#I think I was in like. 10th grade and one of my classes had a whole end of the year movie day..................

[iiboronii]

Me upon realizing that I can just have an AU instead of writing an entire fanfiction about an idea I had in my head once:

[ventiswampwater]

she’s the moment

[mihai-florescu]

there was someone who got on the tram that i had to double take because they looked like you it was wild

Whisper the secret password "wataei canon" and see if they ARE me...

[incorrectbatfam]

I'm writing an AU where Damian grew up in Gotham and I need some names for the background classmates/people but I don't want to do the plain John/Jessica/etc. but I'm not American so idk what other names are popular for his age

Some things you can do assuming you're still working on this after 3 months of me not answering:

• Look through yearbooks

• Watch graduation footage

• Check websites like LinkedIn where people post their names

• Search up popular names by year

America is diverse enough that no one bats an eye. There are literally 0 rules (I'm looking at you, boy named Pistol from 2nd grade)

In canon Damian was born only 3 years after me so feel free to use some of these repeat names I went to school with that I recall off the top of my head

First names:

- Nicole. I knew 3 and they all got married straight out of high school for some reason

- Aiden. Had 2 in my 10th grade English class and they had the same last initial. We called one of them Fish

- Alex, Kai, and Elliot. If you're in any queer circles you know what I'm talking about

- Muhammad (and other spellings). It's the most common name in the world and the a lot of ones I knew went by their middle names precisely because of it

- Ethan. I knew like 4—two played on the same basketball team and one almost got arrested

- Hannah. In my experience she'll either be super chill or Catholic

- Will. I've met 2. Both weirdos

Last names:

- Zhang. There were like 6 Zhangs in my graduating class and I felt bad that they were always last since they're at the end of the alphabet

- Johnson. They're everywhere

- Nguyen. I think something like a third of Vietnamese people have that last name

- Prondzinski. It was because of a set of triplets but I'm gonna count it because why not

- Sharma. I knew 2 and they went a full year letting people think they were related

- Schaffer. Also knew 2. I think one works retail now last I checked

- Hernandez. I knew 2 Mexican and 1 Filipino kid with that name

[songmingisthighs]

Wanbelyn

introduction pt. i | pt. ii | pt. iii

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ch. xlv - pb&j

neurosurgeon!hongjoong × reader

buy me coffee ?

where love and peace is held, i never expected for this to happen. i planned and i planned, i expected, and i hoped, but it was never you. you held what i wanted hostage to make room for you, the thing that i needed but has no means of acceptance. deny me, live your best life.

Hongjoong is not one to be surprised easily. Well, by events or situations. He's a scaredy cat who had fallen victim to his son's pranks at least 20 times. In the past month.

But the sight of Kijoong's teacher, Mr Kang, lighting up as you produced a bag of sandwiches from your bag and handed it over to him almost made him choke on his own spit. Honestly, he didn't know why he was so surprised as he had seen (peeked) into your (private) conversation with Mr Kang the other day. Maybe he had been in denial (for some darn reason) about the exact identity of the Yeosang you talked with, thinking that it could be someone else with a similar name. That's possible, right? But seeing the way you adjusted the sleeve of his rolled-up shirt, Hongjoong was hesitant.

When you took Kijoong inside to settle in his cubby and spend some time before the classes started, Hongjoong found himself walking towards the guy he was eyeing.

"Ah, good morning! Mr Kim, right? Kim Kijoong's dad?" Yeosang asked politely with a warm smile. Even Hongjoong had to admit that his heart fluttered slightly so his "baseless" annoyance curiosity has decreased slightly. "Y-yes," clearing his throat, Hongjoong slipped his hands into his pants pockets, "How are you? How's your dad? I heard he was at the hospital?" "Yeah, yeah, he's fine! We went to the other KQ branch hospital so he was taken care of well. His recovery was even better when (y/n) sent him soup," he chuckled.

At the mention of the teacher's dad knowing you, Hongjoong couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at that. "Oh, I didn't realize that you two were so close," he nodded casually. Yeosang shrugged, "I guess in a sense we are, but (y/n) just cares about people and she takes it upon herself to take care of those who know her from her roots. Another hint, you two had known each other for a long while. "(y/n) didn't mention that she knew you to me and she often tells me about the people she knows from her youth." Hongjoong cringed slightly, realizing how easy it could be for Yeosang to twist his words and make it seem like he was jealous. Which he kinda was but it's not like it's obvious. Thankfully, if he did realize, Yeosang didn't let it show. "That could be because I haven't seen her in a long while and it didn't even occurred to us that we knew each other until the second day I came back," well that made Hongjoong more curious and Yeosang could sense it based on the way Hongjoong nodded along and putting all of his focus on him which made him rather nervous. So this time, it was Yeosang who cleared his throat and mended his posture, "S-see, (y/n) and I knew each other from way back in high school. We met because we had entered the same debate competition and we were in opposition. She was formidable with her arguments and it actually made me fear her in a major way. I didn't even think I'd get to talk to her but as you can guess, I did," "How so?" Hongjoong asked, engaged in the story, "Well, she made my teammate cry and she just wanted to make sure that the know-it-all 12th grader had his mommy to wipe his snot. We were in 10th grade at the time." The revelation made Hongjoong let out a snort which caused some parents and their children nearby to jump in surprise, looking at him who had to turn around in shame.

"So, is that how you and (y/n) started dating?" Hongjoong asked after calming down, not really realizing the words that he used. Yeosang furrowed his eyebrows momentarily before chuckling, "Oh, no. We are not dating! We became close again after the realization of our connection and became even closer because I found out that my spotter at the gym is actually Kijoong's instructor so we just shared and bonded and got even closer because of that!" he explained.

Though he was not even supposed to feel that way, Hongjoong felt a sense of relief and his posture even relaxed considerably. Though, he tensed up again when Yeosang continued, "Although, between you and me, (y/n) seems to be interested in this other guy." "What other guy? Is it someone she's close with? How'd you know?" At that point, Hongjoong didn't even care that he was acting rather ridiculously, asking random, personal stuff to his son's homeroom teacher. How professional. "I think you'd know him too," Yeosang stated and for one moment, Mingi came to mind but considering how you still deny him ice cubes, that seemed irrational, impossible, and positively stupid. Yeosang turned around slightly and pointed to where you were inside. "There."

Slowly, almost dramatically, Hongjoong turned his head, following Yeosang's finger to see you talking to the guy he recognized as the other homeroom teacher in Kijoong's class, Choi Soobin. While you were kind and affectionate towards Yeosang, you were more... Flirty with Soobin. That was the only word that seemed suitable because your stance was more passive yet open while still maintaining some boundaries with Soobin. Very different from the way you were with Yeosang whom you treated in a more motherly manner, like how you would Kijoong. With Yeosang, it was tidying him and giving him what he needed but with Soobin, it was more playful what with the gentle pushes and allowing him to guide you so your head won't hit the shelve nearby. You both looked very comfortable with each other, being as close as you both could and remaining respectful at a kindergarten while Kijoong tried to climb up Soobin's legs. His eyes glazed over the way you gently chastised the boy and tried to pry him off but Soobin grabbed your hands away from Kijoong and made gestures that suggested he was telling you to just let Kijoong be.

It was then that Hongjoong realized that his gut feeling was correct but he had jumped to a conclusion.

A lot of thoughts ran through Hongjoong's head, trying to make sense of things as if correcting an assignment, marking parts that were wrong and putting notes on certain parts as if pointing out which information needed elaboration. Above all, one thought seemed more prominent compared to the other. The thought that questioned whether or not he was supposed to feel bitter, jealous, and, well, hurt. Knowing that he was questioning his action did nothing, however. He just kept staring at the two of you in the corner while he was there, at a distance. Because that's what he had made his persona towards you to be since the beginning, right?

Distant, unapproachable.

Like he always was.

Alone.

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[wifey-badalee]

ALL I NEEDED WAS A LITTLE LOVE AND AFFECTION,WAS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?

How it started!

When I was six when I noticed my mom never really payed attention to me Ike other mom with my friend’s ,it made me question her as to why?

“Mom why don’t you love me the way my friends moms do? You never hold me and cuddle me like they do. What’s wrong with me?” “ Oh , I don’t know what you want me to say those are your friends moms I’m your mom we aren’t the same”, she said. I guess she is right not all moms are the same I’m just overreacting,I know she loves me a lot…..right?

MY FIRST DAY OF GRADE 1!

“Mom I’m so excited for my first day ,I hope I make a lot of friends and have a lot of fun since I’m a big girl now I can go out and play a lot with my new friends right?”

“Yea atleast you won’t be such a burden anymore bugging me to play with you,” she said.

“U-uhm yea I guess so I’ll be occupied with my new friends.” Little did I know making friends isn’t so easy

“OK we’re here get out quickly before you’re late,” moms shouts.

“Well aren’t you gonna walk me to my class that’s what all parents do for first graders?”

“ You’re a big girl now you don’t need me to walk you to your class you can find it by yourself.”

O-oh OK bye, I love you!” Cricketssss ,that’s all I heard

I walked into school with a big smile excited for this new chapter, a group of girls around my age were standing outside my class, I knew they were in the same class.

“HI guys my name is Isabelle I guess we’re gonna be in the same class for the rest of the year we should be friends!”

“Uhm is this a joke, do you think just because we’re in the same class we should be friends? Uh yeah that’s not how it works but good luck making friends with the others,” the one girl snickers.

My mood was immediately ruined and I felt sad after that encounter, they all looked at me and laughed along with the girl. What is wrong with me why isn’t anyone nice to me, why don’t they want to be my friend!?

The entire day went on like this no one wanted to be my friend, I tried so hard to make friends but they all had their own cliques and didn’t need another friend, was I really that bad? I mean my mom didn’t like me so much so there must be a reason no one likes me, I just need to find out what.

MY 10TH BIRTHDAYY PARTY!

I’m now 10 and its my birthday party all of my friends have been invited ,I’ve grown so much since the last time, I know have a lot of friends since I moved school last year, we moved because mom didn’t like the neighborhood anymore so we moved a few blocks down, my school was then too far so she transferred me to another, it was so much better there, I made so many more friends than I could have ever imagined, maybe something wasn’t wrong with me after all…I’m actually super smart, my new teacher wants to send me for an advanced programmer for gifted kids, though I don’t think I will go, mom says it's a waste of time they just want to use me as an experiment, which I don't get or believe, speaking of her she hasn’t changed she’s so much colder now, I think she genuinely hates me as I got older I noticed it’s not normal for parents to be so cold to their kids all of my friends parents love them so much and will do anything, her saying she isn’t other parents was just an excuse, I’m not stupid I’ve seen the context clues she just doesn’t like me, but I don’t know why? I’ve done everything to please her I even started playing soccer which I hate because of how injured I get, yet she still doesn’t notice me or care . WHY CANT SHE JUST LOVE ME AND GIVE ME AFFECTION US THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

“ Your daughter is super smart , you must be so proud. She’s a wonderful little girl you have done an amazing job, she’d so kind gentle and lovely, she truly is a daughter all moms would wish for,” says my friends mom.

“Oh she’s nothing special, I’m sure your kids are just as lovely,” my mom replied.

Wow can’t she just accept the compliment and compliment me as well? This completely ruined me day, I don’t want to celebrate my birthday anymore. My aunt alba looks at me sadly as she saw my face drop she’s the only one who understands me and sees how my mom treats but she’s too scared to talk about this with my mom.

3 YEARS LATER!

I’m now 13 , I’ve just come our of the longest day of high-school which was dreadful, who knew high-school would be such a horrible place to be it’s like he'll, the workload is insane and so is the people here I hate it and I hate my life. My school life is already bad I just need to go home to my personal life which is worse.

The sun is blazing hot today and my head is pounding…oh yeah I forgot to mention my “mom” makes me walk to school and back which is so far away and her excuse is I’m taking too much time of her day, she needs to focus on training especially now that she had injured her leg. That’s a lie I didn’t buy she just didn’t want to, I don’t engage with her anymore I’ve learnt to just live it and pretend she’s not even there which is basically a reality, all she does is hangout with her friends and hangout with her new girlfriend, who doesn’t seem to fond of me either.. I wonder what mom said to her about me she gives me dirty looks and acts like this isn’t my house and I don’t belong here…maybe I don’t. Aunt alba is the person I hangout with besides my friends she’s gets me and we always have fun together, sometimes I wish she was my mom instead.

PRESENT DAY!

Uhm so yeah let’s just say my life is a whole lot worse than now, my got married to her girlfriend Olga and she had a baby about 2 years ago, that baby that I hate so much even though its done nothing to me, but its parents make me hate it so much. My suspicions..well it wasn’t really one it was facts just got proven even more my mom genuinely just never liked or loved me. She’s so loved dovey to the baby and is just completely a whole new person with her, she cuddles her almost all the time, as soon as she walks through the door, she doesn’t even greet me (not that I expected her to do so since she never does or has) but runs to find the baby and greets her with hugs and kisses. That’s all I ever wanted as a kid, why was it so difficult for her to do that with me. I was never a bad kid or nagged her, u never even said anything….is that why? She takes Olga and the baby on trips even to other countries why I don’t know its not like the baby will even remember but she does leaving me behind because “I’m being punished” for whatever reason Olga cane up with .Oh yeah I forgot to mention she completely despised me, she’s sees me as an obstacle in their perfect family, apparently I don’t fit in according to her which my agrees, she’s says I’m too cold and mean and not a good influence for her new baby since I “disrespect” since I disrespect my mom so much, she says she doesn’t want that negative energy around them. I don’t know what to do anymore I hate my life, I hate myself and I just want to end it all, I’m so tired of people acting like I’m such a horrible person and acting like something is wrong with me.

I go to the lounge and sit on the sofa to watch a new series I recently started until I hear a knock on the door.

“I’ll get it,” I said as if someone else would.

“Hola mi amor, you just keep getting more beautiful everything I see you,” says my gran Eli.

“Thanks gran, hey alba!” I screech with excitement, that doesn’t last long as Olga comes in the kitchen to quieten me.

“Stop yelling the baby is sleeping, I just put her down I don’t need you to wake her up. You’re such a nuisance,” Olga says.

I just turn around and walk back to my seat on the sofa when my “mom” appears.

“Hola mami and alba, Como estas?,” she greets.

“Moy bien,” Eli replied

“Lets eat shall we,” Olga says.

We al sit down to eat, I go to it next to aunt alba which is so much nicer, I’ll have someone to talk to during dinner.

“Are you excited for your school play coming up,” aunt alba asks.

“Yeah I actually am surprisingly,” I reply.

“What school play,” mom asks.

“Isabelle's school is hosting a play of Romeo and Juliet, our girl scored the part of Juliet, can you imagine, though shouldn’t you know this since you’re her MOM,?” says gran Eli

“With who’s permission did she get to participate in this?, you don’t even ask anymore you just do things on your own buzz,” says mom

At this point I was furious, firstly I told her this 2 weeks ago and she agreed, she probably wasn’t paying attention, and now she wants to accuse me of just making decisions without asking..really. My whole life I has to make decisions for myself and I had to be put in adult situations from the time I was little because my mother wasn’t interested in helping me with anything, now she wants to come be a mother when I’m so much older, NO I’m not letting this slide anymore, I’m finally excited for something in my life and I won’t let her take that way from me… I push my chair backwards and bang my hands on the table….

TO BE CONTINUED….

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

North To The Future [Chapter 15: Drive] [Series Finale]

The year is now 2000. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, violence, character deaths.

Word count: 7.3k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @elsolario​ @ladylannisterxo​ @doingfondue​ @tclegane​ @quartzs-posts​ @liathelioness​ @aemcndtargaryen​ @thelittleswanao3​ @burningcoffeetimetravel​ @poohxlove​ @borikenlove​ @myspotofcraziness​ @travelingmypassion​ @graykageyama​ @skythighs​ @lauraneedstochill​ @darlingimafangirl​ @charenlie​ @thewew​ @eddies-bat-tattoos​ @minttea07​ @joliettes​ @trifoliumviridi​ @bornbetter​ @flowerpotmage​ @thewitch-lives​ @tempt-ress​ @padfooteyes​ @teenagecriminalmastermind​ @chelsey01​ @anditsmywholeheart​ @heliosscribbles​ @killerqueen-ofwillowgreen​ @narwhal-swimmingintheocean​ @tillyt04​ @cicaspair418​ @fan-goddess​ 

A/N: This is the fic I almost never wrote because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in some random, angsty, 1990s, Alaskan, crime-thriller AU. Thank you for proving me wrong. I hope you enjoy the ending. 💜

Almost everything about your existence is pure chance; it’s the most freeing and horrifying truth imaginable. There’s the genetic lottery and corporate downsizing, revolutions and hurricanes, plagues, asteroids, famines, faulty airplanes and malignant blooms of cells and drunk drivers. There are 100 billion planets in this galaxy and your atoms ended up on the one called Earth. After all that, do you really think what you want matters? So make all the choices you like, all the nail-biting deliberations and promises and vows, weigh costs and benefits, do research, roll dice, ask astrologers and palm readers, start over every New Year because that’s something we tell ourselves is possible. The fact that you exist at all is one big cosmic coin flip. If you think you’re the one driving, you’re dead fucking wrong. You’re the speck of dust on a windshield, the spin of a roulette wheel. You’re a flash of silver in the universe’s pinball machine.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about chance, okay? My family is one of the wealthiest in the Western Hemisphere, and I didn’t do anything to earn that. I was born first, and I definitely didn’t do anything to earn that, Jesus Christ, what a chromosomal fuckup. I inherited an affliction that others get to live without. I can’t imagine what it feels like to wake up and not be horrified by myself, my shortcomings, my failures: too small, too stupid, too wild, too weak. And the first time someone says something like that to you, you want to apologize, you want to drop to your knees and cling to them and beg for absolution, maybe even the first hundred times, the first thousand. And then it just starts to piss you off. Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all before, why would you expect anything different? Isn’t this getting old, Mom? Maybe you’re the stupid one, Dad, if you think you could cut me and anything but disappointments would fall out. I’m not horrified by the fact that I’m an addict. The horror came first. The horror is what led to all the rest of it.

One day when I was in 10th Grade—I was slumped way down in my chair and drinking vodka out of an Evian water bottle—my American History teacher, purely by chance, assigned me to make a poster about Juneau, Alaska. Some other kid got Los Angeles (Hollywood! The Whisky a Go Go!) and another got Chicago (the Mob!) and another got Nashville (Johnny Cash!) and some jock moron I hated got Baltimore (um, crabs? the War of 1812…?), but I got fucking Juneau, Alaska. I thought this was so unjust that I never forgot it, the fact that I had to get up in front of the class with my pathetic Crayolas-and-magazine-cutouts poster and pretend that Juneau was a place that mattered, that microscopic cloud-covered relic of a late-1800s gold mining settlement on the shores of the Gastineau Channel. Juneau was never on my list of cities to run to. It just wasn’t. It didn’t have anything I wanted. But when I started thinking about places where I could really disappear, where no one would ever bother looking, where days are short and dark and incurious and irrelevant…well, that sounds like Juneau, right?

Let me tell you something about the night I left. I’ve been more messed up, yeah, and I’ve hurt people worse, and I’ve been closer to death, I’ve been one more powder-white gram on the scale away from oblivion; but I’ve never felt that fucking low. I can’t decide if I wish I’d never gone to Juneau at all. I can’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse.

My flight is a red-eye with a layover in Ketchikan, American Airlines, bound for Seattle. Sunfyre has the window seat. He’s wearing the bright red Service Dog vest that I once stole for him specifically for such occasions. My dog fly with the cargo? My dog?! Bill Clinton will be elected pope first. Sunfyre is chewing contently on Milk-Bones and watching the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean. He knows the drill. We’ll touchdown and deplane, and then…and then…

And then we’ll start over again somewhere new. I’ll find a flight board and pick a destination; Seattle is a hub, with spokes leading everywhere. I could go south, to Galveston, Lafayette, Biloxi, someplace where it gets hot, someplace where I can sweat her out of me, purge every cell that still remembers what she felt like. I could go west, fading into mountains or cornfields, vapid infinitesimal towns in Montana, Iowa, Idaho, Nebraska. I could go to New England or the Great Lakes or freaking Hawaii, sleep in hammocks, swim with sea turtles, drink my rum and Cokes out of coconut shells. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that nowhere really sounds good to me. My legs are suddenly tired of running. There’s an ache that rattles down to the bone.

I don’t have to tell you that I love her, right? It’s not so easy for me to say. But it’s true, and it’s beautiful, and it’s torture, and it’s a dream. It’s pain that flays you alive and then builds you back again, layers of fresh muscle and tendons and veins growing over ribs and vertebrae like a trellis thick with ivy. It’s not a high. It’s just the best life can get down here on earth. It’s the ocean, it’s the Northern Lights.

I’m swimming in a black hoodie that is three sizes too big; I haven’t slept and I’m pale and raccoon-eyed, looking like death, feeling worse. When the stewardess rolls by with her clattering cart just slim enough to fit through the aisle, I order a cup of water for Sunfyre and a double rum and Coke for myself. It arrives with two blood-red cherries bobbing in a caramel-dark carbonated sea. The guy in the next seat over gives me a judgmental little eyebrow raise.

“That doesn’t look like breakfast,” he says.

I bite off both cherries—juice dribbling down my chin, wiped away with a sleeve—and throw the stems over my shoulder. The lady sitting behind me yelps in disgust. “Because it’s dessert.”

The man smiles and shakes his head, one of those I shouldn’t find it funny but I do sort of looks. I inspire a lot of those. He’s maybe mid-thirties, long hair and ripped jeans, very punk rock, cool as hell. There is a constellation of pins on his denim jacket. One of them has a roman numeral 10 on it, a stark X nestled inside a triangle. Unity, Service, Recovery, the gold letters say. To Thine Own Self Be True. It’s an Alcoholics Anonymous pin. What are the chances?

He catches me staring, and I ask: “Does it really make you a better man?”

“It doesn’t make you better. It just makes you real.” He smiles again, patient and kind. “It makes your emotions and experiences real, your relationships real. And so you become whatever version of yourself you were always supposed to be. But you have to want it. Not your wife, not your parents or your kids, not your pastor, not your friends, not your parole officer. You.”

I speak without knowing what I’m going to say. “I want it.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

He sees a lot, I think, as the plane descends into the grey fogbank of Seattle. 20/20.

When we land, the man squeezes into a cab with me and Sunfyre—he sniffles into a Kleenex for a while before reluctantly admitting that he’s allergic to dogs—and pays the fare. The cab’s worn brakes squeal to a stop outside a residential treatment center on the banks of the Puget Sound. When we step out onto the sidewalk, I ask the man if he’s going to take me to get one last drink first. He laughs in my face. Fucking jerk.

He pulls out a black Sharpie and rummages through his pockets, his wallet. He can’t find a scrap of paper. He writes his phone number on the underside of my arm instead. “You call me, okay?” he says. “Call me when you get out. Call me before you get out, if you need to. I don’t care if it’s in five minutes, I don’t care if it’s at 2 a.m. You just make sure you call.”

“Why would you do this? I mean, you don’t even know me. You have no idea who I am.”

“Because once, years ago, someone did the same thing for me, and someone did it for her too. Maybe one day you’ll be able to pay it forward. I don’t care who you are or where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d like to think that we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

And then he waits for me to go inside. He doesn’t leave until he watches me check in at reception on the other side of the rain-flecked glass. Outside, a brand new day is beginning. A misty sun rises as pieces of the sky fall.

Sunfyre trots into the lobby alongside me, panting cheerfully, shaking the perpetual Seattle drizzle from his fur. There’s a girl at the front desk, just a girl, and that’s the other thing that’s different now. She’s not a maybe-future-one-of-my-girls. She’s just like anyone else. I already have a girl. I mean, I don’t anymore, not really. But I still do.

I throw my things onto the counter: my single suitcase, my tattered wallet, my bundle of cash held together with rubber bands, my scraped-up electric guitar.

“Checking in?” the girl asks.

“Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes, I guess.”

She opens my wallet, reads my license, blinks in bewilderment. “Aegon…?”

I sigh dramatically. “It’s Greek.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You dream of him; and when you do, he’s always smiling. He’s reading your palm in an empty Taco Bell, he’s kissing you under the Northern Lights, he’s regaling your parents with stories—of lobster fishing in Portland, of cattle ranching in Denver—all through Thanksgiving dinner, he’s undressing you in his moonlit apartment, he’s climbing into your bed. He’s not angry, he’s not ruined, he’s not running away. He’s exactly as you remember him in his best moments. He’s all chaotic white-blond hair and weightless light, sharp laughter and bright eyes. And each morning there’s a splinter-thin moment before you remember that he’s gone. That’s the worst part, really. You always knew it would be. You can’t even begin to forget him.

Your friends want to help you, but they don’t know how. Neither do your parents. Your dad gets an atlas from the study, throws it down on the dining room table, and opens it to a map of the world. “Pick anyplace and we’ll go there,” he says. “We’ll close the vet clinic for two weeks and we’ll all go.” But you can’t give him a single name: not Athens, or Paris, or Buenos Ares, or Cairo, or New York City, or Rome, or Tokyo, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s the strangest thing. All your life you’ve been waiting to get out of Juneau, but now nowhere sounds good to you. And maybe that’s a lesson you wish you’d never learned: sometimes freedom is less about places than it is about people.

The blood on the equipment recovered from Trent’s apartment matches DNA from the first three victims. He is charged with eight counts of first-degree murder and held awaiting trial in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. His family visits him faithfully each week. His lawyer is exasperated that he won’t plead guilty and spare his parents the humiliation and expense of a protracted court battle. But Trent’s story never changes: he’s innocent, he’s never killed anybody, he doesn’t understand how the blood could have been found on his belongings. He wants to know exactly what items the police tested; he and his lawyer are still waiting for the prosecutor to turn over all the details during discovery. In the midst of the scandal, the upheaval, you fade into the backdrop like the stars behind fog. People talk around you and through you. They offer gaps that you don’t care enough to fill in. Drinks clink, whispers fly, conspiracies are exchanged between pool shots. You watch the days grow longer and wait for the future to arrive. You don’t know what it will look like, you can’t even begin to fathom it. But surely there must be a future. Life goes on. It did for your mom after Jesse. It will for you too.

A week after Aegon leaves, there is a knock at your parents’ front door. You open it to find Aemond standing there in the muted amber-pink afternoon light. His hair is long and loose, his Armani suit immaculately tailored, his BlackBerry nestled in his right hand. He glances up from it at you and his jaw falls open. And only then do you realize how awful you must look.

You tell Aemond, your voice hushed and heavy, ankles in quick-drying cement: “I don’t know where he is.”

“No, I can see that,” Aemond replies, dull horror in his blue eye. Then he turns around and strides halfway down the driveway towards the street, where a cab idles as it waits for him, engine exhaust pouring into the air like smoke from a firepit.

“How’s your dad?” you call after him when you get your bearings.

He pauses under the dwindling light. “Alive. For now.” And then Aemond considers you for a while. “I suppose if I ever want to find you again, I know where to look.”

You nod. “I’ll be here.”

I’ll always be here.

A month crawls by like a wounded animal, dead leaves snared in the fur of its belly. The flesh on your thigh knits back together. The things that Aegon ordered show up in Juneau, packages left on the front porch and stuffed into the moose-shaped mailbox like Christmas gifts in a stocking. You pack these remnants of him—Zoobooks and cooking accessories, knives and Chia Pets—into a cardboard box and tuck it away in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of the attic, and you’re aware the entire time that this has happened before, almost exactly twenty years ago. When your dad puts a Third Eye Blind or Red Hot Chili Peppers or Oasis album on his record player, you find some excuse to leave the room. When you tack magazine cutouts of beaches and cityscapes to your bedroom walls, all you can think about is where Aegon might be now. You wonder where he works during the day, a surf shop or a construction site or a farm or a fishing boat; you wonder who he spends his nights with.

I’ll always be here. Even if I leave, I’ll always be here.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twenty years ago to the day, almost to the hour, a man fell into the Gastineau Channel and drowned. They found water in his lungs, though the autopsy was only a formality, an afterthought; Jesse had a reputation in Juneau, and no one was particularly surprised to see how his story ended. There were abrasions on his back and shoulders, contusions on his wrists, but so what? He probably tripped half a dozen times before he tumbled over some guardrail and into the frigid black water. There was a bloody mess of an impact wound on the side of his face, but who cares? The blood alcohol concentration doesn’t lie. The man was wasted, and more than that he was a waste. If his premature demise hadn’t been then, it would have been later, in a week or a month or a year. And when someone like that goes, there’s a sigh of relief that accompanies the misery, isn’t there? There’s the sense of a weight being lifted from a scale.

You’re sitting in Ursa Minor at the usual booth, but the bar is practically empty. It’s Valentine’s Day. Joyce is with Rob, Kimmie is with Brad; Heather’s parents have spirited her away on a short vacation to Sitka to try to take their minds off Trent’s imminent lifelong incarceration. Your mom and dad’s February 14th tradition is cooking a homemade Italian dinner together—pasta, bread with herbs and olive oil, caprese salad, tiramisu—and then settling in for a romantic Blockbuster rental. This year, it’s Runaway Bride. Your mom loves Julia Roberts. They didn’t ask for privacy, but you gave it to them anyway. Kimmie offered to drop you off at Ursa Minor and then drive you home after her date with Brad so you could drink away your sorrows without having to worry about calling a ride. So now Kimmie is getting wined, dined, and plied with boxed chocolates at the Red Dog Saloon while you drain appletinis and flip through one of Jesse’s journals, not knowing what you’re looking for.

Dale is washing pint glasses in the sink behind the bar and humming cheerfully along to a Cake CD. It’s just you and him tonight; evidently, Dale doesn’t have a hot date either. It was nice of him to eschew the usual Shania Twain or Sheryl Crow soundtrack. He’s trying to spare you from any crooning love songs. He must have forgotten that Cake has its own little slice of relevance in your memories of Aegon, those memories that refuse to fade, ink in your skin as dark as night.

Your fingerprints trace Jesse’s scrawling, handwritten letters. It’s his very last journal, the last words he ever wrote. His final entry is unremarkable, a lucid recollection of his latest woodcarving project: it’s a family of tiny bears, three of them. He says he wants the cub to have the same slope of your cheeks, the shape of your eyes. And it’s just like your mom said. It really did seem like he was getting better.

You flip to the next page, blank. The heading reads: Thursday, February 14th, 1980.

You go back a few days. And your gaze catches on words that you’ve read before, months ago, back when the journals were a new discovery like striking oil. The entry is from Saturday the 9th. It ends with an unceremonious bullet point of a reminder: dinner w/ Dale on Thursday.

You leaf forward to Thursday, to the blank page that tells you nothing. Back to the 9th, forward to the 14th, again, again. Valentine’s Day 1980, before Dale had married his wife, after your mom had stopped trying to make plans with Jesse, maybe even rebelled against them; just two unromantic, discarded men with a vacant slot in their calendars and troubles to drink into submission. Except that Jesse never came home.

Dinner with Dale, you think dizzily. Dinner with Dale on the night he died.

The opening notes of The Distance shout from the stereo. Everything suddenly feels very loud.

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line,

Engines pumping and thumping in time…

What had Aegon said about that song before you sang it together, stomping and staggering across the hardwood floor? It’s not about NASCAR, it’s about a journey!

Outside, it’s a rare clear night in Juneau. The Northern Lights are a kaleidoscopic ribbon against indigo night, the sky a mausoleum of stars. And you remember when Aegon sang Everlong, when he grabbed your hand, led you upstairs to the roof, kissed you for the first time under the ethereal, shimmering curtain of green and purple and blue…before Heather had interrupted to tell you that Dale was closing the bar. He was irritable, he was tired; he wanted to go home.

The arena is empty except for one man,

Still driving and striving as fast as he can…

And then they found a body, didn’t they? Yes, you can remember being in Aegon’s apartment and hearing the police cars zoom by. You remember the red-and-blue flashes on his face. You remember thinking they looked like sapphires and rubies, the ocean and blood.

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up

And long ago somebody left with the cup,

But he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns

And thinking of someone for whom he still burns…

Icy claws glide down the length of your spine. Memories play back with a focused clarity that you didn’t have before: Dale groggy and yawning just before they found the fifth victim at Christmas, and again before they found the eighth the same night Trent dragged you—shrieking, bleeding, virtually naked—out of your Jeep. You remember Dale at your parents’ New Year’s Eve party talking about how maybe the killer was an athlete with brain damage from CTE. You remember him offering to give Trent a box of his old equipment from when he was a park ranger. You remember him watching as Trent towered over you here in Ursa Minor with a cue stick clenched in his fist, demanding to know where you had been the night before, Dale’s eyes gleaming with disapproval and fascination and…and…oh god, opportunity.

He’s going the distance,

He’s going for speed,

She’s all alone (all alone)

All alone in her time of need…

And now Aegon’s long gone, but you’re still here. And so is the Ice Fisher.

You’re staring at Dale, eyes huge and glossy with terror. He glances up, gives you a brief casual smile, looks down at the pint glasses again. And then his eyes come back to you. He sees you and you see him, really see him, and it’s the first time in your life that you can recall him being a centerpiece instead of an ornament for gazes to skate over like ice, wallpaper or taxidermy deer heads or a mirror. And you watch as the thing that lives inside Dale stirs awake. It is a shadow with fangs, talons, barbs down its spine, a weblike scribble of a brain loud with the echoes of screams; and it unfurls and fills him completely, all the way to his fingerprints. It possesses him, it eclipses him.

It’s Dale, you realize like a bullet slicing through an aorta, spilling an ocean of hot blood. It was him twenty years ago and it’s him now.

You gasp and fumble for the cannister of bear mace still clipped to your purse. Dale crosses the room with staggering swiftness, like a wolf, like a storm, one pint glass still gripped in his hand. He reaches you just as your thumb presses down on the cannister’s release tab. The rust-colored mist spews not directly into his face but into the room; Dale is hacking and rasping, you both are, but he isn’t in too much pain to haul you out of the booth and onto the floor. You’re screaming, you’re clawing at him, your eyes feel like they’re on fire, tiny pinpoint infernos that drill down to the bone. You can feel the ice-cold juice and schnapps and vodka of your appletini, knocked off the table when you fell, soaking through the back of your sweater. You can feel pebbles of glass as they burrow into your flesh. You are dimly aware of a barstool tumbling over as you struggle with Dale.

“No!” you cry into the monstrous hand that he clamps over your mouth. “No—!”

Dale brings the bottom of the pint glass down on your head. The Distance lyrics—she’s hoping in time that her memories will fade—swirl around inside your fractured skull.

Silence descends like a curtain, shadows in, lights out.

~~~~~~~~~~

I knock, and he opens the door. The house smells like fresh bread and alfredo sauce, rosemary and crushed garlic. My rental—a Toyota 4Runner, I remember what she said about the Nova being a bad idea in Alaska—is parked in the driveway behind her Jeep. Sunfyre is standing beside me, eyes sparkling, smiling with that unburdened-by-intellect innocence that dogs have. There’s a bouquet of blue-dyed roses in my left hand, cool melancholy blooms of life like seawater, like bruises.

“Hi,” I say to her dad as he stands in the doorway. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too, Aegon.” He’s not just staring at me in the artificial front porch light; he’s gawking, he’s damn near speechless. “Wow. Wow. It’s really good to see you.”

Yeah, I know I look different. The dark rings around my eyes have vanished, my face is less puffy, my hair is trimmed and healthy and mostly out of my face, I stand taller. I’m wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a leather jacket, black skinny jeans, my combat boots. I have a red chip in my pocket that I can’t fucking wait to show her: 1 month sober. On the first day, you think you’re going to die, and on the second day you wish you would. But you don’t. You live, and that starts out as a grisly inconvenience, and then you get a taste for it. “You can probably guess who I’m looking for.”

“Yeah, I reckon I can,” her dad says. “But she’s not here right now. She went to Ursa Minor.”

I grin, a crooked little curl of the lips. “I think I remember how to get there.”

I hop back into the 4Runner with Sunfyre and pull out into the street, snow and ice chomping under the tires. I had missed driving, I realize now. I got so used to almost never being able to do it that I forgot how good it feels to turn the wheel yourself, to watch the speedometer ramp up when you decide you want to fly. Ten minutes later, I swerve into Ursa Minor’s deserted parking lot and screech to a stop across three separate spaces.

“Oh, what the fuck!” I choke out as I step into the bar, coughing into my sleeve. The blue roses tumble out of my hand. Ursa Minor is empty, but there’s something in the air, something invisible that drives scorching, stinging needles into my eyes and my sinuses. Tears stream down my face; my exposed skin prickles and burns. Sunfyre sneezes over and over again and lingers in the doorway, gulping in fresh night wind from outside. There’s shattered glass and green liquid on the hardwood floor. There’s an upturned barstool. The stereo is playing Cake’s cover of Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

What the hell happened here—?

And then I see it: the cannister of bear mace that had rolled under the booth, the same one she and her friends always sat in.

She used the bear mace. She finally used it. But why?

There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood on the table too. There’s a tattered, olive-green journal opened to a blank page. The pieces slide closer and closer and then link together, an explosion in my mind like fireworks.

I bolt outside and study the snow-covered parking lot. There are fresh tire tracks there under the murky luminescence of the streetlights; they lead out to the main road and then north towards the lakes.

“No,” I whisper to no one but the fierce wind, the sky threaded with the opalescent Northern Lights. “No, no, no…”

I sprint back inside Ursa Minor, get the phone Dale keeps behind the bar, and call the cops. “Stay where you are,” the 911 dispatcher instructs me sternly. “Wait for the police, do not attempt to investigate yourself, do not attempt to intervene—”

“Yeah, fuck that,” I say, and slam the receiver into the cradle. Then I swipe the black 8 ball off the pool table.

I load Sunfyre into the 4Runner and spin out of the parking lot, following the parallel lines of tire tracks like the etching of veins beneath skin.

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s a sound, rough and grating; and then you realize that it’s you being dragged across the ice. When your eyes flutter open, you see the uninterrupted sky: indigo night, distant stars, the Northern Lights. Your clothes are wet with snow; it’s so cold that the fabric is freezing, stiff and crackling when you try to move. Dale is lugging you over the frozen lake by the collar of your sweater. It’s choking you, but of course that doesn’t matter much. He’s about to kill you anyway.

“It’s not right,” Dale mutters, and you’re aware through the disorientation and the fog-like cloud of pain that he’s not really talking to you. “Your mom’s a nice lady. It’s not right that she had to lose two people this way, she doesn’t deserve that. Oh well. It can’t be helped now, can it?”

You whimper something, disjointed helpless words. Please, hurts, don’t, please.

“It’s not me,” Dale says, as if it’s perfectly logical. “I mean, not really. It’s this part of me that I can’t cut out. I can only feed it so it goes away for a while. It quiets down sometimes, it hibernates like a bear in the winter…but it always comes back. And my god, is it hungry.”

You smack clumsily, futilely at his hands as he hauls you over the ice. Dale doesn’t seem to notice.

“You have to make it look like an accident. That’s the ticket, if you don’t want anybody to know. You shove a hiker from a ledge, a drunk into the ocean. I did that for a long time, never raised suspicion. Never pinged on anyone’s radar. Jesse was the hardest, though. Good lord, did he fight. Had to pour a bottle of Everclear down his throat. Had to make it look like he was drinking that night. He wasn’t, which was unusual. Kept saying he wanted to turn things around. I think you had something to do with that. Now this? You were never supposed to be here, ladybug. What a shame. What a goddamn shame.”

Consciousness is a river that you dip in and out of; blackness crumbles around the edges of your vision, collapses in, recedes, swells again like a wave. You moan, you beg, you struggle as much as you can. It’s not much. It might as well be nothing.

“Things were easier after I got married,” Dale continues. He has a large hiking backpack slung over his broad shoulders, you see now. It jostles from side to side as he drags you. You know what’s in there: a chisel to break the ice, fishing line to strangle you. “Having someone else there all the time, it was a distraction. And it kept that thing inside me…not tame, no, I wouldn’t say that. But chained up down in the basement, maybe. Now I’m alone again. And when the chains start rattling, there’s nothing to stop me from hearing them.”

You get your feet under you, twist around, and slam your fists into Dale’s chest as hard as you can. He laughs in a baritone rumble and shoves you back down onto the ice; your head hits the ground, and you can feel yourself fading again, the last wisps of sunlight at dusk.

“Sometimes you want to hide,” Dale says. “And sometimes you don’t. I was ready to stop hiding. I can’t tell you what a high it was every time they found a body. The news, the ceaseless chattering around town, the name they gave me…incredible. Exhilarating. I couldn’t sleep for days after each kill. I’d toss and turn all night imagining what the headlines would be. Let me tell you, ladybug. I’ve never tried heroin, and I never need to. It can’t possibly be better than this.”

What will happen to my parents? you think, heartbreak gutting you, dull knifes rearranging your organs. What will happen to Heather and Kimmie and Joyce? What will happen when Aegon finds out he left too soon?

“I knew I needed someone to pin it on,” Dale informs you calmly. “Didn’t take anyone who went to the bar, didn’t take anyone who could be traced back to me. And still, I knew they’d figure it out eventually if I didn’t give them another suspect. At first, I was thinking I might use Aegon. He was a little small, sure, but he showed up around the right time and he was an outsider. Then I saw the way Trent was with you…aggressive, menacing…and I knew it had to be him. It was almost too easy. I planted the seeds, and good lord did they grow.”

“They’ll know,” you croak. “If you kill me, the police will find my body and they’ll know Trent’s not the Ice Fisher.”

Hideously, horribly, Dale smiles down at you. “Oh, ladybug, I don’t think they’ll ever find you. They found the others because I wanted them to. And no one is looking for victims anymore. Once you sink, I’ll cover up the hole with ice and snow. No blood, no signs. People will assume you’re a runaway. It was just too much, wasn’t it? Trent getting arrested, Aegon leaving town. Maybe you ran off after him. Maybe you threw yourself in the channel. Who could say? No, your bones will become silt, your name will slowly disappear from Juneau. And in ten or twenty years, your parents will have you declared dead in absentia. That’s my best guess. That’s how it will go.”

“No,” you sob, battling against the hands knotted into the collar of your sweater. “No—!”

His knuckles bash the side of your head, and a black silence rolls in like high tide, engulfs you, drowns you. When you swim back up into consciousness again, Dale is a few yards from you and drilling a hole in the ice with his chisel. You try to crawl away and promptly collapse, frail and boneless. He glances over at you, chuckles pleasantly, and then begins using a hatchet to widen the opening.

No, you think, hooking your fingers into the snow and dragging yourself towards the forest. No, no, no…

Dale’s ready for you. He walks over, grabs both of your ankles, tugs you with terrifying ease to the hole in the ice. Then he has a length of fishing line in his hands, and he’s looping it around your throat again and again, and he’s tightening it until the needle-thin nylon wire bites into your flesh, spilling tendrils of blood. You know you don’t have a chance, but you try; you owe it to your parents to try. You claw at the fishing line and you struggle and you cry out in hoarse, useless screams—

And then you hear something that doesn’t make any sense. Through the darkness, through the wind, there are the barks of a dog. Sunfyre rockets into your dimming field of vision and jumps on Dale, snarling and growling and snapping at his hands, his face. Dale flings the dog away, and as he’s distracted, Aegon arrives. He’s holding—ludicrously—a black 8 ball from a pool table, and he smashes it into Dale’s head. A sick, wet, crushing sound ricochets, cracked bone cushioned by flesh, and Dale howls as he rolls onto his side and covers his head with his hands.

He peers up at Aegon, furious and pained and stunned. “You?!”

“Me.” Aegon’s voice is dark and low like thunder, like the iron gale of storms over the ocean. “And I’m a killer.”

He lunges at Dale, still wielding the 8 ball. Dale’s massive hand juts out and closes around Aegon’s wrist, and then he yanks him to the ground. They’re grappling on the snow and ice, they’re striking out with knuckles and elbows, they’re ripping at each other with their bare hands. You’re trying to unravel the fishing line still coiled around your throat, panting in deep, frantic breaths so you can see and think clearly, so you can scramble to your feet, so you can help Aegon. And then Dale gets away from him just long enough to grab you again, to wrap the ends of the fishing line around his fingers. He delivers one last macerating blow to your skull, pulls you by your throat to the gaping hole in the ice, and shoves you through.

The water is so cold it’s paralyzing. There is a thought that seizes you—so overwhelming, so strangely rational—that says all you have to do is stay where you are, to wait a little longer, and then you’ll never hurt again, you’ll never be disappointed or caged, you’ll never be anything. And you think of all the lives you could have lived, all the places you could have gone: cities and beaches and deserts and valleys, gardens and rivers, ruins and glass. You were always so afraid of really going after them. What the hell were you so afraid of? Everything worth fearing is right here in Juneau.

I can still do those things. I can still live. And I can still help Aegon.

You jolt out of your inertia and clamber madly for the surface. But you don’t hit frigid open air; you hit ice, ice too thick to break through, ice too thick for more than a murmur of light to penetrate. Your palms press against the semitransparent wall; bubbles of carbon dioxide spurt from your nose and mouth. You feel for the opening that Dale made, but you don’t know where it is. You are lost beneath the ice, running out of air, fading rapidly. Then you hear Jesse—and you aren’t sure how you know what his voice sounds like, but you do—speaking softly and kindly to you, comforting you, telling you which way to go.

I’m sorry that no one knows the truth, you say without speaking. I’m sorry we thought you destroyed yourself. I’m sorry you never got the chance to truly live.

You were all better off without me anyway, he answers, without any bitterness at all. And that’s true, isn’t it?

There is a great disruption that rocks through the water. New currents stir into existence, fresh waves spring out of the darkness. And then someone takes your hand and draws you towards a noise, muffled through the ice and water: a dog barking, you realize. Then your palms find the opening and you inhale brutally cold air into your aching lungs, the best you’ve ever tasted. Aegon helps pull you through the hole and out of the lake, out of the jaws of oblivion.

You lie together on the ice, breathing in gasps that turn to mist in the night wind. Dale’s body is sprawled several yards away. The hatchet he’d used to break up the ice is buried in his neck, spine severed, eyes slick and vacant. You can see reflections of the Northern Lights flickering in them.

“You came back,” you whisper to Aegon as whirling police sirens approach, the lights dancing on his face: blue like the ocean, red like fire and blood.

“Of course I came back, Appletini,” he says, laughing with frenzied relief, kissing your cheeks and forehead over and over again, lake water dripping from his hair. Sunfyre jumps around you both, yapping ecstatically, his tail wagging. “I couldn’t leave without my Juneau girl.”

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s wind, but it isn’t sharp like a blade. There’s a sky, but it isn’t cloaked in cloud cover or fog. The boats that bob in the surf are sailboats and cruisers, not fishing vessels. Dolphins crest out of the sun-speckled waves like someone coming up from a dream.

It’s June 9th, and you’re soaring down the Pacific Coast Highway in the red Ford Mustang convertible you rented after the plane touched down in Seattle. Aegon is in the driver’s seat, black sunglasses and white T-shirt, his hair whipping in the breeze. He has one hand on the wheel and the other behind your headrest. Sunfyre is in the backseat, grinning like only dogs can. You turn up the song on the radio: Drive by Incubus.

You and Aegon had stayed in Juneau long enough for your skull to heal, and for your parents to find someone else to take over the vet clinic. They settled on a 32-year-old from Detroit: Justin McNair, a former Marine like your dad, and he either has no family or a bad one because he never wants to talk about them. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter which it is; perhaps sometimes they’re just about the same thing. Your parents have already basically adopted him. He eats dinner with them three times a week and calls your dad when he needs help with house maintenance or scaring a moose away from his truck. And just before you went south, Aegon showed him how to make the world’s best hot chocolate.

You send postcards back to Juneau from each town you stop in. Heather’s bon voyage gift to you had been an indecently revealing swimsuit. Joyce appeared with—what else?—a stack of books fit for leisurely beach reading. And Kimmie gave you, however bizarrely, a compass. So you don’t get lost, she had said with an innocuous little smile. You honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking.

During his one month in jail, Trent learned how to meditate and do yoga. He’s still kind of a dumbass, but he’s also a supposedly devout vegan Buddhist, and he had the decency to leave you alone aside from an apology letter that he slid into the moose-shaped mailbox: handwritten, six pages, lots of spelling and grammatical errors. Oh, and he finally got that job with the Forest Service, probably mostly due to his high-profile wrongful detainment. Now hikers get to swoon over his muscles and hair flips.

You’ll go back to Juneau, of course. Maybe just for visits, maybe for more than that someday. But it will never feel like a cage again.

Aegon calls Aemond every two or three days, a habit he started when he was in rehab. At first it was by necessity—he needed someone to pay the $30,000 bill—but now you think he secretly looks forward to it. He updates Aemond about how the road trip is going and reassures him that the plan hasn’t changed: south to San Diego, and then cutting east across the country to Miami. You don’t know what exactly life will look like there, and neither does Aegon. That’s not the important thing about going. Part of AA is making amends, and Aegon has a lot of work to do in that respect. He wants to go back to Miami, he says. He’s ready to go back.

San Diego is exactly like Aegon once told you it would be. You weave through the rust-colored peaks of the Laguna Mountains and there’s the Pacific Ocean, glittering and sapphire-blue, peppered with surfers and sea lions. It’s hot and it’s beautiful beyond words and everything grows there: ivy, cactuses, palm trees, calla lilies, roses. And for the first time that you can remember, the world feels breathtakingly, impossibly big. You get carryout from an unassuming restaurant called The Taco Stand, and then Aegon parks the convertible in La Jolla. You walk down the steps carved into the cliffside, paper bags in your hands full of tacos and churros, Aegon carrying Sunfyre so the dog won’t slip.

You sit together on the golden sand and watch the 8:00 p.m. sun sink into the waves, Aegon’s arm around your waist, your fingers tucking his lock of silvery hair behind his ear. And then he takes your hand, kneads it until it’s sinuous and relaxed, and reads the lines of your palm in the amber dusk like firelight.

“It says you’re happy,” he tells you. “And that you’re free.”

“I am,” you reply, smiling as the ocean stretches out like the arm of a galaxy: the ancient past, the infinite future.

[thebisexualdogdad]

Just simple dating Peter headcanons with some inclusion of how first times would be

Peter Parker x Male!reader

● the first time Peter saw you was on the first day of 10th grade

● he was standing at his locker watching you talk to the principal who was showing you around

● Ned broke him out of his trance "happy first day of school Pete"

● "yeah, yeah you two Ned. Who is that?" He asks pointing to you

● "Oh I think his name is Y/N? He just transferred here from some school in Brooklyn"

● the first time you talk to him is a few days later in Chem class when the teacher told you to partner up for a lab assignment

● your seat was in front of him and he hadn't been paying much attention to what was happening

● you turned around and he was looking longingly at you which he quickly stopped doing as soon as you locked eyes

● "Hey you're Peter right?"

● "yep that's me, Peter Parker"

● "did you want to work together?"

● "absolutely! Uh work on what exactly?"

● he had been crushing on you for an entire year when he finally told you he had feelings for you

● your first date was to a little Italian place that May recommended

● Peter nervously spilled marinara sauce all over his pants

● you thought it was hilarious, the waiter however was quite annoyed

● your first kiss was the same night when you walked him home and stood outside his door saying goodnight

● you leaned in and kissed him when May opened the front door

● "How was the date Peter? Oops looks like I'm interrupting"

● "May!!"

● the first time Peter called you his boyfriend he was talking to Happy

● "So you're turning down an invitation to work with the avengers… over a boy?"

● "not just any boy Happy, my boyfriend! … holy crap I've never called Y/N my boyfriend before"

● the first time he tells you he loves you is 6 months into your relationship

● he had a really close call on a mission and snuck in through your window to see you

● "Peter are you okay? Did you get mugged?"

● "yeah I uh, got mugged and it was super scary and I just needed to tell you that I love you because I really didn't think I'd be making it home tonight"

● "I love you too Peter"

● his entire demeanor changes when you say it back and he just smiles and kisses you

● "as much as I want to keep kissing you babe we should really get you cleaned up, i think May would freak out if you came home covered in blood"

● your first time isn't too long after that

● May was out for the night so you had the apartment all to yourselves

● Peter wanted it to be as romantic as possible

● so he cooked you dinner, lit candles (which he may or may not have almost caught the curtains on fire with) and dressed up in his nicest clothes after showering three times

● it was soft and gentle, a lot of asking if what either one of you was doing felt good and where it was okay to touch each other

● there was a lot of fumbling around and giggling

● you guys were laying in his bed still naked, the biggest smiles on your faces when you hear the front door open

● "Oh crap May's home where are my pants?"

● "Peter? You home? Why are there candles everywhere? And what have I told you about leaving dirty dishes in the sink?" You hear from the living room

● that was also the first time you had to sneak out of Peter's room through the fire escape after having sex

[boag]

I just remembered one time I was in my 10th grade drama class… idk how the conversation came up but this girl said she had never once in her life had thoughts of killing herself and I was like “are you serious? You’ve never even thought about it a little??!” and she was like “of course not!! Why would a person think about something like that?” And it blew my mind that there are people in this world who are just like… fine and don’t hate being alive

[imintoomanyfandomscuzihaveadhd]

Avatar Modern au | High School edition (Sully kids + Spider)

A/N: The ages and grades are just based off me. Also all these head cannons are either based off of common high school experiences, my high school experience, or things that happened at my high school. This is my first time tryna write like actual Headcanons. If these are received well I’ll make more. I’ll a tag list too if needed.

Lo’ak

He’s 14 so he would be a freshman(9th grade)

Had a xxxtention Bart simpson phase In 6th grade

Thinks he’s on that popular loner shit

Hangs out with the sophomores and juniors because of Neteyam and spider

Yk his lanky ass on the basketball team

B student cuz he gotta keep them grades up to play sports

His dramatic ass is definitely in theater

Tried skipping with aonung once and neytiri beat his ass

You can’t tell me him and tsireya ain’t the power couple of the school

He always getting caught with that damn phone

Vaped once and nearly chocked to death

Annoys the hell out of kiri

“Ay ain’t you teyam’s lil brother”

Neteyam

15 so he’s a sophomore(10th grade)

Actually on that popular loner shit

Man’s the school heartthrob

All them girls want him

And he’s oblivious TO ALL OF IT

Always having to deal with lo’aks bull shit

Effortlessly has all A’s

Probably in ROTC to make Jake happy

All the teachers love him

Takes honors science and math like a psycho

Probably dose track and archery

Voted class best boy

Somehow ending up carrying all his siblings snacks

Kiri

14 so she’s a freshman

Pretends her family (especially lo’ak) doesn’t exist

Always has her AirPods in

She be listening to them unsolved mystery YouTubers on her chromebook while she works

Skips with spider and never gets caught

A, B student

She sells homemade shit and crystal to the other girlies

Will ignore tf out of you

In fundamentals of health science and psychology

Dose not and will not take the time out of her day to mess with no boy

Everyone thinks she dating spider

Spider

16 so he’s a junior (11th grade)

People thinks he a stoner, he’s just tired

Grades all over the place one minute he’s a straight A student next he’s failing

Probably did wrestling one year

Rebound popularity from hanging with with spider

He got norm to hack his chrome book so everything’s unblocked

He’s the only one who can drive so he has to drive everyone around

Never gets caught skipping

Dose Percussion in band but plays guitar as a hobby

Probably accidentally called his favorite teacher mom once

He cried

Can’t tell me he hasn’t had a mental breakdown over some kind of school work

Surprisingly good at science

Like he’s in AP Chemistry

The girls at school like his mommy issues, daddy issues, and long hair

@hyperfixatedfandomer sorry I keep tagging you in shit 😭

[alimaybankkk]

hii :)) can u do some sort of school fluff with jj?

𝐢’𝐦 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠

a/n: hiii!! this honestly gave me the perfect idea for the title and the title is honestly so cute

summary: tutoring jj leads to much more

warnings: nothing !

pairing: jj maybank x smart!reader

mr. sunn walked up to my desk and leaned down, whispering, “can you come see me after class?”

a hole formed in the pit of my stomach, but i just nodded.

when class was over, the ring of the bell trapped itself in my ears as i stood up, gathering my things and walking to the front of the class where mr. sunn was stood.

“did i do somethin’, mr. sunn?” i asked.

“no,” he chuckled. “have a seat.”

i cleared my throat and sat down at a nearby desk reluctantly.

“you’re one of my best students,” he said, and i mumbled a ‘thank you’ before he continued, “and then there’s my worst students. and i was wondering..”

he sat down at his desk and clicked his pen, parting his lips. “i was wondering if you would tutor one of those students.”

i nodded immediately, thinking of how perfect it would look on my college application.

“that’s great. i have a student i would like you to primarily focus on…” his voice trailed off as he rummaged through the papers on his desk.

“who’s that?”

he looked up. “i don’t know if you’ve met him before. he’s not in your class. he goes by jj.“

“maybank?” i asked, clicking my tongue as he nodded.

“you know him?”

“i’ve seen him around.”

it was true. i’d never talked to jj before, but i did know that he’d broken my best friend’s heart back in 10th grade, growing a hatred in me for him.

he was a known player, and i knew it would be hard to tutor him as he smoked weed, did underage drinking, and just overall was a criminal.

“but you’ll tutor him?” mr. sunn asked hopefully.

i almost said no, but i just took a deep breath and thought about my college career again. “sure.”

“here. check out this schedule and let me know if you can do it all.” he handed me a paper that i took and scanned briefly.

“sounds good.”

he sat back in his chair, pleased. “great. first session’s tomorrow. let me know how it goes, alright?”

“mhm.” i said as i stood, the tardy bell now ringing in my ears. i pulled my lips into a tight line. “can i get a pass?”

i had to stay after school the next day, sat in the library as i clicked my pen nervously.

i checked my watch. it was 3:00, the time we agreed to meet.

but jj was perfectly on time, arriving only a few seconds after it ticked to be time.

“hi,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down next to me.

“hey,” i replied awkwardly, flipping through the notes that were sprawled across the table to keep me from looking him in the eyes.

“look, i know sunn told you you would be tutoring me, but… he said he’d up my grade just for coming… so i was wondering if i could leave, and you could cover for me.”

i gritted my teeth together. “sorry, maybank, but that isn’t happening.”

he scoffed. “so you’re exactly like i expected you to be.”

“and what’s that?” i asked, tilting my head.

“a stuck up nerd…”

“either way, jj, you’re just like i expected you to be…” i dished back.

“oh yeah, ‘what’s that?’” he mocked.

“a boy who just doesn’t try hard enough…”

he rolled his eyes and clicked the pen in his hand. “you could just leave and not talk to me, then you wouldn’t have to deal with me.”

i shrugged. “i would, but i don’t settle for marginal work.”

“whatever the fuck that means…” jj mumbled, starting to spin the pen, causing it to dance around his fingers.

i’d heard him, so i clicked my tongue. “damn, maybank, do i have to tutor you in vocabulary, too?”

“maybe you do, princess,” he said jokingly, but a lump scraped at my throat at the nickname.

my eyes flickered down to my watch. “come on, can we just start? we only have thirty minutes left.”

“whatever…” he grumbled, leaning back in his seat.

“okay,” i whispered. i rummage through the papers, starting to speak, “mr. sunn tells me you’re learning about the legislative branch, right?”

“i guess.”

i rolled my eyes. “super marginal.”

“shut your damn mouth before i have to shut it for you.”

“how do you expect to do that, huh?” i asked, leaning forward.

he mocked my movement, getting all up in my face. “exactly how i do with all girls. charm ‘em.”

after that, he winked and i rolled my eyes, leaning back. “focus. let’s begin.”

~ “well then. i guess we’re done,” i said, checking my watch.

he grinned, looked down at his own and hopped up. “see you tomorrow, princess?”

“bye.”

~ jj was not on time today. he was already twenty minutes late when he texted me, sorry. gonna be a lil late. give me 20.

i already did, i thought.

but it was whatever, because jj came 20 minutes later. and he was a sight for sore eyes.

messy hair, unbuttoned shirt, hickeys trailing down his neck and his chest, disappearing to where his buttons did meet.

he had a bit of a lipstick stain on his cheek. it took everything in me not to wipe it off. i just stared at him.

we’d met at my house since the school library was now under renovation and we weren’t allowed to go there after school now, so it was the best to go to my house.

“what the hell, jj?” i said once he froze.

“‘m sorry, i..”

“no, don’t even. i had plans, maybank. you ruined them. just like you ruin everything.” i rolled my eyes.

“come on,” he scoffed. “you hardly know me.”

“i know you enough to remember you ruined my best friend’s life a few years ago,” i snapped.

“that was a while ago.”

“jj, the whole session is ten minutes over! might as well just cancel…”

“‘m really sorry, princess. i got held up with… something.” he grinned as he said the last words, mind wandering back to what happened earlier.

“jj, stop. just stop. if you want to go back to fucking that girl, go right ahead.”

he looked down. “i could care less about her.”

“same old jj,” i whispered.

“look. i have a test next week that i can’t fail. i promise today that if you just give me a little bit of your time, i’ll study. no bullshit.” he begged. “please.”

i bit my lip and sighed, walking over to the table and planting my bookbag down.

~ “jj, you still with me?” i asked, tapping his elbow he was draping his sleeping head over.

“what?” he asked, picking his head up.

“you’re sleeping, j,” i said, and as i said his name, i regretted it. “i mean, jj.”

“nah, it’s cool. call me j, princess. i like it.” he patted my arm and i blushed.

“okay,” i looked down at my lap, fidgeting with the rings on my hands as he hummed.

“i’m getting tired. can we maybe take a break?” he asked.

i looked him in the eyes, clenching my brows together. “we just started?”

“i didn’t get any sleep last night. please,” he begged.

“you said no bullshit. this is bullshit,” i clarified.

he grinned. “it’s been over thirty minutes. that’s the whole study session. now, i want to hang out with you…”

“you want to hang out with me?” i repeated.

jj tilted his head. “isn’t that what i just said?”

i groaned. “jj, we’re not friends.”

“i know. but all my friends are gone today, so you have to be one for the day,” he said.

i shook my head. “no. never.”

“please, sweetheart, just for today?” he grabbed my hand.

there was no need for him to be so flirtatious, but it definitely changed my mind when i sighed and gave him.

“just for a little bit.”

he grinned and patted me on the back, rushing over to the living room and flopping onto the couch. “let’s watch a movie.”

“what movie?” i asked, sitting next to him. we were pretty far apart.

“scary movie.. um, i don’t really know,” jj muttered, handing me the remote.

i just took it and runes on a random film i’d heard about, curling into a ball and leaning away from jj so i could lay down.

i felt his eyes on he as he placed a warm hand on my back. “you don’t have to be so far.”

“j…”

he pulled me closer to him, positioning me so that i was laying my head on his lap. “that’s better.”

“jj, we shouldn’t—”

“sh, baby. just watch the damn movie.”

around two hours later, when the movie was over, jj woke me up as i’d fallen asleep in his arms.

“wake up. i gotta go soon,” jj told me.

i groaned, a feeling of regret in my stomach as i sat up. i don’t know why i got so close to him. shit, i was even cuddling him.

“then let’s just finish off the night by studying.”

he sighed, following me to the table and listening to me rant about history.

"..and mr. sunn gave me your test grades, and boy, i almost fainted." i laughed, teasing ij as his face went red.

look, not everyone is smart and pretty like you are, princess." he crossed his arms.

for a moment, my eyes met his, but i just looked back down at the papers. "shut up."

“'m being honest. if you shut that pretty mouth of yours, i'd probably kiss it."

my mouth fell open.

“you should leave,” i told him. “it’s been way past our scheduled time anyway.”

“what?” he asked, standing.

“just go, okay?”

and he did.

~ two days later was our next scheduled session.

it actually went really smoothly. i had kept it strictly professional. i hadn’t even had an actual conversation with him.

“okay. then that’s all. i’ll see you wednesday,” i said, standing and gathering my notebooks and such.

“wait…” he said suddenly.

“what? you have to leave, jj.”

“two days ago you were cuddling with me, now you don’t even make small talk.”

i rolled my eyes. “we said friends for a day. you had your day, now you can leave.”

“well what if i don’t want to be enemies for the rest of the days?”

“what does that even mean?” i scoffed.

“i want to be yours…” he whispered, grabbing my wrist.

“jj…”

“you’re gonna let me talk, princess.” he cupped my face in his hands. “no one has ever helped me. in my entire life. but you agreed. sure, you definitely didn’t want to, but you did. i’ve hardly known you for a long time, but i already know you haven’t just helped me with school.”

i blinked. “i don’t know what to say.”

“you don’t have to say anything. just kiss me.”

and i did.

[charmingsoa]

✶ Where the Wild Things Are: Prequel ✶ ■ 1960s Sons of Anarchy story ■

⌃ Jax Teller/ OC x Thomas Teller/OC ⌃

Warning: Please read with caution. This story will include: drug use, physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. miscarriages, sexual content, alcohol use, homicide, cursing, etc. ★ If You would like to be tagged in future updates, simply leave your username in the comments.

When I look back on my life – I often wonder if I made the right choices when I was younger. I obviously got to my place in life because of what happened all those years ago in California. Hell, there were times when I didn’t even think I would make it out alive. Growing up, my parents were very strict – almost authoritarian. My father had fought for his country in WWII and my mother was your typical housewife. The picture-perfect look was what they strived for – putting my brothers and I in whatever activities they could. There were structured rules that were drilled into our heads from day one.

No elbows on the table Respect your parents and your elders Girls and woman are to bow down to menfolk and do what they’re told. Women are forbidden to wear pants or short skirts. Girls can attend secondary school but will not be allowed to attend college. Marriage, motherhood, and the act of obeying your husband is the most important role in a woman’s life.

I distinctly remember my father telling me that if I wanted to dress like a whore, I can plant myself on the side of the highway and start making a living for myself. I spent most of my childhood bowing down to everything my father said. He instilled that fear in me as a young girl – always being on the back end of his belt or switch if I was “bad” enough. I was the only daughter – I needed to be picture perfect and like a doll. My mother would stand idly by as he inflicted his abuse on me – only doing so because he loved and cared about me.

Total bullshit if you ask me.

I guess you can say with all the structure and ruling that fell at the hand of my father – you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I rebelled. Starting at the early age of 13, I snuck out of the house to meet the boys from the wrong sides of the tracks. We would listen to the devil’s music as my father called it – getting high as kites.  My flower-patterned dress would be hiked up above my waist – my legs wrapped tightly around the guy’s hips – as they pounded into me. My mother always preached that a girl should stay pure until the night of their wedding -giving the gift of virginity to their awaiting husband.

 I lost that gift behind the First Methodist Church to a kid three grades ahead of me. It was meaningless and hurt like hell, but after that I couldn’t get enough.

By the time I hit 16, I had fucked half the senior class. I gained a reputation as the 10th grade slut – willing to do anything and anyone. Now, was this true – partially. I didn’t care if you were the ugliest guy in class – if you had a dick then I was ready and willing. I was never one to seek the guys out first. They would come to me and a couple minutes later they would be making me cum. There were rumors that I was a child prostitute – my parents were less than thrilled to hear that be brought up during a meeting with the principal.

At that point, I was pulled out of the school and sent to an all-girls catholic school about 45 minutes from home. My father made sure to drive me every day and would stay on the premises until school was over. Even if I wanted to ditch class and run away, Roy Landry was watching like a fucking hawk. I managed to mellow out a little once I graduated high school – I guess being locked up like Rapunzel will do that to people. I wasn’t allowed to go to prom – parties thrown by the other girls - I was isolated in my room. While my brothers were living their lives, I was stuck watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News with Brenda and Roy ever night.

I’m sure you’re trying to figure out where I’m going with all this information – I swear it’s important given the truth you’re about to hear.

A girl who hitchhiked all the way to California- fell in love with two brothers who despised each other – watching as they both fell into the pits of hell by creating the most dangerous motorcycle gang in Northern Cali – my story has to start somewhere, right?

[sturnstvs]

finding out

warnings: talks of sex, teen pregnancy, use of y/n, toxic friends, mentions of periods

a/n: I hope you guys will enjoy this series! what I should add and shit should be added to the comments if you deam necessary

DISCLAIMER: IF YOU DO NOT LIKE THESE KIND OF THINGS DO NOT INTERACT

third person POV

y/n and the sturniolos were childhood bestfriends. matt, nick and chris became friends with y/n shortly after kindergarten. they found each other on the play ground one by one. nick was the first one to say hi to y/n and introduce himself to the girl.

chirs was the next to introduce himself when nick said he had a new friend. then it was matt.

y/n was good friends with all of the triplets however her and Chris had a different bond.

they where attached to the hip as some might describe it. they were best friends. all of them were.

when they got to jr high however the friend group got a bit complicated.

you see chris and y/n had made some friends on the first day of 7th grade. they were a little bit older being 9th graders. however at the time cahris nor y/n knew that. (big mistake) they introduced the older kids to matt and nick. the other boys thought that they seemed a little wired and they seemed older.

chris and y/n brushed it off as a 'their just overreacting' turns out they weren't

in 8th grade the now 10th graders invited the whole group to a party. matt and nick said no. nick was hanging out with this girl alahna they he had met recently and matt, well he was just matt. so chirs and y/n decided they would go by themsleves

long story short chris and y/n ended up having sex that night. they where pressured into it mainly. but the two fully decided to carry it out. and its not like they were drunk or anything they were 13 for god sake. the next morning they both decided that what they did the night before was a mistake and should never happen again.

which brings us to here right now, in present time.

y/n had been feeling under the weather recently. it was the colder months of the year so she didn't think anything of it. of course as a 13 year old your not going to automatically think the worst. so she didn't. she didn't think it was a problem. until her friend sophie started saying something about it.

"I saw in this movie that these could be the symptoms of pregnancy" sophie told her as they where walking into the school.

"no way! I mean I know I'm not stupid but there is no way I'm pregnant" y/n shrugged off

"well...you do have the symptoms that my older sister had before she told everyone that she was expecting" shopie said

"are you sure I mean I dont even think its possible, I mean yeah me and chris had sex during winter break but there's no way" y/n told her

"well I'm pretty sure as long as you have your period and you didn't use a condom, its a huge possibility" sophie shrugged as she and y/n walked to class after they put their books in their lockers.

"whatever I'll take a test just to put your mind at rest after school if you promise to come with me" y/n told sophie as they sat down in their first period.

latter that day after school chris came up to y/n after a long day just ready to go hang out with his favorite girl.

"hey! y/n! wait, slow down your going to fast" chris yelled running after the two girls walking out of the school

"what chris?" truth be told y/n didn't want to deal with his hyperactive ass today

"where are you going? aren't we supposed to hang today? my moms waiting in the car" he spoke

"oh, actually change of plans, I have to do something, sorry we'll hang out later" y/n said apologetically as her and sophie walked to the nearest convenience store.

matt and nick who had watched the whole interaction cringed when they saw y/n walk away leaving chris with a frown on his face.

"that was rough" matt comented

"why do you think she ran away so quickly?" chris asked his brothers

"I don't know but I think it might have to do with sophie I mean she has been hanging with y/n way more often" nick said

"yeah" was all chris said as the three walked over to his moms car. he couldn't help but think this was about something much bigger.

it was about a half hour later when sophie and y/n got to the convenience store.

"come on" sophie dragged y/n over towards the aisle trying to find the pregnancy tests.

once both of the girls found the aisle they decided to get the one that was somewhat cheep but also worked.

"I don't have any money" y/n pointed out

"its okay. I have some just pay me back later. this is important" sophie said

"okay" y/n said hesitantly

sophie grabbed the one that seemed like It was the most accurate and cheep.

"should we get two just in case?" sophie asked the girl

"i don't know? should we" this was all very overwhelming for y/n and she didnt want to do any of this.

sophie looked at y/n sympateticly and sighed grabbing another test.

both the girls got in line at the checkout. there wasnt many people in front of them so they got to the coaunter pretty quickly.

the older lady that was at the counter looked at the two girls suspisousely

"hope these are for an older sister" she said scanning the items

the girls just nodded not wanting to say anything.

sophie kindly payed and got handed the tests. she then started walking out of the store while y/n was still standing there.

"I cant go back home and take those" y/n panicked.

her parents werent the most supportive so she knew this was going to freak them out.

sophie nodded while y/n walked over towards the lady behind the counter. as if she knew what she was going to ask, the lady pointed towards the back of the store

"thanks" y/n whispered

as she walked to where the lady pointed thoughts began rummaging through her brain. what if she was actually pregnant? what about Chris? there both only 13, there's no way they would be able to keep it. and their parents. what are they going to say? once she got to the bathroom she let out a shaky breath.

theres no way this was happening.

y/n did everything that she had to once she had read the instructions. then waited.

while she was waiting sophie kocked on the door.

"you good in there y/n"

y/n opened the door and sophie immediately wrapped her arms in a hug. in the time of waiting the was tears streaming down her face.

after a little longer the timer had went off. with shaky hands y/n flipped over the test to revel two very prominat pink lines. y/n immediately broke down. what was she going to do

after a good few hours of crying and trying to adjust the reality of the situation sophie had convinced her to tell chris.

she invited him to her house later that night. chris with a happy face, strolled into her house not knowing his life was about to change.

y/n told him what had happened and obviously he was shocked. they both just cried into each others arms not knowing what they where going to do.

"I guess it sucks that I got my period only a couple weeks before that huh" y/n sniffled a laugh trying to cheer both of them up.

if they had each other they were going to get through this.

note: I want to point out that i feel like this isnt very realistic but that's okay it was a fun idea and it kinda came to me at night? I hope you guys liked it anyway. no hate please.

also give me requests of what if should do make sure you click the info page for more details!

[teeth--thief]

Photos of Lyonyd (Leonid?…) Toptunov? I wouldn’t mind rambling on him, also.

- Rodka

I deliberately saved this ask for last (sort of). As a treat for myself and as a threat for everyone else ♡ And for @ur-favorite-basil-enthusiast since he was also interested in seeing The Collection.

I'll have to split this into a few parts - dreaful, I know! - because I can only add 10 pictures to one post while on mobile =( I'll keep reblogging with additional pictures till I run out of things to share. Subscribe for more insane content in the future and don't forget to click that bell icon to...

Part 1

He had manifested to me in a dream when I first started researching Chernobyl, have I ever mentioned that? Well, he has. Which was truly an anomaly because I almost never have any dreams at all... but about that some other time, perhaps.

I am going to put the pictures of him under the cut so nobody gets jumpscared by my Collection of Five Billion White Guy Pictures. And I'll also include some relevant information! Or as relevant as I can make it, at least.

Just to be clear (and safe): I found all of these out in the wild, on da internet. I am, however, pretty sure that at least the collage of his pics from uni times is from @/toptunovleonid on Instagram. So, just to be very clear: all credit for at least that goes to her.

Semi-chronologically, his pictures go like this:

Ignoring that one picture that is barely visible and out of frame in a few pictures of the photo album it's in, because he looks about 10 there and I feel slightly weird about sharing it specifically.

We're in... Tallinn, middle school number 11!

Second boy from the left in the second picture is him. That is he. He who was 15 then. And a 16 year old Lyonya in the left picture, of course.

From this time, one of his classmates remembers him as follows: At school he was quiet, unnoticeable, very shy. I remember he was always hanging out with younger kids. He was chubby. They'd now say he was a "nerd". Alright, we get it, he was a sweet child... Teen? Both? Or was he like this all his life? Either way, please stop before I die from all that sugar...

He's (10th grade) the guy leading the little girl (1st grade). His shapeless hair has charmed me. What's his hair routine and will it work on my curls? Mhm, didn't think so. And first in the second row from the bottom in the small pictures, in case you can't recognise his face yet.

As a bonus - his school certificate from the school in Tallinn he attended until graduating in 1977:

The grades were from 2 (you didn't pass with that one, so that's an F) to 5 (an A, I suppose?). So as you can see, he certainly studied well. What a nerd (affectionately).

Uni territory now! Moscow calling 📞 or, rather, Obninsk and the MEPhI

If you weren't born in any of the USSR countries during The Soviet Times, it'll come as a surprise to you but the students had mandatory... field... work... classes...? if you can call them that. They had them digging potatoes and what not. Nothing screams socialist spirit like making uni students do free labour in the field, I guess?

Pictures with his uni girlfriend, how cuuute! (And Sasha Korol hanging from the roof in the background... for reasons unknown)

Lyonya pretending to drive a combine harvester. And next to him, obviously, Sasha Korol. When I first saw this picture, I thought he was on some kind of a scaffolding but alas - it's one of those old beasts, like our Bizon. But that's not a Bizon because those had roofs. Nobody here cares for USSR combines talk - not even me - let's move on.

Not too sure when these two are from but they look uni enough to me - probably from the very beginning and sometime closer to the end, judging by his stache doing significantly better...

Mandatory military service because a REAL MAN in the USSR needed to know how to shoot a gun, obviously. Even when that meant military service interrupted your uni for a short while. I say that as if no other countries before or after had mandatory army time... don't question it, I'm doing a bit.

Lyonya is second in top row in the picture on the left and third from the left in the top row in the other pic. Korol is there, too, he's fourth from the left in the top row in the first picture and second from the right in the bottom row in the other picture.

[thatuselesshuman]

Making Art Until I Learn to Enjoy the Process Again Day 1

So I'm going to start this series where I make art I enjoy and post it until I learn to like art again. I'll put the why under the read more, so you don't have to read all that lol

Boom, day one. This is made out of makeup products (lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow, blush, and highlighter) and also nail polish

Looks terrible but i had fun

Why I'm doing this:

This gonna be kinda serious and I'm usually a goofy silly person so stick with me.

As a child, art was my shit. I asked for a drawing tablet for my birthday, and my favorite class in school was art. I dreamed of becoming an animator or a comic artist. Then I hit 6th grade, where I figured out I was colorblind. It's not that serious or even that severe, but it still hit me hard. It seemed like everyone suddenly became sympathetic towards my goal, instead of supportive. They no longer believed I could become a professional artist because I had a disability that prevented me from fully seeing one of the main facets of art: color.

I didn't give up though, because I'm stubborn as hell. That didn't help me any with my art teachers though. My art teachers suddenly became highly critical, seeming to think they were doing me a service by letting me down early. Soon, that critical nature infected me and I started hating my art. It wasn't bad, just typical child art, but I refused to show it to anyone or do anything with it because I thought it was never good enough. I was tired of fighting the fight to convince people of my plan. I stopped trying at art by the 8th grade, and dropped out of art classes entirely by 10th grade.

The story continues however, when I was forced to take an art credit this year at university. I had long since stopped caring about art by then, so I just tried to get through the class. My art teacher, as per usual, was highly critical of my art. She found it childish, and eventually just stopped trying to genuinely critique it. She gave up on me. It didn't hurt me all that bad, but it did make me realize something. I used to love art. Now, it was a chore I had to get through for the credit. That didn't sit right with me for a while, and I finally decided to do something about it today.

Is my art good? No. Does it have any deep symbolism? No. Do I hate to show it to the internet? Absolutely.

But that's exactly why I'm doing it. I'm not going to get anywhere by having such thin skin, so I'm putting it to the fire of Tumblr. I'm going to enjoy making it, post it, and do it day by day (aka when I have time lol) until the comments on it no longer matter. Until I enjoy the art I make not because it's good, but because it's fun.

[invincible-selfxmade-punk]

Big fat teaching rant under the cut

Unlike last year where the kids were just jerks, kids this year are really really low as far as achievement and grade level.

I have no idea what they were taught in elementary school but they're just so far behind in everything. And it's not just intellectually they are emotionally like second graders.

I am honestly thinking about maybe next year studying to get certified in early childhood development because I don't feel like I'm equipped to teach kids at such a low level.

Being certified to teach 4th grade through 8th grade I assumed I will reach a happy medium of teaching maybe 6th grade.

But for the last 2 years the kids that are coming in are not at grade level. And it seems like each year they are lower and lower. I would really have to know how to teach and manage a class of first and second graders in order to be able to teach fourth grade.

Physically they are 4th graders but mentally, emotionally and behaviorally they're in first and second grade. I have one that can't count past 15. In another class, one couldn't tell me which number was bigger between 22 and 27.

It's to the point where the kids that are on the gifted and talented list are just regular 4th graders. There is nothing exceptional about them, the other kids are just that low.

As far as behavior, some days are good and some days are bad. I have spent so much time and just trying to get my 10th period(last class of the day) kids to stop talking long enough for me to even give them instructions, they are almost a week behind everyone else.

The other classes have good and bad days and one day I think I've got them corraled, they're quiet and they're listening and then the next day is chaos again.

I can't even get them to put their notebooks back in the same place every day. I can tell them where to put it. I can stand there and show them where to put it and the minute I move away they are putting it on a different shelf.

Today I gave the following instructions:

" get out your composition books. Turn to page 7.

Then you are going to copy down the I can statement from the board."

The I can statement said I can review this chapter by answering questions on page 79.

In EVERY SINGLE CLASS;

"Miss!!! We don't have a page 79 in our composition books"

"No. You are WRITING this on pg 7 of your composition book. The questions are on pg 79 of your TEXTBOOK."

(10 seconds later)

"Miss! I can't find page 79 in my composition book cuz you didn't tell us to number the pages that far!"

"No. I JUST SAID, you write on PAGE 7 of your composition book. The questions are on pg 79 of your TEXTBOOK."

"Miss!! I don't see any questions on page 7."

I am not kidding and I am not embellishing. I had to answer that question about 75 times in one day.

I'm guessing these kids were in preschool and kindergarten when covid hit and they never made it up. They are at such a deficit that I worry about them even being able to go through school and complete it. I see them getting frustrated around freshman year and just dropping out and never coming back.