#I’m obsessed with a woman that commands a man like a dog

[dilfspitdrinker]

reminder that Tess made that man her dog. Joel answered to her, she called all the fucking shots, he listened and protected her. She had him handled, trained, leashed. Joel was Tess’ guard dog and everyone knew it too.

[im-totally-not-an-alien]

Final Fantasy 7 prompts # 34

1. Sephiroth makes Cloud have a full on mental breakdown and now he feels bad. On the other hand the blond is crying into his chest, and he's really not sure what to make of that.

2. Cloud Strife: King of the Chocobos

Yuffie wouldn't stop calling him that, particularly on the account that they were being followed be no less that nine chocobos. It doesn't help that it's mating season. Yuffie keeps telling him to flirt with them to get a free ride.

3. AVALANCHE giving Nanaki a bath, which somehow induces a water war

4. Protective Cloud looking out for Tifa. He somehow gets pulled into the "Bouncer" role

5. Vincent scaring off one of Clouds many stalkers (of which, Cloud is oblivious)

6. Tifa's wolf ring can call to/ summon Cloud in cases of emergencies via the wolf emblem on his pauldron. Kinda like a summon materia

7. I'm in love with the Commander Strife thing where he joins Shinra post time travel shenanigans and fixed everything.

So:

A. Commander Strife being babied by Genesis

B. Commander Strife becoming Zack and Clouds pseudo big brother

C. Sephiroth, Genesis, Angeal, Zack and Cloud try, and fail, to find out Commander Strifes first name.

D. Commander Strife babying the Infantrymen and looking out for them since few people in the company actually care about them.

E. Sephiroth and Commander Strife exploring the bond through the J-cells

F. Commander Strife is given a soft light blue sweater, "so he doesn't have to wear his uniform at the mall again"

G. Kunsel is obsessed with discovering Commander Strifes backstory. He has the corkboard with pictures and string and everything!

H. "Bold of you to assume I know what I'm doing." - Commander Strife

I. Someone vandalized six large walls within Shinras training facilities. Six whole beautiful and highly detailed paintings, each portraying one of the Commanders and one of the General. The last one was all of them together, standing side by side with thier swords at the ready.

The five people in question were so flattered that the investigation was halted and the paintings remained. The perpetrator(s?) was never caught.

J. Cadet Cloud sending home a picture of him and Commander Strife together, to his mom.

She couldn't help but laugh at the goofy faces they were making.

K. Commander Fair cackling madly as he sprinted down the corridors carrying a blushing Commander Strife while being chased by an enraged cake covered Reno.

....the troops decided that they saw nothing.

L. A picture at a holiday party with the four Commanders and the General, all with hot chocolate in hand and wearing a whipped cream mustache

M. Commander Strife just hands Zack a whistle and walks away.

Curious, Commander Fair blows the whistle, and is immediately swarmed by dogs.

N. Genesis drags Strife out on a spa day

O. The Commanders were all in a room when Zack started asking hypothetical questions about thigh high socks and stuff.

He questions how they keep them from sliding down.

Strife answers the question without thinking, and grumbled about how uncomfortable sagging thigh highs were.

===============================

He froze, jaw closing with an audible click and slowly looked behind him to see Genesis and Zack looking at him with an odd gleam in thier eyes.

"And pray tell, little bird," Genesis cooed with a overly sweet voice, "how would you know that?"

The blond panicked a little, "It's a long story."

Zack snuck up to his side and linked thier arms together, "A story that you will definitely be telling us...if you don't want any rumors!"

Cloud stared that them in disbelief, "You're blackmailing me?"

"Of course!" The redhead sang.

===============================

P. Cloud making Genesis a custom LOVELESS themed motorcycle as thanks for letting him cry on his shoulder. Literally.

Q. Everyone is in honeybee outfits. Reno snaps a picture, and runs for his life.

R. Commander Strife is confronted by a man who claims to be his father, which he knows is impossible for time traveler reasons.

He quickly realizes what the man wants when the guy demands a DNA test...after all, the science department has been practically foaming at the mouth, wanting a sample of his DNA.

S. Sephiroth never gave up on figuring out what the mysterious blonde was hiding. He becomes even more invested in his investigation when he hears him mention the Wutai princess by her first name. Suspicious.

T. While he was on the run with AVALANCHE, Strife had always slept with his group. Being the way he was he unconsciously sought out things that were both soft and firm to use as a pillow, which often lead him to sleeping on his team mates.

He wake with his head resting on Vincents chest, Barrets arm or Tifas abs and always, always, always, they would wake him gently by running thier fingers through his hair.

He missed them so much.

U. Vincent has rejoined the world, but refuses to fully rejoin the Turks. This doesn't stop them from throwing him a birthday party.

V. Vincent is commonly referred to as "Vincent the Vampire" and "My Valentine" by Zack and Genesis respectively.

W. Cloud met the chairman/ chairwoman for his fanclub and he realy wishes he didn't.

X. Commander Fair is forbidden from picking movies at movie night. Thats what he gets for bringing X-rated movies, Though the part that Strife didn't like was that everyone was trying to cover his eyes and ears. He wasn't a child!

Y. Commander Strife runs into younger Tifa and has to explain that no, he is not Cloud.

She doesn't believe him.

Z. Zack, Kunsel, and Sephiroth somehow wind up inside Commander Strifes head and decide to snoop. They find out everything and aren't sure how to proceed.

8. Time travel fix it, but from Kunsels perspective

9. Time travel fix it, but from Zacks point of view and he gets caught up in the madness

10. Time travel fix it, but from random SOLDIERS/ Turks point of view

11. Clouds mom goes back in time and takes her 13 year old son by the hand and, armed with only a few materia, marched into the ShinRa mansion and went strait to Vincent.

She gives the wide eyed Turk the tounge lashing of a lifetime. She becomes enraged however, after the former ShinRa spy gives her some flimsy excuse and slams his coffin closed. Long story short, she drags the man out by his cloak with her son close behind, fiddling with his small sword and glaring at the man as if daring him to do anything to his Ma.

Valentine is baffled.

12. Reno makes the wrong move and Cloud finally snaps, telling him exactly where he can shove his rod

13. Cloud is just so tired of being grossly hit on and sexually harassed. He starts coming up with one liners/ insults /refrances to combat the crude remarks.

Example:

Woman: How big is your ****?

Cloud: *said in the tone of those tootsiepop commercials* The world may never know.

14. Tifa gets turned into a frog, but doesn't turn back. Even when using maidens kisses and ensuna she remained an amphibian.

Aerith convinces Cloud to kiss Tifa, which he does, shyly on the cheek. She poofs back to her normal self and they both blush while the flower girl giggles.

No one even suspected that it was her doing.

15. Sephiroth revives and meets Cloud and Tifa's kids, who took one look at him and decided to latch onto his legs and demand his attention.

They also boldly declared him to be thier uncle/ the moon God, and tell him all about thier wierd family.

They told Sephiroth that he'd fit right in with AVALANCHE, to which he genuinely laughed at the irony of the situation.

[shieldofrohan]

While grrm said that petyr will never sold Sansa to Boltons he also implied petyr disgusting intentions toward Sansa. If Sansa escape petyr and ran to wall there are chances of crossing paths with Ramsay. I'm scared about Sansa arc in twow as there are two monsters lurking petyr and Ramsay.

Hello @please-dot ,

This is what Martin said:

GRRM: My Littlefinger would have never turned Sansa over to Ramsay. Never. He’s obsessed with her. Half the time he thinks she’s the daughter he never had—that he wishes he had, if he’d married Catelyn. And half the time he thinks she is Catelyn, and he wants her for himself. He’s not going to give her to somebody who would do bad things to her. That’s going to be very different in the books.

I know everyone is focusing on Petyr’s disgusting feelings for her in this quote but let’s not miss the part of him seeing her as his daughter.

Petyr-Sansa dynamic was always more complicated than simple perversion from his part. What we have with him is more twisted than that. Sometimes he truly feels like she is his REAL daughter:

“..It was clever of you to see it. Though no more than I’d expect of mine own daughter.”

“Thank you.” She felt absurdly proud for puzzling it out, but confused as well. “I’m not, though. Your daughter. Not truly. I mean, I pretend to be Alayne, but you know...”

Littlefinger put a finger to her lips. “I know what I know, and so do you. Some things are best left unsaid, sweetling.”

[AFFC; Sansa I]

He doesn’t like the fact that she is not ACTUALLY his daughter.

These two different feelings he has for Sansa (daughter or his dream woman) are intermixed. That’s why (I think at least) he doesn’t go further than kissing her.

Will he do sth worse to her? It is possible but in plotwise I don’t see it happening. Sansa already doesn’t like his kisses etc and she doesn’t fully trust him already:

He is serving me lies as well, Sansa realized. They were comforting lies, though, and she thought them kindly meant. A lie is not so bad if it is kindly meant. If only she believed them...

[…]

Petyr saved me. He loved my mother well, and...

And her? How could she doubt it? He had saved her.

He saved Alayne, his daughter, a voice within her whispered. But she was Sansa too... and sometimes it seemed to her that the Lord Protector was two people as well. He was Petyr, her protector, warm and funny and gentle... but he was also Littlefinger, the lord she’d known at King’s Landing, smiling slyly and stroking his beard as he whispered in Queen Cersei’s ear. And Littlefinger was no friend of hers. […] Littlefinger never lifted so much as his little finger for her.

Except to get me out. He did that for me. I thought it was Ser Dontos, my poor old drunken Florian, but it was Petyr all the while. Littlefinger was only a mask he had to wear. Only sometimes Sansa found it hard to tell where the man ended and the mask began. Littlefinger and Lord Petyr looked so very much alike. She would have fled them both, perhaps, but there was nowhere for her to go. […] I have no place but here, Sansa thought miserably, and no true friend but Petyr.

[AFFC; Sansa I]

Sansa is smart enough to see the duality of Petyr and LF. Petyr is a paternal figure who saved her but LF is an enemy…  So she already has doubts about his true intentions. Does she need another attack from him to put a wall between them? I don’t think so.

LF’s part in execution of Ned Stark, Jeyne Poole’s misfortunes and Sweetrobin’s death (I don’t think he’ll die but LF is planning to have him dead) are going to be the issues which will cause the confrontation between Sansa and Petyr, not a sexual attack (IMO).

I am one of the few people who truly believe that Petyr’s Harry plan is sincere. He wants that marriage.. 

Why would he do sth to jeopardize it? 

I think Sansa will need to leave Vale for some other reason like her identity being revealed, an attack by Mountain Clans, Shadrich’s attempt to kidnap her, Brienne’s arrival to save her etc.. (My money is on Shadrich)

Petyr couldn’t get the Tully girl he wanted and it won’t change… He will never have Sansa. I am kind of certain about it (but who knows… )

So this is my opinion about the LF part of your ask. 

(Also believe me if he was supposed to do sth like this to Sansa, D&D would have done it… but obviously Sansa didn’t have a r*pe plot so they had to invent it)

About the Ramsay part…

Ok, I don’t know why people believe that Ramsay gonna get Sansa somehow? Whole Jeyne arc was about Boltons not being able to get a Stark for themselves… But can they cross paths?

Well correct me if I am wrong but Ramsay was in WF the last time we heard about him. 

The last thing we know about him that he wrote the Pink Letter to Jon. Let’s read that letter:

“I am being foolish, Lord Commander, but … this letter frightens me. See here?”

Bastard, was the only word written outside the scroll. No Lord Snow or Jon Snow or Lord Commander. Simply Bastard. And the letter was sealed with a smear of hard pink wax. “You were right to come at once,” Jon said. You were right to be afraid. He cracked the seal, flattened the parchment, and read.

Your false king is dead, bastard. He and all his host were smashed in seven days of battle. I have his magic sword. Tell his red whore.

Your false king’s friends are dead. Their heads upon the walls of Winterfell. Come see them, bastard. Your false king lied, and so did you. You told the world you burned the King-Beyond-the-Wall. Instead you sent him to Winterfell to steal my bride from me.

I will have my bride back. If you want Mance Rayder back, come and get him. I have him in a cage for all the north to see, proof of your lies. The cage is cold, but I have made him a warm cloak from the skins of the six whores who came with him to Winterfell.

I want my bride back. I want the false king’s queen. I want his daughter and his red witch. I want his wildling princess. I want his little prince, the wildling babe. And I want my Reek. Send them to me, bastard, and I will not trouble you or your black crows. Keep them from me, and I will cut out your bastard’s heart and eat it.

It was signed,

Ramsay Bolton,

Trueborn Lord of Winterfell.

[ADWD; Jon]

As you can see Ramsay is asking Jon to COME AND SEE… 

Jon is the one who should come down south because Ramsay is not coming up North..

And Jon says this too… Jon was going to leave Wall to go down Winterfell:

“And where will you be, crow?” Borroq thundered. “Hiding here in Castle Black with your white dog?”

“No. I ride south.” Then Jon read them the letter Ramsay Snow had written.

[…]

“The Night’s Watch will make for Hardhome. I ride to Winterfell alone, unless …” Jon paused. “… is there any man here who will come stand with me?”

[…]

I have my swords, thought Jon Snow, and we are coming for you, Bastard.

[ADWD; Jon]

And in TWOW Theon sample; Theon says that Ramsay will (?) come to Stannis for his bride and Reek:

“Frey and Manderly will never combine their strengths. They will come for you, but separately. Lord Ramsay will not be far behind them. He wants his bride back. He wants his Reek.” Theon’s laugh was half a titter, half a whimper. “Lord Ramsay is the one Your Grace should fear.”

[TWOW; Theon]

So will Ramsay march Wall to meet Jon (because he believes that Jon has his bride) or will he come to Stannis who is in Crofters’ Village in Wolfswood (west of WF)?

I don’t have the answers because of the mysteries surround Pink Letter and we don’t know the true timeline of POVs.

But in any case… If Ramsay is going to march to Wall then he will most likely use the west of Kingsroad or the KR itself but Sansa is going to use the east of KR (according to Grey Girl prophecy and the map).

If he and Sansa somehow cross paths I am not so worried about Sansa.. she won’t be alone (she’ll have Brienne probably). 

* Martin also hinted that we will see a face off between Ramsay’s hounds and Stark dire wolves… but I believe that it will happen in WF Battle..

IMO, Jon and Sansa will face Ramsay in WF Battle and not before…

So I don’t think that Ramsay or Petyr will be alarming threats for Sansa in Vale or during the journey up North.

I hope I am right…

Sansa’s body is WF… and no one will ever get it unless she lets them..

Thanks for the ask.

[marshmallow-phd]

The Anormic

Part of The Experiments Universe

Genre: Lucky One/Obsession AU

Pairing: Kris x Reader

Summary: You were everything he needed to feel human. But not even your presence could keep the nightmares away. The years had gone by and it seemed his dreams were all that was left of his trauma. When his past comes back and snatches you away, the human mask he’d worked so hard to create will be ripped away and he’ll stop at nothing to get you back.

Part: 1 I 2 I 3

**

Dozens of papers were scattered all over the floor. Anyone would have glanced at the chaos and assumed there was no order to it. But there was a reason to the rhyme. You could reach out and pluck up the exact file you were looking for without having to search too long. The fact that you were the only one who understood the order was fine by you. They were all spread out in a semi-circle within easy distance. A worn-out notebook balanced on your knee. The pencil between your fingers bounced up and down in a blur as your eyes scanned over your notes. Scribbles and half-words covered almost the entire space, cutting across the blue lines diagonally and filling in the margins like your own secret code. There were still too many missing pieces, too many avenues to explore. You’re inexperience was getting in your own way.

With a sigh hanging in the air, you leaned back to lie on the floor. You looked over at the digital green numbers glowing from the clock on the stove. The day was slowly shifting into night. To your left, purples and oranges mixed in the clouds out the window in a way that only nature could. Those two colors anywhere else would have been gaudy, but in the sky, they were breathtaking. But they also weren’t the sight you wanted at the moment.

You knew Kris was currently meeting up with his friend, Tao, so you weren’t worried for him – merely anxious for him to get home. The day didn’t sit quite right if you went to bed before seeing his smile. You didn’t know much about the younger man, only that he was in the same orphanage as Kris growing up and his past was just as mysterious. But he made Kris happy, lighter in a way that you weren’t able to. Perhaps it was due to their shared history. It didn’t keep the twinge of jealous away, but you’d learned to manage it. As long as Kris had someone to talk to ab-

Click.

The soft noise made you sit up. It was the kind you were too used to hearing. Kris would often try to sneak in through the front door so you wouldn’t get distracted in the middle of studying. His well-meaning intention did the opposite, making you more in tuned to the sound. Standing to your feet, you shuffled through the living room towards the door. “Kris?” Nothing. You called out again.

Gloved hands reached out from the kitchen entrance and pulled you back. Your mouth was covered by the protective nylon, preventing you from screaming out for help, but you could still kick and flail. Whoever had a hold of you must not have been prepared for the fight back. Or you were simply able to hit just the right spot to make his grip loosen enough for you to get away. In a quick glance, you saw a total of three armored men in your apartment. The odds of you making it away were slim. That didn’t mean you weren’t going to try.

You ran for the living room. All three were right behind you. The advantage was yours, however, since you knew the layout and the arrangement of the furniture. Jumping over the couch that separated the living room and dining area, you headed for the bookshelf. Not knowing where the instinct came from, you tipped the shelf over. The heavy wood landed with a hard thud, vibrating the floor and rattling the glassware that was drying in the sink. It did its job, though, and covered the papers that were spread out on the floor. If men were coming to kidnap you, there was a very real possibility that your research could be the reason why. You never were able to keep your nose out of things. The sudden furniture in the middle of the floor was enough to stop the men in their tracks and give you time to run for the window. Your nervous fingers fumbled with the lock, but the sides were sticking. The window didn’t fly open to let you out onto the fire escape. It had only managed to crack open a few inches when you were yanked backwards. The hands that had grabbed you tossed you through the air. You landed on your back on the glass coffee table, shattering the panel that held your mug and textbooks. The wooden cross legs in the middle cradled your fall and kept you from rolling in the shards that now covered the rug. You groaned and whimpered from the pain as the men stood around you. They covered their faces with cloth before one held up a black aerosol can and sprayed a white mist into your face. You fought hard to hold your breath and not let the chemical into your lungs, but too soon your will gave out. One deep breath was all it took and you were out.

**

Kris kept his head down as he hurried through the streets. The hood kept most of his face covered, but he still couldn’t risk being seen by any cameras nearby. From his time undercover at EXO, he knew they had no qualms about breaking the law and hacking any security footage that might benefit them. The bus ride had been long, but this had to be the place where he started; back at the beginning. His stomach churned the closer his feet took him. Memories danced around in his head, taunting him. Now that you were gone, taken by the very past he was trying to outrun, the parts of himself that he’d been able to repress were coming back with a vengeance.

The old headquarters of EXO was now nothing more than a pile of rubble. Bits of wall still stood here and there, covered in weeds and leaves, surrounded by a mix of dirt and glass. The people around here had wanted the remains emptied out and the lot flattened, but EXO refused and they couldn’t be forced to do so. Stepping over the knee-high rod iron fence, Kris checked his surroundings once again before venturing in deeper. As far as he was aware, there wasn’t too much monitoring of the area, though that didn’t mean it was nonexistent. He knew very well that he might have tripped some sort of motion sensor, alerting the rebranded company to an unauthorized presence on their property. If he hadn’t already been spotted then he should have time to search before anyone else showed up. Getting captured himself was certainly not the answer to getting you back. As long as he kept his face from being seen, he should have an advantage.

Careful with every step he took, he glanced sparingly around the area. However, the one place he should have been looking was near his own feet. An old cracked pipe covered in red-brown rust laid sneakily in the overgrown grass that had managed to break through the concrete floor. Kris hit the ground hard on his knees, palms scraping against the rough surface. Shaking the pain from his hands, he hissed as he inspected the damage. It took less than a minute for the skin to knit itself back together until only dirt and rocks the size a pinhead remained.

“You need to be careful.”

Kris’ head snapped up, whirling around to find the source of the voice that was so close to yours. But there was no one in the vicinity. Not even a kid on a skateboard or old woman walking her dogs. Of course. It was a memory. One of many where you almost discovered his secret.

“I’ll be fine,” Kris had scoffed with a roll of his eyes. The two of you had escaped for the day to a small lake about an hour out of town. The sun was lowering in the sky, stars that you couldn’t see in the city making a rare appearance. A small fire danced and flickered while the two of you skewered marshmallows onto metal kebab rods. You were being the smart one and wrapping a cloth on the end as you held it over the blaze. Kris, preferring it a little more on the burnt side while also being a tad lazy, simply set the marshmallow into the fire and let it sit there while he fixed the blankets a few feet away.

“I wish we could do this all the time,” you sighed, bobbing the stick up and down to keep it out of the flames. Wind ruffled the hem of your flannel shirt. Actually, it might have been one of Kris’ shirts that you commandeered. Not that he would ever complain.

“If you want to come out here more often, just say the word.” There was nothing that he would deny you – except for the truth about himself.

You shook your head. “No, because then I’ll never want to leave.”

Coming up behind you, Kris wrapped his arms around your shoulders. He rested his chin near the crook of your neck and took in the scent of you mixed with the smoke that drifted through the air. He wished that the two of you could stay out here as well – hide out in the woods where no one could find you and you would always be safe. Time would no longer exist out here. Only the sun would indicate the passage of the days. Nothing was more free than space and isolation. Perhaps he could build a cabin, a simple, humble home big enough for the two of you and anyone else who might come along.

A giggle interrupted the romantic moment. “Your marshmallow is burning.”

Cursing, Kris jumped towards the fire and pulled the rod out. Big mistake. The heat from the fire had transferred all the way up the metal, burning his hand. Kris dropped the rod in the dirt as he cried out from the burning of his palm. You put your own stick to the side as you reached for his hand. “Are you okay?”

Kris kept his hand squeezed tight. The pain from his throbbing skin made him want to hiss and scream, but he held it in. “I’m fine.”

“Let me see it.” You tried to pry open his fingers, but he fought against you. “Kris, seriously, you might be seriously burnt.”

“It’s not that bad.” He just needed a few seconds more….

You looked up at him with pleading eyes. “Kris, please.”

He gave in. Letting you open up his hand, he waited and hoped. He barely held back the sigh of relief when he uncurled his fingers. While his hand was still a little red, there was no sign of the previous injury. You relaxed into your own sense of relief was well. “I guess you didn’t have ahold of it that long. That’s good.” You looked over at the ruined s’more lying in the sand. “I guess you’ll have to start over. But, please, this time use a bandana or something.”

He smiled broadly at you and kissed your cheek. “I will.”

What he wouldn’t give to go back to that moment, to that time. He’d grant your wish and never leave that little spot off the lake where the water calmly splashed up on the shore, the pale sand felt soft against bare feet and the trees sang in the wind. It wasn’t the last time you came close to witnessing what his altered body was capable of. Kris had told himself that he would be more careful, more aware, but that was an empty promise. The fact that you were still in the dark was a miracle.

No, you were probably no longer oblivious to his otherness. As soon as you were able to, you would have been demanding answers. He wouldn’t put it past the scientists to spill every little secret, to turn you against him and make him even more vulnerable and pliable to their wishes. He just hoped that you would continue to trust him, to give him the benefit of the doubt and let him plead his own case to you.

The phone in his pocket vibrated. Frowning, Kris pulled it out with every intention of turning it off. But seeing Chanyeol’s name pop up made him hesitate. He shouldn’t answer. He should let it go to voicemail and call back later. He hit the green button. “Hello?”

“Hey, Kris!” Chanyeol’s voice was just as upbeat and joyful as ever.

“What is it, Chanyeol?” He didn’t mean to be short, but he couldn’t bring himself to fake cheerfulness right now.

The younger male could sense his enthusiasm was not being reciprocated. “Um, I know this might be sudden, but I was wondering if I could come visit for a few days? I have something I want to talk to you about and-”

“I can’t. I’m not home.”

“Oh.” Chanyeol’s voice was lower, gone was the earlier excitement. “Okay. When do you get back? Maybe-”

“I don’t know. I can’t do this right now.”

He hung up before he could feel anymore guilt. A few days ago, he would have gladly invited Chanyeol to come stay with him. The two of them were somewhat close, the other’s positive energy being infectious no matter how tired one was. You would have loved him.

Turning his phone off, Kris shoved the device back in his pocket and stood up to his feet. He kept going deeper into the rubble until he came to the spot he was looking for. Wiping away the years of growth, he found the inconspicuous hide away hole. He opened the flap to reveal a metal bar. One turn at forty-five degrees and he was able to open the rounded door in the ground. It was dark, to the point that Kris could barely make out the floor of the hidden room. From his bag, he pulled out a flash light and dropped down. His heart sank.

This was once a secret storage room, cabinets lining nearly every inch of the walls. And they were empty. Drawers hanging open or thrown to the floor like the secrets they held were taken in a hurry. When they had blown this place up years ago, Kris had assumed that this room had been destroyed as well. But it was still intact from he could tell.

They could have taken the files to Moo San’s mansion, he told himself. But a sinking feeling told him that wasn’t the case. They were all so convinced that they’d ended it that day; that all the information EXO had on the experiments they conducted, everything pertaining to them, had been destroyed in the fire. As the years went by, that conclusion began fact. But this empty room was telling him that they were wrong. He couldn’t know for sure, but a sinking feeling told him RS had at least part of the information. Were they looking for more? Was that why they took you? To see what you knew?

Turning off the flashlight, Kris climbed back up the hole, swiped up his bag and stalked away from the scene.

A few blocks away sat the community library. Cash on hand to pay for the minutes, Kris signed in under a fake name, giving a story to the librarian about how he’d lost his card but really needed to use the computer. She reluctantly gave him a guest sign in and pointed to the lab. Sitting as far away from the others in the room as possible, Kris opened up a search engine and typed in Regeneration Science. While he knew some things about the organization and their ties to EXO, he needed more. Expect it didn’t exist to the rest of the world. The only results were those of other labs trying to recreate in mammals the cell regeneration that reptiles possessed to someday use on humans. Okay, then. New tactic.

He typed in EXO Applied Sciences and scrolled through the old news stories about the fires, chuckling to himself as he passed a few forums discussing possible conspiracies behind the incidents. Then he found what he was looking for. The cut and paste website of the company. He searched through the different tabs, bypassing the flourishes of why the company was so great and what wonderful things they were doing for humanity. On the last page he found the list of individuals who owned parts of the company and the directors on the board. None of the names sounded familiar. Even some of the companies that sat as shareholders sounded foreign to him. Frustrated that the answer wasn’t popping out at him, he printed the list of owners along with prominent doctors that headed the different departments – none of which he’d ever interacted with in his time as a prisoner.

Exhausted, he made it back to the dingy motel. Collapsing on the edge of the bed, he pulled your charm that now hung from a red string out from underneath his shirt. The small bird sat in his palm. He told himself that he should have never met you, that you would have been better off never having met him. But he was selfish. He cherished the memories the two of you had created to ever completely regret it. He needed to get you back.

But he couldn’t do this on his own.

Pulling out his phone, he turned it back on. A little prayer went through his thoughts, a prayer that his brother would answer. After the short conversation that had occurred half an hour ago, Kris wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t answer. As the phone rang in his ear, he held his breath and hoped that he wasn’t on the verge of shattering more worlds than his own.

**

You weren’t sure how long you’d been awake. It had been a slow process, opening your eyes and taking in your foreign surroundings. The room was blindingly white, minimal furniture that wasn’t anywhere close to comfortable. Every wall was pure concrete giving you no indication of where you might be. Your muscles were sore. Each movement made your muscles groan as if they’d aged seventy years overnight. You had to take your time getting up off the thin mattress. The metal bedframe creaked from your shifting weight. Still dressed in your pajama shorts and cardigan, you shivered at the constant cold breeze that ran through the room though there didn’t seem to be a vent in sight. The only way out was a door on the far end of the room. A narrow, rectangular window about eye level rested slightly off to the size. At least that would be useful.

Your bare feet hit the tile floor, shooting another shiver up your spine. The slap of each step echoed around the room. Now that you were up and moving around, the room seemed much smaller than you initially thought. Peering out the window, you craned your neck to see as far down the hallway you could manage. In a single file line, strange looking men in equally odd clothing marched down the hall. While you couldn’t see all of their faces, you could have sworn some of them had two different colored eyes. Behind them, a woman dressed in regular clothes walked into view, nervousness written all over her face. She glanced over at you momentarily and frowned. A muffled shout caused her to flinch and she hurried to catch back up with the group.

A new man’s face appeared in the window. You jumped back at the sudden surprise, holding your breath as the door slid open. The man stepped inside. On his face sat a malevolent grin. Before you could open your mouth to demand answers, he beat you to the punch.

“You are currently being held in the underground facility of Regeneration Science, an extension of EXO Applied Sciences and Technologies. I am Dr. Brandt, head of the… experiments we perform down here.”

You frowned. EXO was a name you knew. The company had been in the news several years ago. Both their main headquarters and the owner’s mansion had burned down a few months apart, the owner dying in the latter tragedy. After that, nothing too special happened with them besides the occasional upgrade or technological breakthrough to make everyone’s lives easier on a daily basis. They were also one of the top medicinal companies in the world, only a few others standing in their way of being number one. They often came up in class, the two fires heatedly debated amongst your classmates. The conspiracy that the company set burned the buildings down themselves had never really died out, many thinking they were covering up something sinister. You’d never thought anything of it before. Now, though…

But you couldn’t figure out what any of that had to do with you. None of the projects you’d been researching had anything to do with EXO.

“What do you want with me?” The horrific thought that you were now going to become one of their experiments flashed through your mind. They couldn’t do that, force you to be exposed to whatever new drug or weapon they were working on.

Dr. Brandt smirked. “For you to sit tight right here and be a good girl.”

You scoffed. “You expect me to just go along with that?”

“Yes, I do,” he replied confidently. Hands behind his back, he took several steps toward you. Personal space was apparently not something he respected. “Especially if you want Kris to remain unharmed.”

You pounced. Hands twisted in the lab coat he wore, you pulled and shoved, your blood boiling under your skin. “What did you do to him?! Where is he?!” The door to the room slid open again as two guards ran into the room and pulled you away. They held on to your arms to keep you from attacking again. “I swear, if you’ve hurt him-”

“We haven’t touched a single hair on his head,” Dr. Brandt interrupted as he fixed his coat. “He was the one we were after last night, but he’s exceptionally difficult to track down. So my men went with plan b, which was to bring you in and, hopefully, lead Kris to turn himself in voluntarily.”

“What do you want with Kris?”

Dr. Brandt narrowed his eyes. “He hasn’t told you, has he?”

You swallowed. “Told me what?”

He laughed. “I’m not sure if that was noble or stupid. However, I am more than willing to fill in those particular details for you, if you so wish.” He raised an eyebrow, waiting for your answer.

There was no telling if you could trust a single word coming from this man’s mouth. For all you knew, he had nothing to do with EXO, this Regeneration Science didn’t exist, and he was playing you for a fool by dangling Kris in front of you. But you couldn’t deny the possibly poisoned candy. Kris had a mysterious past, you’d been aware of it since you first met. Sometimes, his stories or explanations didn’t add up. You knew he kept secrets. Those mysteries had been impossible not to investigate. So, you gave in.

“Tell me what you know.”

[raindrop-on-a-spiderweb]

female-female romance w obsession and staking by quieta WHEN 😠😠😠(I’m not demanding anything just trying to jokeeee btw)

😘😘 just for you I'll post the beginning of that female stalking work that was sitting in my drafts.

***

Cheryl Ann Croxton had a schedule that was very unwavering and average; so much so that it seemed months upon months had passed before she noticed that the calendar had changed from 1979 to 1984.

She woke up at the same time, just before 8:00, and would feed her dogs and dress in her waitress uniform. She would let the pups out in the yard for a run, then securely lock them inside the house and set off for the diner she worked at.

The neon lights of Big Betty's Diner, decorated with the buxom blonde caricature of Big Betty, were half dim and half flashing, perched on the side of a huge gray highway. Trucks and cars zoomed endlessly beside the truck stop the diner was located at. Cheryl parked in back and went out front to take orders. She schooled her face in the sort of bland, dead smile only a employee whose working years had beaten out all of her emotion could.

Truckers had money. Drifters didn't. And lot lizards, never. Very often a drifter or hooker, bruises dotting the insides of their elbows, would hang off a trucker, hollow eyes looking for their Reuben Sandwich that would be vomited out one smack binge later. Cheryl Ann had gotten used to it, just as she had gotten used to the hands grabbing her ass as she served food and the fake giggling she forced herself to affect in response.

It had gotten easier as of late. Cheryl Ann had been a handsome woman at one time, but lack of interest in men had shaped her mind and body. She was slim, with a flat chest and long legs. Her buttocks were nonexistent (not that it stopped the men who came to Big Betty's) and her shoulders rangy. Her face had a long, almost horsishness to it, and her hair was cut short and pitch black in a pixie cut. She wore large glasses. Cheryl Ann felt safe behind her glasses. Like she was hiding behind another person, a person unlike her who smiled and joked and laughed and simpered to her rude customers. 

While she was serving a tray of flapjacks to a rowdy bunch of truckers, she heard a sudden explosion of screaming outside the diner. She peeked through the glass walls, and then, when the screams increases, ran outside.

A woman, her blonde wavy hair wild and standing straight up, and a sweaty man in flannel, were in the middle of the truck parking lot. They were tussling, ripping at each other and yelling. Another trucker went to yank the man away, hands tangling in his coat. "Get the fuck off! What the fuck you doin, man?"

The woman staggered back on high heels, stringy hair hanging to frame her face and her lurid red lips bared in a snarl. "Cocksucker! You goddamn piece of shit! Imma fuckin kill you!"

It seemed like nothing but an argument between a lizard and her john, so most people dispersed. The john went to stalk back to his truck. In the wasteland of concrete and discarded burger wrappers, the lizard bent over the curb, heaving in what was either fury or sobs.

"Are you all right, ma'm?" Asked Cheryl Ann, hesitantly touching her shoulder. The woman turned and shamelessly wrapped her arms around her.

The woman's legs slowly collapsed. Aware of the eyes on her, Cheryl Ann hesitantly let herself fall to her knees as well. "Ma'am? Do you want me to dial 9-1-1?"

"Just stay with me," the woman whispered in her ear. Her voice was dirty liquid.

***

When Cheryl Ann got off work, she was surprised to see the same figure, tears making tracks on her makeup, waiting for her by her car.

"I don't got nowhere to go," the woman said, her voice small and childlike. "Please. I can pay you… just let me stay the night…"

She was wearing a tank top and denim miniskirt hiked way up, and a faux fur coat draped over her frame. She had long, peroxide blonde hair and lipstick fading to pink on the edges of her lips. She looked garish, done up, but vulnerable, like a child in a beauty pageant.

Of the ten commandments of the truck stop, number one was never let a lizard stay the night. 

***

They bounced in her scratched-up car all the way to Cheryl Ann's trailer. The woman had stopped sobbing and thanking her, and had settled for merely dabbing at her eyes, occasionally sniffing.

Cheryl Ann lived on the side of a desert highway in Rio Arriba county, New Mexico, where the grumble of car engines echoed through the night outside her house. Her trailer was flat and squat, with a rusted metal roof and sagging wood panels on the walls.

***

~~~ that's what I got up to lol. Never ended up continuing it BUT I STILL LOVE THE IDEA. Lol

[theinvisibledreamergirl]

Chap. 1: “The Beginning of Everything”

————————————

3 years ago: 14th of September 2017

“Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday to my gem!

Happy birthday to you!”

His soft and playful voice made her giggle when he did an impression of a birthday wish because she knew that he hated to say it out loud.

“Thank you Mr. Standall.” She kissed his lips slowly not letting a yawn to break this blissful moment. “And that was a very good impression on how boyfriends want to make surprises to their girls.” She giggled while tracing with her right palm his grown beard that made her weak whenever it scratched.

“And I’m glad that made you smile.” He gave her a peck on her forehead while smiling aback.

“You always make me happy like no one else.”She said it in full acknowledgment and wrapped her arms around his neck, giving that sympathetic look that Alex knew too well. Whenever those words fell from her lips, he knew that she would get teary so he tried to lighten up the mood.

“Whoa Miss Craig, we haven’t still arrived to the part of being emotional.” He cupped her cheeks in full adoration. “And I haven’t brought your breakfast here yet so…” He got up from their bed while she was admiring at his sculpted body only in his underwear and was catching her lower lip thinking how handsome he was. He wore his shorts while doing another mimic of her while biting her lip knowing she had a soft spot. “Oh Al you’re so fucking handsome ma-”

Before he would finish the sentence, was met with a pillow on his face and a stern voice. “Get my breakfast here ‘cause I don’t want to die hungry.”

“Your wish is my command, my lady.” He chuckled before bowed down while she was laughing at his poor attempt to be look like a 18th century gentleman but she didn’t care that much. Because her heart was so full and couldn’t be more thankful that he was by her side.

Present day: 14th of September 2020

She woke up from the irritating alarm of her iPhone while groaning loudly. She felt her body sweating on her sheets and knew that the dreams were still appearing in the middle of the night and were not giving her the peace she wanted. She had only been one week in Boston and was hating this city already. Crowded, disorganised, dirty and was nothing compared with Brighton or Washington. Even the great buildings that surrounded didn’t give her a slight awesomeness and rolled her eyes while some tourists were looking wonderfully and snapping selfies. It was 5 AM. She had a bad habit to wake up early in order to work out outside in the nature. Or better saying- somewhere far away from the flowers or trees that gave her allergies even though it was the fall season. But first she needed to change quickly her wet clothes before getting a cold. When she got up from her bed, was met with a wiggling tail and a huffing sound of her best friend- Jonah.

“Hey good morning buddy!” She kneeled down to him while he was licking her hands. “Yup we’re going outside but first mama needs a shower okay?” She kissed his head when he jumped on her bed waiting impatiently for his owner to finish.

She stripped off her clothes and didn’t want to give a spare glance to the scars in her forearms if she didn’t want to experience another breakdown. The warm temperature of the water cascading down her body was everything she needed and let out a content sigh. She mocked at her anti-grease shampoo for keeping her hair done only in two days.

“Bloody shampoos.”

She carefully rubbed the cores of her forearms with her sponge not letting to fall a single drop of blood while wincing. It was such annoying to wait for another year until they were regenerated completely and if not, she needed to undergo a plastic surgery in which she was worried about it.

This day was slightly different from what she’d been used to. It was her first day of work at a hospital after graduating with excellent grades from University College London and got an alumni award for her outstanding performance in saving five people’s lives (including her professor Dr. Sarah Bennett) doing solo operations without the practice and the leadership of an attending. And that’s why she chose Edenbrook Hospital but- with a bit lateness.

It was only three days ago that she got the acceptance e-mail from nonetheless the well known and the most respected diagnostician in the whole country Dr. Naveen Banerji. The reason was that she spent her summer holidays in Italy and wasn’t sure if she was ready to go back in USA almost four years after her parents died. But mostly she still was on search for the truth behind her grandmother’s unexpected death- Daisy Ahmad. A quest in which she hadn’t solved the mystery behind of it.

While putting on her Nike sneakers she took a brief look at the clock on the wall- 5:15 AM. She still had time until 7 AM to catch up for work so she whistled to the husky dog letting him know that they were ready to go- or not until she straightened up her back and raised her eyebrows while looking at the mirror.

“Mirror mirror on the wall, tell me... who’s the most badass woman here?” She chuckled at her poor joke. “Of course it’s me. Right Jonah?” He barked in approval tilting his head, showing his blue sky eyes to his owner’s. “That’s my boy.”

The hangout consisted of walking firstly, because Jonah always came the first into their priorities and sometimes she would call him the King Jonah I and if he would have children she’ll gladly call them Jonah II or JJ. Secondly, it was playing with him and doing some exercises to train him with what she had read in a recent book about huskies. Lastly, it was time for her to put her headphones on and listening to the great Arctic Monkeys band while running for an hour without breaks to the asphalt coastline. And Jonah was more than happy to follow his owner wherever she went.

Annoyed, after finishing her run, she totally forgot that she took a shower already but thankfully her hair was tied up in a ponytail so her tendrils weren’t at least wet. “We got sweaty again buddy huh?”

6:37 AM.

They finally made it back at her apartment and greeted the receptionist Billy for taking the morning shift. She kicked off her sneakers and went immediately to the bathroom to change again her sportswear and quickly finished her body shower. The breakfast consisted of baked bread, white cheese and fiches jam whereas for the husky dog were the raw meats and bones. While she was waiting for the slices of bread to be toasted, her eyes landed to his photograph placed in a black rectangular frame.

“Why Alex?” She whispered to herself and crossed her arms while tilting her head in one side. “Why are you still appearing in my dreams every night? What do you want to tell me?”

It became a monotonous thing for her to see the nightmares of the people who were gone now and the worse part was that they would always appear with unknown causes. Like her parents for example, died not because of a coincidental car accident- but a well-planned one- and after their case was solved, they didn’t appear anymore. She knew that her grandmother’s death was truly a devastating event for her and of course she needed to find the surgeon who took the responsibility to operate her. But what about Alex? She had no clue why this was happening but one thing was for sure... her PTSD wouldn’t stop if she didn’t find out the last parts to complete the puzzle.

After finishing her breakfast she wore her casual clothes despite her efforts in wearing a suit. She was so obsessed with them. Maybe if she becomes a resident... who knows what fate will bring for her? She shook her head in disbelief- she was going to work with Ethan Ramsey and was excited but stressed in the same time.

“My oh my... am I going to work now huh? What do you think buddy?”Jonah twirled around in excitement when his owner opened her arms to reveal the outfit. “You always have liked my style, haven’t you? Can you believe that I’m going to work with the attending who inspired me to be this doctor I am now? Nope, I can’t believe it too.” She chuckled wearily as her memories with Alex came back on her mind. How both of them were determined to be doctors and to be graduated in the same year, then going to their respective inspirational doctors who, for instance, both were in the same hospital- Dr. Ethan Ramsey and Dr. Simon Tennant.

“Y’know Jonah, I was thinking about how this Ethan Ramsey looks like because his face doesn’t appear anywhere. Like I’ve searched for him in any websites possible but no- he’s like an invisible man who has sealed every images of him. Even Simon doesn’t want to tell me and said that I would see him soon. What the hell? I mean can you imagine working with an old man and a grumpy one or who knows... maybe he’s a good one? He can’t be like those snarky and annoying attendees that have always appeared in the TV shows, right?” She twitched her lips in confusion and shrugged. “Whatever. Just wish me good luck.”

She grabbed his collar in the direction of the door but before that she glanced up to the photograph again. A hard lump was formed on her throat re-imagining the scene in which they could leave together but instead... she was going alone. A small and a sad smile tugged on her lips as if he was there too, smiling widely at her and wishing ‘good luck’ and giving a blow kiss while saying ‘I love you’.

Unfortunately the blue-eyed husky was cooing sadly after the owner left him to her neighbour Lola and her husband Mike and he really needed to fit into the new adjustment of lifestyle.

Klaw wanted so badly to drive her car to the hospital because she knew now all the streets of Boston but changed her mind in the last minute to go the metro line that wasn’t far away from her neighbourhood and it took at least 20 minutes. While she was seating in front of the window she opened her messages that popped up on her phone and she frowned in suspicion for who might’ve been. Then she chuckled softly. It was nonetheless than her friends.

Klaw scoffed.

Of course Imy would bring up those numbers as a reminder.

14.09.1995- her 25th birthday.

But she had already discussed with them to not wish her and to not make any presents despite Imy’s insistence to try to forget what happened two years ago that had wrapped their minds for a long time. But there wasn’t enough for forgetting and she still wasn’t ready to move on to another point of her life. She was afraid that if she believed in love again- she would lose it. Just like with Clay and Alex she didn’t want to experience another heartbreak or another trauma.

The great building of Edenbrook Hospital in the heart of Boston Massachusetts appeared in front of her now, where her life wouldn’t be the same again. She felt her quickened heartbeats and her tightened chest by the view and still couldn’t believe she was now a doctor. She shook her head in disbelief again while chuckling.

Well well Dr. Craig, seems like the beginning of everything to you, isn’t it? Just don’t try to kill anyone today. Keep your punches off to yourself.

Everyone were hurrying up and looked they were all in a moment of a rush. She took long stride steps while ogling to the new settlement which later she would call it home. Klaw could hear the urgency of nurses while taking IV’s with themselves to the patients, two doctors wheeling their patients who seemed to have done a transplant operation before, the receptionists talking to the phones and writing the names of those who wanted to leave a meeting with their doctors. Even though this gave her a lightened moment to truly appreciate, she felt lost and didn’t know where to go so she tilted her head to the sides almost panicking.

Is this how all of the interns have been before?

“Are you new here?”

A guy in violet scrubs asked her gently behind her back so she turned around only to see him smile.

“Uhm, yeah I am.”

“That’s pretty good! Are you our new nurse from Delaware?”

She chuckled. “No, actually I’m a surgical intern from London.”

“Oh, sorry.” He said sheepishly. “I’ve been asking all the new female faces here and all of them turned to be interns because we were waiting for a new internal nurse but seems like she’s vanished.” They both shared a laugh. “By the way my name’s Danny Cardinal.”

They shook their hands while nodding. “And I’m Klaudia Craig but please call me Klaw instead ‘cause there’s a loooong story about that.”

“Klaudia Craig... just give me a second to check the list.” Danny run his index finger while murmuring her name until he flipped the other page and her name was the last. “Ha! I found you... Klaudia Helena Craig, the tick is in the box. If I’m right you’re the last doctor who has applied here?”

“Uhm, yeah.” She let out a nervous laugh and scratched the back of her neck. “I actually wasn’t sure about this place to apply but- here I am.”

“Well because of Dr. Delarosa’s absence for the moment I’ll do you a quick guide.”

Danny was such a nice guy and now the first friend Klaw made in this hospital. She could see his cheeks flushed sometimes when he made eye contact with her and later he admitted that this year strangely all the new interns were so attractive. With her back-bag in one shoulder she entered the closet room to change her clothes to green scrubs until she saw a woman in her underwear. Embarrassed that she may be interrupting her, made a quick motion of closing her eyes.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sorry I’m truly sorry!” She waved her hand awkwardly and she thought that was such clueless move.

“It’s alright you can open your eyes.” Her accent let Klaw know that she could be somewhere from India. When she opened her eyes- damn it. Danny wasn’t lying that everyone were attractive. She was the greatest example of a hot woman. “And please don’t you know that this is a closet room or what?” She scoffed. “Are you shy?”

Klaw scoffed aback when her last words teased her. “No, but I don’t think I can invade someone’s privacy and that’s disrespectful y’know... maybe you were doing other things rather than changing clothes.”

“Alexa play “The Final Countdown” by Europe for Jackie Varma getting her butt roasted!” Klaw flinched when a half-naked guy barked in laughter. “I’m feeling sorry for you now Jackson.”

“Shut up Lahela!”

“So my prediction was right.” Klaw nodded slowly in acknowledgement thanks to her observation skills, she could see Jackie’s messed hair despite her efforts to put a proper bun whereas the guy named Lahela had a small glitter on the corner of his lips. And she couldn’t feel any prouder.

“You got a smart mouth sweetie don’t you?” Jackie challenged her by inching dangerously close, their faces mere inches apart. Klaw smirked knowingly and slowly lowered her head.

“I do and you should actually be afraid of me, darling.”

Jackie was caught off guard despite her efforts of staying neutral. This girl was so gorgeous and such a smart ass, she thought. She was wondering how her full lips would fit into hers and how her body would arch in the wall while doing to her the most nasty things. And when she got that look- god she thought- she looked even more sexy.

Stop it Jackie.

“I like this girl, she’s just my type.” Lahela added. “Can we please have a threesome?”

“Bryce!” Jackie shouted angrily. “That’s enough!”

So his name is Bryce.

Klaw felt her jaw tightening even though she knew that he was just messing with them. “Only in your dreams big boy.”

“Ouch you are hurting my feelings right now. Look, no one can resist my handsome face... and not even you pretty.”

“I’ll show you pretty when you’ll see yourself with your broken bones.” Klaw smiled wickedly.

“Who’s roasted now huh?”Jackie laughed while Bryce was left mouth gaped from this statement. He didn’t think that someone as beautiful as this girl could reject him in one click. She wouldn’t do that, right? Bryce Lahela had never been refused by any of the girls he encountered with- not even from boys who had tried to have an affair with him. This is was the first defeat he got slapped by and it looked like this first day was going to be a hell. But when he looked deeply in the dark and fiery brown eyes of that lady, he had hopes that she wasn’t a bad person. Maybe she was trying to shove him off or who knew... maybe it was a game plan and for that, he wanted to know more of her.

Be careful Bry. ‘Cause this girl is going to be harder than it looks like. What is she doing to me?

“Whilst I appreciate your words Varma I think we should let this girl present herself, right?”

“This time I agree with you.” Jackie was well aware of his changing of subject and in a brief moment she saw the hot guy going pale and silently thought that he had fallen for her. Yuck.

Klaw smiled. “Okay people I’m Dr. Klaudia Craig, a surgical intern with one condition- only if you call me Klaw.”

“Another scalpel jockey here?” Jackie let out her tongue in disgust. “Ewww.”

“Hell yeahhh.” Klaw rolled her eyes while Bryce was offering his hand to shake hers. “Dr. Bryce Lahela graduated at the top of the class 2020 from Harvard University and selected as the best face from all the nerds around the campus with one condition-” he kissed the back of her hand before winking “-be mine already.”

“As tempting as it may be Dr. Lahela I’m afraid I’m not the first one in your flirting list hm?”

Two can play that game, right? Bryce’s cheeks turned to a light pink as if he felt- embarrassed? Why did this girl make him feel like that? What was her real intention? One thing was for sure- she was different and mysterious. Before he could reply Jackie cut him off.

“Shit! Time is ticking! We must go immediately, the whole atrium is expecting us!”

“Who?” Klaw asked confused and with that expression made Jackie eyeing her incredulously.

“Do you live on earth or what? The doctors, our attendees, our bosses!” Klaw nodded slowly in acknowledgment since she was right. She lived in Moon. “Hurry up, we need to change!”

All of the interns were gathered as they were waiting for the attendees to come at any minute. Lots of unknown faces were about to work together in this place and lots of things were going to change forever their lives. Daniel Griffin appeared among them giving Klaw a small smile but also a relieved one. He still was worried with the yesterday’s incidence where she fought with some random street girls and almost she was caught by the police. He couldn’t ask her if she was okay because she wouldn’t tell him anyway so the only thing that caught his attention was that she was coming with other two strange guys. Not long after that his girlfriend Imy joined them and greeted with a warm smile that always crossed on her face which was why Dan fell in love with her. Again Jackie was disappointed that they were other scalpel jockeys and couldn’t wait to meet colleagues on her profile. The attendees were coming towards them with an assurance and a determination that Klaw felt a shiver on her spine. She spotted her brother (her guardian angel) Simon beside a woman who seemed to be a very important person in the hospital alongside with four other doctors whom Klaw tried to guess if one of them was Ethan Ramsey with the exception of the curly woman.

Or tried to guess- who was the surgeon she was looking after all these years?

“May I have your attention please?” The curly woman spoke up, trying her best to keep her calmness while everyone were speaking aloud until another grunting voice made them startled and turn their heads to them.

“Will you shut your fucking mouths and listen now?!”

Silence.

A genuine and a grateful smile came from the woman mouthing to the man her ‘thank you’ and he nodded in acknowledgement.

“Welcome to Edenbrook Hospital everyone! You have come a long way to be in this place and you have to always remind the Hippocrates  Oath: ‘Do no harm’ which is going to be the first thing that comes to your minds. My name is Dr. Ines Delarosa and by my side is Dr. Zaid Mirani, your senior residents who will guide you in every step of the way.”

“Do not consider this as a favour because if you do, then you have to forget your big sacrifices to come here.”

When Zaid almost chewed them with his sentence, Ines tried to lighten up the mood. “But also we’re not the only doctors here- please welcome our surgeons Dr. Harper Emery, Dr. Simon Tennant and Dr. Edgar Allen!”

The speech was started by Harper who stood between the males giving her the authority that she deserved as she looked intensely to every intern.

“Thank you Dr. Delarosa. Again welcome to the most prestigious and the most competitive hospital in our country! I hope all of you have been prepared for this day and for more to come. I’m delighted to work as a neurosurgeon to help and to teach you how important is and what it means to be a surgeon. Mostly about our surgical interns- you will be tasked with a lot of cases from the easiest ones to the most complicated ones. And you have to remind yourselves that you must not neglect any patient because they are all equal and they need the same treatments. I think the doctors would agree-” her eyes flicked immediately to Simon’s, ignoring Edgar’s purposely. “- right?”

“Yes Dr. Emery especially after this looong speech everyone here is more motivated, right?” He mocked playfully while Harper was rolling her eyes.

You'll never change Simon.

“Hi! I’m Dr. Tennant as Dr. Delarosa previously mentioned and I’m a cardio thoracic surgeon, currently the chief of Cardiology Department. Which means that if you notice your heart quickening its heartbeats or if you notice that is breaking into two halves- feel free to swing by my office or in the O.R to fix it.” A laughter was heard among the interns who seemed to be more relaxed and many whispers said that he was going to be their God’s sent angel- which clearly he was. “Jokes aside- this year was the most difficult time to choose the ones you are here because of competitiveness and the strong knowledge you came from your universities, ranked at the top of your classes. What I want to say is- nothing is impossible. Everything can be achieved with work and passion for medicine if you feel it here.” He patted his chest lightly. “But if not-” he shook his head even though his smile didn’t disappear. “- then you weren’t ready for these days.”

A knowing look crossed Klaw’s face; she knew where his limits were when it came to being professional especially in medicine. He wouldn’t tolerate anyone who made unacceptable mistakes and everyone would see his worst side and wonder how this man could change so quickly- something that she was used to.

“Alright.” Harper was nodding and giving an eye to everyone and turned her gaze to the older man. “Do you want to add something Dr. Banerji?”

That’s when Ines realised that she had totally forgotten to mention Dr. Banerji’s name because of Zaid’s distraction.

So he’s Dr. Naveen Banerji- the person who accepted my application.

“Yes, thank you Harper. Well, hello everybody, for all of those who don’t know me yet- I’m Dr. Naveen Banerji the Chief of Medicine, but my real job is general surgeon which I’m very good at it rather than being a chief.” He chuckled and Klaw thought this man was truly like a father to all the interns. “I’m very happy that we have chosen the best students for our non-profit hospital and especially those who’ve already done a big difference during medical school.” Klaw didn’t notice it as Bryce whispered in her ear but Naveen gave her a briefing look before he continued what he was saying. “I hope everyone will get themselves accommodated, making new relationships uh-I meant strictly professional and friendly partnerships.” Everyone shared a laugh. “What I want to say is- if you want to be successful to your job you must at first be humans. If you want to understand the patients you must understand yourselves. And finally as Dr. Ramsey would say you should observe everyone.” Again it was heard a big laughter as he did an impression on him. “Anyways, you will have the chance to know him, now I must go back to work as you should do the same. Have a nice day doctors! We’re expecting the best from you.”

“Thank you Dr. Banerji!” When Naveen and Harper left another attending came in front of the other doctors- Dr. Edgar Allen.

“So, I think now that we have done our pleasantries, I’d like to call the surgical interns names to assign their cases whereas you internal medicine will be assigned under Dr. Delarosa’s and Dr. Mirani’s. Understood?”Everyone nodded and from the looks of it he was the harshest doctor they have encountered by far, leaving Zaid out of the black list.

“I despise this man so much.” Zaid grumbled under his breath enough for Ines to hear it.

“Don’t worry Zaid.” She assured him again with that infectious smile which made him less angry than he was. “He’s always like that. We can’t change someone’s personality hm?” He nodded in agreement.

Before calling the names Simon came closer to Edgar clearly not liking the way he was prodding.

“Shouldn’t you be less grumpy among them? It’s their first day and they don’t deserve this kind of treatment.”

“Hmph. Or what else is going to happen Dr. Tennant? I’m really curious about it ‘cause right now I’m shaking from your concern for such minions.”

Simon felt his narrowed eyes dagger in Edgar’s saying in a hushed tone. “Watch your language Dr. Allen and may I remind you where did your internship start huh?”

“Mass Kenmore.”

“Exactly. So if it wasn’t for Dr. Thorne’s insistence because you saved his life- your ass wouldn’t even reach in this position without him.” Edgar clenched his teeth in frustration knowing fully well that everything what Simon was saying was true. “Now you can continue doctor.”

With that Simon trailed off without sparing a glance to the worried look of interns noticing their little exchange not knowing what was said between them.

Klaw kept wondering where actually Dr. Ethan Ramsey was as he didn’t show up and was nowhere to be seen until Ines answered the same question raised by another intern who seemed to be just as curious as her.

“About Dr. Ramsey, we’re expecting him to come today from the Miami’s conference, so you don’t have to worry- you’ll meet him soon.” She assured the shy blonde guy who seemed to be more relieved now.

But still Klaw had gears on her mind about it if Dr. Ramsey would be present.

And how do we say it?

Some things happen in the most unexpected ways.

———————————————————————

Chapter 2: “First Impressions”

[enigma-im]

Kindle Unlimited Recommendation

Dark Planet Warriors Series

Warning: Gore, violence, some situation of wrongful touching

Summary:

8 stories. The series begins with a bug infestation on the mining station outside of earth. A species called Kordolians are there to be the exterminators. After a meeting with a strange human our primary story kicks off while the bug story plays in background in some stories while being the main focus for several books. The consistent story for the other 8 books is a romance between the aliens and humans that results in a war for purity.

Person thoughts:

Great fuckin series. Almost every book has a different couple with only the very first couple being the focus several other times. First book is fantastic, especially the first sex scene. Its so good. The next few focus on the bug infestation till its dealt with then it gets back to the war. Don't skip them though, Riker is a treat that deserves to be acknowledged. My favorite one of this amazing series is Infinity's Embrace. That book has some dope characters. Electric Heart is my least favorite because it's like a real bad Watch Dogs (video game).

Rating: 9/10

Books:

Dark Planet Warriors

Dark planet Falling

Into the Light

Out of Darkness

Forged in Shadow

Infinity's Embrace

Electric Heart

Brilliant Starlight

Office Alien Series

Warning: Awkwardness, drug use, kidnapping (kind of)

Summary:

Three books about an office relationship with three different aliens. Each alien goes through the venture of courting a human woman. All of them succeed on confusing then educating these people on their culture. All the aliens come from the same planet that has been ravaged by a tough alien species that try to wipe them out with their superior technology. That isn't a plot point, its just an explanation. Each story shows the struggles of cultural differences and how education and understanding can help make the world a better place.

Person thoughts:

I adore this series. One book in this series actually got a perfect score from me, which is strange cause I'm a tough grader. The first book has a super awkward lad who just seems to hate everyone. Its really cute and I like them both though their relationship is filled with cringe. The second book I didn't much care for. The main love dude was kind of an idiot and was too blinded by acceptance to be a reasonable thinking alien. Still decent but Its not my cup of tea. The last one- sweet jesus- was amazing. It has a ‘my cousin Vinny’ vibe with their relationship where they fight often but its like their form of foreplay. So good. There is another series that’s super short that takes place 1 year later for each story. Totally worth a read after you read the series.

Rating: 8/10

Books:

The E.T. Guy

The New Guy

The Security Guy

(Christmas special)

Kraving Khiva

Warning: Sex workers, forced prostitution, abuse

Summary:

Eve is a virgin who is fed up with it. After her father's death she has been ghosting by in life with her best friend. After said friend points out a brothel of some interesting aliens she decides to give the place a try to finally rid herself of her virginity. After just one night she keeps coming back, falling for the sex worker. Romance ensues with lots of strife and abuse to keep the two from their HEA.

Personal Thoughts:

Man, this story represents everything I love in a story. Tons of fluff. It was a really good slow burn that I didn’t expect from a story about a prostitute. The cover gives the illusion of a typical middle aged mother romance - which I guess it is- but it has so much more. I only had one problem with the story, the ending. I felt they could have given more information but they just glossed over it. Besides that, hot book. The second one is really boring, just a slice of life that I couldn't get into.

Rating: 9/10

Books:

Kraving Khiva

Prince of Firestone

The Queen's Ransom

Warning: Near death situations, a lot of near death situations, gore

Summary:

432 pages. Long book. Jalia enters into a competition to win a great prize. The interest of great fortune is too much for her to pass up. Little does she know the treachery the competition hides or the actual prize. The king of Minotaurs is hosting an event to test the strength, endurance, and intelligence of potential wives. In a culture that values strength they refuse to accept a queen who hasn't been tried. Genius Jalia goes through challenge after challenge, nearly dying about every chapter while catching the attention of a charming king.

Personal Thoughts:

I generally don't have the patience for long books but this one never dragged on. Every chapter was captivating and riveting. The challenges were interesting and Jalia's solutions were pretty genius. The relationship between the king and her is pretty grand, I adore them greatly. My only problem with the book is all the potty humor and insults. She was a genius but her insults left much to be desired. Once her biggest annoyance is no longer in the picture does that kind of stuff end.

Rating: 9/10

Book:

The Queen's Ransom

The Kraken

Warning: Gore, racism, attempts of suicide(only 1 book), sassy AI

Summary:

A mysterious creature has lived in the ocean long ago, since the beginning of the settlement on this planet. After a nearly drowning woman is saved a series kicks off. Each book has a different relationship of humans and Krakens. Every book tells the story of how the krakens go from living in isolation at the bottom of the ocean to breeding with humans.

Personal thoughts:

When I first read this story I was just getting into monster romance. The love interests have fairly human tops but hella tentacle bottoms. So I was a little off-put by it but as I read on I didn’t care. The first one is pretty good for a start. The second one was decent, I didn’t really care for it. I actually skipped the 3rd one my first go around. Which is fine, it doesn't add too much and its short. Its still worth a read. The 4th one, fucking grand. 5th one? My all time favorite of the series! If you don't want to read them all at least read the 5th one. Like ask me for story details and I'll give you a cliff note for what's mentioned in that story then you can read in peace. 6th was ok, love the sassy AI. I didn't read the 7th one. Its two old people and I just can't

Rating: 8/10

Books:

Treasure Abyss

Jewel of the Sea

Hunter of the Tide

Heart of the Deep

Rising from the Depth

Fallen from the Stars

Lover from the Waves

Escaping Wonderland

Warning: Sexual assault, gore, lots of sexual stuff

Summary:

Alice is wrongfully placed in a psych ward that specializes in simulation therapy. She is placed in a pod then taken to the world of wonderland. This twisted version of the children's classic introduces a rapey mad hater and manipulative Red King. The main love interest is a playful lad who has more control of the simulation than most. The two run from the clutches of the Red King while trying to escape the simulation.

Personal thoughts:

I had very low hopes for this story. I didn't expect it to be as good as it was. It was a twist on the beloved movie and book. Everything was rapey and creepy and I weirdly loved it. Of course nothing too terrible happened to the main lady so it made those situations more tolerable but only just. I adore the main dude, shadow. He was a playful little mischief maker and I would die for him. What made this book better for me was when everything hit the fan they didn't rid him of his sassy personality. Most books make the cocky, silly, playful personality as something that is bad and needs to change. This one they didn’t and kept it. So good.

Rating: 9/10

Books:

Escaping Wonderland

Infinity City

Warning: Abuse, gore, sexual assault, dope ass fighting

Summary:

A city where criminals are more in control than most people think. Each book takes the reader through different adventure of different people. All having the similarity of protecting the ones they love. The first is of an assassin protecting the only woman who has made him feel so strongly. The second is with a mob boss hacker who grows fond of a shy human. The third is the second in command of the mob boss hacker who finds a pregnant woman in a menagerie and discovers she is his mate. Fourth is one of the workers of the mob boss's security team who gets taken by some slavers along with a woman he was entertaining for the night.

Personal thoughts:

First book sucked. He was obsessives and pretty much took all her choices. It wasn't till the end that he was like "my bad, you can leave if you want". Bleh. Second book was fan-fucking-tastic. Arc is a charming idiot with an amazing backstory. I didn't like the girl in the beginning but she grew on me. I love that he focuses on her but still pays attention to work and his 'family'. The third was surprisingly good. I generally don't like stories where someone is pregnant because they get boring. This one was not that. She was never a hindrance or weak, she was a badass. With her big kitty man they made an amazing duo. Also any scenes with her man and the baby made me tear up. He was so sweet. Fourth was boring, it reminds me too much of a lot of other stories.

Rating: 8/10

Books:

Silent lucidity

Shielded hearts

Untamed Hunger

Savage Desire

------------------------------------------

While people watch TV or Youtube in their free time, I read. I have such a weird organization with everything i read because i tend to reread stories and forget i read them. the entire time i read it im like “have i read this before?”. so for books i write them down, rate them, then review them. i didn’t post the reviews here because it would be so many spoilers. Also i sort my favorite fanfics by fandom then relationship. i read so fucking much, its a problem at this point.

If you liked this recommendation drop a like, reblog, or reply. i will perhaps do another if you all like this. i have read so many books and i can post some decent ones and some god awful ones. perhaps you all can tell me how wrong my thoughts are on the ones i deem terrible. i think we will probably agree, ‘free’ books tend to have lower standards.

[trixree]

@touchmycoat, I belatedly realized that the ask I submitted could not possibly do the insanity that is the Bachelor any real justice. I grew up in a household that was obsessed with the Bachelor. Here is all that I have gleaned: 

The most critical thing to understand about the Bachelor is that it is a modern-day Colosseum; every interaction, every conversation, and every mini-game/challenge is part of a larger Competition for “The Rose”. The Rose is given only to the worthy women and ensures that she will survive to see another day. 

The show begins with a 2+ hour premier in which some number of disturbingly identical women arrive to Chris Harrison’s Fuck Mansion. It is impossible to pinpoint how many women enter the competition. After about three introductions, their eerily similar faces, names, and careers blur together into a meaningless slurry of lipstick, glitter, and social media influencers. I have a theory that the women themselves are self-replicating. There are always duplicates--by which I mean there is always a Stacy K. and a Stacy G. or a Megan J. and a Megan C., etc.

Chris Harrison is the malevolent god of this land. He sees all. He knows all. He commands all. His role as Host is to tell you that this season will be the most exciting season yet. He reminds you of this frequently. You will eventually come to hear him in your dreams. This will be the most exciting season yet. 

The organization of the show revolves around dates comprised of anywhere from 1 to 9 women and the Man of Honor, our Bachelor. Dates are announced by mysterious cards that arrive at the door of Chris Harrison’s Fuck Mansion at any and all hours of the day. The card is read aloud by one of the contestants because it is Chris Harrison’s word and must be spoken like Moses on the mountain reading the 10 commandments. Group dates are the largest (and least desired) and usually revolve around some competition, such as a talent show, obstacle course, relay race, or I dunno... fucking bungee jumping? Whatever. It makes no sense. The title of winner is meaningless in this smaller competition. You are not guaranteed a rose just because you can yodel or bungee successfully. The REAL competition is the one for the Bachelor’s attention. 

The girls may KISS him, TOUCH him, or FLIRT with him on these dates, but they may not fuck him. It is a goddamn bloodbath for the Bachelor Boy’s attention. The fucking comes later and only at Chris Harrison’s command. This will be the most exciting season yet. 

At the end of each episode, there is a Ceremony. The women adorn themselves in all manor of glittery, gaudy, and expensive clothing. Still, they are indiscernible from one another. They stand on bleachers, like American highschoolers during the world’s most tense and drunken pep-rally, and they wait for Chris Harrison. Chris Harrison arrives. This will be the most exciting season yet, he tells them. They nod solemnly. An aura of Death haunts the room. The Bachelor is sent in. He has some number of roses that is simultaneously an Endless Amount of Roses and Not Enough Roses. One by one, he calls the women that he would like to see again forward by name and gives them a rose. 

When there are no roses left, Chris Harrison returns from the shadows. “I’m sorry ladies,” says Chris Harrison to the failures. “Please say your goodbyes.” The women embrace each other, weeping. Often, the Bachelor Boy walks them out or whispers apologies and well-wishes at them. 

A camera follows each individual woman into a separate limo. They never, EVER take the same limo. Some weep. Some are furious. Some are apathetic. (Most weep.) “I don’t know what I did wrong,” they say. “He was so perfect,” they cry. The orchestral music swells to the rhythm of their sobs. 

This continues for an entire season until there are only four (?) women left. Finally, you can tell the women apart. Barely. Kind of. It’s a very delicate science. The dates are seemingly random. A group date. Then a three-on-one. Then a two-on-one. A group date. A one-on-one and so on and so forth. They frequently leave the country to stay in a series of increasingly elaborate villas. Every date is like a Disney movie. Somehow, there are always horses. They must breed horses specifically for the show. There are just as many horses involved as there are limos and as there are women named Stacey.

Each episode is two hours long. Nothing ever happens. Someone always cries. Sometimes, an EX will arrive at one of the Fuck Mansions to stir up trouble. This will be the most exciting season yet, Chris Harrison reminds you. One season, they lost their Bachelor Boy. He jumped the fence that surrounds Chris Harrison’s Fuck Mansion like it was a prison wall and he ran into the forest in the dead of night. The camera men lost him. It was spectacular. I like to imagine that they needed dogs to hunt him down. Or maybe all they needed was Chris Harrison. 

Towards the end of the season, Chris Harrison tells the Bachelor Boy that it is time for Overnight Dates, if the Bachelor Boy so chooses. It is at this point that he may choose to fuck one of the women. Or just... talk to her without cameras around, maybe? I don’t know. They’re never really clear on that?  

Either way, it’s going to be exciting. It will be the most exciting season yet. 

And that is absolutely everything there is to know about the Bachelor. 

[boog-shitposting-edition]

So I been playing a ton of Kenshi and watched all of the Mandalorian in a single day shortly before and it’s got me thinking about what makes what I consider a good action hero, because there was definitely a time where I thought the phrase “good action hero” was an oxymoron.

I grew up around some angry, unstable dudes who had that bad habit of watching horror movies and opining that in the same situation they would simply shoot the monster with the gun the character was holding. I got some views on the model of masculinity that sees the male ideal as functionally a tool for performing violence, condescension and occasional reddit-approved banter with all other emotional responses pared away or suppressed. This seems like a good way to manufacture a product for performing labor rather than developing a whole functional human being. So I generally veer away from that sort of thing pretty hard.

So I’m resistant to the Mandalorian at first, right? All the ads are basically star wars apocryphica and a power armored fighty gun boy. The last star wars thing I’d seen was The Rise Of Skywalker and my faith in the franchise is low. But it’s been a hot minute, the hype dies down, and my girlfriend is a better and more patient fan than I’ll ever be so we give it a go. And the first thing that really nails it for me is what a DORK the mando is. I’m delighted, his life is violence interdispersed with being an absolute buttfumble disaster. He slips and falls over things he could never have predicted, he burns his life down for a baby he finds in the desert. Pedro Pascal references Boba Fetts stiff menace and plays it off as someone who has no social skills other than stiff menace and it’s FASCINATING. Him explaining to the village woman who is obviously into him that he hasn’t taken the armor off since he was thirteen isn’t a badass declaration of martial devotion, it is the single saddest and most awkward interaction I have ever seen filmed and it hits all the harder for the fact that this is a character I’ve mostly ever seen as an action figure with a spring loaded missile backpack. Instead of being a faceless emotionless action-cudgel, Pedro amps up the body language in his acting to really sell you this heavily psychologically damaged, desperate, viking-space-catholic mess with no life skills other than violence and a devotion to his people’s creed that borders on obsession. Rather than paring himself down making him a psychological fortress, the Mando is an incredibly obvious walking raw nerve (”I’m not sad-” “Yes you are.”) So, Kenshi.

I’ve heard about this game on and off a few years and finally got it a few days ago. It’s been in early access since 2012, appears to be mostly getting finished by its modding community, and glitches like absolute woah. There’s no core storyline, just a post-apocalyptic setting with some surprisingly detailed autogenerated NPC interactions with some options for starting conditions and the sole goal of surviving. It’s essentially a rapid sequence of story prompts hidden underneath a closely interlocked system of XP grinding, survival mechanics and dismemberment algorithms, and is appallingly my shit.

My first run at the game got pretty far, went from a lone confused desert wanderer to a 13 man village running a tidy copper-mining operation to trade with the ant people. In the early game, fight mechanics are basically a death sentence; my first character immediately got her leg torn off by a goat and I had to restart. All skills grow only by excersizing them; you have to fight to get better at fighting, you have to LOSE fights to gain toughness, and when you lose a fight the consequences can range from “these bandits are stealing all your food” to “this monster is eating your leg/heart/head” to “these slavers are taking your character away and your game experience is Different now.” And while I was proud of myself for finding a way to survive, grow and thrive with a low-combat squad, once I tried the basebuilding mechanics that basically just meant my town was a source of free food and money for local bandits while my squad starved to death, unable to abandon our locale. So I got fed up and restarted.

As mentioned the game gives you different start positions; wanderer gives you 1 character, some money and pants. Guy and his dog gives you a dog, which is fun. Exiled officer starts you with good skills and the hatred of your former commander, which complicates things. Cannibal Hunters starts you already in a fistfight with 30 cannibals. It’s exciting times. But I figure this time I’d like to start my squad a LITTLE more capable of defending themselves, so I look at the Holy Sword start; you’re a bandit who starts with a stolen holy weapon, minuses in most skills, no money and a 20,000 bounty on your head from both major factions.

So I proceed to character creation and notice I can pick whatever I want for player species/subspecies with this start. There’s robot people and warriors made of stone and baseline humans and all sorts of fun options, but you remember those ant people I mentioned before? In game they’re called the Hivers, you find ‘em in 3 recruitable varieties (prince, worker drone and soldier) and they have an interesting in-universe quirk; ones that grow up in the hive are pheramone-addicted, chemically wired into the needs and wants of all of their fellows, but if you’re away from your kin for over a fortnight this addiction dries out incredibly fast and cannot be reinstated. Hivers who ever spend any time away from the hive are declared “lost ones,” and are often taken advantage of in the outside world as they long for a new community.

In survival sims I dont often play dedicated fighters, I always feel like being a brutal fight-beast isn’t really in the spirit of finding a niche to exploit and growing from a fumbling plebian to a major power. But I was already starting this game with my ONLY advantage being a nice sword. And the soldier hivers gain a buff to experience gained for melee attack and toughness, and a debuff to literally all else.

Manual labor. Science. Engineering. Farming. Cooking. First aide. In a setting that heavily prioritized your ability to survive using multiple vital skill sets, my character would start with negatives in his skills for putting on band-aids and FEEDING himself. So I gave it a go.

Getting more wild here, it turns out the Holy Sword opening also takes place in a time in the setting with more recent warfare, so a bunch of the starting villages are destroyed and it appears that more of the nearby cities are controlled by the factions that have a bounty on me. So my character CAN’T rely on other people or meet anyone to recruit at first. He can run, he can scrounge and scavenge, and as mentioned above starting characters can take lethal damage from GOATS so he can’t even hunt for food; the only way I was getting a meal was if I robbed someone or ran into merchants on the road I could hawk my salvage to for a scrap of bread.

He eventually finds someone willing to join him on his travels in spite of being flat broke, a shek named Ruka running from a dishonerable loss on the battlefield, and comparing their skills he’s so useless for everything besides combat that I assign him to bodyguard her. And again, this game’s appeal is that the survival mechanics make good story prompts, so imagine that in character.

“Fine, I need a change. I’ll join you.” “Thank god. Lead the way boss.” “What?”

Things regarding my characters bounty are starting to heat up in town, so we head north into hiver territory. We get attacked by bandits and heavily injured, my soldier gets knocked out, so Ruka picks him up and carries him until we find a hive town. I saw these guys all the time in my last playthrough, I survived by selling to them, they’re super friendly, should be fine. Ruka walks into the local shop and before I can have her ask for directions and a medikit the shopkeeper is already shouting- “SKREEE! LOST ONE! GET OUT! LOST ONES BRING MADNESS”

Apparently, my protagonist being a hiveless hiver means there’s a THIRD faction that’s hostile to him; his own goddamn people. Ruka has to leave him under a tree not just outside but like 50 feet from the edge of town, and just has  to hope none of the local wild megafauna eats him while she rushes back in to buy things from the now abruptly friendlier shopkeep.

I’m finally sitting there, having Ruka watch my soldier hiver sleep while she cooks scavanged meat and waits for him to finish healing, that I realize what the story being generated here is and it’s a good one; a Hive soldier whose only skills are violence, frantically scavenging and stealing to survive until he can find the one circumstance where he’s comfortable, sacrificing himself to protect others. He steals a sword that’s obviously important to two major governments, just because he knows it’s powerful and thinks that power will justify his continued existence as a hiveless soldier drone, essentially buying his way back into his people’s good graces by performing his function. Literally wandering the world until he found a single person who was willing to boss him around again and devoting himself to their defense to a state of pathological damage just to feel like he has a hive again. It’s sad. It’s badass. It’s deeply, unsettlingly pathetic.

But I also think it’s what makes a really really good gruff action hero!

Hypercompetence in violence is really interesting when you acknowledge the damage it can do to your humanity in the storytelling! The Mandalorian is unsuccessful in repressing his empathy response so he just tries to tough through the pain it causes him as best he can, until he meets The Child and it snaps. The Hiver is essentially playing pretend at being still valued as a product for committing violence, even in the face of being openly rejected for his previously esteemed role. This stuff is INTERESTING.

TL;DR version, a lot of these “supersoldier raised by the military/fight wizards/karate” characters are super boring and obnoxious when they’re put forward as power fantasies, and really interesting when you realize that being raised by Fight Wizards is why they’ve never had a girlfriend and called their handgun “mom” once.

[holyhellpod]

[TRANSCRIPT] 1. Pilot

Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Instagram | Patreon

Trigger warnings: discussions of death, fridging, child abuse, child death, alcoholism

[Music]

“In one sentence, this is X-Files meets Route 66. Two brothers, cruising the dusty backroads in their trusty ‘64 mustang, battling the things that go bump in the night.”

These are the first two sentences of Eric Kripke’s pitch of Supernatural, dated August 30, 2004. Based on iconic media such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, On The Road, The Odyssey, and The Matrix, Kripke considers Supernatural to be Star Wars in Truck Stop America. He went through over two dozen rewrites of the pilot to get to what we know today: grimy, gritty, horror-filled hero’s journey of the lives of two extremely damaged individuals who don’t really like each other personally or have anything in common, but love each other to death. They save people. They hunt monsters. That’s the family business.

The original pitch for the pilot had Dean informing Sam that supernatural creatures are real and they killed their mum. Sam spent his whole 21-year-long life believing that their father killed their mother, and now their father’s body has been found with Dean as the lead suspect in the murder. Sam has to make the choice to run back to their aunt and uncle’s house in LA where he can spend the summer interning at a law firm before he starts at Stanford, or help Dean fight monsters, and you KNOW which one he chooses.

In the pilot that aired, Sam knows about the supernatural. He and Dean grow up trained as warriors by their father John to hunt supernatural creatures, kill evil, and save people. The plot goes as thus: Sam, a 6 month old baby, is in his crib when an unknown man appears. Mary, Sam and Dean’s mother, walks in. John, their father, comes in as well to see what’s wrong, and finds Mary pinned to the ceiling with a slash across her womb. The house catches on fire, Dean as a four year old takes Sam out of the house, and John follows soon after.

Cut to 22 years later, Sam is a college student at Stanford with a beautiful girlfriend Jess whose resemblance to his mother is, ah, uncanny. He reveals that he’s got an interview on Monday with the law school at Stanford. His idyllic, apple-pie, safe life is interrupted by the appearance of Dean, who asks Sam to accompany him in finding their Dad. That’s the premise of the first season: finding Dad.

Sam makes a deal with Dean that he’ll help on this one last case before he embarks on his life as a lawyer-to-be. Dean takes the deal, but when they realise that John left the case unfinished and skipped town, it’s up to them to follow in John’s footsteps and pick up hunting again, as a fambily. However, Sam reiterates that he needs to be back at Stanford for his meeting that will determine his future, and Dean drops him back. But of course, this is not to be. When he finds Jess pinned to the roof of their bedroom, her womb slashed open, and the apartment starts to burn down, Sam is forced into repeating the history of intergenerational trauma that traps them in the hunting life. The trauma their father inflicted on them is a Promethean circle that leaves no one unscathed.  

John is a hard man. While it’s evident in the first scene that he loves his boys, his grief coupled with his military history twists him into a drill sergeant who works his kids to the bone all in the name of the fambily business. He often puts his own needs above that of his kids, especially Dean, who often acts as the go-between Sam and John. From the very beginning, Sam is positioned as John’s mirror, pulled back into the hunting life when his girlfriend dies just like his mother. Both John and Sam have their lives upended by the death of their significant other, except for Sam, he has Dean, and John had his sons. Bringing them into the life meant leaning on them when he couldn’t handle his grief and the exhaustion of the job himself, but this is a caustic dynamic: your children are not your partners. Dean should not have gone on a hunt by himself at 17 to lay to rest the ghosts of two closeted nuns, when he was closeted himself. John should not have put the burden on Dean to look after his brother while John was away on hunts, because Dean was a child. It robbed Dean of his childhood, forced him to grow up too quickly, and left him with a saviour complex and control issues that he carries well into the last season of the show.

The abuse Sam and Dean suffer at the hands of their father is something that permeates the entire show, all the while the characters apologise for him and little commentary is made on how badly he messed them up. In the pilot, We don’t see him in the present, only in 1983, and then sporadically throughout the rest of the show, notably in seasons one, two, four and five, as well as in the show’s 300th episode “Lebanon”. He is a ghost that controls the fate of these two men, as he directs them where to hunt while at the same time refusing to even show his face in times of dire need. In the episode “Faith”, Dean is dying and John doesn’t make an appearance. In the episode “Home”, Dean calls John scared and crying and begs him to come back to their childhood home of Lawrence, Kansas. Again, John doesn’t show up for them.

There are many moments throughout the show that seem to hinge on one decision, and John’s decision to become a hunter and raise his kids as hunters too is one of them. Another decision is Dean’s choice to die in the last episode. Cas’s choice to partner with Crowley and suck all of purgatory’s souls into himself in season 6. Sam’s choice to settle down with Amelia in season 8.

But it all comes back to the very first decision: Sam deciding to go with Dean to find John. We know now that the demons Azazel and Brady were just waiting for the opportunity to kill Jess when Sam was at his most oblivious and unguarded, which they took after Dean re-entered his life. the repercussions of this reverberate throughout the entire show, most obviously in Sam choosing not to settle down with a woman for the first 7 seasons. But Jessica’s death is the impetus Sam needs to start hunting again, just like Mary’s death was the impetus John had for starting to hunt in the first place.

But actually, with the last episode of the series in mind, another choice is made clear. Dean’s choice to go to Sam.

If the first season would have you believe, Sam Winchester is the protagonist of the series, and Dean is his second in command. He’s one of five main characters throughout season 1, including Dean, John, Mary and Azazel the demon. Azazel begins the narrative by invading Sam’s childhood bedroom and killing Mary, but after the ordinary world of their lives before we hit the call to adventure, Sam is shown as an ordinary guy who just wants to make something of himself. He admits to Dean in some truly spectacular exposition that he swore he was done hunting for good, and that he’s put that life behind him to live safely with his girlfriend and college friends. Of course, being Supernatural, it doesn’t turn out like that.

If you take the last few seasons as gospel, it’s clear that Dean is the emotional heart of the series and Sam exists as his narrative foil. Somewhere along the way their roles got reversed. It’s Sam’s emotional journey we follow throughout the first season. It takes us until episode 4, “Phantom Traveler”, to find something that Dean is afraid of. As the season wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that all he wants is to have his family back together — Sam and Dad, all under one car or motel roof again. Sam, in the Winchester tradition, wants to find Jess’s killer, suspecting that the thing that killed Mary is the same thing that killed Jess. This obsession drives him throughout the first two seasons.

Sam’s motivation in the pilot is laid out clearly: he has to make it back to Stanford on time for his interview for law school. While it’s normal for regular people, it's about as far from the Winchester normal as can be, and that’s what Sam likes about it. It’s normal, it’s wonderbread, it’s safe. It’s freshly baked cookies and a tab at the only bar on campus. It’s your girlfriend in a maid outfit on Halloween, which you still don’t celebrate because it reminds you of what you gave up to be there. It’s getting a 174 on the LSATs but not telling your family because you don’t talk to them anymore, and you haven’t for years. It’s fine.

And then it all comes crashing down, and Sam’s motivation changes. He’s the hero accepting his journey while grieving the loss of the most significant person in his life since he ditched his family at 18 to live in the world instead of saving it from the sidelines. He’s the one our story hinges on, and it’s his reactions we live and die by. When Mary dies, we hardly know her. We don’t know John, either, so it’s hard to gauge how broken up we should be by her death. While I wouldn’t say we know Jess necessarily, we do know Sam, so when he grieves we grieve. The framework through which we view all of these events is Sam’s perspective, even if we do see Dean without Sam. I’m pointing this out because it’s important to know who we sympathise with most, and whose story a narrative is trying to tell. What exactly the narrative is saying is completely dependent on who is saying it.

One of Dean’s defining traits is that he’s great at getting laid. In the original pitch, Dean was supposed to be covered in tattoos and smoking like a James Dean-type. Nevermind that James Dean was queer, as is Dean from On The Road, the character the eldest winchester is named after. Dean chases tail like he’s a dog chasing bumpers, and he’s attractive and charismatic so it works out well for him. He doesn’t take it hard when a woman rejects him, which is something that a lot of men need to learn.

Sera Gamble, staff writer, executive producer, and showrunner of seasons 6 and 7, said about Dean:

“Dean always has a great comeback line, so it’s always fun to write him. Dean’s introduction to us in the pilot was him hitting on his brother’s girlfriend, specifically pointing out her boobs.”

But this is not all Dean is. He’s first and foremost Sam’s protector. In Dean’s second scene of the pilot, Dean is shown to rescue his brother from their house as it burns down, carrying him out of harm’s way. Dean, as the older brother, knows it’s his job to protect his younger sibling. It’s been drilled into him since he was four years old that he is supposed to protect Sam above everything, even when Sam ditched their family. Before the pilot, Dean and Sam hadn’t spoken in two years, and Sam hadn’t seen John in four. But by the end of the episode we realise that Dean hasn’t given up the mantle of protector. He rescues Sam from the building where Jess is being burned alive. First and foremost, Dean will always protect Sam.

At 26, Dean has seen things and done things that no one should see or do. Where Sam is sullen and quiet, Dean is loud and brash, getting into trouble, jumping headfirst into situations he shouldn’t be in. The situations he shouldn’t be in include: a crime scene, a river, a motel room, a haunted shack. Places he should be include the police station, because Dean winchester is many things and one of them is a felon.

We can’t find ourselves sympathising too much with Dean as a main character just yet because we don’t have any attachment to his weaknesses. Yes, Mary died, but she is such a non-character it doesn’t register (unless of course you’ve been through a similar tragedy, then sympathise away). Yes, he loves his car and his guns and his leather jacket, but we find out later that they are handmedowns from John. Dean’s personality is a carefully curated list of acceptable likes and dislikes, inherited from the abusive, alcoholic father John is to him and the woman, wife and mother he thinks of Mary as. In the pilot, Dean is the lovable scamp, but his desperation is lying in wait beneath the mask of finding his father. He wants his fambily back, but more than that, he wants his fambily safe.

We see Sam and Dean’s strengths play out through the episode. In their first encounter with the Woman in White, she possesses the Impala and drives it towards them. They both jump off the bridge, but while Sam clings on, Dean hurls himself into the river. Thus the death-defying stunt ends up a funny gag as Dean drags himself out of the muck, and Sam is positioned as the smarter brother. I mean, he got into Stanford, right? so he’s smarter, right???

Another moment establishes the bulk of their characters in two lines. Sam says, “What I said earlier, about Mum and Dad, I’m sorry,” and Dean replies, “No chick-flick moments.” Within this simple exchange lies the heart of their differences: Sam wants Dean to be okay. Dean would rather push Sam away than offer up his feelings like a charcuterie platter for anyone to pick apart.

From what we know of John, he is a man obsessed. Sam reveals that their whole lives have been based around trying to find the thing that killed Mary. John trained his sons to be hunters from an indeterminately young age, after finding out about the supernatural from various side characters and piecing the rest together himself. From how the other hunters talk about John, he is a master in skill and execution, and Dean and Sam take after him. Sam is smart and coordinated enough to be good at everything, and Dean is naturally gifted in intellect, tactical skill, and weapons. Together they make a formidable team. By the time the show really gets going, John, Sam and Dean are legends in the hunting community. Dean comments in a later episode that he’s famous, and other characters point out the same thing. Characters introduced later know who they are before the boys know who the other characters are and what their connection to John is.

The implications of John raising his sons are hunters are multitudinal. Because Sam and Dean have been raised this way, they have saved a lot of people that otherwise would have died. But it’s at their own expense. They can never live normal lives, and even when they settle down in season 8 at the Men of Letters bunker, the echoes of their loneliness and isolation are still present. That’s why it’s not enough to focus only on Sam and Dean, or introduce more characters just to kill them off, because the brothers are fundamentally lonely and isolated. And the point of any story is to have your characters progress (although in the case of a short story, it’s to reveal something about a character), so when they start out a certain way they need to have outgrown that stasis that they were trapped in by the end of the series. Sam deserved to build a life for himself in the hunting world, with another hunter and/or the queen of hell, making connections and a home for other hunters to stay in and, as one tumblr user says, a monster rehabilitation centre. Dean deserved to outgrow his trauma and simply grow as a character instead of being stuck as an depressed alcoholic with anger issues.

On the surface of the show, Dean is supposed to be Han Solo and Sam Luke Skywalker. But the first thing we learn about Sam to do with his family is that he left them as soon as he finished high school and had a chance to escape. Dean, however, stayed loyal to John and continued hunting. This dynamic of Sam rebelling against the the God figure of their father and Dean’s dependency on their father’s approval continues into the fifth season and parallels the storyline of the angel Lucifer rebelling and his brother Michael staying loyal to God. It certainly is an interesting dynamic, which I  just realising as I type this paragraph was repeated in my own family. Me, the youngest rebelling against my abusive father around the time I started watching this show while my older brother continued to live with him, in squalor and destitution. There were no Gardens of Eden in our family, only a hell of our father’s making. My dad loves muscle cars and heavy metal, too, and I haven’t spoken to him in three years.

The motel room they find John occupying before he takes off is something you’d see in a serial killer’s lair. There are articles printed out and stuck to the wall, a line of salt encircling the room, various talismans and charms, and information on the woman in white. From what we see, John lives up to his legendary status, putting together a pattern of strange deaths and disappearances over the course of 20 years for his sons to eventually solve. But we already know by now that he puts hunting above his own children, and it becomes clear as the episode goes on that he is sending them out on hunts that he himself either can’t or won’t finish. He disappears and leads them on a proverbial and literal ghost hunt as they chase him across the country.

The universe of Supernatural started with monsters but encompasses a lot more than that. Kripke’s vision, which personally I think he executed really well, was small town Americana meets monster of the week. It’s ghosts on highways, cannibals in forests, and spirits in lakes. It’s a possessed car on a bridge aiming straight for our protagonists. It’s gas station junk food and driving 16 hours across multiple states on a hunch. It’s sleeping in your car and brushing your teeth at the side of the road because you couldn’t afford a hotel for the night. It’s grit meets slime. It’s real and fantastical at the same time. When I say this show activates the part of my mind that lives for road trips across a barren country through miles and miles of desert, I’m not lying. I used to love road trips as a kid, just staring out the window with my gameboy in my hand and Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill album in my discman. I long for those days.

The lore is one of the most interesting things about the show. in most episodes, the characters are seen to flick through physical books to gather information about what they’re fighting, which seems to take hours if not days. At one point I’m pretty sure that their father figure Bobby digitises his library, but then that’s never brought up again, so maybe I imagined it. There are hundreds of different creatures throughout the seasons, including some the show made up (Jefferson Starships in season 6), others they’ve taken from folklore and legends and put their own spin on. The interesting ways they present creatures, some pure evil, others sympathetic, is one of the reasons I loved this show from the beginning. All I ever wanted to write was urban fantasy, and this show presented it in an accessible way. I grew up in small towns with populations of less than a thousand people, so watching the characters go through small towns, back roads, truck stops and service stations in the middle of nowhere just hit me right where it hurts.

The lore of the woman in white is thus: a husband cheats on his wife, and the wife, in a moment of insanity, murders her children. When she comes back as a vengeful spirit, she finds men who have been unfaithful and murders them. The character of Constance hitch hikes along the road waiting for men to pick her up, and even if they haven’t been unfaithful she seduces them before she kills them. Spirits are shown to have special powers: they can move objects, wield weapons, and kill with their hands or minds. They can also appear and disappear at will, making them hard to fight.

As with all episodes of tv shows, the problem they face is something out of the ordinary. The Woman in White is a ghost, something they’ve hunted before with ease. Sidenote: this show can be summed up as Pru from Ride or Die podcast says, “the Winchester school of boys who fight ghosts real good.” While a normal ghost would be taken out by salting and burning their bones, laying Constant Welch to rest isn’t that easy. Before they can find her bones to burn, she appears in the Impala while Sam is driving. But Sam figures out a plan: drive the Impala through the house she can’t go home to where her children are lying in wait to drag her into the underworld. And the monsters only get more interesting from there.

Now that the show has finished, it's interesting to examine what it could have been. We know what it is: a 15 year long experiment in family dysfunction and queerbaiting. We know it’s about choices and free will. But what could it have been? It could have been more than family dysfunction. Throughout the entire show, the premise has always been about two brothers, and that’s to its detriment, as there’s only so many times they can rehash the premise of brothers betraying each other. The showrunners were so bent on keeping the show about Sam and Dean that they neglected the other storylines that could have proved more interesting and killed off all the characters that were a threat to their dynamic. It could have been about characters becoming their own creators in stepping outside the narrative, usurping their writers and choosing love instead of violence. It could have stayed about found families, instead of focusing solely on Sam and Dean in the last episode, which undid all of the groundwork they’d laid out in the last 7 or so seasons.

But what we have is what we get, and while the show falls down in some respects, especially with regards to its treatment of people of colour and the queer community, it is still a show that I’ve loved since the Howard administration, and something that has changed and improved my life in numerous ways. If I hadn’t started writing Supernatural fanfiction, I wouldn’t have majored in writing, and I wouldn’t have the experience to write four books and some novel length fanfiction. Supernatural has inspired me so much over the years, and I will always considered it kismet that it entered my life. I know others feel the same, and you only have to step into the fandom for a day to realise the impact that Supernatural has on people all over the world. Few shows have had both the gall and opportunity to shape television in the way that Supernatural has and do the things that it has done. Falling in love with it again at a time when I was outgrowing a previous hyperfixation, feeling lost and adrift, and burnt out from writing 150,000 words in the middle of a pandemic, has been extremely serendipitous, and I can’t wait to dissect every single thing about this show.

You can find the show at holyhellpod on Instagram and tumblr, and patreon dot com slash holyhellpod. I’ll talk to you soon.

[Outro music]

[yanderedbh-moved]

This post was a tag-game sort of thing started by a major inspiration of mine, and a serious blog recommendation @dear-yandere ! Odds are if you follow this account then you’ve come across at least a few posts of theirs before, but if you haven’t, check out their account! This was just a fun little post I wanted to finish before the end of the year, I’m using the original categories in the original post, ass well as adding a few more so all the characters I write for will be featured here. (Here’s a link to the original post for any other writers interested in this tag, it was a lot of fun, and it didn’t take too long to fill out, so give it a shot!^^)

Most Delusional: Ralph

Not at all a difficult decision here, unfortunately. While he may not have always been the scatterbrained and nervous recluse, he is in the game. The severity of the psychological and physical damage leaves Ralph as easily the most detached of all the characters. Resulting in him living in his own little world to cope with the harsh reality of life. In how this extends to him is a yandere, Ralph sees the two of you as star-crossed lovers living in your own oasis in a life away from the other cruel people of the world. No matter how many times you try to run away from him.

Most Manipulative: Josh

This category likely doesn't seem quite as evident as Ralph's. However, when it comes to exploring Josh is a yandere and less so his character, this adds up if you think about it. Obviously, as a character who represents the path of peace and nonviolence, Josh would be the type of yandere who will never use violence to control you. Instead using his words of persuasion on you. One of his most prevalent modes which to control you include persuading you to remain loyal to him alone because going against him would be like turning your back on the piece itself.

Most Sadistic: Zlatko

Unique from nearly every other yandere mentioned here who would, to some extent, feel remorseful for having to hurt you or your loved ones as punishment for rejecting their love, Zlatko would honestly feel a sort of obligation to cause you pain. The reason here being he doesn't see your relationship as a loving connection between two equals. Instead, you're more like his own personal test subject. The more he hurts you, the more he can learn about you, and that's how the relationship grows. In a way, Zlatko has abnormal ownership over your pain. It's something special to him. Only he deserves to see you screaming in agony teary-eyed and entirely at his mercy.

Most Protective: Kara

This woman is protective to a fault and nothing less. Kara sees herself as the only one in your life who knows you well enough to properly look out for your well-being, Kara hates when you try to distance yourself from her or if she feels as though other people are posing as a threat to the relationship. All she wants is for the two of you to remain loyal together forever. If you would only stop trying to fight her on this and let her keep you safe and happy when you'd see why the two of you were made for each other.

Most Obsessive: Markus

When Markus first falls for you, it was new for him and, as a result, left him feeling less in control around you as he typically would around others the way of a first crush often leaves just about anyone. However, as more time passes between the two of you and a genuine relationship begins to form, Markus would feel a significant change around you. No longer does he feel so insecure and nervous but rather powerful, passionate, dominant, and the most addictive feeling of all in control. Markus would begin to obsess over this relationship because he views it as something which provides some strength and power. And for a man with such a weight on his shoulders, Markus would take whatever source of energy he could even if that means keeping you under the tightest of control.

Most Possessive: North

Driven and feisty as a fighter North can't help but allow these traits to manifest themselves and her love life as well. North isn't the one to take things slow and settle to be just your friend. She's a lady who knows what she wants when she sets her sights on you is over. North is terrified of the idea of losing you to another human. Considering how hard it is for her to take a chance with someone and allow herself to be vulnerable and loving with someone in the first place, this relationship is to be protected at all costs. It's hard for her to keep you so entirely under her control when she knows how awful it is to live like this, unfortunately for the time being North doesn't know what else to do. As much as she loves you and will keep you happy, there's no way for North to fully prevent her hatred for humans from manifesting in this relationship.

Most Lucid: Nines

In a word, his character could be described as decisive. The ideal android in its purest form. Uncorruptable, unscrupulous, unflinching. Even a love-struck Nines would behave wildly different compared to other yanderes. Rather than allowing these new and overwhelming feelings to control him, Nines woldn't take that chance and would force you to live by his command. There is no way to compromise or to bargain with him, to let you go or to spare you. To Nines, it's just too high a risk to allow you to walk free again. Nines is a skillful and season hunter, and you are his most prized of prey.

Most Submissive: Chloe

When it comes to the way Chloe feels so weak and emotional and powerless around you, it's nothing short of addictive to her. Unlike many other yanderes who would act violently or cruelly as a precaution around their obsession to keep you under their control. Chloe would never even think to hurt you without reason. Chloe adores how human and real she feels as she goes to the emergence of developing her first-ever crush and never wants these feelings to go away.  Chloe would rather cling to your side and give you no reason to ever suspect she means you any harm or has any other ulterior motives. Reluctant: Luther Despite the fact, Luther was created to act as a violent and ruthless attack dog, that doesn't mean Luther wants to behave that way around you as a way to keep you by his side. In his eyes, it was a miracle he ever escaped from that life in the first place. It hurts to resort to violence in the name of keeping you safe. More often than not, Luther will provide you with a warning before lashing out that you know what he's capable of. If you keep trying to fight back against him, then he won't trust himself to hold back against you. It is indeed quite dangerous to put the fear of losing you against the fear of his own violence for Luther, and more likely than not the both of you will suffer the consequences of this derision.

Most Jealous: Gavin

Don't ever underestimate the way jealousy will cause people to act irrationally. In the mind of the genuinely envious, it's everyone in the world against them and, by extension, if they want to look out for themselves, then they must take whatever they can before it's gone forever. Before someone else gets it first. If Gavin wants a relationship with you and he has no choice but to make sure that he's the only person in your life. Aside from the jealousy, Gavin is something of a misanthrope which gives him all the more reason to separate you from others. On the one hand, because he doesn't want anyone else to convince you to leave him but also Gavin worries that you and leave him all alone.

Most Deceptive: Connor

Deceptiveness isn't too far from the lucid category; however, several key differences result in two different superlatives. Connor is more likely to act perceptively and gather much more information he can on his target before making a judgment on how to respond. Connor would at least try to get close to you on his own and would try to give a healthy relationship a chance. Any yandere-Esque tendency flare-ups he would playoff as not knowing any better. Or would use any other possible alibies first so he can keep you from suspecting anything of him. Because he wouldn't want to act before thinking first, he can easily use alibies to keep other's suspicions down and to keep and to keep them from believing you over him.

Most Controlling: Kamski

There was never any chance the two of you could have shared a regular healthy relationship for the moment he developed feelings for you. No way could someone with an inflated sense of ego like Kamski would view the relationship as one between two equals and not one between a superior and lesser. Kamski lives so separately from other humans he has no desire to live by anyone else's terms but his own, and it's very likely for the longest time Elijah never saw himself as sharing a relationship with another. Not when he lives with the Chloes that can function as a source of companionship and sexual gratification. But when he falls for you, Elijah is overwhelmed and feels as though he's never really been another before. Can't see what at the end of the day see you as one which would serve to gratify his own needs a little more than that. The idea of you rebelling and trying to become anything more than that is unspeakable to him.

Most Emotional: Daniel

For the longest time, Daniel never imagined he would want to share a relationship with a human, considering how he was burned so hard the last time. But when he falls for you, he can't help feel a sense of optimism and wonders if he's once again found a human he can trust enough to reach out and become attached to. And this is all well and good for the time truly difficult, and toxic relationships are tricky to ever fully recover from. The scars of old memories are still sore. Daniel isn't so well equipped to handle the sore spots in a relationship resulting in impulsive, emotional outbursts. At these moments, Daniel is at his worst and most dangerous.

Most Nervous: Simon

Similar to the reluctant category but not quite. The hesitant yandere would feel painful remorse for their own actions. Simon is more nervous because he fears what you would do if you ever saw him for exactly who he is. There's a nagging voice in the back of his head which warns him over he's in over his head. If you were to ever escape, you would ruin everything he has in his life, leaving him with no choice but to keep you entirely to himself. He's guided by fear first and foremost, and this is why he acts so secretively.

Most Selfish: Hank

It was a grave Injustice the day Hank lost his son. Rather than genuinely coming to terms with his own misery here and hoping to move on, Hank chose instead to develop an unhealthy attachment to you. Forever stuck in the grieving and self-serving mindset rather than allowing himself to move on. Hank keeps you in his life because without you, there nothing would distract him from his own sadness, and this is just too bleak a reality for him to ever face. Even if this hurts, he can't bring himself to ever do what's right and let you go.

[elopez7228]

Scenic route 20/47

Read on AO3 : https://archiveofourown.org/works/18268208/chapters/43229774 

Start over : https://elopez7228.tumblr.com/post/620919089893933056/scenic-route-0147

***

The conversation flowed amicably and Rey was quite relaxed by the time the Millenium Falcon reached the parking lot of the tourism office.

Maz left the car with one last affectionate pat for BB8, taking a moment to thank Rey for wishing her safe travels.

Inside the immense air-conditioned mass that was the tourism office, a 4-feet-wide digital clock showed the countdown until the next eruption of the geyser.

With nearly half an hour to spare, Rey took a walk through the gift shop. She briefly admired the keychains and postcards, before pausing in front of an item that left her quite perplexed. Bear spray?  What on earth was that?

The shopkeeper—who was appropriately decked out in green forest ranger attire—informed her that it was used by hikers to ward off bears in the unfortunate event of an encounter. An accessory that would surely save lives, given the population of grizzlies that roamed freely within the park.  

Rey bought one because she knew that only too well. The odds of her being attacked by a bear a second time in so few days were low, but she had learned not to underestimate her natural tendency to conjure bad luck out of nowhere.  

Her phone informed her it was almost show time, so she settled on one of the benches installed in a semi circle at a safe distance from the white crater of the geyser.

***

Syed felt like a punk in a playground. She had ended up in the middle a sea of tourists who were all wearing some hideous combination of sun hats, shorts, Hawaiian shirts, cameras, and—she shuddered—socks with sandals. She stuck out like a sore thumb against the pastel masses with her tall black-clad frame, her numerous piercings, and her menacing brass chains.

She cursed Kylo for sending her to hell, far from her friends, her audience, her guns... and him. She had taken multiple photographs of a very sloppily dressed Rey, who had taken the Millennium Falcon for a joyride. Now she was wondering who to send them to. Kylo? Or Hux? Or maybe Snoke?

Theoretically, she was doing this mission on behalf of Kylo Ren. But he had shown signs of weakness that in his interest, she had the duty to report further up the chain of command...his obsession for this little English brat was beyond comprehension.

He used the hunt for environmental activists as an excuse to justify his meddlesome romantic advances, but Syed was no fool. This girl was just a tourist. She wasn’t a secret agent of the Earth Soldiers. She was frolicking about with sunglasses and a cap glued to her skull, sipping some basic frappuccino, bothering bears, and taking selfies. It was improbable, and even impossible, that she was on a mission for an ecologist association that was making dooms-day preparations. She was too relaxed; obviously a woman on vacation, certainly not an agent on active duty.

Syed meanwhile, was always on the clock. It was a shame really, the amount of time had she wasted stalking that bitch.

She finally sent the photos to Armitage Hux. He was particularly pleased when he received an image of Kylo in the throes of passion with his plaything.  She didn’t know what he would do with it, but she knew from experience that when Kylo needed a guardrail, Armitage Hux was the man of the hour. He would simply do a little sleight of hand and suddenly the unruly punk would fall back in line.  

Everything would be back to normal...like nothing had ever happened.

As for Kylo Ren himself, knowing he needed a bone to chew on, she sent him hourly reports of his little protege, deliberately omitting any mention of the hitchhiker. It was really the only useful information of the day;  and she preferred to keep an ace up her sleeve in case he decided to be difficult.

The hitchhiker was nearing the Millennium Falcon again, and Syed went off to disappear into the crowd.

The little woman circled the car for a while, then sat down on the hood, with spectacular ease. She took off her hiking boots and massaged the soles of her feet. Syed rolled her eyes. For fuck’s sake, this old hag was probably less important an update than she had initially anticipated.

When Rey came back, the woman had come down from her perch and was waiting patiently next to the mirror. Rey frowned. People had to seriously stop their fascination with her car. What was that all about?

All her wonder at the sight of the geyser (the truly magnificent explosion of water and steam as high as a five-storey building), faded to give way to an anxiety that was alas, very familiar.

"You’re still here?” Her reaction was harsher than intended, spurred on by the unexpected intrusion.

"I was waiting for you, I hope you don’t mind," Maz replied innocently.  “I haven’t found another ride, may we continue some of this journey together?”

Rey regretted her initial inclemency. She reacted too intensely, to everything.  She took a breath to force herself to regain her composure. Maz was harmless, but it was easy to see why she was struggling to find a helping hand: the park was teaming with pretentious tourists who were reluctant to change their route or their agenda...and who were suspicious of pickpockets.  She had been one of them, after all.

Rey sighed, her shoulders sagging. “Okay, fine...but I’m warning you, I’m doing a tour of all the geological marvels out here.” She said with a smile.

“Fine with me,” Maz smiled in return. “Thank you very much. I promise you won’t even know I’m here.”

Rey swallowed a remark about Maz’s tiny stature, and gently pushed BB8 over to make space.

“It's funny,” Rey observed. “BB8 doesn’t seem at all disturbed by your presence.  She’s rather aggressive with strangers, usually.”

“What strangers?” Maz laughs, reaching out to stroke the dog.

"Oh, just one stranger in particular," Rey corrected with a wave of her hand. “It was impossible for him to approach, she would try to bite him.”

“Had they met before?”

“No, of course not. He would have told me if...” Rey’s voice caught in her throat.

Did Ben and BB8 have history?  It was unbelievable, and yet...he had immediately shown interest in her, seemingly out of nowhere, when they had joined him in the Jackson Hole Lodge parking. He even outright asked if BB was her dog.

It was a silly question to ask someone walking with a dog on a leash. Why would he need confirmation?

Now that she thought about it, he had asked the same strange question about the Millennium Falcon:

Is this your car?

Obviously, it was hers. It’s not like she was just playing Russian roulette out there, hoping to find a car she could force open in the middle of the parking garage. But it was strange that he tried to make sure.

That said, in his defense, perhaps it was simply because the Millennium Falcon was an infamous bastard of a car. Anyone would have been shocked at seeing a machine like this still in use! Who knows what went on in Ben’s head?

Her face had scrunched up into a worried expression, which did not escape Maz.

"Something bothering you?” She asked in a gentle voice, “maybe I can be of some help?”

"I don’t really know," said Rey, still pensive, as she slowly pulled out of the parking space, "I've experienced some rather unlikely things since I landed in Denver. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

"Start at the beginning," Maz replied encouragingly. “I've got plenty of time.”

That afternoon, Rey and Maz visited some of the most spectacular geological sites around the volcano: boiling springs that gave way to rainbows, geysers by the dozen, bubbling fumaroles ...they even crossed paths with animals that were once threatened in the wild—but were in total safety within the park’s verdant confines. They came upon placid bison, elk, and bald eagles. Thankfully, they saw neither bears nor wolves. These animals, however numerous, tended not to approach busy trails.

They spoke a lot.

Rey found in Maz an attentive third party, to whom she could open up without fear of judgment, and especially without fear of the rampant sexual tension present in her conversations with Ben. She knew he was attracted to her, he did nothing to hide it. But as a result, she continually wondered if the words he said were sincere, rather than a carefully prepared speech designed to charm her to his bed. He had almost managed to get there, in fact.  

In principle, there was no harm to that, she was a consenting adult. And she had to admit that she had savored every kiss, every touch...But her own ardor worried her. Had she flirted with Ben Solo because she wanted him, or because she needed to be reassured, to be held, after what Finn had done to her?

She had to put her heart back in place, heal her wounds, find her inner peace.  Only then would she consider Ben Solo.

"You do not want to make him your consolation prize," Maz hummed sagely.  “That is rather commendable.”

“I don’t think he cares either way. I mean, we are both consenting adults, but I don’t want to be a trophy...be just another notch in his bedpost.”

"You should talk to him...is it possible you’re mistaken about his intentions towards you?”

Rey narrowed her eyes. “Yes, we need to talk ...” about more than you know.

Maz was from Florida. She was bored of her apartment which sat at one end of the land, and thus decided one morning to go on foot to the other end. She had plenty of time, and improvised her itinerary at random. She had a host of tales to tell about backpacking trips to Central Asia or South America, often far from cities and crowds, and Rey began to wonder how old she really was.

It was impossible to say: her face was both smooth and furrowed, her eyes constantly hidden behind huge triple-focus glasses. Her hands were small but her fingers were long and bony. Despite her diminutive appearance, she seemed to burst with energy, and possessed an exceptional amount of savoir faire.  

Yellowstone?  She knew every corner of the place. Alaska?  She knew which roads to use in which season. London?  She had lived there twice in her youth. The Millenium Falcon? She had once owned a car of the same make and model. BB8?  Canine behavior was no mystery to her.

What a strange old woman, Rey pondered, finally glad to have good company.

Black Sand Basin, Geyser Basin, Great Fountain Geyser, Lower Geyser Basin...The park's attractions were like cat nip to tourists, including Rey and Maz.  It was hard to blame people for coming all the way to Yellowstone form the corners of the globe.

Evening was falling. The day had been exhausting, the traffic was atrocious, and the heat was stifling.

Rey went to the Madison Village campground in the park to reserve a place for the night.

Everything was complete.

Finally able to stop panicking, she was content to sleep in her car in the campground parking. Simple as that.

But what about Maz?

Leaving the campsite's bungalow, she returned to her car. The little woman was standing there, her bag hoisted on her shoulders.

"I’m all done for today," Rey explained, “I'm going to sleep in the car, they told me it was okay as long as I paid parking fees. How about you?”

She gestured awkwardly at the  car. “Do you want the back seat?  BB8 can come sleep with me...?”

Maz smiled to assuage her fears. “Don’t worry, young lady. I'm used to sleeping under the stars.”

"Right here?! With the bears and everything—“ Rey was incredulous.

“Don’t fret. I’ll take care of myself, you take care of yourself and BB8.”

Rey looked away as the sound of tinkling bracelets faded into the distance. Better not think about it, the last thing she need was an extra dose of anxiety. And besides, she was hungry.

The vending machine at the campsite procured a packet of chips, a flavorless coffee, and a Snickers bar. Dejectedly, she looked down at her meal. It was the food pyramid of sadness.

She wanted fresh vegetables and a hot plate...she would have to plan better tomorrow. These snacks were barely what she considered food.

What was Finn doing now?  She couldn’t help but wonder.

He was probably still on the respirator; if there had been any improvement in his condition, Poe would have called her.

What was Ben Solo doing?

That was easy, he was about to give a concert. Rey pulled out her phone. Should she call him or send him a message?  She opted for a message.

Good luck with the concert tonight!  Not too nervous I hope?  

An answer arrived immediately. He wasn’t on stage yet.

Thanks for the good vibes! But I wish you were here in the room.

[kaspbrak-tozier-reddie]

You Engraved This? AU

Bear with me, I don’t usually do this sort of thing with ships. I do skip a bit 😂

Requests open

Trigger Warnings: swear, mentions of blood, death, homophobia.

Spoilers

———————————————————————

As Richie goes out in search for his token, he walked past the old arcade, that is now boarded up. “Oh no.” Richie muttered to himself. He knew what would happen as soon as he would enter the grime old place, he would relive the moment that deterred him away from arcades forever.

The door creaked open and sure enough he was suffocated by the dust and cobwebs that covered the interior.

His mind filled in the blanks.

A reasonably cute, dirty blonde haired boy was playing Street Fighter and Richie had basically asked him out in a friendly manner. Except the boy was a homophobe and took Richie’s kind gesture the wrong way. Not only that but he was cousin to Henry Bowers.

“It’s not real.” Adult Richie said to himself imagining far more than he bargained for. He saw the scene happen right in front of him as if he were in a 3D film. But Pennywise didn’t want to stop.

Richie grabs the gaming token and heads out to the giant statue. And there sat Pennywise on the shoulder of lumberjack statue. “I know your secret.” Pennywise tormented, just like he did 27 years ago.

Richie badly wanted to scream to the supernatural being (that was obviously not there) that he loved Eddie, no longer caring, but nothing came out. He knew that the town was just as homophobic as it was when he was a kid. He knew he would be shamed, even as an adult.

The fear came back, he wanted to leave but he couldn’t leave the Losers especially Eddie. So he went back to the inn with the intention with taking a roadtrip with his best friend and leaving the hell hole that Derry was.

****

The Losers Club enter the entry of the sewers. “Is that rope still safe?” Bev asked.

“Only one way to find out.” Mike said. Fear crept onto everyone but the adults pushed it aside. They needed to be brave so that their fear didn’t make them vulnerable to Pennywise.

Mike went down first with Richie heading down last. Richie looked directly atEddie as soon as his feet touched the ground. The hidden fear in Eddie’s eyes made his heart ache. He reached for Eddie’s hand but instantly chickened out.

Eddie was married, to a woman! Dammit Richard, get your shit together

But then he felt someone grab his hand, he looked down and sure enough it was Eddie’s. “I don’t remember there being this much water.” Ben said. Richie and Eddie pulled their hands away.

“It flooded years ago.” Mike replied. The 6 of them started swimming towards the pile of junk that sat in the middle of the sewer. They all had made it onto the wood pile except Bev. She disappeared from the surface and immediately the losers dived back in to sesrch for her. All but Eddie, that is.

He had a horrible feeling that one of them was gonna die. He wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen in that lair. “Right, down we go.” Mike said. One by one they went down.Eddie hesitated, he felt Richie grab his arm, stopping him.

“You’re braver than you think Eds.” Richie had said to the other man.

“He’s right Eddie. And this, this arrow. If you believe, you can kill any monster.” Beverly said handing him the arrow. Eddie nodded, he took a deep breath and followed to two into Pennywise’s home.

It was gloomy, slimy and claustrophobic. It was an unsettling place. It was like a visual representation of Pennywise’s personality.

Cold, grim and creepy.

Mike led them to where they were going to do the ritual. “Everyone got their tokens?” Mike asked, the rest of them nodded. One by one they threw their objects in.

Richie wanted to be beside Eddie. He saw the fear that Eddie trued to conceal. He wanted to comfort him. “Is that from the arcade?” Eddie asked Richie.

“Huh? Oh uh, yeah.” Richie replied tossing the small coin into the metal bin.

“It’s not going to burn!”

“It will when it meets your fucking inhaler!”

“It still won’t burn.”

“There are chemicals in that inhaler, Eduardo!”

“Guys, this is not the time to fight each other!” Bev yelled.

“Sh-sh-she’s right, guys.” Bill backed Bev up.

After they threw Stan’s token, the shower cap, the next step of the ritual began.

That’s when Mike screams for them to shut their eyes.

Fear crept onto the group of adults but Richie felt a deeper fear. He didn’t want to die without telling Eddie. Heaven forbid! If Eddie died, Richie didn’t want Eddie to leave him without him knowing how Richie truely felt.

That’s when a red balloon appeared in the centre of the circle. The Losers scrambled away from the growing balloon. Richie and Eddie immediately went for each other.

“Wanna tell them why the ritual didn’t work, Mike?” Pennywise chuckled.

Mike was quiet, he knew why but he couldn’t bring himself to see the disappointment on their faces.

“Wanna play truth or dare Richie?” Pennywise tried again. “Wanna tell them your dirty little secret?”

The cogs in Richie’s mind starred turning faster and faster until he couldn’t contain his anger he needed to do something but fear crept onto him.

He did the thing that they all agreed not to do.

He made himself vulnerable.

****

During the fight, Richie and Eddie found themselves running in a dark tunnel. The two men came to a halt as they found themseves in frint of 3 doors with words written in blood. “‘Scary’, ‘not scary’, ‘very scary’?” Richie read out loud. He gingerly walked towards the ‘Very Scary’ door. He gripped Eddie’s wrist a little tighter as they opened the door.

As the door creaked opened, the two were faced with a closet and half a torso. With a scream they slammed the door. “‘Not Scary’?” Eddie asked.

“Why not.” Richie replied. They ran to the final door.

They were met with a ginger fluff ball. “Awe.” The two exclaimed simultaneously. They started obsessing over the small fluffy animal, telling it how cute it was. In the process, completely ignoring the sound of IT’s extension that was coming towards them.

“Sit!” Richie commanded. The small Pomeranian sat. “Good boy.”

The scraping of the sharp extension drew closer but the men were still caught up in the dog.

But alas! It was too good too be true, the dog turned out to be a monster. Much to Richie’s disappointment.

They regained their breath from running and Richie announced, “when we get outta here, we’re adopting a dog!”

Richie miraculously finds the strength and picks up a reasonably large rock, thinking that he could distract Pennywise from his friends. “Yipee Kayay Motherfu-“ Richie screamed before he was caught in the deadlights.

****

It was white for a split second before Richie saw a vision. It was sort of clear, everything had fuzzy edges though.

He was in IT’s lair only brighter. He saw all his friends screaming at the creature, attempting to belittle the creature. But he couldn’t see Eddie or himself , he tried to move but he was stuck, he turned his head to the right and sure enough there was Eddie, bleeding from his abdomen and Richie holding the wound.

He wondered how Eddie ended up in that position. Sure enough, Pennywise took him 5 minites earlier.

He saw himself get saved by Eddie but what shocked him was that he watched himself kissing Eddie. But just as they come apart, Eddie is impaled.

Richie watched as Eddie’s blood was spurted onto his clothes and face (glasses included). He watched himsef cry out in agony.

If he ever made it out of the deadlights, his mission was to keep Eddie from the psychotic clown and tell him how he feels!

****

“Huh?” Richie regained consciousness, he saw his best friend and life long crush, hovering over him. “Oh my God! Eddie!” He hugged him but that was over within a second.

That’s when he remembered what he just saw in the desdlights. He pulled Eddie away, hiding in the cave they were just in. “I saved you!” Eddie screamed excitedly. Eddie’s excitement disappeared when he looked at Richie’s concerned face. “What did you see in the deadlights?”

“You getting impaled. Wasn’t going to let that happen.” Richie replied hesitantly. That’s when he saw the fear in Eddie’s eyes and he knew he’d start hyperventilating shortly. “Focus on me okay. Block out any fear.” Richie handed Eddie the spare inhaler that he took from Eddie’s bag before they left the inn.

****

“We should go before we’re arrested for destruction.” Bill said, everyone snapped their heads towards the previous ringleader. “What?”

“You didn’t stutter once.” Richie said.

“You said that the last time, before we defeated IT as kids.” Eddie pointed to Richie. They all laughed.

It was like 27 years earlier. Heading towards the Quarry to hang out. The nostalgia that they felt as they walked the route but something told them that they would not forget each other this time. They were no longer afraid of the things that Pennywise feasted upon. Their bond was even stronger than it was back when they were kids.

As the group was nearing the entrance to the Quarry. Richie said, “We’ll meet you at the Quarry. I’ve got to show Eds something.” He pulled Eddie a little further up the road towards the kissing bridge.

“Richard?” Eddie question Richie as he saw Richie finishing off a carving. There was half a faint ‘E’ written beside an obvious ‘R’. “When did you start this engraving?”

It would’ve been clear to anyone walking past that the ‘R’ and the ‘+’ looked as though they had been carved decades ago.

“When Bowers caught me checking out his cousin and called me a fag in front of the whole arcade. Oh and that was right before my encounter with Pennywise and his worse rendition of what Bowers said.” Richie replied. “I realised they were both right. I just didn’t want to believe I was gay, especially with being in a town like Derry.”

“I’m proud of you, opening up about your sexuality. But, um, you liked me when we were 13?!”

“Thanks and uh yeah I did, still do.” Richie gulped and muttered to himself, “In fact, I think it might be love now.”

“You hesitated before when I asked so I could only assume there’s more.” Eddie took a breath. “What else did you see in the deadlights?”

Richie sighed heavily and braced himself.

“I uh, I kissed you and Pennywise. He uh, he took the opportunity to kill you. Well actually, he made it a slow death.” Richie choked on his spit and tried to fight the tears. “I couldn’t let that happen. You’re my best friend, even if we didn’t remember each other for 27 years. You’re still my best friend Eds.”

“Let’s head back to the others.”

A cloud of disappointment hovered above Richie as they walked back towards the Quarry.

I knew I shouldn’t have told him. I’m an idiot! He’s married. Dammit Richie!!

He ducked under the fence and ran toward the cliff, jumping into the gross water below. Eddie followed after him.

He completely ignored Eddie, not wanting to wait for him before swimming over to the others sitting on the bank.

****

Eddie looked at the tall dark haired man. It was clear that Richie was upset, he was hunched over and didn’t care that his glasses were almost off his nose. He felt bad for dismissing Richie’s admission of love. He didn’t mean to, it was just too much.

But he started putting the pieces together, starting back from that Summer. Not only did Richie go to him when his parents were giving him a harsh time or when he couldn’t sleep. It was that particular day at the clubhouse.

The day when Eddie sat in the hammock with him because Richie refused to move. Richie clearly did that on purpose, not to mention his hand on his leg.

He thinked back to every single action of Richie’s but more importantly his own. Eddie knew he liked guys, that was no lie, but his mother made him marry Myra.

Eddie couldn’t pinpoint the day but he remembered when he bought Richie an icecream. He loved hugging and cuddling with Richie at 3am. He had always thought Richie was hot, even if he annoyed the shit outta him.

Eddie gasped loudly, catching the attention of every loser. Richie even looked up. “What?” Bev asked. Not wanting to face the others, Eddie looked down to avoid eye contact.

“I liked you too, Richie, I, uh, I still do.” Eddie said.

“Eds don’t – ” Richie began.

“Don’t call me Eds.” Eddie stated. “I didn’t want to admit it. But those cuddles we shared as kids, the egging you on was because I wanted your attention asshole!”

“The ‘I fucked your mom’ jokes were to get you attention!” Richie exclaimed.

“You’re both oblivious! We’ve known for years!” Bill yelled.

Ben and Beverly laughed and swam away, Mike and Bill then left, leaving Riche with Eddie. Eddie waded through the shallow water towards Richie.

“What will you do about Myra?” Richie asked.

“I’m divorcing her. I never loved her. Mom forced me to date her when I came out.” Eddie admitted. “Said, I was sick and that Myra would help.”

“I know I offered it to you once before we graduate high school and you said no but, come with me back to Cali.”

Eddie smiled and nodded, he kissed Richie. “I would love that, boyfriend. Oh and we can even adopt a pomeranian.” Richie laughed and kissed his boyfriend again.

“Boyfriend?” Richie giggled.

“We waited long enough, eh?” The two laughed.

[instakpop]

Chanyeol scenario - Lessons in love

Requested by anon

Genre: mafia!au, angst, smut, little bits of fluffiness

Warnings: stalking, rough sex, strong language

There’s nothing more tragic than love running out. You pour your heart and soul into a relationship only to feel neglected one year into it. You were hypnotized by his smile, swindled by his charms, then broken by his passive behavior.

You met Chanyeol purely by chance. Working in a bank doesn’t sound very exciting,  but your job brought you to the same level as some of the most powerful people in the country. Who’s your biggest client? Park Chanyeol, mafia boss. The man who was practically untouchable. He’d have a whole number of charges against him, but even the best lawyers in the business couldn’t take him down.

One day you came into work and caught his eye. He courted you with flowers and jewels until you gave in to his advances. In the beginning, he was the kind of boyfriend every woman dreams of. Great listener, gentle, an all-around romantic. But, sadly, that romance didn’t even last six months.

After a while, Chanyeol because cynical and mean. In public, you and Chanyeol would arrive at events together lovingly only to be separated when one of his “associates” came to steal his attention away from you. You would have left months ago if it weren’t for everything you invested into the relationship. He took you on long vacations, causing you canceled plans with friends all the time to be with him. You’ve even taken a sabbatical from work to spend time with him. Now, just having a weekend alone with him is a blessing. Meals for two were left uneaten, reservations at hotels that fell through, and a one year anniversary that was forgotten about.

Sex was no different. He would crawl into bed late at night and stay awake long enough to get his rocks off. It didn’t matter if he was pleasing you, he only cared about himself.

Which brings you to today. Chanyeol has been gone for three days straight, leaving you in his enormous house like an abandoned puppy. But enough is enough. You’ve decided once and for all the Chanyeol just isn’t the man you thought he was. You packed your things and checked into a hotel until you find an apartment.

It broke your heart to watch your relationship crumble like that, but you’re not the one to blame. Chanyeol became arrogant and plain rude. The answer to every question about where he was going was “don’t worry about it.” It’s time for you to get back to who you were before. You returned to work as if nothing happened and finally found a great place to live. Over time, you blocked out the thoughts of the man who broke your heart. But you couldn’t stop thinking about the man who swept you off your feet. You missed the Chanyeol who texted you sweet messages while he was at work and held you close late at night. The Chanyeol who made you feel safe and adored.

As the days turned into weeks, you regressed into your usual pattern. Wake up, stop for breakfast, go to work, swing by the gym for a quick workout, and head back home.  But one day you noticed something. Something strange. All day you could feel someone’s eyes on you. Everywhere you went, you were able to catch a glimpse of a man in a designer suit who was never more than 20 feet away.

You weren’t certain if he was following you, but you had to find out. On your way to the gym, you took the long route, trying to see if anyone was pursuing you. After a few minutes, you spotted a red Cadilac that was taking the same turns you were. You pulled over onto a side road and stepped out of your car. You mentally prepared yourself for the worst as you grabbed your emergency pepper spray. You walked down the alley and hid behind a corner. You heard footsteps coming closer until you heard a voice.

“I lost her. She went down the alley and disappeared.” He said.

You peeked out to see him on the phone. But who could he possibly be talking to? The man walked past you, unable to see where you were hiding. You stepped out from behind the corner, summoning up enough courage to raise your pepper spray and yell. “Who are you?!”

The man turned around in shock. He stammered over what to say, “I’m not a threat. I was just told by my boss to keep tabs on you.”

The thoughts started racing through your mind of who his boss could be. You had one idea, but you needed to know for sure. “And how long have you been keeping ‘tabs’ on me.”

“About three weeks.”

Chanyeol! He’s the only man in the world he had the power, authority, and motive to do something like this. You put your pepper spray back into your pocket and sighed.

“Take me to your boss. Now.” You demanded.

Your domineering tone was enough to turn the mafia soldier into a cowering dog. He quickly leads you to his car and took you to Chanyeol’s house. The second you arrived, you marched through the door, hot-tempered, and ready to fight. You passed by his personal staff, each of which was both confused and intimidated by your sudden presence.

“Oh, Miss y/n. So good to see y-” Chanyeol’s second in command asked.

“Where is he?” You asked.

“In the office.”

You headed upstairs with fury in your step. You burst through the doors and there he was, leaning back in his chair with his trademark poker-face.

“A spy?! Really?! What gives you the right to hire someone to watch me? And what was going to happen? Were you gonna just have him follow me forever? And what would happen if I met someone else, someone who isn’t a self-obsessed asshole who lies and deceives people? You are unbelievable!” The more you screamed, the better you felt. You weren’t able to tell him off when you left because, once again, he wasn’t around.

But instead of fighting back, or having you hauled off, Chanyeol just sat there, staring at you with a blank look. You ended your passionate speech and stood there, waiting for a response, but instead, silence filled the room. Chanyeol closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Y/n, sit down.” He said with a calm voice.

You were a little suspicious of his demeanor, but you complied. You sat across from him and relaxed.

“You… are completely right. I was terrible to you. I didn’t call when I said I would. I stopped listening to you. I stopped tending to you, and I was wrong for that. But The reason I stopped doing those things is that you stayed so much longer than the others.” He said.

What he was saying didn’t make much sense, but you remain intrigued to hear his side of the story. “I’m not the guy that women want to spend forever with. I ask a girl out, she says yes and I spoil her rotten. Six months later, she’s gone. She goes her way and I go mine. All the gifts I give are returned, but her social status is set in stone. That’s all I am to them. They see the wealth and power and they use it to their advantage.”

He could hardly look me in the eye when he explained, but the words rang in your mind. “And then there was you. The girl who was already a staple in the mob world. I looked at you and the way you carried yourself and I thought, ‘now that’s a girl who can hold her own’. You already had status and power. I knew you were different, but I guess the romantic in me died one day. My love had an expiration date.”

“Chanyeol. Gifts are not the romantic part of dating. The thought behind them is. You knew I’ve always wanted to see Paris, so you took me there for my birthday. I told you I loved getting love notes so you send me texts throughout the day. You just stopped caring. You ignored me constantly, I’d even try to kiss you and you’d turn the other cheek. You didn’t think you’d be a good boyfriend, so you just gave up.”

Listening to what you had to say, Chanyeol started to understand what made you leave. He stood up from his chair and offered you his hand. “Let’s talk somewhere more private.” He said, knowing his men were right there on the other side of the door. He took me to his room down the hall, dismissing anyone who was in the area. He closed and locked the door behind you both and continued where you left off.

“Chanyeol… Why did you need to check up on me? I left you one last text saying it was over, but you still went out of your way to find out what I was up to.”

He thought to himself, trying to come up with a good answer but the truth prevailed. “Because I couldn’t stop thinking about you. When we were together, I’d leave for work, I knew you were at home waiting for me and then one day, you weren’t. I didn’t have the sense of security that you would always be there. I had one of my associates follow you because that’s the only way I felt close to you.”

“That’s just it. I’m only around when I feel like I should be. I fight for things worth fighting for and I didn’t feel needed anymore. I just assumed you fell out of love.”

Chanyeol was clearly pained by your words. “Y/n, I can’t fall out of something I never knew I had. You were the first woman I’ve been with who actually said you loved me. But I just don’t know how to love you back.”

“Yes, you do. Or at least you did. When you and I first met, you were genuine and attentive. Those first several months were proof that you have the capability. You just can’t follow through.” You explained.

He sat on the edge of his bed, smiling to himself, shaking his head. “You have me all figured out and yet I’m surprised by you every single day.”

You walked closer and stood in front of him. “You’re more predictable than you think. You can’t just love someone immediately, you have to fall in love with them.” You lifted his chin, brushed the hair away from his face and peered down into his warm brown eyes.

“Can you teach me?” He asked. He was slowly returning back to the man who stole your heart a year ago. The one who would lie awake at night with you,  placing soft kisses on your face. You cupped his cheeks and nodded, accepting his proposal.

“For starters, you’re very good at dominant, rough fucking. But you need to learn how to make love.” His eyes lit up as you spoke. “It’s about intimacy. You have to really know who you're climbing into bed with. Which is why I know you’ll fall to pieces… if I kiss you… right here.” Your lips pressed to his neck, just below his earlobe. Chanyeol sighed, relaxing his muscles. “See? You have to know exactly where to touch…” Your hands moved up his chest, unbuttoning his shirt and pushing the material out of the way. “And kiss…” Your lips continued down to his bare collar bones, leaving your mark on the sensitive skin.

“Your turn.” You straddled his hips, allowing his hands and lips to roam wherever.

His skilled hands had you both naked in seconds. He laid you out on the bed, kissing all over your chest. He pulled out his cock, stroking up and down your slit.

“Mmm~ Just like that, baby. Feel how wet I am for you. “ You purred.

Unable to take another minute of teasing, Chanyeol slid into you slowly, savoring your warm channel. You stretched around him, clinging to his strong back as he eased into you. Rather than pounding into you, Chanyeol glided in and out of you at the perfect pace. He held your leg up high, finding just the right angle to hit your g-spot with each thrust. He watched you arch beneath him and smirked. He knew just what to do to get you to your climax.

“C-Chanyeol. Baby, I’m so close.”

“Not yet. I want you to cum with me.” He thrusted a few more times until he arrived at the edge of his orgasm with you. Simotaniusly, you called out each others names in ecstasy. “Fuck, y/n! Oh, god. I love you...I love you so. Damn. much.”

After cooling down, Chanyeol’s confession still stuck with you, making the smile on your face widen. The romantic inside him was still alive and well. No matter how much he denies it, he’ll always have that part of him who is completely head over heels for you.

“So, does this mean you’ll come back?” He asked.

“Yes, but there are conditions.” You replied. “First, I’m not going to be some whithering housewife. I have a career and I’m not quitting anytime soon.”

“Agreed.” He said.

“Second, You really need to make an effort. I can’t keep leaving for you to realize that you want to be with me. I want to know that you love me as much as I love you.”

“...Agreed. I’m not losing you again. I had to pay my associate double to follow you around and he failed.”

You laughed and him and playfully slapped his chest. Chanyeol pulled you in close and ran his fingers through your hair gently, giving you a few kisses just like he did before. Only this time, his love didn’t have an expiration date.

THE END

[nayutai]

5 | Bulletproof

⤖ Pairing: OT7 x OC

⤖ Genre: light angst

⤖ Summary: Laila fights back against the powers that be

⤖ Warnings: implied and descriptive violence (it’s just a sparring match), foul language, mentions of death and deception, light sexual content

⤖ Word Count: 2.405

⤖ A/N: Things are starting to happen!

Laila’s hands curl into tight fists in her lap when Yoongi brings up several pictures of their new target. She has to force herself not to focus on the rage threatening to overcome her senses so she can focus on the words coming out of Yoongi’s mouth. In his research, Yoongi was able to discover that Cobra had blown the underground scene quite suddenly. It had been hard to track down people with any useful information about the events surrounding her disappearance but a former general that had refused to work under Minseok had only been too happy to talk. It was really all he could do considering that Minseok had tried unsuccessfully to get rid of the Cobra loyalist. He’d been confined to a wheelchair for the past two decades after a bullet had left him a quadriplegic.

His name is Jisoo and he had quite a lot to say. According to his intel, Cobra had simply told Minseok not to run her empire into the ground, wishing him luck before walking out the door for the last time. Jisoo had been floored. Her resignation had come seemingly out of nowhere. It was when she’d lovingly touched her belly after he’d followed her out into the hallway that he realized why she was getting out. Cobra had considered him one of her most trusted confidants and had told him long ago that were she to ever become a mother she’d leave and never come back. She didn’t want to raise a kid in this life.

Tears rise in Laila’s eyes for the second time as a single picture of her mother appears across several of Yoongi’s monitors. It’s grainy but a daughter knows. She looks like she’s on a job. Gun in hand. It’s the only known picture of Cobra in action.

Namjoon wordlessly slides a box of tissues in Laila’s direction. She doesn’t protest when Jungkook softly rubs her knee a few times before retracting his hand. Yoongi senses that she’s the type who doesn’t like to dwell on sad emotions so he keeps talking to give her something else to focus on.

“According to Jisoo, your mom and uncle had been estranged for quite some time before she left. He remembered that Minseok had tried several times to find your uncle but the 90s was a rough time for people like us and he had bigger fish to fry.” Yoongi produces several news articles detailing the violence and chaos that had plagued the city back then. A few of them feature pictures of burning warehouses and even the aftermath of what looks like a deadly shootout at the docks.

“So what you’re saying is that my uncle sold my mom out to this Minseok guy? Is that what I’m hearing” If she knew what hole her uncle ended up at the bottom of, Laila would gladly spit on his makeshift grave. Her mother had extended an olive branch to him and he’d set it on fire.  

“Essentially.” Yoongi answers casually.

“I’m glad he’s dead but I hate that I’m not the reason.” Laila’s fists clench and unclench as she tries to stay focused.

Her mind drifts back to all the Friday afternoons her mom had spent at the small café near their house. The memory almost feels foreign like she’s watching a movie about someone else’s life. She’d always asked why she chose to sit in some hippie dippy café every week but her mother had always been tight lipped about her reasons just like she was on why she insisted on having a daughter trained in three different martial arts and advanced weaponry. Laila had known that wasn’t normal but saying no to her was a surefire way to get cursed out in one of the three languages her mother had been fluent in.

Laila feels a twinge of pain at how happy her mom had been the day she died. She’d said that that day was special. That whatever she’d been waiting on at that café was finally going to come to fruition. If it hadn't been for the fact that she'd had an important exam that day, Laila's parents would've pulled her out of school early to go with them.

“Well, I think that’s enough debriefing for today. Yoongi will get you copies of everything for you to obsess over later. I need a nap.” Seokjin sighs at the satisfying crack of his bones when he stretches over the back of the chair he’s perched on.

“Unfortunately for you though, Hobi here  is our logistics man so-” He doesn’t even get to finish his sentence as Hoseok and Laila immediately start voicing their distaste at the implication of what Seokjin was about to say. The leader shuts them both down with a bellowed command. Hoseok falls silent but Laila is having none of it.  

“Oh, stuff it, you bastard. Your little groupies here might be scared of you but I’m not and I’m not working with him.” The room goes eerily silent as Seokjin and Laila stare each other down. No one present has ever seen anyone directly challenge their boss this way and live to tell about it.

“Watch your tone, Song.” Seokjin practically growls through his teeth, rising to his full height to stare down at the insolent woman across from him. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s being disrespected in front of his people.

“Watch your back, Kim.” Not one to let a man try to intimidate her, Laila stands toe to toe with Seokjin. Jimin shifts subtly at the blatant threat she’s just spat at his older brother. His movement doesn’t go unnoticed in the slightest. “Move again and that’s your ass, Park.” Her eyes don’t stray from Seokjin’s face once and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a bit impressed.

“How about we all call it a day and try this again tomorrow when we’re calmer?” Namjoon, ever the level headed negotiator, steps between Laila and Seokjin. His eyes flit quickly between the two of them looking for any signs of rationality and understanding.

“Fine but I’m still not working that closely with someone who tried to have me killed. I’ll go after Minseok myself before I do that.”

“Go ahead. You’ll only get yourself killed and then I’ll finally get what I paid for.” Laila catches everyone off guard when she pivots on her heel to slam her fist into Hoseok’s face faster than anyone can make a move to stop her. The force of the hit sends him flying off of the stool he’d been perched on.

The room erupts as Jungkook pushes Laila into a corner, using his body to shield her from Hoseok who has rebounded from the punch to continue what she started. Jimin, Taehyung, And Namjoon are just barely holding him back while Laila adds fuel to the fire by flipping him off and sticking her tongue out at him teasingly. Yoongi grabs a beer from the mini fridge under his work table and watches the whole scene unfold in amazement. He hasn’t been this entertained in a while.  

“You might want to get some ice for that eye, Hoseokie. It looks like it’s swelling.” Laila coos as Hoseok is finally wrestled out of the room. Jungkook’s shoulders tense up a little more when she pats her hands against a rib cage. “Alright big guy I appreciate what you were trying to do, but you can move now.”

“Oh, yeah sorry.” Jungkook shuffles to the right to let her out of the corner.

“I don’t appreciate you fucking Hoseok’s eye up like that.” Jin doesn’t give Laila even half a chance to interrupt him which she has her mouth open to do. “Working with Hoseok is unavoidable because he’s the best strategist we have. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you two to be around each other right now though so we’ll start with battle training instead. I’m not about to send you into a war zone without knowing what you’re capable of.”

“Yes, sir.” Laila gives Jin a mock salute and a cocky smile. “Can I go now or do you want to scold me some more, headmaster?”

“Please get out of my sight.” Jin maintains his exasperated façade but hearing Laila speak to him so formally - even in such an obviously mocking manner - makes his blood rapidly flow south. “Jimin will contact you about your training.”

***

Two days of radio silence go by before Laila hears anything from Jimin. She meets him at the location of his choosing per the singular text message she’d received. It’s a rundown looking building in the warehouse district that looks like it should’ve been condemned a long time ago but Laila has long since learned that looks can be deceiving.

She’s not surprised to find a renovated interior. The air is tinged with the scent of sweat. Her eyes wander around the room taking in the various types of workout apparatus arranged around the spacious area. The room would appear to be empty but Laila can feel a set of eyes on her. She’s almost certain that it’s Jimin, but whoever it is has decided to stay hidden for a reason so she drops her bag on the floor next to the regulation-sized boxing ring that takes up a large portion of the room.

Jimin watches from the shadows of the second floor balcony as Laila hops into the ring. His breath hitches despite his best efforts to remain neutral when she sheds her tank top, revealing the crimson sports bra underneath. Even from so high up, the swell of her breasts is as clear as day. He can’t deny that he’s attracted to her on a physical level but business and pleasure never mix well. That doesn’t stop him from appreciating the view as he watches the shapely woman below him prime her muscles for the ringer he’s about to run her through.

“Jimin, come play with me.” Laila taunts from the boxing ring as she moves into the downward dog position. Jimin's boyishly good looks had always stood out to her the most when she was going through all of the surveillance pictures her uncle had of the various members plastered around his apartment. The oldest Busan member looked like a walking meal with his sleek but muscular physique and Laila always did love to play with her food.

The sound of light footsteps coming towards her shortly after her little stunt aren’t surprising in the slightest. Men are predictable creatures after all. He’s dressed simply in a white shirt, black jeans, and a pair of sneakers. Not exactly what she’d expect someone doing combat training to wear but he looks delectable.

Jimin makes a slow appraising circle around her, whistling appreciatively at the sight of her ass in her leggings. Laila rolls her eyes at his horn dog antics and that’s when he strikes. She’s admittedly caught off guard by him suddenly knocking her feet from beneath her but she recovers quickly.

“What the fuck!” She yells in a fit of rage. She wants to tie him to the rafters by the ends of his hair for that little trick.

“Minseok’s guys aren’t going to ask for permission to try to kill you so why should I? Always be ready.” Laila snorts sarcastically but readies herself nevertheless. Play time is over. Jimin may have gotten the drop on her this time but she won't let him do it again.

She twists, bringing her foot up towards Jimin’s pretty face. He neatly dodges and moves to counter while she’s off balance but instead he finds himself ducking the fist coming full speed at his face as she completes her turn. He notes the quickness with which she follows one move up with another. They dance around each other in an almost graceful fashion. Both of them doing their best to gain the upper hand. Laila smiles internally at the obvious frustration leaking through into Jimin's movements. It's clear to her that he didn't expect for her to be such a fierce opponent and she plans to make him pay dearly for that mistake. A jarring hit to her shoulder cements the idea in her brain as she does her best to shake away the pain of the blow. No more games.

Sweat drips down the back of Jimin's neck as he grunts in exertion. He's very comfortable in his own masculinity and his identity as a man but there's still a tiny part of him that doesn't relish the idea of being bested by a woman with a quarter of his muscle mass. What had started as a simple sparring match to gauge Laila's skill has become an all out war to come out on top. She leaves herself open for the kill and Jimin lunges; his tunnel vision not allowing him to see it for the trap that it is.

Laila uses his own momentum to take him down, straddling his waist and pinning his shoulders to the mat as she leans down until her mouth is level with his ear. "I've never taken a life, Jimin." She whispers. The tip of her tongue slowly drags along the shell of his ear. She takes a second to delight in the shiver that rolls through him before she continues. "Don't make me change that so soon."

Despite the threatening nature of her words, Laila can feel an unmistakable hardness beginning to press against her core. Her eyes drift over Jimin's face while his own are firmly trained on the swell of her breasts. She's never met a man that found death threats sexually enticing but she reckons that there's a first time for everything. Her hips grind against his crotch teasingly, resulting in drawn out groan that ignites sparks in Laila's blood. Time to get up. She makes to do just that but Jimin lives up to his reputation of being quick on his feet, his hands shooting up to grab at her waist as he moves as if to flip her over.

"No!" She pushes his shoulders back down and completely removes herself from him. "I don’t fuck losers." Jimin is stunned for all of three seconds before a devilish smile splits his face in two.

"I'll make you eat those words right before I eat you out."

[scarletgardensrpg]

LIVING ♦ FORTY-FIVE ♦ ASCENDANCY

NIKOLAAS VAN HOUTEN is Head of the Ascendancy—commonly addressed as De Dominee by Undead members—and was Senior Advisor to Agostina for the first two years of the House's inception before stepping down. He is also a founding member of the infamous Red Room, where the fatal PM-GRNT 197 drug was first conceived. For his unapologetic and public involvement in this project, Nikolaas remains a controversial figure, especially among the living. Although he possesses the rare and coveted gift of resurrection, he avoids using his ability, preferring instead to work through Cecile.

BIOGRAPHY

tw: violent death, needles

This is how it starts. A bullet splits a woman's head in two outside Patisserie Chez Maitre Pierre, and her shopping bags fall to the ground, tipping over as children's books and clothing scatter across the pavement. She drops the cake, too, and it smears against the plastic casing, blood red velvet on black chocolate. The paramedics come and go, taking the body with them, but her bags are abandoned in the street, kicked aside by passing strangers. She lives in an apartment in Riquier, a stone's throw from Nice. They send someone, who pounds twice on the door with a closed fist and only hesitates for a moment when a boy answers, blonde and brown-eyed, not a day older than thirteen. He knows, because there had been thirteen birthday candles in Eva van Houten's coat pocket. Nikolaas, the man says, and it is not a question. He looks just like his mother. Something's happened. And just like that, the serene, open look on the boy's face begins to change.

- ❀ -

He was conceived against the counsel of every Moulin Rouge whore with a say in the matter. Pretty Mila had struck Eva across the face, red nails leaving lines, hard enough that she saw stars. Do you think he is your husband? She was on the brink of tears, but her expression bore nothing but cold rage. He will have you killed for the information you have stolen. If not him, his wife, de Dame. She is Queen of the Penoze. She will spare neither you or de klootzak. And Eva, in knowing this and more, had silently slipped out of her heels and wiped off her makeup. She placed a delicate hand to her stomach, which would begin to swell soon. By then, she'd be long gone from this place. Mila began to sob finally, but Eva felt warm. She felt sure. That spring, in a hospital in Rome, Nikolaas came into the world with a wail, no larger than a doll and twice as pretty. He was a dangerous, miraculous child, the love crime of a common whore and a lord of the underworld; a fugitive on the run the moment he was born. And loved, still. One year hiding in Italy, two in Germany, another six months in Thailand. Three and a half in the safehouse in Nice, hopefully longer. Eva ran the coordinates in her head over and over. She sang them softly to the tune of nursery rhymes, lulling her son to sleep.

Nikolaas and Eva; Eva and Nikolaas. His world began with her hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake, and ended with the sound of her laughter on the evening balcony. He had never felt embarrassed for it, had never felt compelled to earn the doggish approval of neighborhood boys by treating her poorly, as they treated their own mothers. All other things, after all, were temporary: the apartments they lived in, the cities and schools they rotated through every six months, the men who came and went; some kind, some cruel, none permanent. The kind ones, he ignored. The cruel ones, he broke his knuckles on their teeth. Eva always said: You deserve a father. Nikolaas always replied: I have you. His mother, beautiful as she was, carried with her a sadness Nikolaas could not understand. She was lonely, but enforced their rootless existence year and after. She slept fitfully and jumped at loud noises. He knew better than to ask. Once, he had seen the puckered line that ran up along her abdomen, too high up to be a cesarean scar—as if someone had vivisected her and clumsily sewn her back up. He would grow up to look just like her: high cheekbones, straight nose, sun-silver hair. He acquired her love of books and silence, her intimate charisma, her academic wit. And the things he did not inherit from her—that needle of unfeeling darkness when he ought to have felt affection or love for someone other than Eva, that cruel thread of pleasure when he hit a classmate—he pushed down dutifully, deep where it would not be found. And so it festered within him, a slow night-falling in his soul while he won awards and played tennis and made Honor Roll, cloying and uncomfortable—growing larger and larger, until, after Eva died, it became unbearable at last. Something's happened, the police officer said. Nikolaas had found the papers the night before. They'd fought the morning she left. When they returned her coat to him, the wool was still spattered with blood and bits of dried cake. She had gone out and gotten the gifts as an apology.

After: an apartment of ghosts, the incessant whir of press outlets, the city of Nice at his back for the next ten years. Teachers and students alike either pitied him or adored him—usually both at once. Fatherless, motherless, and with nothing to his name but thirteen candles and a ruined coat, he became something of a tragic hero. Poor thing, so went the lamentation. Another victim of the Penoze. Another helpless child unjustly bereaved. Of course, he was also an adept actor: warm to the touch, willing to pose for photographers and sit in studios, bringing journalists to tears while the funds and donations rolled in like tidewater. And all the while, the first tendrils of a gestating obsession gripped him: something to ease the agony of waking in the middle of the night to the sound of a skull splitting, sometimes Eva's and sometimes his, the smell of rotten cake, the nonsensical pulse of a ghost scar on his abdomen, sheet after sheet of stolen papers—papers that had costed Eva her life. His mother had not been killed. She'd been hunted. Death, death, death. It was all he thought about. At Johns Hopkins, at Harvard. Gripping Agostina's hand for the first time in an empty classroom. How to outrun it. How to survive it. In Palestrina at midnight, listening to the sound of Thalia's velvet voice, saying, We never wanted you, just your drug mule of a mother. And still, death. He thought about the shape of it as he squeezed the syringe into Cecile's neck, then his own, the pain immediate. It lingered in the air as he stood in her and Evander's empty cell, the metal bars bent, his creatures gone to set fire to the world. And when he returned, at last, to bury the ruins of Amsterdam beneath a new order, he thought of Death once more. How to conquer it. How to master it.

CONNECTIONS

AGOSTINA – MIRROR, MIRROR.  She was no lamb. He had seen it in her the moment they shook hands and exchanged names and vices: the deceivingly delicate curve of her steady mouth, the lush dark of her infinite gaze, the edged grace with which she commanded lecture halls and courtrooms—and later, entire cities. In Agostina, Nikolaas found a place to put down his dreams. She was someone to share with, when he had not thought sharing was possible. She was intelligent, unafraid, his. For who else but him had she bared her true face to? Who else but him was privy to her spider-web mind, had indulged in the dark waters of their shared ambitions? Life after life. Deathless death. Together, they had destroyed a world, and raised it once more from the ashes. Whatever strange, bleeding thing bloomed between them in the wake of those rituals, it was intimate. Rare. Pure. Nikolaas considers their falling out over No. 200 and subsequent separation his biggest failure. Up until then, she had remained his unconstestable ally—an unquestioned friend and irreplaceable life partner. Almost naively, he had not thought it possible for the two fo them to disagree. But in the end, Agostina had shaken her head and refused to venture deeper, go darker. He does not disagree, that Agostina looks radiant under the sun: a leader among lambs, herding her flock toward salvation. But deep down, he is sure she would look even lovelier among the wolves. At his side. Nikolaas may have been the one to walk away, but it was Agostina who refused to follow. 

CECILE – LITTLE MONSTER. If there were a God, Cecile would have bitten his wrist. If God were a beast, she would have had his throat torn out and his body tossed at Nikolaas' feet—and they would have both understood it to be a gift. Fifteen years ago, when she entered the Red Room as a test subject, she did so with all the flagrant, unwavering arrogance of a true American. They wound up developed a strange friendship over the years: steady Doctor and willing patient, two dark things who could never quite look away each time something died in a cage. She had egged him on and dragged him into deeper, more depraved depths than either could imagine on their own—daring him to find a place she could not follow him to. You aren't going to escape? He had asked, if only to watch her face twist in amusement. This is my sanctuary, she purred. Out there is where I'm shackled like a dog. So he had killed her, and freed her, and damned her, and saved her. She had done the same for him. When the worst of the chemicals subsided, she awoke: Undead and terrible, his first and only creation. Somehow, he knew there would be no one else after her. They are tied together forever, by flesh and blood—and perhaps this is why Cecile will always find him, again and again: shivering together on the laboratory floor, in Warsaw at the end of the world, in Amsterdam at the start of it. When they had agreed to perform the act, two syringes in Nikolaas' coat pocket, he had said to her: Don't be afraid. Every transformation requires the death of its predecessor. To this, he still remembers the way she had tipped her head back and laughed. That rich, terrifying sound. Then, Doctor, I am a woman who has died a hundred times over.  

LUANA & MAURICE – COME ASTRAY, LITTLE LAMBS. He likes them. They hate him, of course, but their hatred is grown from a dishonest seed—they hate him for a crime he did not commit, and see only a monster among monsters when they look to him. The irony is not lost on Nikolaas: that the royal twins, upon their return, learn immediately to eat from the hand that ruined them and snarl at the one that saved them. He sees Agostina's bloody signature written all across this devil's deal. It's a clever political play on her part, Nikolaas can admit; something that will guarentee the twins' eventual alliance to her, provided the truth of the family massacre never comes out. Regardless, Nikolaas is not concerned; just as all blooms grow toward the sun, the Prince and Princess, being clever children, will grope their way through the darkness and eventually come out with the horrible, funny truth. He feels no need to personally reveal this crucial information to them either, as the discovery will be sure to do greater damage if they can find out on their own. As such, he will only gently nudge them closer, disincline them to partake in blind obedience, and encourage them to see the ugly light. While Luana remains steadfast in her condemnation of the Undead, Nikolaas sees something more hopeful in the boy, Maurice—his resolve wavering in the wake of Dimitri's most hospital gestures, his curiosity rising to defeaning volumes with every night he spends racing with Nikolaas' garden of monsters.  

OPEN ♦ FC: MADS MIKKELSEN