in the right market solving for the right pain point you should have a good close rate, a decent sales cycle, and sticky end usage, and we believed there should be some equation for that.

We then assigned acceptable ranges (and corresponding values) for each variable as a warning system in case we had miscalculated something. Multiplying our coefficients by respective values left us with the sum of their parts: a score greater than 50% meant we are in the right forest but had work to do on clearing the path forward (offering, pricing, messaging, etc). A score below 50% on either equation gave us directional indicators of what we needed to focus on solving, or if we were in the wrong market altogether. We know this is oversimplified but mediocrity often hides in what’s unquantifiable and we believed it’s better to have an imperfect indication than none at all.

You will need to adjust the ranges and variables to suit your product and market. (e.g. your average sales cycle may be 9 months based on your ACV / market while another service might be shooting for a 2 week sales cycle). Take this equation and make it completely your own — that’s the point.

—

David: What were the key lessons you learned from your first vertical that you wish you’d known beforehand?

Guy: A few immediately come to mind:

Talk & listen to users / buyers: you can’t find out through email marketing. It’s vital to hear their voice and understand the market challenges and opportunities through real conversations — call as many people as you can and get them to open up.

Test your Pricing: as we learned in the Lessons of History, “Total perspective is an optical illusion. We must operate with partial knowledge”. We didn’t get it right the first, or 2nd, or 3rd time and it’s one of the most critical components to success. We treated it more like an R&D function that constantly needed to be tested and tweaked until we achieved the results we were satisfied with.

Find a CEO with a clear long term vision: so much of this P-M-F journey is dependent upon what you’re ultimately trying to achieve as a business. I was blessed to partner with a founder who trusted the process as we wandered through the desert. Make sure you are completely aligned and leave no room for miscommunication on plans and expectations.

Everything is better in 2’s: we’ve always tried to avoid single points of failure. For example if you hire a single rep and they tell you this market doesn’t work, that’s your only reference point and you can’t be certain if it’s that rep or the market itself. We’ve always tried to do things in 2’s and it’s saved us more than once.   

Books: Winning the Brain Game, The Sales Acceleration Formula, Never Split the Difference (3 must-reads)

David: Any final thoughts for other entrepreneurs starting their journey?

Guy: We’ve heard a handful of entrepreneurs claim they “found” P-M-F as if it’s the last horcrux that leads to a happy ending, but Alan Watts famously said “you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run.”

We prefer to think of P-M-F as a perpetual river that evolves over time and takes turns you could have never imagined, and only the paranoid survive this trying journey.

Here’s to surviving!

For those interested in learning more about Guy, I asked him to tell us a bit about himself

Guy: Everything I learned about work ethic and tenacity can be traced back to my parents.

Having a love affair with numbers growing up naturally led me into accounting and then finance before I caught the startup bug. I joined the team at Seeking Alpha and as we grew the company I had the fortunate privilege to work directly for the founder and CEO; it was the greatest 2 years of learning I could have ever hoped for.

Along the same timeline my close friend Justin was building Wonder and he eventually hooked me — I was sold on the product and his vision and couldn’t imagine not working on this massive challenge, and so our journey began.

Source: https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/search-for-product-market-fit/

[rainbowravioli]

i wanna more chris with a non-ass content.

You and me both anon.

Chris actually shows depth and complexity to this character, and his arc has one of the most satisfying endings for me (even if bittersweet). It’s too bad Kubo doesn’t seem to be willing to talk about any of that though because any time Chris comes up all we talk about is his ass and his highly sexual programs! Is it too much to ask to hear about Chris as a character and not a sexual object his creator lusts after??? IS IT????

Ahem.

So Chris is somewhat intriguing when you stop to think about him. It was very obvious he would be one of the finalists considering he is a character with really strong ties to Victor and he was consistently shown as the silver to Victor’s gold, so we know he’s good.

(under the cut because I just started going on and on about this I’m sorry)

His actualintroduction in episode 6 doesn’t do him any favors but it does say…a lot about whohe is as a person. It’s one of those moments that episode 10 puts intoperspective, of course. It becomes less “creepy dude” and morelike “’sup my pole dancing buddy” so it’s more “acceptable”, even though Yuuri is still veryvisibly discomfortable with what’s going on. The important thing thoughis that Chris is being friendly towards Yuuri, he is. It’s just that Chris hasthis thing where he’ll be friendly one minute and terribly bitter the next. Heexpresses interest in being invited to hang out with Yuuri, he complimentsYuuri on being in shape, while at the same time implying that Yuuri and Victor are sleepingtogether. As soon as Victor shows up though Chris slides into his roleas an antagonist to Yuuri. He’s another person who is upset that Victor is notcompeting, at a personal level even, and he’s very, very bitter. And he focuses said bitterness on Yuuri fast.

The thingwith Chris is that he’s not a bad guy. He probably sincerely wants to go todinner with Yuuri and everyone else, he seemed sincere in asking Victor ifYuuri was alright pre-skate, his relationship with his coach seems very closeand sweet, he does a lot of fanservice for his fans. So yeah, Chris is veryfriendly, and seems very chill. On the surface. But then you have things likethe fact that Chris was not taking Yuuri seriously at all or seeing him as competition before he sawYuuri skate Eros. And let’s be clear here, Chris knew Yuuri. They were in theGPF together the previous year, he has seen him skate and he was not impressed.After Eros though, Chris makes Yuuri a target. He was bored before, now he ispersonally invested in beating Yuuri and showing how much better he is. 

Chris is a slow starter but he’s good at catching up. His coachtells him to just do things at his own pace. This together with the way hekeeps complaining about a season without Victor to compete against being boringcould imply that he has a more relaxed approach to skating, almost like it’s agame to him. But like I said, Chris is mostly chill on a surface level. He saysit himself that he lives for a life on the ice. He’s not as technical as someof the other skaters either, nor does he seem to strategize the design of hisprograms (like say, JJ saying he specifically made his programs to beatVictor), he’s more concerned with skating the way he likes. The ice is personalto him, he’s individualistic and creative in his skating. Which is anotherthing that indicated early that he would be a finalist. Because although Chrisserves as an antagonist for Yuuri on the account of being an obstacle to thegold, being a strong competitor as he is, his personal investment and arc istied to Victor, not Yuuri. Thoughit has interesting parallels with Yuuri.

Chris seems like a very different person in the brief flashbackwe see of him. Victor even points it out in his episode 10 monologue that Chriswas very different when they first met. Fifteen year old Chris’ first meetingwith his idol turned rival turned unachievable goal clearly left a mark. Hestarted off as just another young skater who idolized Victor and he worked hardand rose in ranks and made a name for himself trying to reach him. He’s goodenough to always share the podium with Victor but never good enough to beat himand he’s very bitter about that and I think he feels entitled to Victorsomewhat. I’ve said before I don’t believe they were friends prior to theseries but they were friendly rivals and Chris certainly believed he knew Victor better than he actually does, and he projected onVictor a lot of ideas, same as the rest of the world. So now he holds a bit ofa grudge towards Yuuri. Yuuri caught Victor’s attention, Yuuri is the one Victorhand-picked to be his successor and win gold in his place. For someone likeChris who has always been second best to Victor and always trying to catch up,that’s gotta sting.

Despite that, Chris is not actually malicious at all and doesn’tseem to hold any ill feelings towards Victor or Yuuri when off the ice. He’svery friendly towards both and he is supportive of their relationship. I firmlybelieve he can be their friend and he probably wants to be. 

Still, even though Chris is very individualistic with hisskating, his flaw that ends up costing him the GPF is that he is still toofocused on the ideal that is Victor and reaching that ideal. Even afteracknowledging Yuuri as being actual competition for him, he still says inepisode 11 that the season has been boring without Victor. He calls out toVictor in his mind to watch him and he skates trying to impress himspecifically. The personal tragedy here, so to speak, is that we as an audienceknow that Victor is already impressed, that he already acknowledges Chris’worth. But Chris doesn’t, probably because Victor just never expressed that tohim. 

See, Chris is probably retiring after this GPF. There’s variousallusions to that.I mean who the hell knows if they’ll follow through with thatin s2 considering…everything else that’s been going on, but in s1 canon Chriscertainly thinks about this GPF being his last one. What makes the conclusionof his arc bittersweet is that he realizes too late that he has been focusingon the wrong things. He should have been making the most of what could possiblybe his last season but he hasn’t because he feels that the chance to beatVictor to the gold has been stolen from him and he’s so caught up in that heends up missing his chance at the podium altogether. But! He finally has Victor’s open acknowledgementand support. He also gets a flower crown, similar to the one Victor was wearingwhen they first met. In a way, he is standing where Victor once stood. He’scertainly beloved by the audience and giving them love and hope in return, theway Victor did for him.

Chris didn’t get what he wanted. The last time we see him he seems both wistful and content. He ended the series with regrets but his arc stillconcluded in a way that was satisfying for his character.There was a sense of closure there, even if bittersweet. There’s a lot of explore hereabout his feelings towards skating, towards retiring, towards Victor, towards Yuuri. Not tomention all the layers to his personality. There’s a lot more to Chris’character than just his ass and his programs and I would really want to seemore content exploring that. But here we are…

[chmergess4ever]

Happier

Hey Guys! Sorry it’s been a while since I posted. I am working on part 2 of “His Redhead Girl” but this is another idea, I got that I had to run with. I usually don’t write a lot with lyrics but I one of the songs on the new Ed Sheeran album gave me this idea and I had to run with it. I didn’t include the lyrics in the story, but I highly suggest listening to the song while reading, before or after you read if you haven’t heard it. It’s called “Happier”. All of the songs on the album are perfection so there might another one of these stories with a different song if you guys like this one. If you would like a part two to this one, I’m open to that too so just let me know! Thank you! As always, let me know what you think! I love reading your comments. Like/Reblog! 

They had loved with everything. The intensity was irreplicable but still, they had gotten torn apart. Torn apart because of being too similar, torn apart because of busy schedules, torn apart because of misunderstandings, but mainly-torn apart because there became a point where love just wasn’t enough. Yes, they loved each other but everything else became too much. The pressure from the public, the pressure from the job and everything that came with it.

So they separated. Sharna and Val had decided it was best for them and everyone around them if they broke things off where they were. It was better for them to be friends. Nothing more, nothing less. So that’s exactly what they did. They both pushed down their feelings and tried to go on like things were back to normal. But they both knew, there was still something there. Whenever they looked at each other they could feel it, whenever they touched they could feel it, and whenever they danced everyone could feel it. They both still loved the other, that much was evident to everyone. Still, they knew it was the best for them to remain apart.

A month went by, and the aftermath of the relationship had died down. They both submerged themselves into the new season of Dancing with the Stars, distracting themselves with work. And when it wasn’t time to work they both handled being single very differently. Val had many flings, but while that was happening, Sharna was developing a relationship with someone else. Very fast, they began going public with their relationship-flirting with each other on social media, getting photographed together and they soon confirmed it to the tabloids. Val had seen the pictures for the first time when they were released by Just-Jared a day after being taken. Sharna looked happy with Pierson. He made her happy. And that’s all he wanted. Or all he thought he wanted. As the weeks went by, he realized things weren’t getting any easier. He tried to hide his feelings, mask them in other things,focus on work, but still it was always in the back of his mind. He saw them out at a bar together-she had her arm laced through is, and then he pulled her closer into him, resting his hand a little too low on her waist for Val’s liking. He took a shot as he watched them trying to mask the pain. He had called Maks to come get him, and his brother obliged. He helped Val as he staggered out of the bar.

Sharna had noticed him during the night but tried to pretend like he wasn’t there. SHe didn’t acknowledge him. She didn’t want ot ruin what she had with Pierson, it was great and she was happy. She didn’t want anything to jepoardize that.

Maks put him in the passenger seat of the car and then walked aorund to get in. “Bro. You need to do something about this.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do Man? I lost the love of my life.”

Maks patted his brothers shoulder. “You didn’t lose her. She’s still there.”

“She doesn’t care Maks. She doesn’t care about me. She saw me there! But she cuddled into him.”

Maks handed Val his phone. “She cares.”

Val looked down at the phone which was lit with an open text from Sharna. It read, “Val’s here. You should come get him.”

“Is he ok?” Maks had replied.

“He’s fine. I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Thank you Shar.”

“Always. Just because were not together doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

Val put the phone down in the cupholder and rested his head back. He felt a tear escape from his eye. Maks rested his hand again on his brother’s shoulders. She texted me for you before you even did. “She cares.”

“I love her Maks. I still love her.”

“I know.”

Time continued to pass. He watched on from afar. She was happy. He wanted that to make him happy, he tried to convince himself that it did, but it just didn’t. He ran into her in the lunchroom of the studio one day. He thought he could keep himself together but that plan went south.

“Hey.” He said as he walked in, passing her to get to the fridge.

“Hey.” She brushed the loose red lock of hair behind her ear.

“How are you?” He reached in the fridge to grab his drink.

“I’m ok.” She pursed her lips. Leaning into the counter and looking down. She didn’t know what to say or what to do. They were rarely alone. Whenever they were together someone else was around.

He nodded and smiled. “I’m happy for you. Ya know?”

She turned around leaning her back against the counter and crossed her arms. “You are?”

“Shar, I loved you. Hell! I love you. I just want you to be happy.”

She nodded and looked down. He put his head down and walked towards the door but stopped when he heard her voice. “I do miss you, Val.”

“You don’t have to miss me. I’m right here. Always will be.” He smiled and walked out of the room leaving her standing there alone.

He walked down the hallway, trying to clear his mind. It has pained him to leave her there. He wanted her back. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, he wanted to kiss her, and he wanted to make love to her like there was no tomorrow. But he had to do what was better for her. She looked happier with Pierson than she had ever looked with him. Whether it was because of the guy, or whether it was just because of a less stressful situation, it didn’t matter because it was fact. She was happier. He would do anything to make sure she stayed that happy no matter how it affected him. If he was who she wanted, that him would be who she ended up with.

So the weeks continued to pass by, Sharna and Val both remained in the competition. They had just been announced as finalists, and the whole cast and crew decided to go out for drinks after. Sharna had invited Pierson to tag along, as did the other pros with their significant others. It seemed as if everyone was slowly getting engaged in relationships and the only singles left were Val, Alan, and Keo. They sat on the stools at the bar as everyone else went to dance in the middle of the floor. The amount of drunkenness in the room was laughable. Val looked over his shoulder at Sharna and Pierson in the middle of the room. They were pressed up against each other and he had both his arms wrapped around her waist. She was laughing and engaged in a conversation with Peta who was next to her wrapped in Maks arms. Val smiled, just seeing her smile made him happy. She was having a good time. He turned back to face forward and took a sip of his drink, before swirling the glass in small circles making the ice twirl.

“You doing ok bro?” Alan asked.

“All good. She’s happier with him.” Val nodded trying to convince himself.

Alan nodded trying to stay away from the situation. Shortly after Pierson came up to the bar and ordered drinks for him and Sharna. He turned to the side and leaned against the counter looking at Val. “No dancing for you tonight?”

Val shook his head and spoke lowly. “Not really in the mood.”

“You know you’re going to have to get over it eventually right. She’s mine now.”

Val looked at him. “She’s not a piece of property. She is no one’s. Not mine. And Not yours. Get over yourself.”

Pierson laughed and shook his head. “I beg to differ.”

“Oh yea?”

“I’m the one getting in her pants tonight. Not you, right? You weren’t good enough.”

Alan cut in. “Bro. Why are you picking a fight?”

“Cause this fucking guy keeps eyeing my girl and it’s not ok.”

Val shook his head. “Fuck you.”

“I’ll just do that to her.”

Val’s eyes widened and before he could get a grip on his own emotions he had Pierson gripped by his collar. “She’s not a piece of meat. She’s the best woman you will ever meet! She’s special and she doesn’t deserve someone who isn’t going to treat her like that.”

“I highly suggest you let go of me.”

Emma pointed out the exchange to Sharna and rapidly Sharna walked over to the bar but before she reached the men, Val had let go of Pierson and stormed off.

“What just happened?”

“I was just trying to make friendly conversation and he attacked me.”

Sharna looked to Alan. “That true?”

Pierson eyed Alan with a threatening look. Alan looked right back at him. “You don’t scare me. At all.” He turned to Sharna, and shook his head. “He came over here and tried to pick and argument with Val.”

Sharna looked at her boyfriend. “Why?” She shook her head out of confusion.

“Cause he can’t have you. You’re mine.”

“He doesn’t have me Pierson. We’re exes. That’s all we are. Thanks for ripping a bandaid off of that cut.”

“The bandaid shouldn’t still be there Sharna. You’ve been with me for months. Why the fuck is the bandaid still there?”

Sharna started to get filled up. Peta came up behind her and rested both of her hands on each of Sharna’s shoulders.

Pierson continued antagonizing her. “Tell me. Why the fuck is it still there? Why?”

Maks cut in between Pierson and Sharna and started nudging Pierson away. “I think it’s time you go.”

“Oh! The big brother to save the day.”

“Leave now Pierson. I won’t say it again.”

“Whatever. I’m out.” Pierson turned around and began walking away. “Screw you, Sharna.” He yelled over his shoulder.

Peta turned to her best friend and wiped the tears from under her eyes “You loved him?”

Sharna whispered. “No. That’s the problem.”

After that night, things had slowly settled down. Surprising herself, she wasn’t that sad that the relationship was happy. Yes, she was happy with him but it always had felt like something was missing. The dancing with the stars season came to end, with Simone and Sasha taking the mirror ball, followed by Val and Sharna landing in second and third place. After the finale, and the press line, Val walked towards the dressing room to get a break away from everyone. He opened the door and saw her sitting on the couch scrolling through her phone. “Oh, I’m sorry-”

“No. You can come in”

Val slowly walked in, not knowing what to do with himself. Sharna spoke to him, “You can sit next to me. I won’t bite.”

Val moved to sit next to her on the couch. “It’s just-” “We haven’t talked. I know.” She sighed, “I’m not mad at you Val. Alan told me everything. He told me what Pierson said to you, the disgusting comment he made about sleeping with me. Believe me, you did me a favor.”

“You were happy though.”

“On the surface, I was.”

Val turned to her, “What do you mean?” Sharna shrugged. “It always felt like something was missing. Couldn’t put my finger on it was though.”

“Something you felt in our relationship?”

Sharna smiled at the question. “I suppose.” She teased.

There was silence as they both thought about the conversation they were having. She continued. “Maybe the reason it wasn’t there in this relationship, was because it was never gone from a past one.”

Val pursed his lips in regret. He stood up and began pacing. Then he looked at her,  “What happened to us, Sharna? We were perfect. You were everything to me. You make me happy. I don’t know if I will ever feel like that again.”

“We let outside pressure, ruin our relationship.”

“We did, but we don’t have to.”

“Val-”

“What? We can’t try this again? Tell me you don’t feel anything! Tell me Shar! I still love you.” A tear escaped from her eye. “Val.”

He sat down next to her. “Babe, talk to me.” He rested his hand on her leg. That was the first time he had called her “babe”, since they had broken up.

She rested her hand on his cheek. “Of course I feel something. Of course I do. But if it didn’t work the first time, what’s going to make it work the second time. We’d just be complicating things all over again.” She dropped her hand into her lap.

He reached in her lap and grasped her hand, clasping it in his own. “I’d rather be happy, and have things be complicated. Then be unhappy and live an easy life. You’re my happiness Sharna. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone.”

The tear ran down her cheek and she closed her eyes taking in his words. She raised their intertwined hands and kissed the top of his hand. Resting her lips upon it as she pieced together her thoughts. He watched her, the thoughts on her face and then she turned to look at him. “We’re going to try this again?”

Val nodded slowly. “I’m all in. You have me. Completely.”

She leaned in and pressed her lips to his. After the initial kiss, they smiled while resting against each others foreheads and Val leaned in again.

“I’m happier with you babe.”

“What?”

“Something else Alan told me. I wasn’t happier with him. Happier with you.”

“I love you.”

“You too babe.”

[sanctumslider]

Fic: Glass Houses, Chapter 36

Summary: In an alternate universe where all humans are empaths, Kurt Hummel is the odd one out. Registering at a mere 0.5 on the Hawkins Scale of Empathic Sensitivity, Kurt has resigned himself to a lonely life, empty of touch or true love. That is, until the mysterious Blaine Anderson transfers to McKinley, and everything Kurt thought he knew was changed. But finding love is never easy, even in a world where everyone’s emotions are shared. This is the story of the boy who could not feel, and the boy who felt too much.

[Go to Chapter 1]

[FF.net] [S&C] [AO3]

Kurt skidded around the corner, designer boots squeaking on the polished linoleum floor. Blaine looked up from the choir room piano, hands slipping into his lap as he smiled warmly, “Hey, I got your text, what’s up?”

For a moment, Kurt’s words failed him, heart beating wildly. His throat was tight as he simply slid a folded piece of paper over the piano top towards Blaine. Blaine’s eyes widened, reached over and pulling the paper close to him with a fingertip as if it was hazardous material. Kurt watched as his boyfriend carefully unfolded the paper, drunk in every minute expression on Blaine’s face, the Parsons logo stamped clearly at the top of the letter.

 Blaine’s eyes widened as he read the first line, and Kurt’s breath was stolen with a shock of pride-joy-excitement-love barely seconds before Blaine jumped up and swept him up into a hug. Blaine spun around as he lifted Kurt off his feet, “I knew it! Oh my god Kurt, I knew they couldn’t say no! You’re going to New York!”

Kurt laughed, tears of happiness welling in his eyes as Blaine set him down, “I can’t believe it Blaine, I actually got in! They want me…”

Blaine shook his head, pressing a kiss to Kurt’s lips in a swell of love, “They’d have been crazy if they didn’t. What did your dad say?”

Kurt grinned, still disbelieving. It had been a long waiting game, and Kurt had tried to put his applications out of his mind and just enjoy senior year with Blaine. Aside from their regular sessions with Dr Nordstrom and Dr Monroe, and Blaine’s still delicate relationship with his mom, the painful memories of their summer were finally fading in to the past.

It was nice just for once to be normal teenagers in love. Glee Club of course had supplied its fair share of drama, from the splinter group of the Trouble Tones, to Rachel’s near manic attempts to boost her extra-curriculars to help her NYADA application. Then there had been the slight set-back with Sectionals, when at the last minute not only had they already been short on members, but Dr Nordstorm decided it was too early for Blaine to try and perform in such a highly charged atmosphere.

Blaine had been disappointed and angry with himself, but Kurt had tried to remain positive. For him, just being able to watch Blaine perform in front of their friends in the safety of the choir room was something to treasure. It was all about baby steps, and he truly believed that they would get there.

But then the new year had swung around, and Quinn heard back from Yale, while Rachel got her finalist letter from NYADA. Kurt had started to think the worst, despite Blaine’s confidence that his letters were just taking a bit longer. After all, unlike NYADA, there were no interviews or auditions. Parsons offered places on the sole basis of the submitted portfolio, design project and essay, and like Blaine kept reminding Kurt, that’s a lot of material to get through.

 “Dad said pretty much the same as you, said he’d never doubted it. He wants to take me out to Breadstix to celebrate. You’re invited of course.”

Blaine grinned, looking back at the letter as if to memorise the words on the page. But then a frown crinkled his features as his arm slipped slightly down Kurt’s back in a draw of confusion. Kurt waited, carefully watching Blaine as this time he read past the first line of the letter.

“Kurt…” Blaine said slowly, “This says you’ve been accepted for spring intake next year, not this fall.”

Kurt smiled softly, “I know.”

Blaine’s head snapped up, his eyes searching Kurt’s for an answer, “I don’t understand, we agreed you wouldn’t give up your dreams for me.”

Kurt took Blaine’s hand in his, twining their fingers as he purposefully focused on how much he loved Blaine, pushing the feeling through their touch. “And I’m not. I talked it through with my dad before I submitted my applications, and we looked into it. There’s no disadvantage if I start in January, and this way I get to stay with you a little longer through your senior year, make sure we’re both going to be really ready for New York. Besides, college isn’t cheap. I could use the extra few months to save money.”

Blaine still looked uncertain, eyes flicking back to the letter, “Kurt…”

“This was my choice, Blaine,” Kurt said quietly. “Be as happy as I am?”

Blaine swallowed, leaning into Kurt as he kept one arm looped around his boyfriend’s waist. “I’m so proud of you,” he murmured, making sure Kurt felt every word. And then he smiled, finally looking up from the letter to lock eyes with Kurt’s steady gaze, “And yes, I am beyond happy for you. You’re incredible.”

Kurt raised his chin, eyes sparkling, “I know I am.”

00000

Kurt kept his eyes closed, focusing on the pressure of Blaine’s spine lined up against his as they sat back to back on the floor. Dr Monroe’s voice lilted through Kurt’s consciousness, a lulling calm of imagery and guidance that had long lost the meaning of real words since they began this little meditation.

His senses were tuned to Blaine, and he wasn’t sure if he could separate them as they floated there in their very own ocean of calm. All he knew was that Blaine was with him, that they were safe. It was peaceful.

Blaine’s hands were loose within Kurt’s, his fingers warm.

Gently, one hand broke contact, and there was a cascading flicker of anxiety from Blaine, but Kurt easily washed that away. There was nothing to worry about, he was here, they were together. Nothing could touch them.

“Well done, Blaine,” Dr Nordstrom’s deeper voice broke the spell on Kurt, “You’re doing really well.”

Kurt opened his eyes slowly, unsure how much time had lapsed since the beginning of their session. He twisted his head to look over his shoulder, careful not to move away from his position against Blaine’s back, right hand still holding Blaine’s left. Dr Nordstrom was firmly holding Blaine’s right hand, skin to skin. He must have been the one to break Kurt’s hold.

And Blaine was still sitting there, eyes still closed. His breathing was a little uneven, and Kurt could feel a second flare of sharper anxiety begin to build within Blaine as Kurt’s awareness returned completely.

Kurt shifted, breaking his hand hold with Blaine to turn, sliding his legs either side of his boyfriend so that he could wrap his arms around him, pulling them back-to-chest. Kurt rested his chin on Blaine’s shoulder, “It’s okay, I’m here, it’s okay.”

He felt Blaine’s muscles relax under his arms, and Dr Nordstrom smiled encouragingly. He seemed to be concentrating on something, but Kurt couldn’t feel anything from the man through Blaine. His boyfriend had slipped back into a calm lull, trusting Kurt to hold him in his silence.

They sat like that for another good ten minutes, until Dr Monroe started to switch up her constant stream of words, Dr Nordstrom carefully letting go of Blaine’s hand. “…and whenever you like, you can open your eyes Blaine.”

Kurt felt Blaine blink a few times, shifting as he registered Kurt’s change in position since they had started the session. Sluggishly, Blaine moved to cover Kurt’s hands with his own where they rested around his chest, “Hey.”

Kurt smiled against Blaine’s shoulder, “Hey.”

“How do you feel, Blaine?” Dr Monroe asked.

Blaine yawned, “Kinda sleepy, but good.”

“Anything else?” Dr Nordstrom prompted, “Any emotions that are not your own?”

Blaine frowned, “I don’t think so? I felt a bit weird I think at some point, but most of the time there was just Kurt.”

Dr Monroe smiled, “That’s excellent, Blaine. Kurt?”

Kurt drew back slightly, starting to become more aware at just how intimate a position he was sitting in with his boyfriend. Blaine seemed happily and purposefully oblivious to Kurt’s sudden discomfort, leaning back into him. Kurt said, “Everything just seemed peaceful to me. Blaine wasn’t very happy when you took his hand to start with, but I think I just got distracted.”

“You took my hand?” Blaine asked blankly.

Dr Nordstrom nodded, excited. “Yes. And I was projecting to you as well. But you remained shrouded. It is excellent progress from both of you.”

Blaine’s face broke into a grin, “Does this mean I can perform at Regionals?”

Dr Monroe rolled her eyes fondly; Blaine had been asking them that for the last four sessions without getting an answer. But then Dr Nordstrom nodded, “I really don’t see why not,” he held up a hand to try and curtail Blaine’s yell of excitement. “As long as you make sure you take five minutes before the show to do the exercises we’ve been practicing. It’s very important.”

Kurt grinned, “Of course, we definitely will! Thank you!”

Dr Monroe laughed, “Just make sure you win!”

00000

“Hey, what’s this?” Kurt picked up a flash drive from Blaine’s desk, running his finger over the neatly written label.

Blaine twisted, catching himself halfway through the move he had been practicing. He danced over, still keeping rhythm to the music as he wrapped himself behind Kurt, his arms warm around Kurt’s waist. “What’s what?”

“This has my name on it.” Kurt showed the flash drive to Blaine. That was all it said, just one word. KURT.

A scattered mix of shyness, nervousness, pride and embarrassment flitted through Kurt just before Blaine broke contact, taking a slight step back as he replied with badly faked nonchalance, “Oh, that’s nothing.”

Kurt smiled, catching Blaine’s wrist as he enjoyed watching the deep blush rising to colour his boyfriend’s cheeks, “Blaine.”

Blaine ducked his head, and Kurt knew that look. It was how Blaine looked whenever he was carefully measuring what he wanted to say, weighing each word in his mind before he let it out into the world and set himself up for scrutiny. “It’s… well, you know I said I want to follow you to New York next year? Well, I’ve kinda been preparing stuff early. I know I’ve got tonnes of time, but… I want it to be perfect.”

Kurt blinked, not having expected that answer. Sure, they had talked about Blaine following him in abstract terms, but they hadn’t really gotten much further than that. Kurt hadn’t wanted to push, preferring to focus on their sessions with the doctors. Blaine still hadn’t ever been to a city bigger than Columbus, let alone somewhere like New York. And if they won Regionals, they would first have to deal with Chicago. “So, what’s this got to do with it?”

Blaine’s eyes remained fixed on what must be a very interesting bedspread. “It’s my current version of one of my application scores. If I want to get into Julliard for Composition, I need to send them two samples of my work. My first is easy, you’ve heard it plenty of times when I mess about on the piano at school. I’m just going to record myself playing it. But for my second, I needed to compose it digitally.”

“And… this is it? With my name on it?” Kurt barely managed to ask, his heart swelling.

Blaine finally looked up, plucking the flash drive from Kurt’s fingers. His eyes were earnest, “It’s you. I just… you’re so amazing and no one can feel you except me and that just isn’t right. And, well… I kinda needed a whole orchestra…” Kurt’s eyebrows rose, and he was unable to verbalise how he felt in that moment. But it didn’t matter, because Blaine knew. “Would… would you like to hear it?”

Kurt nodded, overwhelmed. And then Blaine popped it into his laptop, and turned up the speakers and wow Kurt knew Blaine was talented but this was something else.

And it was him.

When the last echoes of the instruments died, Kurt was frozen in the quiet. “That’s how I feel to you?” He asked in wonder.

Blaine nodded, slipping his hand into Kurt’s, “As best as I could get it, yeah. It still needs some work but I’ve got all summer. Hopefully by application season I’ll have got it right.”

“Blaine, there is no way Julliard is going to say no to you,” Kurt said with absolute certainty, pride swelling up within him. “I had no idea…”

Blaine pressed his lips to Kurt’s shoulder with a smile and a blush, “I’m glad you like it.”

Kurt could only nod, throat stuck, and simply let Blaine sense his overwhelmed emotions. Words couldn’t have expressed how he felt anyway.

00000

Kurt sidled up to Blaine, sitting down on the piano stool in the empty choir room that had been transformed into the New Directions’ dressing room. The first group were performing right now, and their friends were outside in the audience watching. Blaine and Kurt had decided ahead of time that it was better to sit that out, just in case.

“That Cooper?” Kurt asked, leaning into Blaine’s shoulder as his boyfriend typed a reply text.

“Yeah,” Blaine smiled, a warm happiness exuding from him. “I think he’s feeling bad for not being there for my first performance.”

Kurt nodded. He had been on the Skype call last week, both of them persuading Cooper not to ditch his show for Regionals, especially as it was his first major role Off Broadway. They had reached a compromise by agreeing that Cooper would come to Nationals to watch them win, because obviously they were winning Regionals, but the older Anderson brother hadn’t been happy about it.

Still, both their parents were in the audience, and Kurt knew Blaine was excited to perform for his mom and dad.

A swell of applause echoed down the empty corridor. One more group to go, and then it would be their turn. Kurt looked at Blaine’s face carefully, watching his boyfriend carefully close his eyes and breathe against the onslaught of emotions thrumming out of the auditorium by sheer weight of people. Kurt rubbed a hand between Blaine’s shoulder blades, “You doing okay there?”

Blaine nodded jerkily, taking a moment before opening his eyes with a nervous smile that sent pre-show butterflies dancing in Kurt’s stomach. “I’m good. It’s just… big, you know?”

Kurt smiled, pressing a kiss fondly to Blaine’s temple, “Remember a year ago, our last Regionals? Think back to that, and then to where we are now.”

Blaine quirked a grin, replying deadpan. “Yeah, I know. I wanted to kiss you so badly that I went to a show choir event full of emotionally charged people I couldn’t block out, only to nearly collapse on you when you should have been on stage accepting first place. Smooth.”

Kurt huffed, bumping Blaine’s shoulder with his own, “You know what I mean. Wait, you wanted to kiss me way back then?”

Blaine rolled his eyes, “I wanted to kiss you the moment I met you at my locker. Have you seen yourself?”

Kurt bit his lip, feeling his cheeks heat up as his stomach squirmed pleasantly, Blaine’s compliment accompanied by tingles running up his arm where they sat touching side by side.

Somehow, Kurt gathered himself and his hormones. Focus. “I think it’s nearly time – the others will be here for show circle any minute. Come on, turn and face me.”

Kurt slid back on the piano bench, throwing one leg over so he was straddling it, facing Blaine as his boyfriend mirrored him. Blaine scooted forwards, their legs and ankles tangling as Kurt reached forward and rested his arms on Blaine’s shoulders, loosely linking his fingers behind his boyfriend’s neck. He watched as Blaine let his eyes slip shut once more, reached up to take a light hold of both Kurt’s wrists, anchoring himself.

Kurt studied Blaine’s face carefully, stroking the nape of Blaine’s neck with his thumb in a soothing motion. “It’s just us. There’s no one else here. Just us,” Kurt murmured, letting his voice follow a careful cadence that ebbed and flowed with the shushing of the waves between them. “I’ll always be a touch away, just dance close to me, and I’ll be right there. We’re going to be amazing Blaine, and you’re going to get on that stage beside me, with our friends. And we’re going to get our place in Nationals.”

Blaine sighed, a soft exhale through his nose, before he opened his eyes again. He lightly squeezed Kurt’s wrists with a rush of gratitude and love, and for a moment, they just existed.

Then Blaine grinned, and Kurt only had a split second warning before the other boy surged forwards in a kiss that stole the breath from Kurt’s lungs in a rush of fiery confidence. Kurt squeaked in surprise, but fell into the kiss with equal enthusiasm, uncaring if their friends walked in any second.

Too soon, Blaine broke the kiss by barely a hair’s breadth, his eyes alight with a cascade of sparks that settled deep in Kurt with a tugging desire for something more, “Let’s win this thing.”

Kurt nodded dazedly. Right.

The moment broke as their friends came sweeping into the room, and then it was all about the competition.  They took to the stage in a burst of light and song, and Kurt couldn’t have been more proud. In that moment, things were perfect. He was performing, he was doing what he loved next to the love of his life, surrounded by friends who had risked everything for him and Blaine.

In that moment they shone like stars.

So, when the first place trophy was announced, Kurt wasn’t even surprised. The New Directions had killed it, and they were going to beat everyone in Chicago too.

And when Blaine’s parents mentioned amidst the congratulations that they had a load of errands to run in Columbus, and would probably be having dinner there too, so Blaine might want to go to the Hummels following the Regionals after party that afternoon…

…both Kurt and Blaine had just nodded, sure sounds great, see you later.

But one graze of fingertips, and both knew that they weren’t especially fussed by any after party, Kurt’s lips grazing Blaine’s ear in a breath of a whisper.

It was the longest drive, followed by the tallest stairs in an empty house, but finally Kurt was able to capture Blaine’s lips in a continuation of their kiss, his back pressed against Blaine’s closed bedroom door as every nerve in his body lit up with electricity.

Kurt looped his arms to rest over Blaine’s shoulders, his words escaping with barely any air, “You take my breath away…”

Blaine smiled, his eyes adoring, and Kurt couldn’t believe that he had found this boy. “I love you, Kurt.”

Kurt reached up to cup Blaine’s cheek with his hand, overwhelmed by the echoing reverberation as their emotions fell perfectly in sync with one another’s. “I love you too Blaine.”

When Kurt had first kissed Blaine, the incredible boy in front of him had set the stars alight in a cascade of sparks. It had been scary, and impossible, and wonderful.

When Kurt had first felt, truly felt, just how much Blaine loved him, in a perfect mirror of his own feelings, Kurt had been stunned, and petrified, and overwhelmed.

That afternoon, Kurt couldn’t describe how he felt.

Everything was heat and skin and Blaine, and all Kurt could do was let himself fall into it. To let himself be swept away into the vast unending expanse of midnight blue and molten gold, as waves crashed up to catch the stars.

And as they lay there wrapped up in each other, Blaine’s lips hot on Kurt’s skin, Kurt’s finger’s tangled in Blaine’s hair, Kurt felt whole.

Epilogue

[numuatelierlife-blog]

NUMU Atelier Life | Part 3 The Progress of Enzo Segovia

Enzo Segovia is an Illustrations major at California College of the Arts. He plans to be a Concept Artist or Illustrator for game companies. He has a rare combination of talent, skill and imagination.

Enzo’s imagination is very unique. As seen in this painting from Fall, 2016.

  One very enjoyable part of my job is meeting parents of artistic children and helping them understand his or her path toward a creative future. Enzo graduated from Westmont High School in Campbell, California with the class of 2016. Enzo is naturally talented and that included music and playing in his high school marching band. He was really getting the most out of his teenage experience. Right now he is finishing his Freshman year at CCA. “I'm enjoying college a lot more than high school. I can focus on what I like and make friends with similar attitude and interest toward Art”, says Enzo.

His parents Yumi and Dan supported Enzo’s artistic education from the beginning. He began taking Art classes at the age of 8 and by 14 or 15 they knew he needed an education for older or more advanced kids. They had an unconditional respect for his obvious calling, even though they did not always know what to do for him in advance. They pursued his future along with him, trusting he had the ability to follow through.

Yumi told me before Enzo graduated about her trust in him, “When he told us that he wants to go to Art college, we were very happy because we knew that's what he does best and that's what makes him happy. To us, that's the most important thing in life, being happy with his life. Some people asked us what kind of job he's going to have with an Art degree. We answered, whatever makes him happy. That's it”.

I met Enzo in June of 2015. Enzo was a finalist in the 2015 NUMU Annual Santa Clara County Juried High School Exhibition. He noticed that NUMU had a Drawing and Painting Program and he enrolled for my Summer Art Studio for several weeks. As my roster began filling up I was hoping one or two new students would bring an extra challenge. One name popped up that grabbed my attention.

Enzo Segovia. “What a name”, I thought. He already sounded like a famous artist. His name sounded like a high end designer or luxury brand. How cool would it be if he was really talented and ambitious?

I looked for an image of his and I found this beautiful drawing of sea shells. I had my answer. He could really do whatever he put his mind to. This would be fun.

His talent was obvious. The drawing was sensitively done but I could see room for improvement. Expanding his use of values and fine tuning his proportions would be a good place to start.

His first drawing with me required deeper shades and he was able to capture the light and form easily. I was glad to see he was a quick study. Enzo was confident, polite and an excellent listener. He was completely respectful and wanted to prove himself.

The challenging forms were his favorite and it was a joy to know he would not shy away from complex detail. He was in his element and had perfect concentration. The dramatic lighting in the studio gave him added form to study. In these conditions I could talk with Enzo about truly seeing, observing and rendering form. Much of Art is opening your eyes and processing the imagery conceptually. Art is not purely visual. It is mental, spiritual and a way of seeing things that many overlook. I call this Artistic Observation.

Recently Enzo wrote about this for me, “You quickly taught me how to see and observe, which to me, is more than half of painting and drawing from life. You taught me important technical skills as well. I could never complete my portfolio without your help”.

His second drawing was of a skull and he was becoming faster and more accurate. As an Art student he was conceptualizing more, which translates to predicting his process in advance.

Apparently suggesting which stages of the process to begin first seemed to help. He completed several more drawings and we began oil painting. Being a good listener he learned quickly. I taught him to manage a palette of oil paint and his command of values and form immediately showed in his use of color. He appreciated learning to mix color in advance of painting and understood the concept right away. His first small painting was a relief to see.

Enzo continued on with me into the Fall and Spring until he graduated. Along the way the other half of the story is his family’s choice of, “what to do”. Enzo had choices to make and this is the task that I defer to a parent’s wisdom.

Yumi wrote of this process and this is every parent’s puzzle to piece together.

“He was not interested to move far and wanted to stay within California, so we searched Art schools in California. Also, he asked his high school Art teacher and you, Gabriel, for recommendations. He wanted to focus on Art only so his choice was Art school and not the UC or Cal system. Enzo and I decided CCA because of the flexibility and they don't force you into a box like many Art colleges do. It's also close to home and that's a big plus.

He was accepted by The Art Center in Pasadena as well and they offered Enzo a Creative Achievement Scholarship. However, they didn't have housing for in-coming Freshman. As a parent, I wasn't comfortable sending him far away without housing of some sort. CCA offered a Freshman-only dormitory and we liked that. They both gave him Creative Achievement Scholarships”.

Enzo accepted a scholarship. I was delighted, as this was my second student being offered this by CCA. So, something was working.

Meanwhile, his progress in drawing was accelerating. He had been assigned to create a self portrait by his high school Art teacher. He completed, at home, this absolutely amazing charcoal and chalk drawing on gray paper. It was a beautiful collaboration of his combined teachers, but done by his own hand, in his own style. He was now firmly in command of his talent.

I was so astonished at the progress in his abilities. I could see the results of my lessons, and humbled by his effort to work independently. I am still happy to see this drawing and to show it to others.

As Winter turned to Spring we kept painting up until graduation. He was able to work well with a large brush and he had excellent judgement in his process. I could see him thinking out his steps in advance as he worked. This 14 by 18 inch oil painting on panel was done rather quickly.

Having produced so much good work, in the span of a few months, gave Enzo leverage to negotiate the choices he was given. Knowing more than one Art school was competing for his admission was enormously satisfying.

Ultimately, the main objective of my job as an Atelier instructor is to prepare a student for this position. An Atelier trains a student to be qualified to study in another teacher’s studio. Enzo became a highly qualified student and it was a pleasure assisting him. The best reward is the friendship of his parents and the feeling of helping.

Currently Enzo’s work at CCA shows his growth and use of Art as a means of study. Drawing can be the conduit for absorbing knowledge and information, as in his recent anatomical studies.

His style is still evolving and is showing diversity.

I still enjoy the updates by Yumi. When I am reminded of her appreciation I know the museum has done a great service for our community. Often a museum serves as a place for reflection and rebirth. It can be a community of families and students. It’s a place where students can find a retreat and can meditate and concentrate. The studio has helped many families and students find a safe place for growth and practice.

Yumi recently wrote, “Private art instruction definitely made the difference in his skills. They taught him different techniques and things he couldn't do on his own. He also got HUGE help in preparing his portfolio. I believe he couldn't be where he is without their amazing support.

Really, he couldn't do this without you, Gabriel! Thank you so much!!!!!!”.

Thank you Yumi, Dan and Enzo Segovia!

Your experience will help other families and I am thankful for the chance to tell your story.

Gabriel Coke | Atelier Program Director

NUMU Atelier | New Museum | Los Gatos

numustudio@gmail.com

831345-1845

NUMUAtelier

[newyorktheater]

Director Danya Taymor

Julia McDermott as Emily at a climactic moment

Playwright Will Arbery, accepting his Obie earlier this month

John Zdrojeski as Kevin

Heroes of the Fourth Turning on stage at Playwrights Horizons

At Playwrights Horizons: John-Zdrojeski-Zoë-Winters-Jeb-Kreager-Michele-Pawk-Julia-McDermott.j

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” Will Arbury’s much-acclaimed play about a gathering of former classmates at a conservative Catholic college in Wyoming, not only  worked amazingly well as a Zoom play last week; in some ways, it improved on the production at Playwrights Horizons last October.

This is a crazy thing to say, for two reasons. First, the stage production could not have been more highly praised: It swept local awards, including two Obies (one for Arbery, one for the entire team; the citation was for “five brilliant performances, four remarkable designs, and a powerfully focused vision guiding them all.”) The playwright was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

And second: Plays presented on Zoom as “readings” are generally tolerated rather than savored – an adjustment we’ve grudgingly made to an imperfect technology because of shut theaters and social distancing.

When I saw the play on stage,  however, I found it terrifically acted, intellectually stimulating, at times wondrously eerie — and also too long and too dark. And by too dark, I meant it literally; the play takes place late at night in a dimly lit backyard. Arbery has told interviewers that more theatergoers walked out of the play because of the low lighting than because they disagreed with the characters’ politics (Arbery disgrees with their politics too, by the way, which is one reason why his respectful treatment of the characters is so impressive.)

The Play-PerView’s one-time streaming of the play eliminated both issues for me, the darkness, and somehow also the length. The characters seemed to be communicating with one another together under the stars, rather than from their disparate homes. (We saw black, not their furniture.) And even some of the long philosophical rants kept me spellbound.

The playwright himself was impressed: “It has the spirit of theater — liveness, risk, access to the hidden….a vision right now of what theater can be. Danya Taymor is my hero.”

So I asked Danya Taymor, director of “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,”  for an interview. She agreed to a remote encounter; she happens to be on a ranch in Wyoming (the state where “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” takes place!)

Taymor, “The Lion King” director Julie Taymor’s 31-year-old niece, has made a name for herself in the theater over the couple of years – helming such fine and disparate works as Martyna Majok’s “Queens,”  Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over” and Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy.” During the pandemic, she has directed short plays for Viral Monologues and one by Arbery for  The Homebound Project # 2   She also helmed a benefit reading of “Uncle Vanya,” which will be presented online soon on behalf of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition and the Actors Fund, with the starry cast Samira Wiley, Constance Wu, Mia Katigbak, Manik Choksi, Alan Cumming, Anson Mount, K. Todd Freeman, Ellen Burstyn and Taymor’s boyfriend, the Tony-winning actor (for Matilda) Gabriel Ebert. “Heroes was my first experience directing a live show, ” Taymor says, “and I think that liveness is a big part of why it felt so electric on Saturday night.”

In the interview, which has been edited, Taymor talks about what livestream can do that theater can’t, and vice-versa, how they translated the stage to screen, and how she and the playwright have a Wyoming connection, or at least a “Wyoming” one.

How did you react to the idea of mounting “Heroes of The Fourth Turning” online?

I have to admit, part of me had a gut reaction of “no.” How could we possibly deliver even close to one tenth of what we were able to deliver in the theater? Would this be a watered down version? Would we even be able to get the play across?

Then Will, the cast, the designers and I started to talk about darkness, about liveness, about how to best deliver Will’s words and expose the world of the play in a new medium. Honoring the medium of the livestream really helped us figure out what it can do that theater can’t do,

How did you honor the medium of livestream?  What could it do that theater can’t? 

I think that what we were able to do with the live broadcast of Heroes was the closest thing I’ve felt to “theater” since the pandemic started and we’ve all been isolated, and that’s in some part because we committed to making it ephemeral. It existed in this way one time, on July 18th at 8pm EST, and now it will live on in the memories and imaginations of those who saw it, and nowhere else. That gave the performance itself an exciting danger and buzz and required total fearlessness from the actors.

The biggest tool we had that we don’t have in the theater is the close-up. Access to every tiny miniscule facial movement, every whisper and sigh, every glance. I think that in some ways, the text made a bigger impact at times over the livestream because of the intimacy of the camera and the incredible expressiveness of the human face. Will and I found that this version of Heroes was most compelling when the actors played for each other. We adapted the acting styles and of course modified the staging to play into what Zoom can deliver that a stage cannot. It allowed for subtlety that is sometimes absent in the theater simply because you want to reach the folks sitting at the back of the house.

And what couldn’t it do that theater can?

The biggest difference is the absence of a live, vocal audience. In live theater, the audience is absolutely another player in the piece. Theater brings bodies together in space. It was a thrill to know that 2,200 people were simultaneously watching this as Jeb, Zoe, Julia, Michele and John performed it live, but it isn’t quite the same as sharing space and breathing in the same air. You can’t go for a drink with a stranger that you sat next to and talk about the play afterwards. You lose the physical intensity of live theater, though I do feel that this company brought the ferociousness of their physical performances to the livestream as well.

What’s the most tangible difference between what it took to put together this play, and what it took to put together the Viral Monologue and the Homebound Project monologue?

A huge advantage we had on Heroes is that we all got to spend time in space together rehearsing and performing this play for four months in 2019. These actors fused with their characters, and they brought all that cellular memory to this process. I think it would be much more challenging to achieve something like Heroes when you are building it from day one. Not impossible, but we had the advantage of all that work and time together, a collective memory of the thing and what it felt like. The Viral Monologues were more like gesture drawings to me, quick sketches from the gut that are beautiful and powerful in their simplicity. And those were 5 minutes long maximum. Heroes is 2 hours and 20 minutes, so finding and nailing that rhythm was so important, and we worked hard to achieve it.

Can you walk me through the process of translation from stage to screen?

We did our first read through and it was clear we had to shake off the version we were doing for the live audience at Playwrights Horizons. But we also discovered gems, like the fact that the darkest, quietest scenes could be more themselves in this new medium than was perhaps even possible in the theater.  That first read was such a good diagnostic test for us to see how the camera and the performance were functioning together.

The biggest change was embracing a physical stillness, not playing everything dead on to the camera, and letting the space still feel like it was in 360 instead of flat forward. The Playwrights production had so much embodiment, so much physicality and that just didn’t translate. The end for instance, there was an incredible physicality to that moment in the production, and Julia was able to harness that deep knowing of what the monologue needs to do, and lean entirely on the text to achieve the same effect.

The prologue was another thing that needed to be adapted. In the live theatrical version, you encounter the stage in total darkness,  live with shadow and light. We knew we couldn’t have a curtain speech, and tried to adapt the prologue as best we could: When the audience entered the zoom, there was Justin (Jeb Kreager), meditative and near invisible in the darkness, pre show birdsong playing. I think we were able to translate that blinking-through-darkness-into-light thing that was so effective in the production.

Each actor also had a costume consultation with our incredible costume designer Sarafina Bush, who went into the actors closets with them on FaceTime, picking out each article of clothing and working with Isabella and myself to get the perfect visual aesthetic of these folks. Justin Ellington, our tremendous sound designer, actually ran sound live on Saturday night because only he had the equipment to make it sound good. Normally a stage manager would run these cues, and it is a real art, and Justin stepped up in a brilliant way. Another distinction was that when characters left the stage, they left their cameras rolling so that their squares could become the dark night.

One distinct difference from a regular Zoom play that anybody who watched the show would notice is that, rather than seeing the actors’ homes in the background, the backgrounds were all black. How did you come up with that, was it difficult to accomplish, is this what Will Arbery was talking about when he Tweeted about “makeshift caves” and “moonlight rigs”?

When we first began talking about doing the presentation in the first place, we knew we needed to preserve the feeling of that expansive Wyoming night. Isabella [Byrd, the lighting  designer] had some incredible ideas about how to achieve that darkness, and we scheduled lighting fittings with each member of the cast.

These actors performed that magic in their bathrooms, bedrooms, tiny spare rooms, and each of them created their own lighting setup that allowed for the unified sense of darkness. This was no easy feat, and truly amazing that they could deliver the performances they did standing alone in rooms with their laptops piled up on stacks of books, with black duvateen draped behind them.

If you don’t mind my asking, how did you wind up in Wyoming now? Is it just a coincidence that “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is set in the state?

Great question! My pull to Wyoming began when I was directing a play by Brian Watkins for Lesser America back in 2015 called “Wyoming.” Actually that play was the first time Will Arbery saw my work too; I think that’s how I first landed on Will’s radar  I fell in love with the world of “Wyoming,” and knew that I needed to get out here and see this mystic land in person.

I think I’ve been here five times, including one trip I made the winter before we began rehearsals for [the Playwrights Horizons production of] Heroes. That trip was so important. [Boyfriend] Gabe and I drove from Jackson to Dubois, Wyoming, where good friends of ours run a ranch called three spear ranch. The time I spent at three spear directly inspired so many of the design choices we made in the Playwrights production of Heroes….that darkness, that expanse, the house with the single porch light, the charge of that land, the history of the land and the silent scream you can hear if you are listening hard enough. One night we hiked up a hill near the ranch. It was close to midnight and there was a full moon. When we got to the top of the hill I gasped because all the horses on the ranch, and there are 1500 acres here, were all together on the top of the hill together, lit only with moonlight. That was when I felt the feeling of Heroes and began trying to figure out how to translate that for our production.

The weekend before we began rehearsal [for the livestream), I drove from Dubois to Lander, Wyoming, where Will’s family lives and where Wyoming Catholic College is located. WCC is the basis for Transfiguration college of Wyoming in the play. I was able to spend a few hours with Will’s parents and two of his sisters and their kids. We spent a few invaluable hours talking about the play, about the state of the world, the future and the past. It was an incredible afternoon and it definitely inspired me in a new way right before returning to the play.

Did the Wyoming part of Brian Watkins’ play “Wyoming” have anything to do with why you and Will Argery clicked? 

The Wyoming part is definitely a part, but only one of many many things I love and admire about Will and what I think brought us together.

How Heroes of the Fourth Turning became a vision of what theater can be online. Director Danya Taymor Q and A “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” Will Arbury’s much-acclaimed play about a gathering of former classmates at a conservative Catholic college in Wyoming, not only  worked amazingly well as a Zoom play last week; in some ways, it improved on the production at Playwrights Horizons last October.

[thrashermaxey]

Ramblings: Jets and Flames Post-Knockout; Keller; Playoff Hockey – April 23

  It was locker cleaning day for the Winnipeg Jets and there was a lot of interesting tidbits to come of it.

There were a lot of votes of confidence for coach Paul Maurice, namely one coming from Blake Wheeler, with the captain saying he’d run through a brick wall for his bench boss.

The Jets have made the playoff in three out of five years with Maurice behind the bench full time and that includes last year’s trip to the Conference Final. Quite honestly, I don’t know whether Maurice is a good coach or not, and I don’t think the vast majority of hockey fans and analysts don’t either. Some people may point to questionable lineup decisions but literally every coach has those, so pointing it out isn’t unique to Winnipeg. The team has become more disciplined, ranking in the top-5 for short-handed opportunities every year from 2014-15 through 2017-18 before finishing 9th this year, so maybe he’s helping in this area?

Whatever the Jets decide to do, they better make sure if they decide to get a new coach that he’s better than what they have. The grass isn’t always greener – just look at Los Angeles since the end of Darryl Sutter’s tenure.

As for Patrik Laine, we may have a reason for his, let’s say, lackluster performance in the regular season: a back injury he was fighting throughout the year. The extent and nature are unknown, but any tweak would be enough to throw anyone off-kilter. Keep this in mind: Laine had a 30-goal season as a 20-year old, his third consecutive 30-goal season, while fighting through a back problem. Any and all inquiries as to What’s Wrong With Laine should now be settled.

In that tweet, we found it Nikolaj Ehlers fractured his leg during Game 5 of the playoffs. I assume that if he was fine enough to keep playing, any sort of recovery won’t linger into next year. Of course, once we have a more definitive answer, we’ll pass it along.

Josh Morrissey was still battling the effects from a separated shoulder earlier in the season that kept him out of the lineup for six weeks until the postseason. This was obvious as Morrissey typically played 22-ish minutes a night but played just 18 minutes a night in the playoffs.

We won’t know until we hear more about Laine, but it does not appear any of these issues will be long-term.

As I mentioned in these Ramblings before the playoffs, there were a lot of injuries for the Jets in the second half of the season. Morrissey, Ehlers, and Byfuglien were the ones we knew about, and now we know about Laine. It makes sense that this team did not look the same from January onward as it did from October through December. They’re a team with Cup aspirations but I hope they don’t blow it up. All of Laine, Jacob Trouba, and Kyle Connor are RFAs. I hope to see them all back next year.

*

There wasn’t nearly as much to report from media day for the Calgary Flames. It was mostly just discussion about how disappointing they were to lose out in the first round. There were no major injuries or anything along those lines to report, even Sean Monahan.

One interesting quote came from Matthew Tkachuk about how the playoffs are so much different than the regular season and he knows that better now that they’ve failed.

I bolded the word because it really reminds me of a lot of teams in the past. In 2007-08, the Blackhawks, a team on the rise, missed the playoffs by three points. The year after, they made the playoffs and lost in the Conference Final, winning the Cup the following season. The Penguins lost in the first round in 2007, lost in the Finals in 2008, and finally broke through in 2009 for the Cup. It’s not to say Calgary will win the Cup, and they’ve probably wanted to go deeper in the playoffs by now, but I see some other similarities here.

The problem would be that a major cog in their team, Mark Giordano, turns 36 in October. They can’t replace a Norris-calibre defenceman should he start to really decline. But if he doesn’t, there’s no reason to be pessimistic about this team.

*

Just want to point everyone in the direction of Cam Robinson’s 2019 draft rankings. He has a little write-up on the guys he has ranked in the first round as well as a complete list of his first three rounds, all the way to 93rd overall.

I also want to point in the direction of Jokke Nevalainen, who has been posting updates throughout the World U-18 Championship. You can read his first update here and his second one here.

Aside from Cam and Jokke’s great work, we have an army of scouts and writers doing lots of work at Dobber Prospects leading up to the draft. Be sure to check constantly for updates on the players you’ll be drafting in dynasty leagues this summer.

*

I was reading an article from Richard Morin from the Arizona Republic on the down year from Clayton Keller. There was a lot of talk about how he had difficulty getting to the net, and how the good teams get to the net to create chances.

So, I looked into that:

Going over our numbers here at Dobber Hockey, Keller had 108 even strength shots on goal from within 30 feet of the net in 2018-19. That number was 113 in 2017-18.

Keller’s individual expected goals per 60 minutes at five-on-five this year was 0.62. Last year it was 0.63. The importance of that is that expected goal rates are heavily influenced by shot distance – guys like Brendan Gallagher and James van Riemsdyk always rate highly because of it.

His role on the PP changed from primarily a bumper/net front-type player in 2017-18 to a primarily wing role in 2018-19, so if he wasn’t getting to the net on the PP, it wasn’t his decision.

Of course, there’s a whole lot more to the story than just checking numbers on a couple of sites. He did have fewer shots from right in tight than last year but his rate of shots from medium-to-high danger areas was basically unchanged. I’m sure there are instances when the coaching staff wished he got to the net more and that would explain their comments. In reality, when looking at the season as a whole, it was more of the same from his rookie year.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Keller won’t shoot seven percent next year like he did in this one.

*

We were guaranteed a third Game 7 of these playoffs as Carolina held down the fort in a 5-2 win over Washington in Game 6. After falling behind 2-1, Teuvo Teravainen scored early in the second period to tie the game up 2-2 with Jordan Staal scoring early in the third period to take the lead. Justin Williams salted it away with the fourth goal.

Alex Ovechkin was kicked out late in the game with a misconduct but it shouldn’t have any bearing on his availability for the next game.

There was a no-goal call due to intent to blow that may have cost the Caps a goal in the third period. Ovechkin jammed a puck that was under Mrazek's pad and he thought they scored. This was the play:

  "No goal" pic.twitter.com/XnbfzygDe3

— NBC Sports Capitals (@NBCSCapitals) April 23, 2019

  I don't understand the fervour, it seemed like a pretty cut-and-dry play. I guess everything is magnified in the playoffs.  

It was a great night for both Jaccob Slavin and Dougie Hamilton as they assisted on Warren Foegele’s goal in the first period, giving Slavin six points in the playoffs and five for Hamilton. The man named Dougie added an empty-net goal for his sixth point. The pairing played over half their shifts against Washington’s top line and just crushed them; Ovechkin-Backstrom-Wilson all had shot shares under 35 percent. Alex Ovechkin scored on a rush when they were on the ice but let’s be honest, you can only hold down one of the greatest ever for so long.

*

Dallas moved on to the second round thanks to a 2-1 overtime win in Game 6 Monday night. John Klingberg sealed the series on an odd-man rush off a nice find from Alex Radulov. The Stars had carried the play for most of the overtime period, and pretty much the second half of the game for that matter. It was a just reward for a team looking to earn a spot in the Conference Final for the first time in over a decade.

Ben Bishop, two days after his Vezina finalist announcement, saved 46 shots in the win. For the series, he had a .945 save percentage. It’s a fair to discuss things like Nashville’s abysmal power play, which was bad all year and went 0-15 in the playoffs, or their scoring depth, but not many teams will get past a goalie who manages a .945 over the course of a series.

Nashville’s third pair didn’t get much ice time, but I will say that Dante Fabbro seemed to get better each game. It’s hard to look good in a loss when you play 14 minutes on the third pair, but he seemed to outlet the puck well while holding is own in the zone. There is still a lot of work to be done here, obviously, and it was only a handful of games so beware confirmation bias.

The Stars now go to St. Louis to face the Blues in the second round.

        from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-jets-and-flames-post-knockout-keller-playoff-hockey-april-23/

[vinayv224]

Amazon has yet to announce the HQ2 locations, but reports suggest the company is coming to both New York City and northern Virginia.

It seems Amazon has finally chosen the two locations for its new headquarters: Queens, New York, and Arlington, Virginia.

The company has yet to formally announce its decision, but news about the HQ2 sites began leaking last week. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that instead of one city, Amazon would split its HQ2 between two locations. A few hours later, the New York Times followed up with a report that the company was “nearing deals” in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens and the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, a suburb of Washington, DC.

More than 200 local and state governments submitted proposals for Amazon’s consideration last year after the company announced it was looking for a North American city to house its $5 billion, 50,000-employee HQ2, a second headquarters outside its home base in Seattle. Some cities promised the company millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives.

New York City, for its part, claimed not to have offered Amazon any extra incentives. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, offered Amazon a still-undisclosed benefits package. Virginia, meanwhile, reportedly hired McKinsey & Co. to draft its proposal, which has yet to be publicly released.

The road to HQ2

Amazon first asked local and state governments to submit HQ2 proposals in September 2017, noting that municipalities with more than 1 million residents and a “stable, business-friendly environment” would have a leg up, as would those with robust public transit systems and large airports with direct flights to and from Seattle.

“We expect HQ2 to be a full equal to our Seattle headquarters,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement at the time. “Amazon HQ2 will bring billions of dollars in up-front and ongoing investments, and tens of thousands of high-paying jobs.”

Hundreds of cities, from New York City to Gary, Indiana, jumped at the opportunity for its potential to boost the local economy and job market. A new Amazon headquarters would create 50,000 new jobs in the chosen city, meaning a larger tax base and opportunities for further economic development. And that’s just jobs at Amazon: Construction crews would be needed to build the company’s new campus or renovate an existing structure, and all those Amazon employees are going to need places to eat and shop.

A total of 238 cities and states ended up submitting proposals. Some, including Detroit, Las Vegas, and Pittsburgh, created videos explaining why they were the right choice. Orlando had more than one.

Amazon announced its 20 finalists in January. The shortlist included some obvious contenders, like New York and Chicago, as well as some less likely options like Indianapolis and Dallas.

Some of those cities tried to lure the company with huge financial incentives.

A letter obtained by the Chicago Tribune revealed that Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and city leaders promised Amazon more than $2 billion in perks, including $1.32 billion in EDGE tax credits — grants for companies that promise to create jobs in the state — as well as $172.5 million in state sales tax and utility exemptions, and $61.4 million in property tax discounts. The largest of those incentives, the EDGE credits, would have been equivalent to 50 percent of employee income tax withholdings, the Tribune reported.

New Jersey offered Amazon $5 billion in incentives, plus an additional $2 billion from Newark — the second-largest publicly available offer the company received, according to CityLab. Maryland made an even larger offer: $8.5 billion in subsidies and infrastructure funding, as reported by the Baltimore Sun, in addition to an undisclosed incentive package from Montgomery County.

“I’m doing everything I can,” Cuomo told reporters when asked about his administration’s efforts to win over Amazon. “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes. Because it would be a great economic boost.”

Was HQ2’s competitive selection process a highly publicized ruse?

Some experts reasoned that the massively hyped selection process was rigged from the start, and that Amazon knew where it wanted to locate its HQ2 all along. Scott Galloway, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, said as much at Recode’s Code Commerce conference last month when he predicted that Amazon would choose — and has always planned to choose — Washington, DC, as the home for its second location, but allowed cities to compete in order to extract more incentives from both the chosen city and its competitors.

“Amazon has gamified the HQ2 process and basically created a game which will result in a transfer of wealth from municipalities — fire districts, school districts, and police forces — to Amazon’s shareholders,” Galloway said. “I believe it is a [ruse]. I believe they have no intention of being in any of these [other] 18 cities. I believe this game was over before it started.”

CityLab co-founder and University of Toronto professor Richard Florida similarly said in May that Amazon always knew what the location for its second headquarters would be. “Like all corporate site selection, the HQ2 process is a rigged game, where the company knows the answer in advance and sets up a fictitious competition to wrest maximum incentives,” wrote Florida. “What’s going on is something that is bigger than just a search for a second headquarters; it’s about the company’s continued expansion across North America.”

The HQ2 process, he argued, was a way for Amazon to crowdsource information on sites across the country — not a genuine competition for a new headquarters — in order to have intel on where to place new distribution or logistics centers. He called it a “brilliantly cynical exercise in corporate locational strategy,” and he might be right.

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon had begun calling up cities whose HQ2 proposals it had rejected to tell them why they hadn’t been chosen — and some of those cities are taking Amazon’s suggestions to heart. Cincinnati, for example, responded to Amazon’s critique that it didn’t have enough local tech talent by refocusing a high school apprenticeship program on information technology. Orlando, which reportedly received a similar critique, considering starting a community development fund to invest in local tech companies. Detroit is looking for ways to beef up its public transit in response to losing out on the Amazon bid.

So what does this mean for the winner?

It’s likely that despite the hoops cities and states jumped through in order to show Amazon they were worthy of being chosen as the home of HQ2, the company knew what it wanted to do all along. In the case of New York and Virginia, all of this could mean that any extra perks officials offered may come at the expense of longtime residents.

In May, Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote that Amazon’s promise of 50,000 jobs may not be as much of a boon as it may seem. Instead of creating jobs needed by “people who are really in need of help,” i.e., under-paid, low-skilled workers, Amazon’s presence will likely lead to a surge in well-compensated white-collar professionals who will drive up property values even further.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the effects Amazon’s presence has had on the housing market in Seattle, which is home to more than 45,000 of the company’s employees. Highly paid Amazon employees in the city have contributed to steadily rising real estate prices in the city and its outlying suburbs, causing housing costs to surge and leading to the displacement of low-income families. In 2015, King County declared a homelessness state of emergency; conditions have hardly improved since, and local lawmakers have repeatedly pointed to a lack of affordable housing in the city as a key culprit in its homelessness crisis. House prices in the city have risen 70 percent since 2011, according to a report by the Guardian, and rents have risen along with them. Traffic is also a concern; Seattle is contending with an excessive burden on the city’s public transit system.

What remains to be seen is what kind of effect HQ2 will have on New York and Arlington, and whether the cities will take steps to protect their residents from Amazon’s presence.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2OxBkwg

[cynthiajayusa]

Season 10 Finalists Dish on ‘Drag Race’ Finale

Well I hate to pat myself on the back (ok, sometimes I like it…LOL), but I did predict in writing that Aquaria would win Season 10 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. However, if anyone pulled themselves away from who their favorite was and looked at the facts (stats), it was pretty clear that Aquaria was going to win.

Having said that, I cannot speak more highly of Eureka and Asia who were both incredible contenders and kept this season exciting and very close. The day after the finale it was a pleasure to sit down with both of them for this exclusive Hotspots interview:

Eureka O’Hara

At what age did drag become an interest?

I started going to the bar before I turned 17 and had a fake ID. When I turned 18, the fake ID expired, and I couldn’t get into bar, so I decided to dress up in drag, and they let me in. Other drag queens convinced me to do the talent show. I kept doing it and never stopped doing drag.

How did you pick your name?

My biological mother’s name was Eureka, so I modeled myself after her. O’Hara is my drag father’s last name. His picked the name O’Hara from Gone With the Wind.

How many times did you apply to be on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and how did it feel when you found out you’d been chosen?

I applied for four years, and it was life changing when I got chosen, and even more life changing when I got to come back.

Do you think being a returning queen made it easier or harder for you?

Harder, so much harder. There was a level of anticipation and a standard that was already set. I felt the judges were harder on me, and I had to prove more and more why I should be there.

How was your Drag Race experience different the second time around?

This time I was there a lot longer, and I got to experience it in a different way. Last time I was gone from home only two weeks and this time six. The farther into the season, the scarier it gets, and the more anxious you are. It also gets more exciting.

What’s your marital status?

I am single.

What are you looking for in a man?

I’m looking for a man that has a job and can take care of himself. That man also has to be emotionally strong so he can deal with not being around me all the time. I also love romance.

Going into the finals, if you knew you couldn’t win, who would you have wanted to win and why?

Asia. Because she is a leader, and she is inclusive and sees all sides.

Seeing your family in the finale, it seems like you are very close to them. Tell me about that relationship?

I am very close with them. My twin and I have a connection that you cannot describe. We are so much alike. My mom is now sick but always took care of us as a single mom. My older sister has three kids and is living with my mom and sister, and they all rely on me to eat and have their bills paid. They are my strength and the reason I fight and work so hard.

What’s ahead for Eureka?

Ideally, I want to be on Saturday Night Live. Tell Lorne Michaels! I just released the song “Big Girl” (available on iTunes), and I’m working on a one-woman show, which will be entitled “Pretty Hot and Tasty.”

Asia O’Hara

At what age did drag become an interest?

Drag became an interest at about 20.

How did you pick your name?

I picked my name because I have a family member whose name is Asia. It was a last-minute thought since most of my friends had boy names in drag.

How many times did you apply to be on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and how did it feel when you found out you had been chosen?

I auditioned three times, And when I got the call, it felt great. It was very exciting that I finally made it.

Do you think there’s more pressure on the queens now that Drag Race has been on so long?

Absolutely. The bar is raised every year, and there is more pressure to be greater. The talent and the fashion level continually gets raised.

Tell us about your Drag Race experience?

It was absolutely phenomenal. I got to meet incredible people and build relationships with girls I would have never met. I got to learn a lot about myself — and found some great qualities I didn’t know I had!

In the finale we saw you have a handsome boyfriend. How did you meet and, since you mentioned you were getting married, when?

We aren’t officially getting married yet. I just felt the need to let people know it’s serious. We met at a pageant I was judging in St. Louis. The second I met him I knew he was the person.

Other than Drag Race, what’s the best thing that has happened to you in drag?

People coming up to me and telling me how I inspired them or changed their life. In those moments, you realize that what you are doing is not going unnoticed.

Going into the finals, if you knew you couldn’t win, who would you have wanted to win and why?

All of them for different reason. I felt Aquaria was the most deserving, based on the competition. But I felt Eureka had some of the best qualities for people to emulate.

What’s ahead for Asia?

I am definitely looking forward to creating new art from scratch. I am very excited for the future.

source https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/07/12/season-10-finalists-dish-on-drag-race-finale/ from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazin.blogspot.com/2018/07/season-10-finalists-dish-on-drag-race.html