#I should say I have actually 0 idea how these two would interact.

[thevoidperceiving]

Fanart for @cynthplop and their amazing Darkest Dungeon oc, Robin, featuring my own oc Alaric! This was very fun to draw and I'll certainly have to draw em both again soon. Alt colors below.

[100vern]

ex-conomics | csc

you supported seungcheol through years of being an aspiring athlete, and all you got to show for it was your undergraduate degree and an awkward, stuttered apology when he dumped you to go semi-pro. now he’s back after an injury derailed his career, and there’s only one problem: you’re the only one available to tutor him. you - 0; the universe - 1. talk about no return on investment.

⚽ pairing: choi seungcheol x f. reader ⚽ genre: exes to (lite) enemies to lovers; university au; angst, fluff ⚽ rating: while there is nothing explicit in this fic, there are two brief references to smut. while i can't stop anyone from reading this, i would prefer minors do not interact with this or any of my work. ⚽ warnings: cheol is some degree of famous, reader is a grad student/TA, mentions of an injury and coping with the aftermath of it, lots of economics talk that even i do not understand, swearing, one mention of alcohol, some misplaced jealousy, rom-com tropes, dino is kind of a loser but we love him anyway. probably a lot of other things i missed, but this is actually pretty tame for a fic of this length. ⚽ word count: 13.4k ⚽ thank you: a lot of people looked this over for me in the process and i'm sure i will forget some of them so if i do i'm sorry: @the-boy-meets-evil, @hot-soop, @highvern, and @haologram, who also gave me some wonderful ideas for the vlogs. thank you to MIT for opencourseware existing. i took microeconomics and dropped it, so i couldn't have done this without you. everyone in the discord server for helping me along the way and keeping me motivated. ⚽ author's note: i haven't posted a fic in nearly seven months, so i think it goes without saying that there are parts of this i like and a lot more i'm not 100% happy with. i'd love if this was more fleshed out and 10k longer, but i was able to write anything at all so it's good enough. this was written for the back to school with seventeen collab, hosted by @camandemstudios. thank you both for letting me participate! please make sure to check out the rest of the stories! everyone worked so hard and this collab was a ton of fun to participate in. <3

You look down at the paper. Back up at who handed it to you. Down at the paper again.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

The poor freshman kid laughs, all nerves, and even though the sound is grating, you remember what it’s like to be forced into work study. How far away graduate school seemed; how large your professors loomed over you with all their power and knowledge and credentials; how you constantly felt like the dumbest person in nearly every room you walked into for four straight years.

“Um—”

You sigh, just barely resisting the urge to slam your head onto your desk. “I—it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” Your words do little to ease Freshman’s nerves. He’s still hunched over in the doorway of your office, wringing his hands as he shifts his weight back and forth, in for a lifetime of body pain with the way he’s squaring his shoulders. “You’re sure about this, though? Like, I’m really not being set up?”

“I don’t think so?” he offers, slowly starting to turn green right before your eyes. “Dr. Lee ga-gave me the paperwork himself, I don’t think he would’ve messed it up? Oh no, did I mess it up? Should I go back to Student Services and conf—”

Good god, this kid’s anxiety is gonna stink up your office for weeks. “No need!” you interject. “I’ll just…” Sign it, you want to say, but the longer you stare at the sheet of paper the quicker you’re losing your resolve.

TUTORING REQUEST FORM Student Name: Choi Seungcheol Degree: Undergraduate Major: Business Course: ECON04101 Introduction to Microeconomics Instructor: Lee Yeonseok, PhD. Recommended Tutoring: High (3-4 hours per week)

You curse under your breath. Of the two names on the paper, Dr. Lee’s does not come as a surprise. He’s a notorious hard-ass with an infamous attrition rate—most students don’t last more than a week in any of his classes—but he’s also the sole reason you were able to pay for someof your grad school tuition out of pocket with all the tutoring money you made.

That, however, was two years ago.

“Does he know I don’t tutor anymore?” Stupid question. The kid stares blankly back at you, as if to say I don’t know any more than the people in Student Services, let alone Dr. Lee. It is literally my first year here. “I’m Dr. Ahn’s TA this year. I’ve got my hands full with her bullsh… stuff—”

Immediately, you know you’ve said something wrong, because the kid’s eyes light up, all that previous anxiety disappearing like smoke. “Wait, the same Dr. Ahn that teaches the crypto course?”

“No, that one died,” you say quickly. Kid deflates. “Anyway, I don’t really tutor anymore, especially for econ. As you can see”—you gesture vaguely around the cramped four walls of your office—“they’ve upgraded me. They even put my name on a little placard by the door! Go look! They spelled it wrong! If that doesn’t sum up this university I don’t know what does.”

You heave another sigh. Try to school your face and tone into something that exudes professionalism and finality. “Look, I’m sorry I can’t help you. I tutored Dr. Lee’s students for, like, three years in undergrad so I’m sure they just… forgot that wasn’t my actual job here. Who’s in charge of tutoring these days? I’ll shoot them an email and explain all this.”

Freshman gives you a name, and it takes less than a second to find them in the employee directory. You expect that to be the end of it, but he’s still taking up space in your doorway. You quirk an eyebrow. “Yes?”

The hand-wringing returns, along with an embarrassed flush that disappears beneath the neckline of his school-branded sweatshirt. “I just—um. Maybe you could, uh. Send that now? Before I get back there?”

You blink. “Don’t you have to go all the way back across campus? How slow do you think I type?” He shrugs, and you give up on the idea of getting rid of him. “Fine. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Lee Chan. I’m a sophomore. Do you know that guy?”

“Oh. I thought for sure you were a freshman, but you’re gonna need to be more specific, Lee Chan, Sophomore.”

“The guy they want you to tutor.” You freeze. The guy they want you to tutor is—“Choi Seungcheol,” Chan tacks on, and, yeah, you know—knew, you correct yourself—someone with that name, once upon a time.

But there are a lot of Chois and a lot of Seungcheols. It’s been years since you’ve spoken to the Seungcheol you knew, and that was when he’d broken up with you to—“I heard he’s a football player? Well, used to be, I guess. The girls in the office were freaking out so I guess he’s pretty famous, but I don’t know anything about sports, do you? They said they have photocards of him. I thought they only did that for idols.”

You think about being kids together in Daegu. Think about the exasperated looks you’d share when your parents would drag the two of you to festivals: Palgongsan in the autumn, Biseulsan in the spring; transformation and rebirth. Think about being eight years old and watching your father cram into the small space of the Chois’ living room, standing around the TV with Seungcheol’s dad, shouting at Park Jonghwan. Daegu FC made the FA Cup quarterfinals that year, and you think, of everything, that’s what you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

You think about falling in love slowly. Sixteen and clueless, the pair of you were. Didn’t really know any different, just that you’d look at him and feel butterflies. That you’d hold hands in secret. Text beneath the dinner table. That you’d watch him on the football pitch and be consumed by pride. That the future felt impossibly far away, that life would never catch up to the two of you.

You think about all the football jargon you didn’t understand—the academies, the teams, the implications. You think about, I’m thinking about trying out for the FC Seoul U-18, I just don’t think there’s much more I can do here in Daegu. You think about replying, Oh, I applied to university there.

You remember thinking it must’ve been fate, how easy that had worked out. How easy that first hurdle had been overcome.

You think about how fast everything happened. The try-out, the acceptance, the explosion. Remember being unable to go anywhere those first few months without seeing Seungcheol’s face, touted as the next big thing. Think about applying for scholarships when he was applying for international visas. Think about studying for midterms when Seungcheol was studying English for interviews.

You think about the last few weeks of your relationship, when it felt like you were desperately trying to cling to ghosts. Think about how Seoul had once felt endlessly big, both in opportunity and size, and how it now felt suffocating. You think about, So you’re just giving up? Is that what you’re saying? Think about, I don’t know what else to do. It doesn’t feel fair to you.

You think about all the places you’ve watched him. On countless football pitches; shy glances in school hallways; in the passenger seat, wracked with nerves on the drive to Seoul; poised above you in bed, hairline dotted with sweat as he rolled his hips, telling you how much he loved you.

You think about watching him walk out the door, and how you never watched him again.

So you fire off your email, concise and to the point about why you can’t tutor Choi Seungcheol in Introduction to Microeconomics, and turn to Lee Chan, Sophomore.

“No,” you finally answer. “Never heard of him.”

For all intents and purposes, your rejection should’ve been the end of it.

A few days go by. You hold office hours, attend lectures, work on your thesis when you have both the time and the energy. Try to ignore the feeling of bees beneath your skin, anxiety needling each time you check your email. You were well within your right to decline the tutoring request, but you can’t help but feel like you’ve done something wrong. That someone somehow knows who Seungcheol was to you and will pull you up on it. That those girls who’d gushed about him to Chan are somewhere laughing at your expense.

But you don’t hear anything at all about it… until you do.

Sunday evening. You haven’t moved from your couch in hours, some variety show playing in the background, barely audible over your keyboard clacking. Much to your detriment, you don’t write many papers these days, so you’re out of practice. Feels like you haven’t done anything besides formulas in years, all of your academic knowledge reduced to fucking math, so you’re about ready to toss your laptop out the window long before the email even comes through.

You see, From: Lee Yeonseok. You see, Subject: Choi Seungcheol - Tutoring.

Your stomach plummets to the floor.

You scan the body quickly. You see the words personal favor… friend of his father… urgent matter… and your hands start shaking. Whether it’s from the sheer audacity of this man or anxiety, you aren’t sure, but it’s not like it matters. There aren’t a whole lot of people on campus brave or dumb enough to go up against him twice.

“Motherfucker,” you spit, bitter the only taste in your mouth.

Where did you go wrong to wind up here? You’d followed the script: got the grades, passed the exams, received half of the required education for the Respectable Career, helped a few others along the way chase dreams that may or may not have been their own. You’d fallen in love. Only had a broken heart to show for it, but that’d been in the script, too: The First Love, followed by The First Heartbreak.

The split from Seungcheol was supposed to have been the end of that chapter. You’d planned on never seeing him again, and you never would have, had it been up to you. Apparently the universe has other plans, participation required.

“Did you spill onion dip on the rug again?” You startle, sending your laptop flying. Kaori, your roommate, is perched halfway in between the living room and the kitchen like a cryptid, clearly not expecting your reaction. “Oh. Were you watching porn?”

Face burning, you fetch your laptop from the floor. “In a common area? Kaori, please, I have far more decorum than that.”

She snorts, resuming her trek to the fridge. “See, that’s what I thought, but then I walked out here and you threw your laptop so fast it was like watching my ex get caught watching furry porn all over again.” She pries the lid off a large container of yogurt. “You think this is still good?”

“Dunno. What’s it smell like?”

She sniffs it and pulls it back to check the label. “Vanilla, I think, which is concerning because it’s supposed to be strawberry.”

You shrug. “What’s the worst that can happen, you get extra”—you pause, trying to remember the correct order of things, before giving up entirely—“...biotics?”

“Mm, so close. Care if I just eat this with a spoon?”

Nose scrunched, you wave her off. “Couldn’t pay me to eat yogurt on a good day, let alone if it’s expired. All yours, babe.”

Spoon in hand and a pleased smile on her face, Kaori collapses onto the couch beside you. You try to return your attention to your paper, try to find your momentum again, and it works for all of ten minutes before you’re groaning and slamming the top closed.

You don’t even need to look over to know Kaori’s staring. “What’s up with you?” she asks. Before she can answer: “Wait, is this serious? Because I can’t have a serious conversation in this t-shirt.” You steal a glance sideways. Ask Me About My Hemorrhoid! it says, and you exhale loudly. “Don’t breathe at me, I lost a bet.”

“And continued wearing it?”

She jokingly rolls her eyes. “God forbid a girl has hobbies.” Nudges you with her foot. “C’mon, spill.”

Kaori doesn’t know about you and Seungcheol. Most people don’t, aside from a few old classmates from Daegu who found you on social media and tried befriending you once he started making a name for himself in Seoul. After that, it was just easier to keep things private while you were together. New friends knew you were seeing someone but not their name or how long you’d been together. Any curiosity surrounding why the Choi Seungcheol was following you on Insta had been waved away easily. Our parents are friends, we grew up together. Then you broke up, and there wasn’t any evidence to delete, and he wasn’t following you on Instagram anymore, and it was easier that way.

So, yeah—even though you hadn’t met her until years later, Kaori knows you have an ex. She knows you’ve had a few flings and situationships in the time since, too, and it’s why she’s none the wiser when you ask, “It’s nothing, really. Just—do you follow football at all?”

“Nah, not really. The new guy’s pretty into it and keeps trying to get me to watch the games with him, but it’s so fucking boring? I dunno, I can’t get into it. Not in real life, anyway—I binged all of Captain Tsubasa in an embarrassingly short amount of time, though. Why?”

“Student Services asked me to tutor someone the other day and I had to turn it down. I just don’t have the time, you know? This semester’s already killer, and Dr. Ahn’s been riding my ass nonstop about grades. Turns out it’s some football player, so Dr. Lee emailed me asking me to do it as a personal favor, which means, on top of all the other shit I have to do, I’m now tutoring some football player four hours a week in Microeconomics.”

Her face distorts. “God, that guy’s such a prick. Like wow, you’re good at the economy! Good for you! Who cares! Why don’t you go balance the national debt or something instead of torturing university freshmen!”

You also wrongly assume that’s the last you’ll hear of it from Kaori.

Two days later, after Student Services replies to your email with the days and times you’ll be tutoring Seungcheol, she materializes in the living room to harass you.

“You didn’t tell me your football player was Choi Seungcheol.”

The panic is instant. You know how she means it, but it’s not how your body interprets it. All of a sudden it feels like an interrogation, an accusation, and a whopping serving of guilt takes up residence in the middle of your chest for not being entirely honest.

“Explains this weird text Ken sent me.”

She slides her phone over to you, open to her text thread with her current flavor of the week. Beneath an article about Seungcheol enrolling in classes at your school:

doesn’t ur roomie TA there Why are you calling her “ur roomie” like you don’t know her name?? Rude. Also yes. ask her to get me an autograph No babe pls he was my fav player before he got injured No 🙄 fine. can i come over later? Starting to think you’re using me for my roommate. Get your own job 🙄

You hand her phone back. “I didn’t think you’d know who Choi Seungcheol even is.” It’s the best you can do, even though it just digs you a deeper grave. “You said you’re not into football.”

“I’m not, but unfortunately I am into that stupid man.” She sighs, wistful and longing. “Babe, you have to understand. His dick is so big.”

You hadn’t wanted to stay in Seoul for your graduate degree, let alone the same university you’d gone to for undergrad.

You’d applied to schools all over—Japan, Europe, even a few in the States. Romanticized the hell out of NYU, went window shopping for an overpriced apartment, picked a favorite pizzeria based on nothing but vibes and online reviews. In those few months after graduation, there wasn’t a whole lot tying you to Seoul. Your and Seungcheol’s relationship had been old history by then, your parents split. Your dad stayed in your childhood home and your mother moved a few hours closer to her sister. They’d waited until your brother was old enough to be out of the house.

And it’d just been… a lot. Overwhelming. Some days you could barely shower or feed yourself, let alone move halfway across the world, so you’d stayed in the familiar and tried not to let it feel like failure.

But the good thing about familiarity is you learn its tricks, figure out the hiding spots. Early on, your first or second week of grad school, you laid claim to a study room on a floor of the library everyone else ignored. You write notes on the whiteboard with faded blue markers that are still there days later. The chair on the opposite side of the table is always exactly where you left it, the space between it and the table enough to only accommodate you. Sometimes you leave books—old paperbacks littered with notes in your writing—or papers, just to see if they move.

They never do.

And all of this is why it feels like a punch to the gut when that sanctity is tainted. When you’re halfway through a stack of Dr. Ahn’s exams and the doorknob rattles behind you. When you don’t even need to turn around to know who it is, because he still sounds the same, still has that overwhelming presence. You’ve always sensed him before you felt him.

“There you are,” Dr. Lee says, ambling into the room before you can protest. He, too, is overwhelming, just in different ways. Immaculate posture that anchors his slight frame that’s always dressed impeccably and expensively. Wears a watch that’s triple your tuition. Shoes polished so bright they’re nearly blinding. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

This time it is an accusation.

Well, you found me, you want to say, but just knowing Seungcheol is behind him, lingering in that half-study room, half-hallway space, is enough to keep you quiet. Like if you speak you’ll summon him closer and you’ll no longer be able to pretend this is nothing more than a nightmare.

You plaster on a polite smile. Say, “Ah, here I am, kyosu-nim,” and put all your energy into trying to glue Seungcheol to the floor with your mind.

Which is fruitless, because Dr. Lee moves further into the room. Gestures for Seungcheol to follow him with an impatient huff, and the study room is small, sure, and with three people it feels cramped, but that’s not the reason it feels like all the air’s been sucked out of the room.

Seungcheol looks… different. He looks as anxious as you feel, and he sticks close to the wall like he’s trying to disappear. Dr. Lee introduces him with grave importance, unaware of your history, and the forced smile he offers you almost looks embarrassed.

You know Dr. Lee is still hammering away, probably giving you a stern talking-to for rejecting his request the first time, but you can’t tear your eyes away from Seungcheol. Feels like the world around you has reduced to a pinhead, all hyperfocus; feels like your lungs are sucking in stale air one at a time.

“...his father is a very good friend of mine, so I expect…”

You expected to feel nothing. Seungcheol had left to chase his dream—one you’d always been so supportive of that it sometimes felt like your dream, too—and, perhaps naively, you thought the distance and the years would’ve been enough. You expected your heart to have hardened. You expected all those nights you spent crying to hit you at full force. You expected anger, hurt—indifference, at the very least.

“...as many hours per week as you both can manage…”

But you should’ve known better. Should’ve expected the butterflies, the way your palms grow clammy, the way your heart rate spikes. Should’ve expected everything to feel upside-down. You should’ve expected to look at Seungcheol and feel sixteen and in love all over again.

“...you are responsible for his academic progress…”

And that simply will not do. You’ve spent the last few years pulling yourself out of that hole, clawing your way back to something resembling normal. You’ve purged the thought of him from your mind—let his scent fade from your sheets, an old sweatshirt he’d left behind; forgot the way his lips felt against every inch of your skin; forgot the way his entire being lit up when he laughed; forgot the safety he encompassed, the way he whispered all those sweet nothings.

You cannot go there again.

So you roll your shoulders back, smile politely. Say, “Ah, kyosu-nim, Choi Seungcheol-ssi seems very intelligent, I’m sure he is capable of being responsible for his own academic standing, don’t you think?”

Dr. Lee cannot disagree without all but calling Seungcheol an idiot, so he hovers before you in shocked silence. Makes a show of huffing and checking his watch, like he’s all of a sudden remembered he’s late for something and being inconvenienced by this conversation he started, and then he’s halfway out of the library with a terse, “Discuss and figure this out amongst yourselves,” thrown over his shoulder.

You have an entire dramatic exit planned in your head. Gather your things, fake a phone call that makes you sound authoritative and important, and brush past Seungcheol wearing your nicest perfume as if all of this is so far beneath you you can’t even bring yourself to care about it.

Of course, you actually have to brush by him for any of that to happen, and since you’ve already decided you will not go there again, you quickly scribble your email address onto a piece of paper and slide it across the table at Seungcheol, who has steadfastly remained planted just outside the door. “Here’s my email. I don’t have time to discuss this right now.” Seungcheol cocks an eyebrow. You start throwing things into your bag haphazardly. You know you look frantic and affected, but there’s not much you can do about that. “What? Send me a copy of your syllabus and what you want to prioritize. It’ll be easier to get through this if we have a plan instead of winging it.”

He seems to catch on to your distaste because he mirrors it. Scoffs as he rolls his eyes and says, “Yeah, no use spending more time together than we have to,” and if you hadn’t gone years without speaking, you would’ve seen right through it.

But you did, so it stings all the same.

As it typically does, the planet keeps spinning after your run-in with Seungcheol.

You grade Dr. Ahn’s coursework. Try running off your anxiety at the gym, even though it’s pretty good at keeping pace with you these days. You meet Kaori’s maybe-boyfriend sneaking out of your apartment early in the morning and he has the good sense not to mention your ex, but you chalk that up to the mess of hickeys covering his neck and not any sense of social decorum.

Other people’s embarrassment saves you a ton of your own, you’ve come to learn.

Throughout all of this, Seungcheol only emails you once to send you his course syllabus. Doesn’t mention tutoring or provide you with his schedule or ask for yours, so when you’re sitting in a bar with your friends, three or four drinks deep and feeling a little petty, you forward him the original tutoring request and make sure to bold, underline, and highlight the “Recommended Tutoring: High” part for good measure.

He doesn’t take your bait—electronically, at least—but he does show up to your office hours the following Tuesday.

Bag tossed onto the floor, he flops unceremoniously into the chair across from you and says, in lieu of a greeting, “They spelled your name wrong. On the door thing.”

“I know,” you reply, your smile polite and terse. Incredible how he has the ability to raise your blood pressure in milliseconds. “What can I help you with?”

“Depends. How long do you have?”

“Well, considering you’ve shown up to my office hours on time, I’m assuming you already know I’m here every Tuesday and Thursday from four to six. So”—you glance at the clock above the door—“assuming no one comes by who needs my help more than you do, you have approximately one hour and fifty-eight minutes.”

Seungcheol is quiet for a moment as he takes you in. His stare is weighted; it makes you feel a little green around the edges. Clinical and sharp, so far removed from the way he used to look at you. You clear your throat. “I looked over your syllabus. The good news is there’s only a midterm and a final and the rest is problem sets. The bad news is there’s only a midterm and a final so they’re weighted quite heavily. You really need to know this stuff inside-out to have any hope of passing.”

“That’s why you’re here, right? Dr. Lee specifically requested you.”

You huff a breath through your nose. “I’m here as supplemental help. I can’t take your exams or do your readings for you. What else are you taking this semester?”

He sighs, sinking further into the chair, very much playing the part of the heir who has no interest in any of this. Which… is unlike him, you think, if you’re even allowed to. The Seungcheol you knew years ago took everything so seriously. Never clipped corners or took shortcuts. Anyone else would think him a spoiled, petulant child. “Business Accounting and International Trade.”

“Could be worse,” you note. “At least those three courses are tangentially related.”

Seungcheol rolls his eyes. “Easy for you to say. I haven’t taken a fucking math class in years.”

You return it. “You remember how to add and subtract, don’t you?”

“I ruptured my ACL, not my…” He trails off, looking a little embarrassed that he can’t name a part of the—“Brain.”

Whatever you were going to quip back with dies on your tongue. It's the first time Seungcheol has broached the topic of his injury—the first you’re hearing of it at all, actually—and he says it like it’s a joke, like it’s not a thing at all, but the pain is all over his face. The bitterness of the situation he’s found himself in. The unfairness of it all.

And there are so many questions you want to ask that aren’t your place: if it’s fixable, if he’ll ever play again, how he’s coping. But you don’t really need to—you can’t imagine how you’d feel if someone suddenly pulled the rug out from under you. If everything contained within the four walls of your office suddenly disappeared.

Not that the man sitting across from you hadn’t already done that, but.

“Right,” you continue, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. You know Seungcheol—know he wouldn’t want you prodding, sticking your fingers in that particular wound. “I want you to take a look at this,” you say, handing over a printout you have saved from your undergrad tutoring days. “Tell me what looks familiar, what doesn’t; what does and doesn’t make sense.”

He looks down at the paper. Back up at you. Down at the paper again. “What the fuck is this?”

“I—what? Cheol, it’s my old notes on recitation. Surely you’ve already covered this—the syllabus says this is week one stuff.” He looks down at the paper again, and it’s so familiar, watching the life drain entirely from someone’s eyes.

You barely resist the urge to slam your face onto your desk a second time.

You meet Seungcheol at the sports center for your next tutoring session.

He likes the humidity and the smell of the chlorine by the pool. He also likes that it’s not the football pitch, so the two of you sit in the bleachers there and go over his lecture notes. Much to your surprise, Seungcheol talks a mile a minute. Has stars in his eyes when he says he finally understands elastic demand curves, supply shock; tells you he spent a whole hour making flashcards.

It’s the first time you’ve seen him so excited since your tutoring began—the first glimmer of hope you’ve felt since Dr. Lee cornered you in your library hideaway. None of this surprises you. Seungcheol has always been smart, even when football was his primary (and sometimes only) focus. He has more determination and grit than anyone you’ve ever met, so you’re not surprised he’s doing well, excelling, but you are surprised—

“Can I ask you something?” Seungcheol shrugs, shoves half a protein bar in his mouth and swallows without chewing. “Why are you… uh. Here?”

“At this university?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I am wondering about that, but I guess… why business?”

Seungcheol hums. Tucks his good knee to his chest and stares down at the pool. No one’s using it, and truthfully the two of you probably aren’t even allowed to be here, but you understand why he likes it. It’s nowhere near as secluded as the library and definitely not as air conditioned, but it is peaceful. Calm. The water laps against the coping in quiet, small waves.

“Ah, I don’t know. You know how it goes.”

You quirk an eyebrow. Never, in all the years you’ve known him, has Seungcheol done anything he didn’t want to do. All that grit and determination. “What about your father, then? Dr. Lee mentioned this was a favor to him. He’s a pretty important person to have in your Rolodex of favors.”

Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what this is: Seungcheol’s father has new money; worked from the bottom up, made some smart investment decisions that finally panned out after Seungcheol left for Seoul. Started doing his own thing, made a name for himself. Last you’d heard from your mother, Seungcheol’s brother was second-in-command. Hell, even your own brother did an internship there.

So you know what this is: a father helping his son after his dream was shattered, life turned upside-down. You can’t blame him, even if you’ve heard the whispers from all the way across campus. That Seungcheol is washed up now, trying to nepo his way into his father’s company because of it; that all he knows is sports and he should’ve stuck to that, what does he know about business, why is he the one Dr. Lee went out of his way to help.

Doesn’t stop any of them from smiling at him, though; doesn’t stop them from asking for autographs or selfies.

But you also know this isn’t something Seungcheol seems willing to discuss, so you crack a joke—“I mean, business. God, who’d wanna go into that?”—and go back to what he was willing to talk about.

You’ve never hated elastic demand curves so much in your life.

Deep in the throes of tutoring—when you can’t tell if it’s week two or week twelve—you make it back to your apartment just before ten, head pounding.

The door flies open just as you’re about to punch in the code, and there stands Ken, looking far more put-off than you’ve ever seen him. Looks defeated, if you’re being honest, like someone mopped up all his emotions and wrung them out like dirty dishwater.

“Oh, hi,” you say hesitantly. The man in front of you seems too much like a caged animal to let your guard down. “Everything okay?”

He aborts a nod halfway. Mutters an apology as he brushes by you and stalks down the hall, disappearing around the corner to the elevators. Usually he’s a talker—you haven’t been able to avoid a Seungcheol-related conversation in weeks—so you’re a little stunned. Stand there stupidly for a while, and that’s where Kaori finds you a moment later.

“You gonna stand out here all night, or…?”

“Oh—yeah, right.”

You follow her inside. Toe off your shoes and put them in the rack. Focus on the sound of the kettle whistling instead of the overbearing tension in the room. Drop your bag off in your room, throw on a sweatshirt three sizes too big and a comfy pair of socks. Rummage through the fridge for leftovers, contemplate what mindless show you’ll watch as you eat, and you do not, under any circumstances, ask Kaori what happened.

You don’t have to. You knew what this was going to be the first time Ken spent the night—the way he looked mortified to be meeting you in the shared kitchen at seven a.m., wearing a look that begged you not to tell your roommate he was sneaking out.

I, uh, have an early class, he’d said. You know how it is.

Maybe you should’ve called him on it then. Issued a warning-but-not-really. She’ll get attached if you don’t tell her. She should know it’s different for you, if it is.

But you’d convinced yourself it wasn’t your place. Kaori wouldn’t want you in her business like that, so you stayed quiet, just nodded before watching him slip his shoes on and close the door behind him so quietly you wouldn’t have known he left at all if you hadn’t been looking. Gone, just like a ghost.

So, yeah, you know exactly why your roommate looks haunted.

“I’m a few episodes behind on this if you want to watch with me,” you offer, pointing at the television with the remote. It’s a lie—you’ve never watched this show a day in your life, which Kaori seems to know—but she contemplates it nonetheless. “Also, my mom mailed us some cookies. I think they’re in the fridge.”

“Why are there cookies in the fridge?”

You huff a laugh. “They were outside the door this morning before I left for campus. I don’t know—just saw who the package was from and was like, oh, this must go in the fridge.”

She nods. Grabs the container and joins you on the couch. Sticks her feet beneath your butt and doesn’t mention a thing.

The closest she comes is a few days later. Catches you right before you head out to campus and asks how tutoring is going.

“Not bad, actually.”

Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes when she says, “That’s good. I’m glad things are going well for you two.”

Lee Chan, Sophomore makes his unexpected return at your office hours on an unsuspecting Tuesday.

“Can I help you?”

He doesn’t answer right away, just helps himself to the seat across from you. “Maybe,” comes his cryptic retort. “I was thinking about signing up for that crypto course next semester.”

You narrow your eyes. “No, you weren’t.”

He sighs. Looks a little panicked, like he can’t believe that didn’t work. “You’re right, you’re right. I, um—I wanted to come say thank you.” He pauses. “You know, for that… email you sent.”

You blink. “No, you didn’t.”

Lee Chan, Sophomore cracks immediately. Thunks his head on your desk and lets loose a pained sound. It nearly sounds like he’s wailing when he says, “I’m sorry! They put me up to it!”

What you’re able to piece together is this: Lee Chan, Sophomore has become a bit of a celebrity in the Student Services department ever since he met you, Choi Seungcheol’s tutor. And, like any smart, previously unpopular university student would do, he took advantage of it. Might’ve stretched the truth a little to make it sound like he knew more than he did, so now here he is, angling for information the girls with the photocards may or may not have paid him to get.

“They want to know about his girlfriend.”

“His what?”

What you’re able to piece together is also this: the Photocard Girls are certain Seungcheol is dating someone, based on little more than vibes. You suspect these vibes are their three degrees of separation, considering there was an abnormal amount of Change of Major files formed after his enrollment, but you tell Lee Chan that you don’t know anything and, even if you did, you wouldn’t put his business out there like that.

But some part of you still has this inexplicable urge to protect Seungcheol, so you match their offer with interest and tell him to say there’s nothing to report—not that you didn’t know, not that he couldn’t get anything out of you. Seungcheol isn’t dating anyone.

You don’t know if it’s true, but you figure that if it isn’t, he still deserves privacy.

Which is a notion you have trouble explaining a few hours later, when Seungcheol strolls into your office with a grease-stained paper bag full of cheese coin bread, offering one to you with a proud smile that drops slowly when you just stare in return.

“What’s wrong?”

Your mouth opens, closes, opens again. Nothing comes out, even though it should be simple. Some sophomore kid was just in here angling for information or the Student Services department is taking bets on whether or not you have a girlfriend would both suffice, but you cannot bring yourself to say the words.

What you settle on is, “Sorry, I just… had an interesting meeting before you got here.”

“Oh. Are you okay?”

You sigh. Tilt your head back to stare up at the ceiling. “It was about you, actually.”

Seungcheol chokes, starts stuttering over words you can’t make sense of. Says, “Me? Why? I passed my last exam—I mean, barely, but I still passed. And that wasn’t your fault! I didn’t study enough! I’ve been losing my mind over my International Trade class, that shit sucks—”

“It wasn’t about your grades, Cheol.”

“Oh.” Then, slowly, a lopsided, pleased smile overtakes his face. “Haven’t heard you call me Cheol in a while.”

“Seungcheol,” you correct.

He seems to forget all about the meeting. Tries again to offer you a coin bread before he threatens to eat them all himself, so you acquiesce mostly to shut him up, say you’ll bring the extras to Kaori. For some reason, you tell him about how much she’d loved the cookies your mom sent, and the nostalgia sets him off, gets him talking again, asking if they were the yakgwa she used to make when you two were kids.

They were, but you can’t seem to tell him that, either.

Seungcheol: sorry it’s last minute - running late. can you meet me at my place instead?

Seungcheol shared a location with you

You’re halfway to replying—I don’t think that’s appropriate—before you sigh and delete it. Midterms are only a few days away and you don’t have time to argue over where your tutoring sessions will be, so if Seungcheol wants to meet at his apartment that’s where you’ll meet him.

You read over the midterm notes on the train. Once, twice, and then a hundred more times until they’re nearly memorized, all so you can ignore the voice in the back of your head saying what a bad idea this is. That you have no business being on your way to your ex’s swanky part of town or integrating yourself into his life beyond tutoring at all. You shouldn’t know where he lives. Maybe you shouldn’t even have his phone number or answer his texts.

Not that there’s much you can do about it now, two stops away.

Seungcheol greets you warmly, if not a little rushed. Apologizes for the mess once you step inside, although it’s less “mess” and more “haven’t finished unpacking,” but there’s enough clear space to study at the dining table, so that’s where you set up, determined to keep things professional.

“Sorry again about this,” Seungcheol says, placing a can of cola in front of you as he takes the seat across. “I had to meet with my father and lost track of time, I guess.”

“Oh. How’s he doing?”

Seungcheol sighs, leans further back in the chair as runs a hand through his hair. A light brown, now. “Same as he always was, I guess. Talked about the business, about my brother. Can’t get him to shut up about that stuff most of the time.”

“The business is doing good, though.” You cough, clear your throat. “My, uh. My brother interned there during undergrad. I don’t know if your father told you that.”

You don’t know why you say it, because it’s clear from the brief flicker of pain on Seungcheol’s face that he hadn’t known, that no one had told him. And it hurts you too that they felt the need to keep it a secret, to protect Seungcheol from you even in tangential ways.

“He didn’t,” he admits, “but I’m sure he was happy to see him. He was, uh—he was glad to hear you’re my tutor. Said you were always smarter than all of us boys combined.”

You laugh. Hope it sounds casual instead of strained. “Well, no need to prove him right. Come on,” you say, tossing a study guide in his direction, “let’s get to work.”

Everything is alright for a while—nearly an hour at least. He has the formulas memorized and attributed to the correct equations. He can explain supply and demand, preference and utility, but things start to fall apart around budget constraints and constrained choice.

The formulas get mixed up. He grows frustrated when he doesn’t know the answers to your questions right away. Rolls his eyes and gets a little snappy when you correct him, try to explain things differently in a way he understands. At first he’s able to temper it, collect himself before things truly start spiraling out of control, but the longer the two of you sit there the more it all unravels.

He snaps, you snap back, and you can’t figure out why. You’ve survived this long in Seungcheol’s orbit even though you never thought you’d be around him again, and perhaps it was bound to explode eventually, but…

It’s the familiarity, you realize.

You and Seungcheol aren’t friends, though you’ve been playing at it for weeks now: meeting outside of the library or your office, the personal conversations bordering on reminiscing, being in his personal space. You don’t belong here. You don’t want to be his friend—you can’t be, not for real or pretend.

“That’s not what I’m say—”

“Then explain it better,” Seungcheol fires at you, eyebrows creasing. “You’re the tutor here.”

You roll your eyes. “I’m trying, okay? All I meant was—your answer isn’t wrong, but I know Dr. Lee and he’s going to want more than that in a response.”

“Right—not good enough, like I said.”

“I’m just asking you to expand on your answer—”

“And I’m telling you that’s all I’ve got. I’m not like you, all right? I don’t have all this shit just floating around in my head all the time. I’m not smart, I barely have any idea what’s going on half the time, and you sitting here being condescending about it is doing fuck-all to help.”

You inhale sharply, taken aback at the hostility in his voice. Suggest calling it for the night, say neither of you will be productive if you keep going like this, and neither of you bother to apologize.

So much of your relationship with Seungcheol was marred by clichés.

The two of you passing notes back and forth during class. You in the bleachers of all his games, screaming along to the team chants, waving a sign around with his name on it. Not realizing you had a crush on him at all until he liked someone else and it made your stomach hurt. Childhood friends turned lovers.

Another cliché: that it’s starting to feel like that all over again.

Seungcheol sits across from you in the library, econ textbook cracked in half in front of him as he pays no attention. Keeps grabbing his phone each time it vibrates across the table. Can’t fight the smile that forces its way onto his face when he reads whatever’s there.

Stupid, you think—both to do this and to think it’d play out any other way. Seungcheol left years ago. Probably lived ten lifetimes while he was away while you were here in this exact spot doing this exact thing. Barely lived half a life, just stuck your nose in textbooks and forced your way through.

“Cheol,” you say, trying to drag his attention back to the study guide. No use. He’s typing away, presses his tongue into the fat of his cheek as he responds. “Seungcheol,” you try again.

Also fruitless.

You have no claim here, you remind yourself—not to his time, not to him. He’s only here because someone else mandated it. You’re only here because someone else mandated it, but it stings all the same. Another reminder of what used to be, of what ended regardless of what you wanted. Another reminder that the role you used to play in his life is not the role you play now. That the space you used to take up created a vacancy, and eventually it was going to be filled.

And if this was anyone other than Seungcheol, if you were more emotionally evolved when it came to him, it wouldn’t gnaw at you as much. All of this would roll off your shoulders.

But it isn’t, and you’re not.

“If you’re not going to listen, then—”

“I am listening,” he interjects, but he’s not looking at you. Not looking at his textbook or his study guide. Keeps laughing and smiling at his phone, and it’s sick how bothered you are by it. That it feels like your stomach’s been turned inside-out with jealousy; with annoyance, because you don’t want to be here anyway, don’t want to do this anymore, and you’re wasting your time on someone who doesn’t appreciate it.

Perhaps he never did.

“What are we discussing, then?”

Still not looking up: “Consumer theory.”

You laugh—more a huff of air than anything, grin sardonically out of one corner of your mouth. Seungcheol sees none of it. “Wrong,” you answer, already expecting the way he shrugs it off. “I’m gonna skip ahead a few chapters, though. Consider it a freebie for your business class.”

It must be your tone that finally grabs his attention. Cutting, precise, purposeful. Seungcheol lowers his phone, quirks an eyebrow, wonders where this is going to go. It’s clear he’s pissed you off, that you’re itching for a fight. It’s clear the years of silence are finally coming to a head.

“Let’s talk about ROI. You know what that is?” You barely give him a second. “Return on investment. A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of several investments. So, let’s say I make one-hundred-thousand won on a ten-thousand won investment: my ROI is 90%. Are you following?”

He nods.

“Great, now let’s try something a bit more hypothetical.” You suck in a breath. “Let’s say I invest years of my adolescence into someone. A friend at first and then something more. Let’s say I played cheerleader, supported every hope and dream he had—went to every game, cheered him on, helped him practice his English. Held his hand and talked him down when the pressure felt overwhelming, when the only thing that felt inevitable was failure. Now, let’s say all I got in return was a stuttered, awkward apology as he dumped me and walked out the door. Let’s say that guy showed up again after years of silence just to once again waste my fucking time.”

The thing about pain is it’s not linear. What hurt five, ten years ago might not hurt today, but it might tomorrow; what hurt yesterday may never hurt again. The thing about pain is it lets you stick your head in the sand until it can’t anymore, and that’s where you are now: that window of time between Seungcheol walking out the door on the assumption you’d never see him again before he bulldozed his way back into your life has been slammed closed, locked up tight.

So you don’t even notice you’re crying until the room goes deathly silent and you can hear the drip drip drip of tears on paper. Until you watch Seungcheol’s hands flex and unflex in mid-air, stuck in that liminal space, wanting to reach out but knowing he has no right to. Until your chest aches so bad you’re sure you’re either about to break into stardust or cease to exist.

Until you say, “What, Choi Seungcheol, would you say my fucking return on investment was?” and he has nothing to say at all.

Kaori invites you to a party.

Just something small to celebrate the end of midterms and a classmate’s birthday. Nothing out of control or raucous, not even the kind of thing that’d earn a second glance from campus security. I won’t even make fun of you if you leave before eleven, is how she sold it to you, in addition to a small amount of begging and bargaining and a powerful set of puppy-dog eyes.

After everything the two of you have been through, you find it hard to say no.

So here you are, nearly eleven o’clock on a Friday, a cup of cheap beer in hand. A friend of a friend of a friend is wailing into a karaoke machine and although your ears are bleeding, it does feel nice for that to be your greatest worry. You aren’t thinking about your classes or how you’ve been prioritizing everyone else’s academic success. You aren’t thinking about whatever’s going on between Kaori and Ken. You aren’t thinking about Seungcheol.

At least you aren’t, until he walks through the door.

You’re going to continue not thinking about him at all—not about the fact he’s alone or how good he looks in a simple black T-shirt that’s a little taut in the shoulders. You’re not going to think about the way the air shifts, like the universe knows he’s important and is willing to accommodate. You’re not going to think about how Kaori catches your eye across the room, recognizes him from all her internet searches, and the way she mouths oh my god he’s so beefy at you.

You’re not going to think about how guilty you feel that she doesn’t know, because if you do you’re certain it’ll take over.

You watch Seungcheol work the room; watch as he floats between conversations, as strangers fall over themselves at the sight of him. How eager everyone is to give him something and how reluctant he is to take them. You watch as he winds up in the same circle as Kaori and how she must mention you, oh, your tutor is my roommate, because there’s a question in return before he turns and meets your gaze.

You wonder why the distance between you feels more insurmountable now than ever before.

Seungcheol finds you in your office.

It’s not a Tuesday or a Thursday, far later than four to six in the evening, but he doesn’t even bother knocking before he’s barreling in, stifling your space with his bad energy.

You haven’t seen him in nearly two weeks. Not since the party, if that even counts. Hasn’t bothered to reply to any of your texts or emails, and that was just fine by you, if that’s how he wanted to act, but it isn’t until he’s brooding on the other side of your desk that you realize you’re still aggrieved, too. Feels a little too familiar, him leaving you behind and in the dark.

So you don’t mean to—typically have much more professionalism than this—but when he tosses a stapled stack of papers with a barely-passing grade on your desk and says, “This is your fault,” the words come automatically and without forethought.

“Fuck off, Seungcheol.” It’s not your words that take him by surprise; more so the roll of your eyes, the accompanying huff. The impression that all of this is beneath you and nothing more than a mere annoyance. That however affected you were two weeks ago is not how affected you are anymore. “That’s what happens when you blow off your tutoring for two weeks because you’re a coward.”

He laughs, incredulous; unable to help the sound the tumbles out of his mouth. “I’m a—I’m a coward?”

“Yes,” you reply, tone giving away nothing. All he sees is feigned nonchalance despite the hurricane you feel brewing beneath the surface. “This,” you continue, pinching the corner of the paper between your fingertips and disposing of it in the trashcan beneath your desk, “is all on you, but do please let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to blame me for. I’m all ears.”

You don’t miss it: the way Seungcheol’s eyes grow wide at your ‘I’m all.’ The way he thinks you’re going to punctuate that sentence with yours, and it nearly has bile rising in your throat. Makes you want to scream, rip at your hair. If the last few months have taught you anything, it’s that you are still hopelessly in love with the man across from you—the man that continues to leave before he’s left, always at your expense.

So, yeah—Seungcheol is a coward, but only when it comes to you.

But he doesn’t look much like one now, gripping so hard at the edge of your desk that his knuckles have gone white, baseball cap pulled down low enough his eyes are barely visible. He’s always been overwhelming, always carried himself with an exaggerated arrogance even when it wasn’t warranted, always took everything so seriously, and maybe that’s why you’d thought he’d treat you the same way. Take you seriously. Wouldn’t just throw it all away on a maybe thing, and that’s why it's been years and you still aren’t over it.

Maybe Seungcheol is a coward, and maybe so are you.

Because not once since he’s been back have you been able to say what you mean. Can’t seem to tell him about the anger, the hurt, the heartbreak. Played it all off as petty nonchalance because you foolishly thought that would hurt him, that you’ve been reduced to simmering ash, no hope left for a fire.

“I could never blame you for a goddamn thing,” he says, voice so deep you could drown in it.

You so desperately want to know. You don’t want to know anything at all. You want Seungcheol to explain everything to you in detail and spoil the ending, but only if it’s guaranteed to be happy. Enduring another loss like the first time—you’re not sure you can take it. Not after you two have crossed paths like this, because you’ve never quite believed in fate but you think that has to mean something. That so much time and life had transpired and you two came back together.

Today, though, it doesn’t look like you’re going to get any answers.

Seungcheol straightens, looms at full height. Digs into the pocket of his sweatpants and pulls out a thumb drive. Wordlessly, he hands it over, and then he’s gone just as abruptly as he’d arrived.

Again.

Kaori wants to spend the weekend moping, and you can’t come up with a good reason not to join her.

She doesn’t mention Ken once. Not when she’s sobbing over A Silent Voice and Toradora! after that. Not when she keeps glancing at her phone every couple minutes to see if she has any texts. Not when you—only halfway paying attention between grading and your own assignments—suggest ordering something for delivery, maybe that new burger place down the street you heard was good, and Kaori shuts it down so vehemently you can only assume it was Ken’s favorite place.

Kaori just cries over the man with the big dick she never expected to take so seriously, and not even your stonewalling makes her feel ashamed of it.

And there’s respectability in that kind of openness and vulnerability. At least whatever she’s feeling is honest; at least she can admit she’s sad. You think watching Kaori process her breakup might help you process yours too, years too late, so you suck in a breath and ask, “Can I tell you something or is now not a good time?”

Kaori looks over at you. Dabs a soggy tissue at her eyes. “Well, I guess it depends,” is her answer, and she doesn’t shy away from how waterlogged her voice sounds. “If you’re going to tell me you’re a Takasu and Kawashima shipper, maybe, but if it’s anything worse I’m not sure I could take it.”

“I—what? Who even are they?” She gives you a half-hearted thumbs up. You sigh in response, sink further into the couch. “It’s, uh.” Clear your throat. “Do you remember when we met sophomore year? At that party? And I told you I wasn’t looking for anything and you said, and I quote, why not, I have a sixth sense for this kind of thing and I know that guy will have a huge—”

She hides her face behind her hands. “Ew, god, yes I remember that. My dick whisperer era. How embarrassing.”

“Right. And I told you I wasn’t looking for anything because I’d just gotten out of something.”

“Not really by choice, if I remember correctly. I told you if it was quiet it should’ve been loud, and then you never talked about it again.”

You nod. “I—yeah, that sounds like something I would’ve said.” You suck in a deep breath. “Listen, this is probably gonna sound bad considering I did never talk about it again, but—”

“Hey,” Kaori says, nudging you with her foot. Meant to be comforting, somehow. “It’s okay. There’s a lot you don’t know about me, too… most of which I’m not sure you should, actually.”

A laugh forces its way out, gives you a nice reprieve from the anxiety of the conversation you’re about to have. The need to explain it all, the need for advice. Maybe it’s not her—or anyone else’s—business, but you think you’ve kept this to yourself long enough. You and Seungcheol loved each other, once, and it seems foolish that no one knows.

Maybe Kaori had been right. Maybe love should be shouted from the rooftops; exist out in the open. Maybe something hidden in the shadows can never thrive in the light, and you knew it back then, deep down, but now it seems so obvious.

You think back to a few days before the library. Think about how things didn’t feel good but they felt okay. Think about the frustrated crease between Seungcheol’s eyebrows as he stared down at his textbook and how all you’d wanted to do was smooth it. Think about how you’d rolled your lips and tried not to laugh; how you thought it’d take a miracle to help Seungcheol pass this class.

Think about: What is the difference between the short-run and the long-run from the perspective of production theory?

Think about the short-run of your and Seungcheol’s relationship—that you’d burned bright and fast, even though it’d felt like a million years. Hadn’t dared to consider the long-run because anything beyond that bubble felt impossible.

Think about: Which of the following is not a property of isoquants?

Think about the way Seungcheol’s eyes lit up when he knew the answer. That they’re always linear, he said, and you smiled at his enthusiasm, raised your hand to high-five him and dropped it when he hadn’t noticed.

You think about the explanation—isoquants can be linear when inputs are perfectly substitutable—and what those graphs look like. Downward sloping, left to right. Think about how the graphs change when the isoquants are perfect complements.

L-shaped. Less straight as the inputs become poorer substitutes.

You know what your and Seungcheol’s graph would’ve looked like back then.

So it’s easy, almost, to tell Kaori everything. You tell her about growing up in Daegu, about the smell of the azaleas at Biseulsan in the spring. You tell her about how your parents had befriended the neighbors, how they had a kid your age, that that kid was Seungcheol—yes, that Seungcheol.

She’s able to anticipate the rest from there, but you fill in the blanks of what she can’t: being sixteen and falling in love, holding hands, the clandestine notes. All those football matches and how your throat would be hoarse from cheering. How nauseous you’d felt applying to university in Seoul, how excited you were when Seungcheol said he was coming with you. That, after you arrived, it felt like you were living in fast-forward. Barely any time to breathe or adjust; no time to just be you and Seungcheol. You had to be a student, someone responsible; Seungcheol had to be a phenom.

“Could you feel it was going to happen?” Kaori asks, now sat ramrod straight, all her attention on you. “Like, did you know?”

“I don’t know,” you admit. “Maybe I did? It’s hard to say now, all this time later. I know things definitely felt different, like life was pulling us in opposite directions.” You laugh, bitterness coloring the edges. “You couldn’t go two blocks without seeing him on some billboard, and I was just… normal, you know? I wasn’t some rising star athlete like he was, I just went to my classes. How was I supposed to compete with something like that?”

Your roommate hums, leans back into the pillows as she stares up at the ceiling. “I don’t think you were. Maybe that’s why Seungcheol was worried—maybe he felt like you were losing your own identity feeling like you had to keep up.”

You want to push back, argue that you weren’t, that you didn’t, but the truth is that it’s possible. That the shadows created by Seungcheol’s dreams were so massive you wouldn’t be surprised if they unintentionally swallowed you up. “It still wasn’t his choice to make,” you say, voice barely above a whisper.

And Kaori already knows all about your hurt, listened as you explained it all and laid everything bare. So when she says, “Sometimes that’s just how it goes, though, babe,” it doesn’t feel condescending. “We do the best we can with what we’ve got at the time. You can say now it wasn’t Seungcheol’s choice to make, because it’s been almost five years and you’ve made a life for yourself separate from him. But the—god, this is gonna sound so patronizing, I am so sorry—but you guys were so young. No one has it all figured out at that age.”

She snorts, runs a hand through her messy hair. “Shit, I’m nearly halfway to thirty and I still don’t know anything.” Adopts a frown. “What do you want now? Do you want closure? Want to try to fix things and become friends?”

“I don’t know,” you admit, biting at a hangnail. “He actually, um. The other day when he stopped by my office, he left me a USB drive? And before you ask, no I did not already look at it.”

“A USB drive? Who does this guy think he is, James Bond?” A pause. “Are you gonna look at it, though?”

You do.

Not until the silver, midnight light creeps in through your bedroom curtains and you’ve stared at the ceiling long enough; waited long enough for texts that never came, for divine intervention to, well, intervene. It never did—fair enough—so you decide to take fate by the reins. Grab your laptop, instant headache from the screen, stick the drive into the port.

It takes a second for it to load, but when it does: dozens of videos, organized by date. Vlogs, by the look of them—some from before your breakup but the majority of them from after.

You’re not sure what you expected, but it wasn’t this.

You click on the first one: a month and a half before both of you moved to Seoul. A fresh-faced Seungcheol appears on your screen, cheeks still round with adolescence. He’s in his room back in Daegu, can’t get the camera angle right. Nostalgia hits you like a ton of bricks as it pans to the side, to the wall behind his bed, and you see all his old posters. Mostly football players you couldn’t name, some girl group he used to love, a few movies. Just below them are some of the notes you’d written him in school, and they’re all you can focus on as he talks about how excited he is for the move.

The next: a few weeks after you’d started classes. By then, Seungcheol was well into the swing of things with Seoul FC. Already a big fish in a small pond, tryout offers from European teams starting to roll in. You can hear yourself in the background stressing over your first exam, wishing a generational curse upon your calculus professor. In the video, Seungcheol laughs, whispers like he’s telling the camera a secret as he talks about how nervous he is for his future. I don’t know why, he says, but it just feels like everything is about to change.

There’s a long pause between that one and the next. You understand why when you look at the date: three months after your breakup. Your hands hover uselessly above your keyboard. Whatever answers you’ve been looking for the last few years are probably in this video, but you can’t bring yourself to open it. Not right away, at least.

You click on a different one at random. Seungcheol’s somewhere in Europe, judging from the language on the signs behind him. Snow falls quietly—whenever he filmed this, it must’ve been early. No one else is around, and he cracks a joke that it’s a good thing, people would probably think he was crazy if they saw him. He doesn’t tell you where he’s going but he narrates the entire walk: points out a cafe he’s grown to love. The way to get to his practice stadium from where he’s standing. Pauses near a restaurant and laughs ruefully, shakes his head, says, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but one of my teammates set me up on a blind date here and I got stood up. You’d probably think that was funny.

(You do. It also makes your chest ache.)

One from two years ago: Seungcheol in a hotel room, clearly nervous. He raises his hand to wave at the camera and you can see the corners of his nails bitten raw. Dark circles beneath his eyes; cheekbones more pronounced than you’ve ever seen them. On the screen, Seungcheol sighs, rakes a hand through freshly-bleached hair. Sucks in a deep breath as he says, I’m so nervous. I’m so—so fucking nervous and I don’t. Fuck, I don’t know what to do. I want to call you because you always knew what to say but that’s so fucking selfish. God, we haven’t spoken in years, and it’s my—that’s my fault, I know, so I brought this all on myself. I just want to hear your voice.

Another from a week after that: the color’s returned to his face, and he’s recording from what looks like a penthouse apartment. Sleek, modern; a small white dog napping on the bed beside him. He smiles, looks like he got his teeth fixed, looks like he’s no longer carrying around the weight of the world. Talks endlessly and excitedly about some tournament. Talks so fast you can barely keep up. Talks around words tinged with languages you don’t understand.

Seungcheol wins a championship. Records a drunk vlog from the same night, hair soaked through with god-knows-what—water, champagne, you don’t know. But he looks radiant. Looks like the culmination of two decades of dreaming. He looks happy, free, at peace. He looks like the reason he let you go, why he had to go away.

You scroll to the bottom of the files. Pause at the last video, dated seven months before the term started.

“Hi,” he says, and you can immediately tell everything is all wrong. Seungcheol’s in the dark, face only visible enough to see the tears tracking on his cheeks. “This is going to be the last one of these I make. I don’t know if you, uh—I’m sure you aren’t paying attention to me—my career—anymore, but. I, um. I got hurt. Ruptured my ACL. They’re not sure I’ll…” A sob escapes him. Has you wanting to climb through the screen to hold him, thumb away his tears, tell him everything is going to be okay. “They don’t know if I’ll ever play again.”

Seungcheol no longer looks happy, free, at peace. “Maybe you’ll be happy to hear that,” he continues. “Maybe it’ll help you to know I threw away our relationship for nothing.”

Cut to black.

The sudden silence is deafening. Has you desperately clicking back to the video you’d skipped, the one from just after your breakup. Seungcheol looks the same in that one, too, like the life has been drained out of him.

I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s not like I’ll ever show these to you now, since I…

I’m sure I owe you an explanation. To be honest, I don’t know what I’m doing, I just—things have been so hard, and I’m still trying to make sense of it all. I feel like my life went from zero to a hundred before I could even blink and now I’m scrambling. I didn’t think it was fair to—to drag you through that. Me being away, moving to an entirely different continent. I have faith we could do it, I just. I don’t know, baby, I don’t…

You deserve to have your own life. Be your own person. I’m so scared that the world will never see you for who you are—so beautiful and intelligent and kind. You don’t deserve to be reduced to my partner. And if you ever see this, I know you’re gonna roll your eyes. Probably call me a mean name because I took the choice away from you, because you think I’m trying to be selfless and heroic, and you’d be right. It’s not fair, and I wish I could tell you I’m sorry.

I wish I could just… pluck out my brain and give it to you, because even if it killed me to do it, at least it makes sense to me. And I don’t—I don’t want you to think I’m not hurting. I’ve been sick to my stomach since I left. I know I’m making a mistake, I know I am, I just—how do I do what I think is right in the long-run when it’s not what I want right now, or ever?

I don’t want to get over you. I don’t want you to get over me, and that’s how you know I’m not acting selflessly, because you should. I want you to always be happy, I just… wish it was with me.

So, I’m going to keep making these. I’m going to take you along for the ride, wherever it takes us, because you should be here but I can only hope you can one day understand why you’re not. I’m so—I’m so sorry, I don’t…

I’m sorry.

I love you.

You fall asleep and dream that you were the one meant to meet him at that restaurant.

The first thing you do is make a call to your mother.

“Could you send another container of yakgwa?”

On the other end of the line, your mother tuts, motherly intuition audibly kicking into overdrive. Is probably wearing that all-knowing, sly grin she always does when you try to be coy and evasive. “What happened to the last container I sent?”

“Ah, you know Kaori loves those. They barely lasted an hour after I told her what was in there.”

She hums an acknowledgement. Sounds like she takes a sip of tea. “I remember someone else being quite fond of those cookies, too.”

“Well, they are the most popular cookies in the country, so.”

After haranguing you into admitting they’re for Seungcheol and not your roommate, your mother promises to send them quickly. A few days at most, which buys you enough time to figure out how you’re going to approach the man in question.

The vlogs have turned your entire world upside-down. Answered questions you hadn’t even known you had. Took all that anger and resentment you’d been holding onto and set it free, and now you’re just left with… a void. Want to mend things, and it makes you wonder if such a thing is even possible, if it’s too late, but you don’t let those thoughts get very far.

Instead, you let them spur you into action. Have you sitting in front of your laptop at your desk, office hours long since over, silence creeping in the more the department empties. The thrum of the airconditioning and the tick-tick-tick of the clock are all the only company you have.

You worry if it’ll show on camera, how out of sorts you feel: sweating from the nerves, dabbing at your hairline; cheeks warm to the touch. But you suck in a breath anyway, steel yourself. Look at your webcam and the daunting red circle…

And start recording.

He hadn’t gotten it at first. Not really.

There’d been a container of yakgwa outside his door with his USB drive taped to the top of it. No note—not that he needed one to know who it was from, but he wasn’t sure what it was. A goodbye? A please fuck off forever and never contact me again?

He’d just taken them inside. Ate too many of the cookies while feeling sorry for himself. Maybe had a glass or two of wine to compound the issue, and never, ever considered contacting you. Didn’t think he could bear it if you never wanted to see him again, but he just…

Well, he was drunk and alone and he missed you, and he’d rewatched all those videos he recorded a million times before when he was like this, so what was a million and one?

It’d been the same as every time before: he smiled at the happy parts, cried at all his old wounds. Wanted to reach through the screen and strangle his past self for including that part about the blind date, because he never wanted to date anyone who wasn’t you, why would he say that, felt mortified at the thought of you watching that—

And then there it was.

All the way at the bottom. A new video. One that hadn’t been recorded by him—

Hi, Cheol, you say, and that’s all it takes to reduce him to a sobbing, yearning mess. I’m not sure what to say here. I don’t really record much—sometimes for lectures when the professors are too busy, but never anything personal like this, but I watched every single one you made for me and I thought I should return the favor.

I wanted to tell you everything I’ve been up to since you left, but it hasn’t been much. I got my degree. Tutored a lot in undergrad—the same thing I’m tutoring you in now, actually. I was good at it and it felt good to have something that was mine, you know? I almost moved for grad school. Thought for a while I was going to wind up in New York, but then my parents divorced and it felt like too much, too scary, so I stayed. Kaori also stayed, so we got an apartment together. It’s not much, definitely not as nice as your place, but it’s good enough.

I don’t think I ever told you, but she was seeing a guy for a bit and he was… obsessed with you, to say the least. Thought you were the coolest person in the world. They aren’t seeing each other anymore. Ended pretty badly, but—speaking of which, maybe steer clear of Student Services for a while, too.

Sometimes it felt like failure that I wound up staying here. That I had scholarships from all these far-away, prestigious places and didn’t take advantage of them. That I gave into my fear. And now… I don’t know. Maybe there’s a reason I stayed behind. Maybe there’s a reason you ended up back here, too.

Whatever happens—I don’t want you to think I still blame you. Kaori says we do the best we can with what we’ve got at the time, and I understand now that’s what you did. Even though it hurt me, you were trying to protect me. I get it now. And I’m sorry you had to go through all of that alone. I can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been to go to all these places you didn’t know. To have to deal with your injury, the loss of a dream.

You said in one of your videos that you just want me to be happy, and that’s all I want for you, too, whatever that looks like.

Here’s my address if you ever want to come by to talk.

I love you, too.

—and then he’d been up and out the door, feeling stone cold sober, running to the front of his building to wait for his ride.

Felt like the drive took hours. Must’ve hit every red light between his apartment and yours. Took the steps two at a time just to get to your door faster.

There’s a man already standing outside your door when he gets there. One that looks shocked to see him, stars in his eyes, and when Seungcheol says, “Oh, you must be Kaori’s ex,” he looks more like he wants the earth to swallow him whole. Embarrassed in front of his idol.

He knocks on your door and gets no response. Knocks again, harder this time, and he has to try really hard to stifle his laughter when your voice yells from the inside, “Fuck off, Kenji, I already told you she’s not here!”

“It’s me,” Seungcheol yells back.

There’s quiet again. Just enough time for it to feel like his heart is going to beat right out of his chest and follow Kaori’s ex down the hall.

Then you’re yanking the door open—slowly, so slowly, like you’re scared it’s not actually him. Your eyes are brimming with tears when they meet his own, and he doesn’t let himself think, just goes on instinct, when he grabs for you, hands on your cheeks, and presses his lips to yours.

Somehow you taste the same.

Somehow you taste like redemption.

You taste like home.

Seungcheol kisses you until the tears slow. Kisses you until the universe realigns, until he could map your mouth in the dark. Kisses you until all you’re all he knows again.

When he pulls away, you’re gripping at his sweatshirt, don’t want to let him go. He presses his forehead to yours, offers up a million more apologies, starts talking nonsense. Says he’s going to drop microeconomics, what the hell does he know, he barely has a passing grade anyway, what does it matter, he’s such an idiot—

And then you say, “You came back,” and nothing else matters.

“I always will.”

(Later on, as you’re trying to steady your breathing, slick with sweat, your thigh thrown over Seungcheol’s hip as he stares down at you, dopey smile on his face, you say, “Choi Seungcheol, don’t you dare drop that class. I have worked my ass off to get you to barely-passing.”)

if you’ve made it this far thank you so much for reading! i am still very new at writing for seventeen, so i hope this was acceptable. i'm now going to throw myself into the warped tour vernon fic and will hopefully not go another 7+ months without posting anything. 😭

i would love to hear your thoughts! <3

[bsdtakanenohana]

My Opinion On Every Single Bungou Stray Dogs Ship

Part Five- Het Ships V

This is the last one for m/f ships! I swear there should be more, but I guess as random as some pairings seem, people aren’t just pairing any woman with any man, because there’s lots of female characters who were not paired with many of the various male characters (for example, even though Yosano had a random ship with Mark, there was none with Tanizaki or Fukuzawa who are people she actually interacts with). This makes the ships I’ve seen so far more interesting because that means the random pairings were actually thought out by the people who ship them.

Part One, Two, Three, & Four

Tachigin/ Michizou Tachihara x Gin Akutagawa: The most popular m/f ship in this fandom. Which I will never understand. I understand why people ship them, but it being the most popular het ship is frankly ridiculous. Gin has like four lines and while we do know more about Tachihara he’s a side character through and through. It would make more sense for the most popular m/f ship to be characters that we know more about, who are more relevant to the plot, and who are more popular. Because I’ve seen the most popular character polls and neither of them make the cut, so how is their ship more popular than all the others? I believe part of it is the way the fandom views Gin (and it’s not a good thing) but I don’t want to get into that conversation. I think it’s an intriguing ship but I don’t care enough about it to be so invested in it. And I don’t understand others’ minds. And you know what? Even though I think this should be a four, I’m giving it a slightly lower score just because I’m petty and don’t like that it’s so popular. 3.5/10

He’s pressing his gun up against her boob, no way he didn’t feel something.

Tachiguchi/ Michizou Tachihara x Ichiyo Higuchi: I haven’t seen this pairing outside of the ot3 of them with Gin. 🤷🏽‍♀️ I don’t really have an opinion on this. I don’t see it, it’s just there as a pairing of two people who work together. 2/10

Tachiguchi 2.0/ Shunzen Tachihara x Ichiyo Higuchi’s younger sister: What? Where are y’all coming up with these things? ?? 0/10

Tachiteru/ Michizou Tachihara x Teruko Okura: I’m sure before the age reveal this was a ship with a lively little fandom. I’ve never seen anyone mention this ship, but I’m interested in how y’all portrayed them in a romantic light. 2/10 EDIT: I saw that there was a translation error that made it seem like she was 12 years old but actually she was 12 when Fukuchi found her, which we don’t know the exact date because it said after the War, and the timeline is a little messy. But I do assume she’s an adult now, even if we don’t know how many years ago she was 12. (Asagiri please bring back the character info sheets 🙏🏽)

Why is she so happy 🤣

Tachilucy/ Michizou Tachihara x Lucy Maud Montgomery: Uhh if you’re trying to ship Lucy with every redhead you should know he’s a fake ginger and all you skipped Oda and Chuuya. Also I don’t think their personalities would even mesh well. 1/10

Tanilucy/ Junichiro Tanizaki x Lucy Maud Montgomery: No. 0/10

Terusigma/ Teruko Okura x Sigma: Finally, a ship with someone she’s too old for! (Teehee) My answer is no and also this fandom is too infatuated with the idea of enemies to lovers or enemies and lovers 🙄 -1/10

Tsujichuu/ Mizuki Tsujimura x Chuuya Nakahara: They met once, but I don’t know enough about her personality to say if they’d have chemistry. However, back in 2021 I remember seeing an ask someone sent in to one of y’all asking something like “do you think they hooked up” and instead of the OP saying “dude wtf” there was a genuine answer typed out on whatever possible relationship they had. So y’all are serious with this one for whatever reason. -/10

Tsujizai/ Mizuki Tsujimura x Osamu Dazai: Why? That’s a serious question. -/10

Vernwells/ Jules Gabriel Verne x Herbert George Wells: This is kinda funny, imo. But no. 0/10

Yuanzai/ Yuan x Osamu Dazai: I’ve been seeing more posts about this ship recently and it’s so confusing. Out of all the female characters y’all wanna make ship content with Dazai, you chose her?? Just ship him with an OC at this point. But she has cute pink hair (I refuse to acknowledge Teruko as having pink hair, the manga gave her a shade of red [as in actual red not orange] and I like that better for her) so I’ll give the ship half a point for that. 0.5/10

[wutheringmights]

Anyone ask for the commentary yet for the latest chapter >:3 *dies*

You’d be the first!

So this chapter is cursed. Let’s talk about that first. 

You probably noticed that my writing output has been in the gutter this year. I have not written half as much as I should have. There are two main reasons why. The first is that I finally decided to get off my ass and have a more enriching personal life. This means a lot more of my evenings and weekends have been spent exploring other hobbies or taking weekend trips. I don’t regret any of those, and they have really improved my life overall (but I do write more when I am a sad little shut-in).

The second, more pressing reason was that there was a very important wedding I was the maid of honor for. That means I have spent a lot of my free time this year planning a bachelorette, a bridal shower, and helping with general wedding prep. I honestly was not nearly as busy as an expert maid of honor would have been, but all of this took up so much of my brain space that I was having trouble being creative. Multiple times, I would go to a coffee shop with plans to write, only to spend the entire time stressing about buying a new dress or researching hotels. 

I did not realize how stressed I was about this whole thing until literally this week. The wedding is over now, and I am already biting huge chunks into the upcoming chapter. I just have so much more brain space to write. I feel free. 

All that’s to say that this chapter was primarily written the month leading up to the wedding, and my head was Not There. I was struggling to figure the chapter out, and that struggle is reflected in the quality of the prose. For that, I apologize, as inevitable as it was. 

I won’t make any major revision to this chapter, but I have plans to redo my proof-reading. There is an egregious number of typos in this chapter, more than I consider acceptable for a one person team of me. 

(That being said, my typos have gotten worse this past year; ever since AI was integrated into Grammarly and Google Docs, both have been godawful for helping me fix errors. I appreciate how lenient you all have been with my most blatant mistakes.) 

Now that all of that is established, let’s talk about this chapter.

This introduction to Proxi is really, really bad. I am frankly a little embarrassed that I went ahead and published it. While I had a vision for the first few scenes of Link trying to help Proxi and Jakucho’s aid afterwards, I didn’t realize until the day of writing that I actually had 0 plans for how Warriors and Proxi’s first conversation would go. 

I am not even joking. I have a bunch of plans for their interactions together afterwards (which will appear next chapter). But their first conversation once Proxi started to get better? None. 

So what little they talked together here feels like a waste of space. What’s worse, I don’t even know what I would change the dialogue to in order to fix it. My brain is blank. I don’t know.  It’ll probably hit me in a few weeks. This is the trouble with publishing what is essentially the first draft of a story. If my initial ideas are solid, it’s great. But when my brain farts, I’m screwed.

That being said, my favorite part of the past section is that first half where Link frets over how to help Proxi, as well as Jakucho’s speech about the fairies disappearing. 

I have been trying to subtly establish this era of Hyrule as being one that is shocking devoid of magic; having Jakucho mourn the loss of fairies and what omen that could mean feels like I am ruining things. Nonetheless, I just really like the idea of Jakucho having this small moment of wonder over seeing a fairy, as well as her verbalizing these fears that darker times are ahead. 

I think I just enjoy reading about older people having the same anxieties about the world as younger people. It’s more comforting to me than an all-knowing mentor. 

So this chapter has a lot of random names splattered all over the place. Me being me, I stole some of the names from other media and such I enjoy. I’ll point out any fun connections as I find them. 

So for Proxi’s list of names for Link, there’s two of note. The first is Grimshaw, which is the name of the male lead from Lightlark. Despite how much I talk about Fourth Wing on this blog, Lightlark is the bad book I am truly passionate about. 

The second is Wen-li, which is for Yang Wen-li from Legend of the Galactic Heroes. He’s the character of all time for me, and I will go insane if I think about him for too long.

This Proxi section was supposed to go on a little longer, but by the time it came to write it, I was 100% over this chapter. Luckily, next chapter will be a fresh slate and I can finally deliver on all my promises about Proxi’s return. 

I cannot emphasize enough how frustrating it is to know that I fucked up an important character’s return. It’s... sigh. C’est la vie. Whatever. 

Onto the present day:

So I have a particular problem with the present day section. The last chapter, this chapter, and the one I am writing now are all the same plot point in my outline. I severely underestimated how long the lead up to a Very Important Event was going to be. No doubt, I have probably made similar mistakes before. But I am trying to finish this story, so any time I have to draw out the pacing, I die a little on the inside.

I think I initially planned to just skim over how Warriors got to the castle, but then I realized that this was the politics stuff that is the supposed bread and butter of the story. But the reason why I wanted to skim over everything was (as Legend pointed out) fucking networking.

What’s worse, I got to this chapter and realized that, realistically, Warriors should have to spend at least a few months building up a cult of personality. This should be a (purposeful) multi-chapter arc. I don’t want to do that, so I tried to really emphasize how much Warriors was using his reputation as the hero and legends surrounding it to his advantage. Does it still feel unrealistic? Yeah, but we’re just going to have to cope with it. 

Sevas is named for the male lead in Ava Reid’s Juniper & Thorn, which was sitting on my desk when I realized the priest needed a name. 

Colonel Remarque is named for Erich Remarque, author of All Quiet On the Western Front. I think I had made a post name-dropping him around the time I got to this character.

Matthew Thorn... again, Thorn is for Reid’s book. Matthew was just the most bland name I could think of. 

Vlad Dubarry... so I was watching both Castlevania and Rose of Versailles and took the first and surname from both respectively. 

Between the conversation with the priest, the provost office, and Remarque, I was trying to give out a few more details every time to paint a clear picture without boring the reader by reiterating information over and over again. Unfortunately, I still managed to write three pretty boring scenes. 

That being said, I think the friction Remarque offered was interesting to write, even if I had to resist pointing out every single plot hole during it. 

So everything from the castle to Spirit being poisoned took me the longest to write. I knew it was boring, but I could not figure out a way to make it more exciting without omitting the networking stuff entirely. I didn’t really hit a stride with this chapter until I got to Spirit being poisoned. 

The entire time Spirit was being poisoned, I was rubbing my hands together maniacally. I have been searching for a good moment to have a true poisoning in this story and I finally got it. 

Also, I think if this chapter was of higher quality, someone out there would have realized that, for purely medical reasons, Hyrule had to technically give Spirit and smooch on the lips. There should be at least two very silly memes about this. But, alas. The quality.

You can tell I ran into the realization that, realistically, the Royal Guard’s structure would be more complex than I have alluded to previously. Very importantly, you can tell I realized that I should have mentioned the King’s Guard sooner if they were really going to be this powerful subsection of the Royal Guard.

I actually like how the idea that the King’s Guard is only super powerful in matters relating to the king, aka: Castle Town, and is pretty insignificant otherwise. The bureaucratic bullshit that must cause feels very real. But you can tell that I have no idea what rank that would make Endicott. I have been bending over backwards to not state that man’s ranking. 

That being said, his absence from Warriors’s social circle until now is kinda important. Put a pin in that. It will come back.

Also, Endicott is a name I stole from Over the Garden Wall. I picked it because it sounds like the name of someone important. I picked Roald at randomed.

I am really happy that a lot of you have been enjoying the growing distrust the Chain has for Spirit. Insert rant about how victims have to remain palatable in order to be emphasized with, and how tragic it is that the only person who seems to understand that is the person who traumatized him in the first place. 

I feel like I have been fumbling Time’s character a bit, and his conversation at the floor of Spirit’s bed is me finally getting back on track with him. I enjoyed writing that so much, from him trying to fold the scarf to him being upset that no one has learned their lesson yet, all while still not learning a lesson himself. 

There was going to be a comment somewhere that Spirit is in such bad shape in part because his lungs are weak from all that smoking he does, but I honestly don’t know if anyone but Spirit would make that connection. 

I also need to put Legend and Midna together more. They can be so snarky, and I want them to keep a running commentary of Warriors and Spirit’s bullshit like they are two sports announcers watching a football game.

I first imagined Spirit and Warriors’s conversation taking place on the parapet, and came to the same realization about the ladders that Spirit had. I’m glad I put them by the moat, though. The bit about the smell is probably my favorite bit of prose in the chapter. 

I also really like this conversation between Spirit and Warriors. It’s not as insanity inducing as their past bullshit has been, but it hits a few notes. I like Warriors showing off how much he understands Spirit’s abilities (via the jacket), as well as Spirit’s utter disbelief that Warriors is capable of caring for anyone but himself. 

I was also trying really hard to put more of their bullshit into subtext. I have a bad habit of having characters just state what they are feeling out loud, so I am trying to write more coded dialogue. It’s never just about a toaster, etc. 

Warriors was also having such a night of self-discovery. First he had a little moment to freak out about how much his sincere attempts to help sound like manipulation. Then he realized that he would probably never be fully exonerated from his past. Big night for him.

Being unable to fully fix your past is part of the reason why I buffer against the idea of Warriors having a redemption arc. That implies a certain amount of undoing that is just not possible. I don’t know if I am putting that well. However, I am concerned that I am letting my Catholic upbringing color my perspective.

That being said, if Catholicism was a thing in Hyrule, Warriors would be that and be plagued by Catholic Guilt

He’s Catholic coded.

Irish Catholic, to be specific. There’s a difference. 

Anyway, Four. When Four showed up, I was going to have this bit of dialogue where Spirit would allude to knowing about Vio (and therefore, Four) having a relationship with Shadow. It would have been nestled in a larger, coded bit of dialogue where Four would obliquely imply that he was starting to suspect what the Hot Mess is. I cut it because A) Spirit is so socially inept that he cannot do subtly like that, and B) Spirit’s spirit senses would not give him the ability to know about Shadow. 

I also did not want to commit to Four figuring it out first, if at all. 

I have so many ideas about what Warriors the Symbol means to the people of Castle Town that I will hopefully be able to elaborate on in this upcoming chapter.

Realistically, Hyrule Castle should probably be more like a fortress. But again, I have been watching The Rose of Versailles, and I just really liked the idea of the castle being this symbol of opulence during a time of poor economics. The people are struggling but the nobles are thriving, babes. 

Also, Endicott is so much fun to write. He’s like the true antagonistic version of Lincoln. That man was enjoying making Warriors squirm, and I was having a blast writing it. The sexual favors line? I was utterly delighted. 

Realistically, Endicott probably could have been replaced with Whitestone. However, Whitestone is still on the front and I don’t regret putting him there to be Wind’s superior during his short stint as a soldier. (Even if I still think I could have cut out Whitestone in favor of giving Impa more to do.)

I also feel bad for killing Meemaw off so suddenly, but I was enchanted by the idea of her name having to be crossed off because the death was that  recent. 

I also was going to have Endicott spare Warriors for unknown reasons, with the reveal that Ganondorf had been bribing him coming later in the story, However, I was so worried about this seeming too-easy for Warriors that I decided to reveal that detail early. 

Okay, King of Hyrule stuff.

I’m trying to play at this idea of Zelda’s reputation not matching her actual role. Earlier in the story, Warriors describes her as a socialite with no political sense, and Zelda derisively thinks that of herself as well. Then that bit about her being the face of the kingdom is supposed to contradict that perception. She can’t just be a socialite if she had been the mouthpiece of the king since she was a child. 

There’s supposed to be multiple mistakes going on here: Warriors assuming the worst of Zelda, a sexist perception of Zelda by society as a whole, and Zelda feeling worthless because she knows she’s just a symbol. Not sure if I conveyed any of that well. 

Reuenthal’s dementia was caused in part by a stroke, but he also has a condition called prosopometamorphopsia, which is a form of face blindness where faces become distorted the longer you look at them. 

Fun fact is that I generally knew that there was some kind of condition that had made Reuenthal isolate from other people, but I did not pick prosopometamorphopsia until I read this article from the New Yorker. I won’t go as far as to say that I wrote an accurate version of the disorder; I definitely played up the emotional distress it causes for dramatic effect. That is probably problematic, so please do not trust this story as a definitive source on it. 

This also went unsaid in the story, but I imagine that because every daughter in the royal family is named Zelda, they probably go more by their middle names. I almost named dropped one of her sisters as Zelda Artemis, just to be mean.

The last line “A week later, everything went to hell” is, admittedly, very silly. I had a whole section describing what that meant written, but it seriously sucked. I am in the process of rewriting it now, and it’s already so much better. Plus, now that I have another chapter to hit these plot points, I can explore a more daring version of my original idea. Very excited for it. 

That being said, I would 100% cut off that last line and probably improve the chapter by 3%.

And that’s the chapter! Again, I am so sorry that it was such substandard quality. I promise that the next chapter will be better. 

In other news, can I get your opinion on something. Ever since polls came out, I have wanted to do a little census poll on how many people know about CTB, read it, or choose to read it. Just to gage how big the actual audience is. 

On one hand, I think it would be interesting. On the other, it’s a practice in vanity that is very antithetical to how hard I try to be nonchalant about everything. I don’t know. Let me know what you think. 

[orange-imagines]

what do you think each of the mud dogs' love languages they find themselves most drawn to are? :0

Relationship: Romantic

A/N: I have so many opinions on this! I tried to keep these simple by saying the guys have the same giving and receiving languages, and I don't think it's far off tbf. AND to be clear: these guys love any form of affection, this is just what I imagine their favorites are.

Leonard

Physical touch and acts of service.

Although it's not as common as you may think, Len does have trouble expressing the way he feels through words sometimes, even when it comes to you. He gets easily lost inside his head with all his thoughts and feelings, so he naturally gravitates toward any form of affection that helps bring him down to earth with you. If he's ever having a rough day or needs some reassurance (though he has a hard time voicing when he does), you going out of your way to hold his hand or give him a hug will speak volumes to him. While he may not look like it to others, you know he loves surprise physical affection, and he's actually quite clingy. It's not even something he realizes, he just finds it very natural to enjoy sitting beside you wherever you two go, holding your hand, putting an arm around you, messing with your clothes or fixing your hair, coming up with any excuse to touch you. And when it comes to sitting next to you, he can get pretty bitter if someone else manages to snag a seat beside you while he has to sit in another spot further away. It doesn't help that this is something Mick does constantly (both on purpose and not- the little shit), but nobody's exempt from having Len glare at them the entire interaction because they stole his seat. If he's already had a bad day leading up to that, he may just forgo politeness in its entirety and shove the person out of the way in order to sit next to you, putting an arm around your shoulders and growling if the person tries to speak up. Yeah. He's only a little clingy.

Alternatively, he also enjoys you doing anything to help him with his responsibilities, whether that be chores around the apartment or lending a hand with the planning stage for the Mud Dogs' next heist. The latter can stress him out quite a bit, so if you want to bring him a cup of coffee and help him get his thoughts out by bouncing ideas back and forth, he'll just fall more and more in love with every word you say. You're definitely his preferred planning partner, and he's not afraid to admit it in front of the others.

His favorites moments of domesticity come from the two of you helping each other out with things at home. You washing dishes while he dries them, you cooking something and him stirring the pot for five seconds when you have to step away- any little mundane thing that would be boring if he wasn't doing it with you. He also really likes it if you hug him from behind while he's got his attention on something else, though he's likely to abandon whatever it is and start kissing you in the middle of the kitchen if you do. And that's how you guys have burned dinner on more than one occasion <3

Danny

Words of affirmation and quality time.

C'mon, he rattles off pet names and praises like he was born for it. This guy loves his words. Even after you two get together, he takes every opportunity to talk you up and flirt with you- you could be five years into your relationship and he'd still put in maximum effort to get you to go on dates with him. A good deal of his charm comes from his words, and although the things he says might seem a bit too smooth and rehearsed, you can tell he's not just saying things for the hell of it. He hangs on your every word when he's flirting with you, wanting to see if you like what he's doing or if he should change something up- and he doesn't act like this with anyone else. Once he has his sights set on someone romantically, they've got his full attention, and they and they alone are subjected to all his cheesy pickup lines and tooth aching flattery. Even outside of his flirting, he's very sweet and open with what he thinks about you, so there's nothing to stop him from giving you compliments and praise on the day-to-day, whether it's about how you look, things he likes about your personality/how your mind works/how you interact with him and the others, he's almost always got a kind word to say about you. He will run his mouth nonstop if you let him.

He also finds the time he spends with you very important, especially when it's just the two of you (he loves the boys, but sometimes he just wants quality time with his partner). He loves seeing you come home in the evening and being able to ask you about your day, or when the two of you can sit on the couch together and just unwind in each others' company. He also really appreciates physical affection during moments like this, either getting to trace patterns on your hand or play with your hair. He'd spend the whole night awake if it meant you were laying on his lap and telling him about your day while he ran and hand through your hair and listened to you for hours.

Mickey

Quality time, physical touch, and gift giving.

The thing about Mick is that he almost always wants to be in your space. If you have a bubble and need moments where he isn't right next to you all the time, please tell him and you can work it out, because otherwise he'll practically be in your lap at any given opportunity. He just loves getting to hang out with you and be physically close to you while he does. If you guys are spending some time alone in the apartment (gossiping, eating, almost killing each other over video games) and he gets to lay in your lap, wrap himself around you, or even just hold your arm or hand, he's completely satisfied. It's a routine that makes him feel very safe and loved, and any reassurance that you love him + want to be with him is best given in this form. He appreciates being told both those things, but to him, actions speak louder than words. Especially when he's so used to people saying one thing and doing the opposite- he likes that you can prove you actually want to be with him by...being with him. Yeah, he has pretty low standards sometimes.

Another thing that'll come up throughout your relationship is gift giving. While he isn't a fan of the standard model of this (he doesn't like receiving fancy or expensive gifts, and he isn't likely to give them unless it's something he's stolen), he really, really enjoys finding knick knacks around the Hidden City and bringing them back to you because he thought of you when he saw them. These are always things that have no real value: a figurine of a character you like that he got from the dump, a piece of glass in your favorite color, a cool rock, etc. But they all came about by him actively thinking of you and remembering things you told him about yourself, so they're very sweet! He always has the biggest grin on his face when he hands them over to you, so if you like them, it'll make him even happier. And if you ever want to return the favor by scavenging for something worthless but extremely personal for him, he'll keep it forever and won't let anyone touch it (not even you. He trusts no one but himself with it. That's his prized possession).

[helplessautomaton]

I love amy AU

- wc: 1066 - tws: yandere, threats to reader (implied?), possessive hopefully i didnt go too soft as i fear i did but hey i tried and im still proud of it

Got this idea by spacexseven and oh my god the brain rot that i had for jouno’s part before actually writing it, i had sooo many ideas for him. Best read with a male reader but gn works as well.

Jouno:

Usually talking wasn't exactly your type, getting into drama even less so, but you can't help but overhear talks about a Jouno. Figuring that you won't ever actually talk to the man, you ignored all the sadist claims about him. Afterall it was none of your business, but you should’ve have been wary about the rumors. There were instances where you did see him in passing, a tiny smile on his face. Other than those times you weren't concerned when really you should have at least kept your guard up.

All it took to get your attention was a tap on your shoulder and a condescending smile that gave off a strong warning. To say it irked you would be an understatement. 

The conversation he started, began fairly casual, asking about what you were doing. This calamity quickly broke when he asked about your business with X, claiming that they were simply too busy to interact with strays. He also attatched vague threats while asking you questions moreso related about X. his smile getting ever so slightly bigger when you staggered back in a wave of uncomfortability. You had your best efforts to explain how it was for work and nothing more, you and X only having a lukewarm understanding of each other. It took a lengthy amount of unnerving silence and Jouno’s expressionless face to turn into a quiet hum from him. Putting up a hand to his chin in thought, until he asked you for more information on X and to take notes for him. Obviously not without poorly concealed threats about if you didn't comply those “rumors" would be tested out on you. 

At least you weren't dead or injured so you’ll take it to avoid being those two things in the near future.

He ended up forcing you to go to a cafe to meet up with him every other week, giving him the notes and briefly explaining what was in them. These notes were mainly audio based to make it easier for him, while you didn't mind doing it, he would complain about how you sounded in them. This was his favorite part of these meetings, making you stressed out and audibly groan at his complaints. Not to mention the degrading comments that came with the meetings. You attempt to say if he ever wanted to get with X the degrading comments had to go, he simply hummed in response, effectively ignoring you. He annoyed you to no end but you gained a little odd sense of pride noting everytime he would give a little smile towards your work.

Soon these meetups became more during the week, instead of 0-1 per week, it started to become 2-3 a week. These updates in schedule made you panic due to the notes you had to record for him, (you knew if you brought this up he’d just laugh cruelly at you).  

However, during this time period something strange started to happen with his attitude towards people around you, mainly any close friends near to you. Whisking you away from your friends because in his words “you’re supposed to be taking notes for me not getting distracted.” and overall trying to intimidate anyone that came close. 

You decided to ignore it since he was more focused on getting information and would not accept you slipping up. The only thing making you want to bash your head in was his sometimes cocky comments about how X should be glad he's seeking them out. Casually noting how he talked about them like an object at times, something he's gonna win, a prize. Overall despite this, you came to like Jouno as a person despite his odd moments of pride but you weren't one to judge after all. (The way he bluntly and sometimes rudely talks to X makes you heavily conflicted.) Sometimes he’d let you vent your own troubles while giving his own advice, be it in a more joking way. It made you loosen up your guard for him but it still felt off, knowing it would never be a proper friendship with the man.

The next time you two meet up, he buys your drink along with something else from the menu, claiming it was for all your hard work as of late. Jouno gave a genuine smile at your reaction towards his generosity. You gave him a small comment about how this would be a great start for X. This wasn't the right move apparently. He immediately tenses up, starts scolding you on how you weren't grateful for what he did for you and not X. After nervously drinking while avoiding Jouno's heavily annoyed expression, you were ready to leave. After a while he apologizes for his sudden outburst, saying he’d take your words into consideration. 

Eventually when you were close to him, he would ask if you could make the notes about yourself instead of X. it caught you off guard but you went along with it, agreeing to do so (it also cured the major headache about scraping for information about X). Sometimes when you were drinking, he'd reach over to your free hand and squeeze with enough pressure to make it hurt. Jouno was adoring the pained breaths that came out of your mouth along with your obvious pained reaction physically. The more degrading comments start to become more frequent while oddly being overly possessive of you. Yet you wanted to continue being ignorant and think he's just being stressed over his own work and future with X. he visited you everyday he could, smiling every time you’d look his way. But this has its downside, driving away anyone who dared try to talk or engage with you about anything.

Then it came full circle, you needed to talk to X about something related to your actual work. You hadn't noticed Jouno following you. Getting a few sentences in before you’re engulfed by Jouno’s arms around your waist. 

X was tensed up, unwilling to look your way, the air became eerily strained.

“Darling, what are you doing talking to strays that aren't worth our time?” 

A/N, i hope those last words work but im willing to change them later down the line if i ever add this into a compilation if i continue to do I Love Amy au's

like i said i hope i didnt go too soft here

[pyromegalomaniac]

SOO, I may have requested this to another author but I wanna see how others write/interpret it

Can I have a wally x reader BUT the reader is close with Frank and Frank sees the reader like his kid or somethin,. like theyre friends but they have a father-kid dynamic

an extra idea but what if frank finds out abt wally’s feelings for the reader 😭😭

Anon... this is such a good idea. Must!! Write!! Headcannons!! Ahhh!!!! I hope you like what I did with your prompt!! (I also threw in a dash of Frank x Eddie because I absolutely ship it~) Enjoy!!!

(♡˙︶˙♡)

Wally x dad/kid-type relationship w/Frank!reader headcanons🍎🦋

Hanging out in the backyard while Frank teaches you about the different butterflies

He also teaches you how to catch them, but that you should always be nice to them, and to let them go also

He doesn't like you laying down in the grass when you look at the buggies cus you get stains on your clothes

He's always telling you to "tuck your shirt in" and "tie your shoes" and stuff like that

(His kid-er, freind needs to be presentable, after all!)

He doesn't like being interrupted by Eddie the mailman when you two are observing a specimen in the front yard

But you think their interactions are cute

Thinking to yourself "He should really find someone nice to be with..."

Wally likes staring at you while you stare at the buggies

Wally will ask you to go somewhere with him (as platonic friends do, of course) and you'll ask if Frank can come too

Wally will cheerily agree after a moment's hesitation

Frank will see that Wally is obviously trying to get you to go on a date and say something like "actually I need their help with x right now..."

Eventually he'll talk with Wally and see he has good intentions and would treat you well

So he starts to gently nudge you two together

You start to catch feelings for Wally and are in the early dating stages

You'll make sure Frank knows about it before every date you go on

Except for one time where you two snuck into the apple orchard late one night and...

KISSED!!

(Oooooo!! :0!!!)

You're happy with your boyfriend but you wish Frank had someone of his own...

Suggesting you, Wally, Frank and Eddie should go somewhere to hang out (totally not a double date) like to the park

You convinced Frank to go because there might be some nice butterflies flying around

You and Wally having a nice time together, holding hands and giggling at Frank and Eddie getting along

(It seems like everyone had a good time!! Yay!!)

Wally's happy! Frank and Eddie are happy! You're happy! You're happy that they're happy! Everyone is happy!! Yayyy!!!

Sorry if there wasn't really as much x reader stuff as I maybe should've done... I kinda went ham with the Frank stuff... I still think it turned out good! I hope I was able to capture what you were asking for!! Thanks for requesting these headcanons, they were fun to write and I look forward to doing more in the future!! Much love!!!

ヽ(>∀<☆)ノ

[athena-xox]

Rating Cerise Hood ships

Cerise/Raven: this is actually really cute. I definitely see Cerise pinning a little bit. But I just love the idea of them. 8/10

Cerise/Daring: even as a kid I saw them as platonic. No chemistry. Some good fics tho. I don’t like it sorry not sorry 0/10

Cerise/Cedar: I have so many hcs about them. Like Cedar finding out Cerise’s secret and then learning how to tell misleading truths and Cedar specifically becoming a real person for Cerise! Otp 10/10

Cerise/Kitty: I’ve posted about them before. Like yk how parents say that boys pick on girls because they have a crush on them? That’s what Kitty would be like to Cerise. And then in exchange Brooke being a nuisance to Kitty by narrating her feelings. 10/10

Cerise/Maddie: not my thing personally. I see them more platonically. 2/10

Cerise/Darling: athletic girls who hid that they are>>> locker room 🤨. I read a rappel fic where Darling had a crush on Apple and Cerise had a crush on Raven and then the two of them made some bad choices together. Cute 6/10

Cerise/Rosabella: I just like the idea of Rosabella being with someone ‘beastly’. 5/10

Cerise/Charlotte Step: this is such a rarepair but like in once upon a twist the clock strikes Cupid, Cupid sees Charlotte play bookball with some girls and then in Cerise and the beast Cerise plays bookball with some girls. And her and this one girl are lowkey flirting the whole time. And I like to believe that that one girl is Charlotte and I’m pretty sure this is implied because one; clock strikes Cupid and Cerise & the beast are the first and second books in the series and it is confirmed that all the miss matched fairytales can all interact with one another in Rosabella and the three bears. 9/10

Cerise/Briar: way more popular than it should be. It’s not that popular but there’s still way too many fics about them. They don’t really have any interactions and they’re just not an interesting dynamic. 2/10

Cerise/Romona: 🤮🤮🤮. So gross. Im not even putting it here for scare factor they are genuinely shipped. I talked about Cerise/Briar having too many fics but they really take the cake. The amount of fics on ao3 with them tagged is insane. -♾️/10

Anyways here’s how I’d rank these ships:

Cedar>Kitty>Charlotte>Raven>Darling>Rosabella>Maddie>Briar>Daring>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>(honestly shouldn’t even be mentioned)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Romona

[aventurineswife]

Hehehe...I should have guessed, don't worry about it! I'll continue rambling a bit, although this will be the last one for today (⁠￣⁠ヘ⁠￣⁠;⁠)

Something I should add, is that I was also inspired by a shoujo anime/manga! (⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)

It was called Kamisama Hajimemashita or Kamisama Kiss, Where the protagonist: Nanami meets a homeless man and saves him from a dog, and as payment he gives her a shrine, I also can't forget a blessing to be the next Goddess of Earth, without her knowing the last thing, then we have the interest of the protagonist: Tomoe! Who is a fox demon. Who after confusing her with Mikage, the previous god of the earth, who abandoned him for 500 years. I explain to Nanami what was happening. (⁠ㆁ⁠ω⁠ㆁ⁠)

There I took a bit of Tomoe's story for the reader, but clearly modifying it so that it would fit them.

Now, I'm going to start with the data again! (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)

0. | —Usually the reader has three forms, the first being his original form of a two meter fox, the second being his form mixed with that of a human and finally where he is like a common fox but with 9 tails.

1. | —There was once, when the reader was sleeping where the sun falls while he was in his first form, when he woke up he found Kakavasha sleeping comfortably on top of him.

2. |—When Kakavasha visited the reader he always observed his hair, it reminded him of the story his older sister told him, about a woman with long hair who healed people when she sang, so one day he carefully combed the reader's hair, discovering that it was quite soft like his tail. While the reader held back his laughter so he wouldn't discover that he wasn't actually awake.

3. | —When Kakavasha disappeared, he began to look for new interests such as pottery and returned to cooking after decades. Also something to mention is that he cut his hair, to forget Kakavasha, since there is a phrase that says: "Hair keeps memories"

4. | —It took two and a half years for the reader to forgive Aventurine for her disappearance. In fact, the reader once drunk said to Aventurine, "You know, I actually still had... affection so I forgive you, but to anyone else it would have been more, even decades..." = Doesn't remember saying that

5. | —One day, Aventurine noticed the reader wearing a hair accessory and asked him where he bought it, the reader was silent for a few minutes until he said it wasn't a hair accessory, it was actually his kiseru¹, which he still kept. The reader let his hair grow, so he uses the kiseru to hold his hair in an elegant way (ignoring that he used to use it to smoke)

For those who don't know what a "kiseru" is, it's basically an ancient Japanese pipe, which was used to smoke various substances, such as tobacco, cannabis and opium.

-💤🩵 anon

Oh, I see! You're blending some of the elements from Kamisama Hajimemashita with your own creative ideas—how fun!

The reader's three forms give a lot of room for development in how they interact with the world and the other characters. I like how the different forms reflect different aspects of their identity and relationships.

The idea of Kakavasha sleeping on the reader in their fox form is such a cozy, intimate detail. It gives a sense of calmness to their bond and hints at how comfortable Kakavasha feels around the reader.

Kakavasha's curiosity about the reader's hair and its connection to the story his sister told adds an interesting layer of mystery and nostalgia. It also shows how Kakavasha’s bond with the reader is more than just surface-level—it’s rooted in shared memories and emotions.

The idea that Kakavasha cut his hair to forget shows how deeply affected he was by their relationship. It’s an emotional gesture that brings more depth to his character. I also like the "hair keeps memories" phrase—it's a beautiful metaphor. (Loved it so much so I gave it to my oc too)

The fact that it took two and a half years for the reader to forgive Aventurine gives a realistic timeline of healing. It feels natural that the reader would still harbor some unresolved feelings, and their drunken confession adds a layer of vulnerability that adds to the character’s depth.

The moment with the kiseru is a perfect example of how small details can reveal so much. The reader using it to hold their hair in an elegant way adds both practicality and subtle elegance to their character. Plus, the fact that it used to be for smoking adds a bittersweet nuance to the story—like holding onto the past while still moving forward.

[alittlefrenchtree]

As a black girl it's indescribable to explain the constant pain of seeing all this racism online, it's like a stab in the heart every time and it hurts just as much to always have to read things like "ignore, if you see hate it's because you choose to interact with hate, It's up to you"

no, unfortunately it doesn't depend on me and it doesn't depend on any of us poc, because it is everywhere and constant and racism is not just the insult with the slur but it is in the way they talk about us, in the way they choose to mock us for everything, in the way that we are never considered on the same level as other people and we cannot ignore it. It's painful and exhausting.

I hug you and wish you a good day.

That's why i tagged the post you're talking about with my reblog.

As shown in the tags, I wasn’t denying what you said. Racism and fandom hate are two very different things even if it sometimes overlaps.

A large part of the hate and/or drama that happens in the RWRB are just patterns that happen in every fandom, even the very white ones. Putting the two leads up against each other, comparing them, comparing acting skills, careers, saying one is sold to hollywood and/or the other is talentless, saying fans aren’t supportive enough of this or that, that fans should move on from this or that, hate and bullying happens in every. fandom. ever.

And many times, the hate and/or drama is amplified by people trying to fight it. How many times did you scroll your timeline seeing people complaining about hateful messages but seeing none of the actual hate message unless you really look deep for it?

The idea is not to compare that to racism but to say that that unlike racism, this could be ignored. You don’t go on in life stopping people in the street asking for their opinions about your favorite actor or movie or book and insult them if they disagree and no one is doing that to you either. So I think that what the original post was about. The Internet expose us to too many opinions we shouldn’t have to deal with on a daily basis. The best answer to that specifically is to ignore.

As for hate messages rooted in either racism, queerphobia or misogyny or something equally revolting, I still think there are specific situations when the best way to fight is to ignore.

Let’s say I receive a queerphobic message in my inbox. 

What could feel right is to answer "fuck you, stop being queerphobic". But even if I’m calling out a queerphobic behavior I’m still amplifying that message by sharing it. I would expose 1,700+ (or more (or less if you count the bots)) people to a queerphobic message while trying to fight against it. I probably wouldn’t have changed the mind of the person writing this in the first place but I made several (maybe hundreds) people feel insulted.

If I ignore the message and put it in the trash where it belongs, I made a total of 0 person feeling insulted. The queerphobia hasn’t been amplified, the message doesn’t exist anymore. That what the original post was about in my opinion. Sometimes, the choice is up to us however we deal with it.

Instead, I’m sharing other messages. Yours. The stories of many actors and actresses of color starting their own producing companies because Hollywood doesn’t give them the same opportunities. Matthew’s voice talking about the rating of queer movies. Taylor’s accomplishments. Casey’s successes. Whoever.

On Twitter, it’s different. More difficult. We know algorithms. If 100 people answer to (or QRT) a racist post saying it’s racist and stupid, the algorithm doesn’t think it’s stupid, it thinks it’s relevant because 100 people interacted with it. If moderation and report and ban were efficient, it would be easier but Elon thinks it’s fun and social medias want more interactions not less so they’re built that way. So saying we should leave this hell hole isn’t actually a bad advice.

Long story short, it’s complicated. Ignoring things is not saying it doesn’t matter or that it’s unimportant. My personal belief is that we achieve more with pushing voices we want to make powerful and heard than by trying to convince people online we actually don’t know and we might never interact again with.

But ultimately it isn’t an easy topic and it’s unfair for too many people. 

[funeralprocessor]

Morgan Rambles: My pet project

I don't think I've mentioned it before, but I've been working on a tabletop system for like, a while now. Working on is kind of doing a lot of heavy lifting as it's still just kind of a morass of mechanics and ideas, but I've been steadily chipping away at it for a while now. A big part of it has just been figuring out what I want it to be, because I didn't come at it from the outside trying to make a game that does X/Y/Z. It just sort of bubbled up organically from a lineage of horrible cobbled together pseudo-systems that existed only in full in my manic imagination and in like 20 google docs. Basically it's half "system that's geared towards stuff I personally like'' and half "mechanics/ideas orphanage" at this point, but It's slowly coming together into something kind of resembling a presentable thing. Not presentable for like, public use or anything, but like I could show this to potential players and I wouldn't look deranged. That may change and the whole mechanical core may collapse a few more times in the gestation process, but I think what I want it, tentatively called Ars Regia/ArRe, to be about/like/for is pretty well defined. Something I'm prepared to explain now that I've rambled for two paragraphs It's going to fundamentally going to be a game about power and how you use it, which sounds a bit generic I know but one of the core tenants of like the way I play and the way I run things is freedom and the many things that come from it. I like to run sandboxes with no "critical path" or main story, just a bunch of elements you can interact with as you see fit. This is a living world, or as close to one as I can simulate without losing my mind, and having characters interact with it, explore it, utilize it, or fall because they underestimated it is like one of my favorite parts of running a campaign. My job is to play the world, the players job is to decide how they want to live in it.

I also really like the collaborative storytelling and investment you get when players really dig into the world they inhabit and make parts of it theirs. That's why a big part of my design philosophy has been trying to come up with ways to empower the players to actually make big changes, and the "power level" I'm going for has kind of skewed higher as a result. Exalted and Godbound were big big influences on me (and Godbound's author Kevin Crawford/Sine Nomine Games is like one of my tabletop idols along with Jenna Moran and a few OSRsphere bloggers y'all should check out like GoblinPunch (The guy who made the false hydra! That's not a modern D&D thing that's an OSR beastie that escaped containment! All of his shit is good like that!), FalseMachine, Skerples/CoinsandScrolls, ThroneofSalt, and Against the Wicked City. Crawford's stuff is always really polished and even if you have 0 interest in running any of his games his GM tools are fucking immaculate and worth the price of admission on their own (especially since many of them have free versions)), but like mechanically/gamefeel wise aren't what I want. I'm also drawing a good bit from PbtA's enormous lineage, partially some BitD and Spire/Heart, but one of the major ones was Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. In addition to being one of my favorite games I can never convince anyone to play, Legacy does a *lot* different that I love. Your character isn't an individual, but a faction in a post apocalyptic world, with the nature of that world and that apocalypse really really shaped by the very act of character creation. If someone chooses the kaiju hunter faction, it kind of goes without saying that there are kaiju now, something that would not necessarily be the case had no one picked that playbook. That's really fascinating to me. It also has a neat system for kind of pseudo-troupe play. When you need to resolve a specific event in detail and actually RP it out, everyone creates a quick character relevant to the situation or picks one already established, which means you'll quickly get something of a cast of recurring characters for a particular faction, even if that character isn't always played by the same person. Also, because these characters aren't your "main" character it kind of lets you play a lot more fast and loose with them and take more risks. It's almost encouraged to angle for dramatactical deaths, b/c each class has a death move that can be pretty impactful and are all very resonant and fun. I'd been considering some kind of "lower decks" mechanic for ArRe since I imagine PCs will be involved with a lot of big/long term projects and this sort of thing seemed like *exactly* what I was looking for (alongside some domain management stuff). This turned out a lot less coherent than I'd hoped but w/e. Long story short is I'm basically trying to make a TTRPG all about getting players invested in and in control of the world, both by collaborating with them to create it and then giving them the tools and incentives to change it. It is kind of geared towards playing in my like established setting, but that's because I haven't actually had a chance to do any of the collab worldbuilding stuff yet. Amala is also just sort of a powderkeg and fun to throw demigods at so we're all good

[mysticrosethedork]

The "interactive cinematic experience" buzzword should stay in the 2010s where it belongs.

At the very least visual novels are up front that what they are trying to achieve is a little less rather than a little more. That's not to say it isn't a daunting task to write a book either but at least then you know the only extra disks that they are trying to spin is learning RenPy and how to draw rather than try and go for the next "revolutionary" 0 in the polygon count for their choose your own adventure romance plots. You get what you are expecting by going into a genre called Visual Novels, and you accept that in the same way someone accepts being a furry, creator or consumer you have probably already heard the memes a hundred times before and you decide to go in anyways because you're curious or already know its something you want to get into.

But videogames have a stigma behind them that lends itself to weird complications when it gets compared to its older (two) brother(s). When you call something cinematic, you are invoking an idea that the story is in some way trying to be its own "insert GOAT movie meme here". Which then becomes its own trap for the genre as a whole, if the story is good and the game is shit, it gets compared to cinema and becomes the new "best" game, if its ALL bad "well what did you expect, its a videogame, nothing but a shiny toy".

that's just fucking unfair. especially when the times I've ever felt genuine powerful emotion is when the game takes things you have been, if not thinking about, then dealing with for hours, before twisting it in powerful ways. Project moon is great at this, often taking small quirks of the game and putting it in context of the actual world. Their most recent game(sadly a gacha side project to keep the lights on while they do other stuff) has an ultimate/id system where pretty much every little weapon that the characters wear or use has some amount of thematic significance with them, so ultimately its up to the player to start wondering how it connects. Even if they don't and braindead the game, theyre probably going to start going insane the moment they hear the word 'ideal', 'that bastard', 'gallop on', 'chains of others', etc from just how often they hear those phrases. the most recent "main" chapter does something fucking amazing with it, turning something almost innocuous and meme worthy from the few times you try it out, then twists it to create a moment of extreme catharsis.

As an older example. I played Deus Ex for the first time a couple weeks ago as well, and the first level on its own is a perfect set piece in how to lay out even a basic sense of how to have your player view your world and game. It immediately gives you the tools to learn about the world and tells you what you need to know when you ask for it. Just with that it makes a great piece of symbolism just from telling you "hey see that green thing you clicked on? yeah the french extremists bombed the statue of liberty. They thought we didn't deserve it." and it makes you think "what the fuck? when? why? what would we have done wrong?" or in my case i check the date of when the game was created and realized it was made a year before 9/11. Its a very specific moment of emotion that is designed to confuse, it helps that its also a very early part of the game rather than a twist kept towards the end as a 'subversion of expectation' because there wasn't much building up to it and its passed off as... just something that happened.

This sort of thing is exactly why i hate it when writers try to market their game as cinema because it shows that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium they are working in. You aren't just making a movie anymore when you step into this space, EVERYTHING you allow the player to do can become a tool that can be used in service of a story, and just putting in a cover shooter for your "cinematic experience" shouldn't really cut it. Its an insult, you have every tool in your arsenal, including the concepts you made up out of thin air for gameplay purposes, and your first thought is to make cinema? Not a sandbox, not a game, not something that means something to the player when they fuck around with mechanics... but cinema? At that point you are better off just making a movie and getting laughed at by the people you're trying to impress because i sure as hell wont find it funny.

This isnt to say you cant write a story well on its own and let it be a part of a game. Just that when making and critiquing a game, consider EVERY facet of it. Ill praise Limbus' story to hell and back but the sheer fact its a gacha, and the consequences that come with it brings it down a little. The sheer fact that Limbus could have ended up like Honkai Star Rail in how braindead it is still fucking haunts me, even as the gameplay, while polished compared to the adjustment needed with ruina, was already sort of a step back.0.

[meirimerens]

I think….Peter might be wary of calling Grace terms of endearment because he uh knows his record with women has been mmmm not great and he knows he is a Creature but doesn’t know how Grace feels about all of that her (but has some like functional adult understanding that Grace is someone he should care about and want to not be creeped out and disgusted by him. Even if just for the logistical reasons that yes. Even HIS apartment is a better home for her than alone in a graveyard) but he does start relaxing and slipping eventually and when she doesn’t prickle or react badly it become almost an artsy little game. Dear, sweetheart, fawn, kitten, spring blossom, etc.

Possibly spurred on by uncle Andrey having 0 hang ups about that sort of thing and maybe Peter being just the littlest bit jealous or even uncomfortable with this imbalance. Andrey will waltz in and pat her on the head and say “hey sweetheart have you seen Peter around?” So maybe Peter can be less than formal to her. For andrey. So they match.

funnily enough(?) I think the exact opposite on who ends up calling her terms of endearment the most.

Peter's track records with women is like. the only ones he's ever interacted with are 1) his mommy 2) the demons and the sorceresses (the fact that he's scared is a skill issue, out of my way boy I'm boutta get it etc) 3) Eva that he liked but kept his hands off because they don't respect much but "thou shalt not covet your brother's gender neutral bitches" they abide by 4) whatever the fuck his problem is with the Kaina women. but his situations with adult women (+ the demonesses) are different from like. Vine voice A Child. + it's not Grace's business + she wouldn't care this is not about her/completely different dynamics [because Vine Voice A Child]. I think he ends up calling her like. Animal names in the loving way. Her Russian name Ласка can be read as "weasel" even if it was apparently not the primary goal so I do think he calls her. Weasel. [My] little weasel. [My] little ermine. [My] little linen-eating moth. Just weird but lovingly.

In my minds eye think Andrey is the less paternal of the two [by virtue of Not Wanting Any he likes the freedom too much] even if he has the most chances of [accidentally] becoming a father [by virtue of actually getting gender neutral bitches] so he has not much any idea how the fuck to behave. His interactions with womankind have been 1) mommy 2) his conquests but like he knows of Child. He knows what Child is. I think some of the S&Hs (typically notkin himself) come steal food in the Broken Heart and he's like oh you nasty little thief [never hunts them down because. Starving orphan] so that's Grace to him but like. Family now. And he has no idea how to do Famly. I think for a while he's like 😃 heyyyy. Kid. Don't tell my brother i said fuck and shit in front of you he would bite me. He does the head pat and the shoulder pat but in a deeply Idk What The Fuck I'm About LOL way. I think he ends up calling her cute names but in a deeply awkward way. Like he would call her stuff in the lines of linen-eating moth but weirder. No example rn it's 6AM. Just picture it.

[artofzz]

Swordsmith Village Arc Review P1

Warning!!! Not spoiler free!!

Since the anime wrapped up, I thought I would do a long review on how I personally thought this arc was, mainly looking at the plot an not necessarily at the animation.

So, let’s be real here, the Swordsmith village arc, despite its conclusion, was not great at all. It could have been a lot better, had there been more efforts put into the writing.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not calling anyone out or insulting the creator I am just trying to give constructive criticism and nothing else.

A big issue here to me is Tanjiro. We spend a lot of time showing his skill set and power-up which is hardly believable. The arc starts after he has been in a 2-month coma. I don’t know how much time has passed until he goes to the village but that hardly can explain his insane amount of progress. His strength feels more plot convenient rather than well presented.

We spent little time on fleshing out and showing the skills of the hashira. Unlike in previous arcs, where we got lots of insight on how strong a hashira can be, with rengoku and Uzui, both Mitsuri and Muichiro are heavily sidelined. On top of that the upper moon Muichiro is battling is hardly any kind of threat, and more efforts went to the upper-moon Tanjiro was battling.

I don’t know what reason was behind the fast pacing, but because of that there was little time spent on a major foe. When all upper-moons are hyped up as hashira killer and being in their position for more than a 100 years then the writer should put some efforts into delivering.

In the end since Tanjiro is the protagonist, he needs the more fleshed out antagonist.

Inherited Memories:

This is another issue. While the idea and concept is actually very interesting it is only used on Tanjiro and conveniently enough he sees just the right ones.

Since Kotetsu can guess what he might be seeing it is safe to assume that it does happen to multiple people and therefore make it odd that only Tanjiro has them.

There are multiple characters with ancestors that knew and interacted with Yoriichi. So again, the inherited memories feel just convenient rather than a well thought out concept.

It is aside from this very ridiculous that Muichiro did not destroy Yoriichi Type 0. All he did was rip off an arm. We established that he is much stronger than Tanjiro, not only through his hashira title but also showing that he is physically stronger. We also know that he does not care about breaking it or not. Yes his sword breaks during training, but he must have still done a ton more damage to that thing.

(I don’t really see much for a reason in Kotetsu crying over this because Yoriichi type 0 is not going to be relevant after this arc, and since the nice kindhearted Tanjiro destroys it. It is fine.)

On a side note, I have watched lots of reactions to this season and I must say it is ridiculous how negatively people thought of Muichiro just because of his bland nature. Like to me Kotetsu was just annoying, you know the typical annoying children animes tend to present you as cute or likable whereas they just are not.

(Besides, I might be the only one but when Tanjiro tried to interject and be again that ‘amazingly’ nice person to stand up for Kotetsu and then got knocked down by Muichiro, it was very satisfying. Since this is the point where I am getting very tired of the endless ‘oh look how nice’ Tanjiro is that the series forces constantly on us.)

Furthermore, this arc while seemingly being about the two hashira is relatively little about them and much more about Tanjiro’s progress. Which is another big issue. Of course, he is the protag and all, but occasionally, focusing on others and giving them time and interest is not a bad idea. It adds a lot of depth to a story.

There is nothing wrong with taking your time and properly showing other characters and what they are like. Your Protag does not make a whole story!! All the characters and concepts added around him is what truly make a story.

Another big issue of this arc is the sword that Tanjiro will receive. It is Yoriichi’s sword but at this point, we don’t know much about him at all and why his sword would be so special. There is no connection that would make us understand why the sword would be so important.

Furthermore, Tanjiro was doing completely fine with the sword he had the whole time, making it even more questionable why he needed the other one. Had there been much more background on the sword one would understand the connection. And had Tanjiro struggled a lot more with the sword he already had one would understand why he needed the other one. In the end, I kept forgetting that he needed a sword at all.

Another issue of this arc is a common Shounen issue and that is writing the arc in a way that the protag finishes off the enemy. For most stories, it hardly makes much sense. there is always a lot of effort put into justifying why the stronger ones cannot do it and too much focus on the mc. This is the second upper moon he decapitates.

Please keep in mind that all this is my own opinion and how I feel a story would be more interesting if you don't agree with this it is completely fine and there is no need to be upset in case you don't like my opinion.^^

[tseneipgam]

"

PRETEND IT'S FICTION. As a matter of fact, the author would like to make an offer. For those of you on the side of Oswald, he will do this: if you send in your copy of this book, in hardcov- er or paperback, he will send you, for a fee of $10.00 (make check out to D. Eggers), a 3.5" floppy disk, on which will be a complete digital manuscript of this work, albeit with all names and locations changed, in such a way that the only people who will know who is Who are those whose lives have been included, though thinly disguised. Voila! Fiction! Further, the digital version will be interactive, as we expect our digital things to be (hey, have you heard of these new molecule sized microchips? The ones that can do, like all the functions ever performed by all computers since the beginning of time, in one second, in a grain of sand? Call you believe that?)."

"P) THE SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT AS ART FORM ASPECT 0) THE SELF-FLAGELLATION AS ART FORM ASPECT R) THE SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT DISGUISED AS SELF- FLAGELLATION AS EVEN HIGHER ART FORM ASPECT S) THE SELF-CANONIZATION DISGUISED AS SELF- DESTRUCTION MASQUERADING AS SELF-AGGRANDIZE- MENT DISGUISED AS SELF-FLAGELLATION AS HIGHEST ART FORM OF ALL ASPECT"

"it should go without saying that if you've checked this book ou from the library, or are reading it in paperback, you are much, much too late. Come to think of it, you may be reading this far, far in the future-it's probably being taught in all the schools! Do tell What's it like in the future? Is everyone wearing robes? Are the cars rounder, or less round? Is there a women's soccer league yet?"

"

"So. Big day, huh?" I say. "Yeah," he says. "I mean, a lot happened. A full day, this was." Yeah. The half day at school, then the basketball, and then dinner, and the open house, and then ice cream, and a movie- mean, it was almost as if it was too much to happen in one day, «s if a number of days had been spliced together to quickly paint a picture of an entire period of time, to create a whole-seeming idea of how we are living, without having to stoop (or rise) to actually pacing the story out. What are you getting at?" "No, I think it's good, it's fine. Not entirelv believable, but it works fine, in general. It's fine."

"Listen, you, we ve had plenty of days like this, and many tha were much more complicated. Remember your big camp-out

depover birthday party? The Lake Tahoe-with-your-large-headed. riend trip? Really, if anything, this is a much more pedestrian day than most. This is just a caricature, this, the skeleton of experi- ence- I mean, you know this is just one slivery, wafer-thin slice. To adequately relate even five minutes of internal thought-making would take forever- It's maddening, actually, when you sit down, is I will once I put you to bed, to try to render something like this, a time or place, and ending up with only this kind of feebleness one, two dimensions of twenty. "So you're reduced to complaining about it. Or worse, doing little tricks, out of frustration "Right. Right." "The gimmicks, bells, whistles. Diagrams. Here is a picture of stapler, all that. "Right." "You know, to be honest, though, what I see is less a problem with form, all that garbage, and more a problem of conscience. loite completely paralyzed with guilt about relating all this in the fist place, especially the stuff earlier on. You feel somehow obligated to do it, but you also know that Mom and Dad would hate it, would crucify you- I know, I know."

"ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes first and foremost to acknowledge his friends at NASA and the United States Marine Corps, for their great support and unquantifiable help with the technical aspects of this story. ¡Les saludo, muchachos! He wishes also to acknowledge the many people who have stretched the meaning of generosity by allowing their real names and actions to appear in this book. This goes doubly for the author's siblings, especially his sister Beth, whose memories were in most places more vivid, and triply for Toph (pro- nounced "Tofe". -long o), for obvious reasons. His older brother Bill is not being singled out because he is a Republican. The author would like to acknowledge that he does not look good in red. Or pink, or orange, or even yellow--he is not a spring. And until last year he thought Evelyn Waugh was a woman, and that George Eliot was a man. Further, the author, and those behind the making of this book, wish to acknowledge that yes, there are perhaps too many memoir-sorts of books being written at this juncture, and that such books, about real things and real people, as opposed to kind-of made up things and people, are inherently vile and corrupt and wrong and evil and bad, but would like to remind everyone that we could all do worse, as readers and as writers. "

"It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing. I tell you and it evaporates. I don't care- how could I care? I tell you how many people I have slept with (thirty-two), or how my parents left this world, and what have I really given you? Nothing. I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is That? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, two seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all of the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet… what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter's boyfriend, but.then what? We will die and we will have protected…. what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please. We feel that to reveal embar- rassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photogra- pher will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it's just the opposite, more is more is more _more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it's of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it."

"Please see this! I am the common multiplier for 47 million! I am the perfect amalgam! I was born of both sta- bility and chaos. I have seen nothing and everything. I am twenty- four but feel ten thousand years old. I am emboldened by youth, unfettered and hopeful, though inextricably tied to the past and future by my beautiful brother, who is part of both. Can you not see that we're extraordinary? That we were meant for something else, something more? All this did not happen to us for naught, I can assure you--there is no logic to that, there is logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason. Just give us our due. I am bursting with the hopes of a generation, their hopes surge through me, threaten to burst my hardened heart! Can you not see this? I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know, and this is all my own making, I know- not the fault of my parents but all my own cre- ation, yes, but I am the product of my environment, and thus rep- resentative, must be exhibited, as inspiration and cautionary tale. Can you not see what I represent? I am both a) martyred moralizer and b) amoral omnivore born of the suburban vacuum + idleness +television + Catholicism + alcoholism + violence; I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oréal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising

an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made. I have nothing but my friends and what's left of my little family. I need community, I need feedback, I need love, connection, give-and-take-_I will bleed if they will love. Let me try. Let me prove. I will pluck my hair, will remove my skin, I will stand before you feeble and shivering. I will open a vein, an artery. Pass over me at your peril! I could die soon. I prob- ably already have AIDS. Or cancer. Something bad will happen to me, I know, I know this because I have seen it so many times. I will be shot in an elevator, I will be swallowed in a sinkhole, will drown, so I need to bring this message now; I only have so much time, I know that sounds ridiculous, I seem young, healthy, strong, but things happen, I know you may not think so, but things hap. pen to me, to those around me, they truly do, you'll see, so I need to grab this while I can, because I could go at any minute, Laura, Mother, Father, God- Oh please let me show this to millions. Let me be the lattice, the center of the lattice. Let me be the conduit."

"

We are happy with our shorts and T-shirts, one side tucked in, just an inch of it on the right side, showing come belt, the rest hanging out--this is our look- it having been arrived at in high school through careful consideration, through the eschewing of so many possible mistakes. We wear no tattoos. because we feel tattoos indicate too much attention paid to one's look and anyway, though the trend is still on the upswing in 1994, we are sure that inside a year, maybe just only a few months, that whole boom will go bust. (How long, after all, could something like that last?) Same with dyed hair, piercings, brandings, creative headwear, neckwear, T-shirtwear, all other indications and accou- trements. We have opted out, taken the ultimate apathetic approach to looks and attire, have moved past the check-me-out look, past the look of rejecting-the-check-me-out-look-in-favor of-darkly-rebellious-look-_ have rejected both and have chosen a kind of elegance through refusal- the check-me-out-if-you-must look-but-you'll-get-no-encouragement-from-melook--thelookof absolutely no look at all. "

"The park is a haven for innovative people-combinations. Even more than Berkeley in general, it's a sort of laboratory, the grass perhaps the grounds of a laboratory for experimental people- making-the mixed-race/ethnicity couple capital of the world. Easily half of all couples therein, whether married or dating or on first dates or just jogging together, are somehow mixed--mostly black and white, but often Asian and white (even the somehow less common Asian man/white woman pairing), Latino and white duos, Asian/Latino, black/Asian, a smattering of lesbians. It's been cast by the directors of commercials for banks"

"I pull up to a light, next to a bunch of young black kids. Maybe they'll shoot me. I'm in the zone of all probability. I cannot be sur prised. Earthquakes, locusts, poison rain would not impress mt Visits from God, unicorns, bat-people with torches and sceprets its all plausible. If these kids happen to be bad kids, and have guns and want to shoot someone for an initiation or whatever reason bad kids shoot people like me, it will be me, the glass will break and the bullet will come through and I will not be surprised. With ie biller in my head, I will drive my car into a tree, and as I am wif ing to be pulled from the wreck, neatly dead, I will not panic or yell. I will think only: Weird, this is exactly what I expected."

"I start wishing I had a pen, some paper. Details of all this will be good. This will make some kind of short story or something. Or no. People have done stuff about suicides before. But I could twist it somehow, include random things, what I was thinking on the way to the hospital, about Indian summer, the doctor riddle, about watching Conan. That's a good detail, the laughing while your friend is having his stomach pumped. People have done that, too. Probably on TV even, Picket Fences maybe. But I could take it further. I should take it further. I could be aware, for instance, in the text, of it having been done before, but that I have no choice but to do it again, it having actually happened that way. But then it will sound like one of those things where the narrator, having grown up media-saturated, can't live through anything without it having echoes of similar experiences in television, movies, books, blah blah."

""You're breaking out of character again."

"

Everyone around the ill must do what they can, in terms of sacrifice and struggle, or malnourishment or sleep depri- vation, to suffer too, and to stay close while suffering; to leave the bedside, to leave the hospital, is to weaken the curing forces, to enfeeble the efforts toward recovery. While the ill are ill, if you can be there you should be there. I know these things. Bizarre, self- sacrificing gestures are important. On days that you cannot possi- bly come visit, you must visit. When you get home one night, and Toph says, "So, are you going to pretend to be a parent tonight, or what?" -which he means as a kind of joke, because you two have been eating fast food for weeks, and you've been napping on the couch every night after dinner you should take a breath and know that this is okay, that this sort of thing, this struggle and sacrifice, is essential, that he does not understand but someday will."

"It is okay for me to have sex with the sexologist while Shalini is in a coma. How could we say no? Our being together means that something is happening, and the happening of things equals a moral good, which equals an irreducible good, which = existing= defiance = pulling = pushing = proof - faith = connection + hand-

holding = affirmation = swimming to the rock and back + holding breath under water all the way from one side to the other = the fighting of fights, tiny fights, big fights, any fights = the proving of points, all the time = denial of the tide = flouting of decay force - restraint - moderation - nail-biting - no-saying + wall- punching + volume-turning-upping + quick-lane-changing + car passing + light-making + yelling + demanding, insisting, staying, getting = defiance = handprints, footprints, proof = tree-shaking, fence-cutting + taking + grabbing + stealing + running = engorg. ing = no regretting = insomnia = blood = soaking in blood and what Shalini needs is the connection, the pumping of blood, the use of the lattice! She needs her friends not only there by her side, but she needs us being as close as possible, not only to her but to each other, creating friction, noise, and if possible, she needs us having sex, having sex with each other and projecting that energy to her, the bursting and love-_it all connects, aha! Shalini would want us having sex! "

[clevermrclandestine]

LIFE UPDATE 0

Well, it's been a while. Dips in mood do that. My bad.

FAMILY Honestly, haven't seen 'em much. Feels good. The few times I have seen them, though, were great! I saw my mom last week when I did my laundry at her house (she always says "Oh, don't forget to bring ALL of your laundry this time! That includes your bedding."). Thank you, Mom. I appreciate you sharing your resources with the needy. She works from home one day a week which gives us time to catch up. I usually don't have much to update her on (I live a nice, boring life), but I always love to hear how she's been and what she's been up to. All that jazz. Had dinner with my two older sisters and their families including my three nephews as well as my dad and his family. It was a nice time. The service at the restaurant was slow as fuck, though. Exceptionally so, in fact. My thought was, "Wow, they must not have wages high enough to ensure competent, reliable workers. Fuckin' management." Having worked in food service for a significant portion of my life, there is little the staff can do other than their best. Aside from that, it was awesome getting to see my nephews talking and interacting with everyone at the table. To me, kids are useless until they start developing sentience. Then things start to pay off. Oh, Nova (my cat) is doing great! Still shedding like crazy, but I'm still willing to look past that. I got here a cheap toy from a thrift store down the road and that mother fucker doesn't even play with it! Like, come on! I'm really tryin', here. Kidding aside, it's nice having something to take care of. But a potted plant would be a lot easier… we'll see.

JOB SEARCH I am taking my mom's advice and looking for a long-term, chemistry-related job. After all, I went to school for chemistry. Been coming up with a cover letter (my first, actually) for whatever places near me are hiring. So far, I have one that has openings listed. Maybe I should just call the other places and inquire directly. A part of me thinks they would appreciate the effort, but another part thinks they would think I am wasting their time. Either way, I will do whatever I need to… things gotta' change.

MENTAL HEALTH No updates, really. Except that I have been getting "brain zaps" again which is odd given that I haven't missed any doses of Paroxetine. They only occur with lateral eye movements (No idea why. Don't ask me.) on some days. Overall, it isn't much of a concern. It's just interesting. Need a blood draw for a lithium level per request of my psychiatrist. Actually, a PNP: they're cheaper. You get used to needles over time. It hurts to say, but I need to stop ingesting political content. It just stresses me out. Also, some good news: I have been drinking less. A lot less. Now, just kick the nicotine and I'll finally be free… but let's be realistic.

PHYSICAL HEALTH Been running a lot. My version of a lot, anyway: 5 days/wk for >3mi @ ~8.5-9min/mi Was really proud of myself the other day when I went for 5 miles, but, shit, I was exhausted. Gonna have to take a break from running, though; shin splints, such bullshit. I guess my stationary bike should suffice, and if I don't build up my core strength then I will never reach my goal of a comfortable 5mi @ <8.5mi/min. That is why God invented situp benches. I'm kidding. People invented those. They also invented gods, now that I think about it. My diet has been leaner the past few weeks. Thank christ that I am not baking anymore. It's for my own good: I always eat whatever I decide to bake. And yes, it is always sugary, salty, and fucking delicious. So carbs are a no go for me, right now. I'll celebrate with a cheat day once I get below 170lbs… just 5 more pounds, mother fucker.

HOBBIES N' SHIT As the first line in this post suggests, I really haven't done many things I enjoy. Sure, I jot down the random ideas I have throughout the day, reorganize my papers and files, and read about the things I like. But I haven't been doing them consistently. Doing them has taken too much effort the past few weeks. Hell, I'm surprised I've been running as much as I have. I feel proud of it, sure, but… I don't know.

'Til next time.

CMC