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thedaythatwas · 4 months ago

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How to be Alone

Summary: Goro Akechi has 30 days to vacate his apartment. If only moving on were half as easy as moving out.

CW: alcohol, emetophobia, run-of-the-mill violent thoughts from Akechi, and more repression than you could possibly fathom

This is just a little snippet of a post-canon Akechi character study I've been working on! I want to share it here on tumblr as a standalone oneshot. Please don't expect any tension to be resolved <333 because that's not happening here <333

Big thank you to my lovely betas, lambsear (ao3), @cardiganbear, and @cloudysonder. Another massive thanks to @chaoticconstellation – thank you for all of the inspo and motivation (and for making me aware that apartments that evil-looking exist!)

House Hunting (or, I'm not hung up on you anymore, but here's why I hung up)

Shopping for apartments online was hell.

Akechi was no stranger to feelings of mind-numbing rage. Even so, there was something about the website he was using to search for a new living space that made him particularly angry, even by his own standards. His cursor drifted across its screen, its interface lagged, and despite his perfect internet connection, it seemed as though every thirty seconds the damn thing refreshed itself.

Akechi wasn’t sure where exactly he was looking to live; his requirements for a new place were the vague but apt key terms, ‘Tokyo,’ ‘cheap,’ and ‘studio.’ Unfortunately, his criteria seemed to be mutually exclusive. A room of his own would cost an arm and a leg; a room with a roommate or two would take a doable (albeit still exorbitant) chunk from his savings. It was tragic, really, that Akechi would be at risk of causing grievous bodily harm to himself and others if he were forced to share a living space. Forking over cash he didn’t have was quite literally his only option.

Akechi might have been able to search out some middle ground between striking gold beneath the streets of Kichijoji and committing another homicide if he had the luxury of time to plan his move. He had always been scrappy, even if he was seldom lucky.

Time, however, was something that Akechi didn’t have. That, of course, had to do with the circumstances that had pushed him to bearing the indignities of online apartment hunting in the first place.

On February 3rd, Akechi had woken up in his bed. This was strange for a number of reasons. One: he didn’t make a habit of waking up when his bedside clock brightly proclaimed it to be 8:37pm.

Two: Goro Akechi was supposed to be dead.

And, joy of all joys, he was not. Upon registering this unfortunate new development in the saga of misfortunes that was his existence, Akechi had rolled over, buried his head in his pillow, and screamed. When soreness in his throat informed him that screaming was no longer a viable way to spend his time, he had walked to his near-empty kitchen and grabbed the frilly bottle of expensive single malt scotch that Shido had given him the day he had reported to his office to confirm Wakaba Ishikki’s death.

Akechi had been saving the bottle for the day he won.

Well. Cheers to that one.

He had sat down on the linoleum tile floor and taken a large swig out of the bottle. Presumably, he’d repeated the act a number of times, because the next morning he’d woken up in his bed – again, ironically, with no memory of how he’d arrived there – and promptly thrown up on himself.

He’d tossed his unlucky shirt in the garbage, along with the bottle he’d found lying knocked over and bone dry on the kitchen floor. He really had always hated it.

After spending several days lying in his bed, only leaving it to periodically feed himself one of the instant ramen packets he stockpiled in the one cabinet in his kitchen he actively used, Akechi had washed his sheets and moved on.

What else could he do?

He had contacted Sae Niijima first, because while he had been spending several days laying horizontal in a dark room, adding an abstract collage of broth splatters to his sweatpants and trying to convince himself that any of his recent decisions actually mattered, Akira Kurusu was probably behind bars giving testimony that would damn Shido and potentially put himself away for good in the process.

And like hell was he going to let Joker one-up him by rotting away in jail while Akechi – clearly, the most deserving party in this scenario on both counts – walked free.

As soon as he’d heard the click of his phone connecting to Sae’s, Akechi had come in guns blazing announcing his intent to march down to the police station and confess to everything he’d done. He would gladly go down with Shido’s ship if it meant he could anchor him well and truly to rock bottom.

The elder Niijima sister had rolled shockingly well with Akechi’s punches. After expressing mild surprise that he was alive, Sae had efficiently talked him off his ledge.

“Do you want Shido to be locked away for life? If your answer is yes, I suggest you stay well away from my case. I have a strategy, and it will be much less effective if I have to account for the testimony of a magical teenage assassin confessing to cognitively killing some of Japan’s most powerful men just as they’ve begun to take me seriously.”

Akechi had never answered her question, because Akechi didn’t want Shido to be locked away. Not like this, anyway. What he had wanted hadn’t involved Kurusu, and yet, here Kurusu was in the center of it all, robbing Akechi of his chance to make Shido’s fall really hurt.

Still, Akechi had come to terms with the fact that what he wanted and what he would get were two very different things in regards to the fate of Masayoshi Shido, and to this brave new world where Akechi was meant to be long dead.

What he had done was take a deep breath, swallow down his very reasonable retorts – he had at least five – and ask about Kurusu.

His inquiry was fruitful, if aggravating. Akechi hadn’t been naive enough to expect that any update on Kurusu wouldn’t be aggravating.

Per Sae, it wouldn’t be long until Kurusu was released from juvenile detention (implied: so long as Akechi didn’t butt in). Apparently, his extended posse had banded together, and Sae doubted it would be more than a few weeks before he was out. He was actually on track to have his criminal record completely overturned.

Kurusu was relying on the power of friendship to not only avoid a life sentence, but to completely exonerate himself from the year he had spent galavanting around the Metaverse, stealing hearts and minds and Akechi’s life’s work, too. One might say that Akechi was less than enthused. Mostly, because he was near certain that using the force of true love to outrun his mistakes would actually work for Kurusu, because he was Kurusu, and of fucking course it could.

He hadn’t told Sae as much, but he sensed she’d intuited his frustration from his chorus of ‘...I see,’ ‘...I see,’ ‘...I see,’ through the phone, each repetition darker than the last.

With that sorted, Akechi had told Sae in no uncertain terms that she was not to tell Kurusu or any of the other Phantom Thieves that he was alive under any circumstances. She said that she would respect his wishes. She hadn’t asked any follow up questions. It was a refreshing change of pace from the back and forth that talking to the rest of Kurusu’s loyal followers always seemed to entail.

Then again, this was Sae. She had been a fixture in his life long before she had become a mainstay in Kurusu’s.

That little detail out of the way, Akechi had been prepared to hang up. Before he could, Sae had invited him to coffee. Bewildered, Akechi had accepted.

“You are aware, I presume, that I’ve killed more people than the number of cases you’ve litigated over the course of your entire career, aren’t you?” Akechi had said as soon as he had slid into the stiffly upholstered booth across from Sae at the too cold, overly gray café where they had agreed to meet the following day. “Including among them Wakaba Isshiki and Kunikazu Okumura.”

Sae had pulled her credit card out of her sleek handbag and rapped it on the table between them.

“I am. Could you give me your order Akechi-kun? Drinks are on me today.”

Akechi had ordered a black drip coffee – far from the best he’d ever had – and the two of them had talked about his future, not his past.

Sae told Akechi that she would be willing to hire him as a personal assistant. She couldn’t swing him a position interning in the public prosecutor’s office; it went without saying that Akechi ought to stay as far away as possible from any branch of law enforcement for the foreseeable future. Sure, very few people recognized him nowadays – the demiurge had fallen and taken Shido’s influence with it, and Akechi had been out of the public eye for a sufficient number of news cycles for even his most avid fans to lose interest – but it seemed unwise to tempt fate.

They both knew that most of Shido’s conspiracy was still at large. As repentant as their former leader was, his sentiments were not widely shared. Shido had done more damage than a single change of heart could fix.

All this to say, Akechi would be keeping a low profile. Not that he would have acted otherwise, regardless of who might want him imprisoned, or who might want him dead.

Akechi was, quite frankly, tired.

His employment would hinge on agreeing to take his high school equivalency and college entrance exams before the next university matriculation cycle. Akechi had, more or less, finished his final year of high school. Unfortunately, the less in that statement meant that he had never actually graduated. Still, he could easily pass a high school equivalency exam – an inconvenience, but a bureaucratic necessity, and hardly an insurmountable one. Before his life had gone to shit, he had been on track to get top marks on his entrance exams. It wouldn’t be difficult to keep himself versed in the material he needed to know in order to pass with flying colors.

He didn’t have strong feelings for or against Sae’s vision for his future. Akechi had been slated to die long before he had shot shut the bulkhead door on his father’s ship. He had gone to cram school because it was what the detective prince was supposed to do, and he had excelled at it because the world had told him that he couldn’t. He wasn’t like Makoto Niijima, with her good marks and bright future.

Sae would pay him for doing this, though. More, she had that earnest look in her eyes behind the stoic contours of her face that suggested she really thought she was doing what was best for him.

Akechi had agreed to her terms.

Besides, he’d always been told that college wasn’t in the cards for him. The idea of proving those people wrong lit something up inside him that he hadn’t realized had been smothered until then.

Akechi would work for Sae on weekdays and study on weekends. She would check in with him once a week to confirm that he was indeed making progress on his personal studies and to assign him new memos and forms to copy edit. So long as he was on track, she would pay him another week.

It had all sounded so easy. Too easy. Akechi needed to ask.

“Why?”

Sae had taken a long sip of her cappuccino. “Why what?”

“You know what.” Akechi had crossed his arms, his mouth drawn in a hard line, “Why this?”

Sae had set her cup down onto her saucer without so much as an audible clink. “Is it really so difficult to believe that I’d want to help you?”

“You pity me.” He’d said it like a fact, because it was a fact, and he didn’t take kindly to it.

Sae hadn’t looked surprised to hear Akechi’s words. She raised her eyebrows.

“No, I don’t. And I’m not absolving you, either. You made choices that hurt people, and you need to face consequences for that. But, Akechi-kun…”

Sae paused, as if weighing her next words on her tongue. “Goro. You were sixteen.”

Akechi didn’t know which part of her addendum offended him most: Sae’s use of his given name – he’d bristled, he couldn’t remember how long it had been since someone had been presumptuous enough to call him Goro – or her implication that he hadn’t known exactly what he was doing back when he first approached Shido.

She hadn’t seen how proud he had been when Shido handed him his first pistol. She hadn’t been there each time he’d pulled its trigger. Akechi had stopped feeling anything about his hits after he’d downed a handful of targets. Through it all, he’d never felt remorse. He’d even smiled, the first time.

That smile hadn’t lasted, of course. It had fallen right along with Ishikki. Still, everyone knows that it’s your first reaction to a thing that really counts.

Her eyes on his were resolute, as if she were daring him to object. She wasn’t budging.

Sae had sounded awfully confident for someone who had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

Akechi remembered their long days at the police station and the late night dinners Sae would treat him to after, when he’d watch as she scarfed down cheap conveyor belt sushi and let her dignified mask slip like the rice that fell from her chopsticks to her perfectly starched dress shirt. He remembered their constant shop-talk that always seemed to border on something more personal.

Sae knew what it was like to prove yourself in a world that wanted to see you fail. He remembered watching her come undone in October, how he almost felt bad as he watched her slip further away from her sister, and from him.

Gripping his mug hard enough to put its handle in peril, Akechi had bitten back the urge to inform Sae that he was eighteen years old now, and had done very bad things continuously from age sixteen through now, thank you very much. He was suddenly aware of exactly how juvenile it would sound if he did.

He decided that Sae could call him what she wanted. ‘Goro’ didn’t feel wrong, he supposed. It just felt new.

She was wrong about him, but he had let her continue without correction.

“You did things that were unforgivable. What our system did to you was unforgivable.” She took a sip of her cappuccino. The action was smug, somehow, like she knew just how much she’d gotten away with when Akechi kept his silence. At least she was self-aware. “Masayoshi Shido is being brought to justice, and Kurusu-kun isn’t facing anything that he can’t handle. This will be over soon.”

Akechi could hardly believe that. While he had faith in Sae’s legal prowess, Shido was just one head of a veritable hydra of corruption and intrigue. Rooting out his conspiracy would air out Japan’s dirty laundry in a way that he doubted the powerful men who soiled it would permit. It would be dangerous business to try.

He couldn’t fathom that Shido was a problem that had an imminent expiration date. He was supposed to be Akechi’s Gordian knot. Shido was his arms race, his mutually assured destruction. Unraveling him couldn’t possibly be so simple, and it couldn’t possibly be done without Akechi.

Could it?

Where the hell did that leave him?

Of course, Sae’s words were meant to be encouraging, even if Akechi could actively feel his vision tunneling and his pulse jackhammering up. He clamped that feeling down and shoved it somewhere to sort through later – or never – as Sae pushed on.

“I want you to move forward. I don’t see any reason for you not to. That’s where you’ll find justice.”

It all sounded so scripted. Akechi wondered how many times she had practiced her little speech in the mirror after she’d drafted it on her legal pad. He knew it was her standard practice for high stakes days in court. Sae never let slip that she was nervous, but that didn’t mean she never was.

While Akechi was almost flattered that she considered him worth a rehearsal or two, her dedication had been proving to be rather inconvenient that day. A Sae who had decided she needed to win seldom lost. The Phantom Thieves had helped her reorient her sense of justice towards good ends, but there was no version of Sae who wasn’t as stubborn as the one they’d encountered in her casino.

Fortunately, so was Akechi.

“I’ve earned execution ten times over.”

He barely managed to keep his words level as he forced them out. It was vexing that he needed to remind the woman sitting across from him – a public prosecutor with one of the most gleaming case records Tokyo had seen in recent memory – that per the word of her own law, he deserved to die.

She tucked a wayward strand of hair neatly behind her ear and clasped her hands together on the tabletop between them.

“And I’m telling you that executing you doesn’t help anyone,” she hadn’t raised her voice, but Akechi could hear it harden with authority, “Learn to be a better person. You still have plenty of time to grow. Don’t forfeit this opportunity that you’ve been given to do that.”

He scoffed. “And if I can’t?”

“Then don’t. But I think you can.”

She had said it without hesitation, like she really believed it. At that realization, Akechi let out a laugh that bordered on a snort, the kind he never would have allowed to slip through his throat when Sae had known him as someone else.

“You’re all insane.”

She hadn’t seemed surprised by his outburst as she took a long drink from her cup. As she swallowed, clearly unperturbed, Akechi found himself wondering if he’d given her too little credit, or himself too much. Probably both.

Sae’s lip quirked up. “Maybe. But I’ve realized that you need to be a little insane to believe you can see the world change for the better. Your teammates helped me learn that.”

Akechi’s hackles raised. “They are not my teammates.”

“Oh really?” She set her cup down onto her saucer, “I think Kurusu-kun would disagree.”

That half-smile of hers persisted, like she thought she knew something he didn’t. “You know, he asked about you earlier this week. He seemed riled up. I think he would want to know that you’re alive.”

It didn’t even take eyes to notice Akira Kurusu’s bleeding-heart obsession with who he thought Akechi was. It practically radiated off of him in waves you could touch, like he was some sort of sad magnet for homicidal lost causes. Sae wasn’t telling Akechi anything he couldn’t have reasonably inferred, knowing what he did about Kurusu.

If Sae said that Kurusu was ‘riled up,’ he knew that Kurusu must have been near hysterics. Well, per the yardstick of Kurusu’s typical emoting capacity. He could envision the way Kurusu’s lips had probably gotten all drawn, the way they tended to when he tried to hide that he was feeling more than he let on.

Kurusu didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve, but he wasn’t impossible to read if you knew what you were looking to find. His brow had probably furrowed, his fists had probably clenched, and his eyes had probably gone just short of misty.

Akechi wasn’t sure how he felt about that mental image.

“Well, we can’t always get what we want, now can we?”

“I understand, Goro,” Sae stared him dead in the eye as she said his given name, leaving Akechi no option but to immediately take a good long drink of burnt coffee from his mug. “But consider it for me, won’t you? I don’t think that it would be a bad idea for you to build a support network for yourself.”

Akechi cursed to himself. He should have known that she wouldn’t let this topic lie so easily.

Akechi grit his teeth. “I don’t think Sakura or Okumura would take kindly to seeing me.”

“Then don’t see them.” She said it matter of fact, like it was that easy. “But, for the record, I think that Kurusu-kun would.”

Of course Kurusu would. Even a child who couldn’t add two and two could piece together that Akira Kurusu would probably lop off a limb to have been in that booth with them that day. The idiot had wished Akechi back into existence and into his life, and he would again if he could.

That was why he couldn’t know that Akechi was alive.

Well, it accounted for half the issue.

The other half rested on the fact that Kurusu had been the first thing to cross Akechi’s mind in that half second that passed between realizing he was alive and resolving to scream about it. He hadn’t had the decency to fully leave Akechi’s thoughts ever since, with the exception of the several hours he had spent blackout drunk.

Somehow, that last bit was less than reassuring.

Even worse, none of it was exactly new.

The long and short of it was that Akechi needed to get himself clean, and he couldn’t very well do that if Kurusu came chasing after him.

And so, he made his words as sharp as he could muster. “I think that Kurusu-kun should get a grip and realize that I very sincerely tried to murder him.”

Sae stared him down. He was under no illusions – this was an interrogation. It was a surprise when her gaze softened.

She hummed. “Do you regret it?”

And wasn’t that a loaded question?

He regretted that it had all amounted to nothing. He regretted that Shido had played him for a fool, and that on the evening of November 20th, he’d gone home and damn near cracked open his bottle of Shido revenge scotch. He regretted that at some catastrophic point in the past year, besting Joker had become something bigger than besting his father, and that just as soon as Akechi had thought he’d managed it, the metal on metal scent of blood splattering onto the interrogation room’s table from Kurusu’s too-blank face became something he needed to forget.

Of course, he also regretted that he’d been tricked, and that he’d wasted several nights wide awake thinking about the way Kurusu had looked at him that night in the bathhouse, sweat on his brow and droplets of steam condensed on his irritatingly long lashes, like he had really wanted to be there with him, listening.

His brief brush with insomnia had cost Akechi twelve dollars in drugstore coffee, five dollars in sugar-free energy drinks, and at least three years of his life, if you accounted for the carcinogens that made up the latter. Akechi did.

At least he’d saved that bottle of scotch. It had gone to waste anyway, but it was more about the principle of the thing.

But he couldn’t very well explain any of that to Sae. So, Akechi had lied.

“No.”

“I see.” If Sae was disappointed in his answer, she didn’t show it. She gave him a nod, drummed her fingers on the table, and checked her watch. “Let me know if you change your mind. I’ll keep your existence to myself until you tell me to do otherwise.”

Sae had swallowed down the last of her drink, and that was that.

Since that day, his life had gone on. He spent his weekdays looking over Sae’s contracts and his weekends grinding out practice problems from study books. Sometimes he would work in his apartment. He’d draw open the blinds and spread his papers across his bed – he had a desk, but it was cramped, his chair was stiff, and he’d never really brought himself around to using the space as it was meant to be used.

Other days, Akechi camped out in cafés around the city. He operated under the assumption that any place that had the audacity to charge 700 yen for a barely passable latte must have presumed he would use said latte as an all-day pass to free wifi and a climate controlled workspace. Akechi felt vindicated in taking full advantage.

He found that the more tasks he had to fill his time, the less liable his mind was to wander.

Not that it was always easy. It had been hardest at first, when more mornings than not the was filled with the urge to lay under his comforter and rot through the day. He’d learned quickly that when that urge struck, it was best to call Sae and pick up an extra stack of whatever she could push off on him before her work day started. He would chip away at it during the daylight hours and catch up with his other tasks at night, a can of cold brew in one hand and a highlighter in the other.

He never slipped behind Sae’s expectations for him, because he was Goro Akechi, and he didn’t let himself lose if he could help it. Still, it wasn’t lost on him that he wasn’t supposed to be alive. Sue him if that got to him once in a while.

He hadn’t planned for any of this, and if he did anything besides move straight through it all, the shiny paint of productivity he’d slapped over his unplanned extension pack to living would slide right off. It would become obvious that there was little holding his life together besides spite, busywork, and a lawyer who had willfully decided she wouldn’t let him quit as her part-timer, or as anything else.

Thinking about that never did him any good, so he didn’t. Fortunately, Akechi was no stranger to doing what needed to be done first and wondering how on earth he had managed it after the fact.

Now, he needed to move forward. So he did.

That wasn’t to say his strategy always worked.

It tended to happen late at night, when Akechi didn’t have the energy to stop his thoughts from drifting to the subjects his wiser, more conscious self refused to engage.

Typically, that meant Joker. No. It always meant Joker. Shido, too, but it was infuriating, really, how even those thoughts tended to meander back around to Joker, too.

As Akechi had taken his post-hibernation shower months ago, his sheets in the wash and grease sloughing from his hair in the suds of overpriced shampoo, Akechi had come to a number of resolute conclusions about the state of his life. Namely, if he was going to continue to live it, he had a few non-negotiables.

To start, he would keep a wide berth from any news outlets covering the Shido trial – he was sure there would be more than a few. He’d find a way to get his hands on another, cheaper bottle of something high-proof. He would learn to use one kitchen appliance besides the microwave. The oven, maybe.

And, of course, he would keep himself far, far away from Akira Kurusu.

Akechi would have liked to think that his thoughts always seemed to land on Kurusu out of force of habit. After all, he’d spent months tracking his every move. He’d never quite learned to think like Kurusu – he doubted that anyone could – but Akechi certainly knew the timetables of the trains he took to get around town, the names of his managers at each of his (many) part-time jobs, and which vending machines he preferred to get his snacks from.

Had he strictly needed to collect so much information on the leader of the Phantom Thieves in the name of reconnaissance? Perhaps not. It wasn’t as though knowing that Kurusu routinely arrived at his station around three minutes before his scheduled train would actually give him an edge in battle.

(Akechi of the past had tried to posture that it might, but Akechi of the past was an idiot, and Akechi of the present could admit that.)

He had never been one to half-ass, though, and Kurusu had always been so interesting. His calendar protested his reprioritization, but there was nothing new or surprising about that. The detective prince’s life had been a scheduling impossibility, and Akechi had managed regardless. More than managed, really.

Tragically, ‘reconnaissance’ couldn’t account for the way Akechi’s vision tunneled around Kurusu. It couldn’t explain away the thoughts Kurusu always managed to coax out of his head and into speech.

So, no. Akechi wasn’t stupid enough to believe that his continued fixation on Akira Kurusu was ‘force of habit.’ It was something much more dangerous, and he couldn’t afford to allow himself to succumb to it. Not after everything.

If Akechi was going to live a life, that life would damn well be his own. He refused to live for anybody but himself, and that included Akira Kurusu.

Still, the version of Akechi that lay awake in his bed at 4am, strung out on caffeine, had been known to have other thoughts from time to time. When his eyes were bloodshot and jargon swirled on his ceiling, he thought back to the look on Kurusu’s face when he had caught his glove. Cocky – Joker always was — but something more behind that. Akechi could only describe it as the expression of a boy missing something he hadn’t yet lost.

It had taken him too long to realize that Kurusu had known exactly what the glove had meant from the moment it had been thrown. It had taken him even longer to realize that Kurusu had understood it better than Akechi had.

It was enough to make him want to tear Kurusu apart, nice and slow, piece by piece. It was almost enough to make him want to reach for his phone.

He didn’t, of course. There was a lot of power in ‘almost.’ It meant that he was in control.

It was easier during the day. Sae always had something to shrug off on him if he needed it.

Of course, there was also the pesky matter of his father.

That day at the café, Sae had mentioned that she’d spoken to him. Shido had said that he wouldn’t implicate Akechi in his trial. Apparently, he’d expressed regrets about his treatment of his son.

Akechi hadn’t asked her for more information. She had already said too much.

Once, there had been nothing Akechi wanted more than to hear his father drool out how big of a mistake it had been to leave him. Now, the thought of Shido feeling at all guilty, or heaven forbid, apologizing to him, made bile rise in the back of his throat.

Just one hit, and Akechi would want another. There would be nothing of him left. It was a trend, it seemed, that Akechi needed to learn when to keep well enough away from people he’d let spin him in circles.

Fortunately, he had always been a quick study.

Akechi hadn’t tried to contact him, and he and Sae hadn’t discussed Masayoshi Shido any further since.

Given his track record with all things luck and Shido related, Akechi really should have expected that decision to come back and bite him.

The rabid dog that was the universe’s refusal to let Akechi live his life in peace caught up to him one day in early June. Coming home from a coffee shop, mini-mart sushi in hand, he’d seen it.

He had thirty days to vacate his apartment, because of fucking course he did.

Akechi felt six years old again. Seeing the notice pasted to his apartment door, he may as well have been holding his mother’s hand. He felt it clench around his pudgy fingers tight enough to hurt. He knew that she didn’t mean it. He knew that she hadn’t meant to fall behind on rent, either. He knew that some nights at her club were lucrative, and that some mornings, she couldn’t find it in herself to get out of bed. Their income had never been stable, and neither had their address.

But his mother wasn’t there, she hadn’t been for a long time, and Akechi was the only one responsible for the little crescent-shaped indents in his palms as he stared at the paper on his door and tried to will it away with the sheer force of his – in his humble opinion – very justified righteous anger.

He’d called Sae immediately, right as soon as he’d ripped down the notice, gone inside, and poured himself a drink. Apparently, all of Shido’s hidden assets had finally been frozen. Even if he wanted to continue to pay Akechi’s rent, he couldn’t. Akechi hadn’t been affected until now because Shido had, prior to recent events, had his apartment bills set to auto-pay from one of his more clandestine bank accounts.

That was something that even now made the part of Akechi’s brain that had stayed young and poor recoil. To have so much cash that a transfer of that size could simply be counted on to go through every month, no risk of declining – from an auxiliary checking account – seemed almost gluttonous.

Well, the payment had finally bounced, it seemed. Nobody was untouchable. It would have been more gratifying if Akechi weren’t the one being left high and dry. He had hung up the phone and downed the last of his drink. His mediocre room-temperature sushi forgotten, he’d taken a seat on his floor, opened his laptop, and typed in a preliminary search for Tokyo-studio-cheap.

That brought him to now. It was remarkable, really, how his day had only managed to get worse and worse in the hour that had passed since then.

Staying in his current apartment simply wasn’t an option. Akechi had tucked money into his savings account during his time as the detective prince, of course, but even the sizable amount he had slowly accrued for himself over the last several years wouldn’t be able to cover more than a month or two of rent in the place Shido had picked out for him. It had a separate kitchen, living, and sleeping space, alongside a full bathroom. It was fully renovated and featured in-unit laundry. It even came with a parking spot (not that Akechi owned a car, could drive, or feasibly use his space in the garage in literally any capacity).

All of it had been an undeniable power play on Shido’s part. The place really was too much for him. It was a needless show of excess – an in-your-face sort of look what I can do for you, aren’t you scared to lose it?

Sure, Akechi could spend three years worth of residual earnings on thirty extra days in this place, but all it would do was buy him time, not to mention drain the last financial cushion he had left. He needed to put down a deposit on another place, after all. His bank account would be running on fumes after that, and rent at his new place would be due almost immediately.

Fuck. He’d almost forgotten his utilities. His phone bill. His Wi-Fi. He didn’t need to be a genius to know that any day now, those expenses would hit him too.

Shido would be burning in hell for a whole host of reasons – Akechi knew this, because he’d spent the last several years of his life passively looping his long, long list of them through his head like a rallying cry. It was always a solid hit that got his head where it needed to be to do whatever he needed to do. This newest slight was a tiny drop of water in the ocean of ways his father had wronged him.

Still. If there was any justice in the world, Akechi would be allowed to spit on his father during his fiery descent. Just a little bonus to him for needing to go through this after everything he’d already endured.

All roads led to moving. May as well get it done sooner rather than later.

Akechi would need to pick up a second job to somehow come up with the difference between his dwindling savings account, Sae’s weekly commission, and the cost of living accommodations that would let him avoid adding to his death toll. It would be a less insulting prospect if any of the studio apartments he would be able to afford after that looked remotely liveable.

This one said that the paint on its walls might contain traces of lead, and that its landlord wouldn’t be held liable for medical damages that resulted from it. That one had visible mold on the bathroom tiles, even in the very obviously postured online listing photos. He shuddered to think of the state of that shower if he saw it in the flesh.

Every listing Akechi had looked at so far seemed to come with its own set of shockingly diverse hazards, their one continuity being that they evoked similar feelings of dread in the pit of his stomach. The ones that didn’t come with a laundry list of health and safety violations stated up front that they required an application pre-screening. Akechi’s credit score was perfectly fine – the detective prince had always paid off his statements in full, and on time. What he didn’t have were two good references. As it turned out, that was rapidly proving itself to be a serious problem.

Even on a webpage with the best user interface imaginable, the experience would have been bleak. That said, Akechi might have felt slightly less homicidal if the website didn’t reload every single time he clicked the back-out arrow after he decided he wasn’t (yet) desperate enough to risk braving exposed wiring in his combined living-bedroom-kitchen-foyer-bathroom space.

It wasn’t as though Akechi hadn’t expected this would happen – he just hadn’t expected it to happen now. He had wanted to be able to really plan his move. The fact he’d even thought that taking his sweet time could be an option for him was proof that he’d let his guard down.

He clicked on another listing. Wonderful. This one was just under 150 square feet. He honestly hadn’t known that was legal.

Well. Actually.

He paused. Zoomed in.

On second glance, maybe it wasn’t so bad. It looked clean, recently renovated. The move-in date fit his needs. It was small, sure, but it seemed like the space was well allocated. He mentally crumpled up his commitment to learning how to use an oven. It wouldn’t be happening in a place of this size, but maybe that was for the best, anyway.

He decided to click the button to arrange a tour with the landlord. Maybe his situation wasn’t so dire after all.

Of course, that was when the website decided to crash.

The noise that wrenched its way out of his throat wasn’t unlike how he expected a dying cat might sound. He slammed his laptop shut and rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyelids.

He needed another drink.

He poured himself a coffee mug of vodka and water. It was like vodka and soda for people who barely had the means to buy themself vodka, and for whom also needing to buy mixers felt like adding insult to injury. It was disgusting, but a disgusting necessity. Today, his crime against good taste was the housing market’s fault.

He took a sip, grimaced, and climbed into his bed. He propped himself up on his pillows and took another long drink. It didn’t taste quite so bad now that he’d whet his palate.

Fuck. He hadn’t even had the chance to change when he’d gotten home. He undid the top buttons of his dress shirt where they pinched at his neck. It wasn’t as though Akechi had anyone to look nice for, nowadays, but his wardrobe hadn’t gotten a radical overhaul since the detective prince’s fall from notoriety. He’d worn designer shirts then, he’d wear designer shirts now. They looked slightly worse for wear, but at least that meant they were incrementally more comfortable to wear out now than they had been back in the day.

Not by much. He sighed as the stale air conditioning of his room hit his skin. He took another sip of his drink. Then another.

It wouldn’t be so hard to find that listing again. He was pissed on principle. Websites should work. Apartments should be bigger than closets. You should be able to beg a landlord to let you live in a closet-sized apartment on a website that at least functioned halfway decently.

He took another good long gulp from his mug.

He could have really gone for coffee, right then. Not the glorified overpriced milk you could get from any old chain. The good stuff.

It had been a long time since he’d had good coffee.

There was only one place Akechi had ever had truly, honest-to-god good coffee.

His cellphone was lying at the foot of his bed.

He could send him a text, right now. Something clever. Akechi knew that no matter what it was, it would shock him, but it needed to be witty, too, because he would expect nothing less. He would kill to see the look on his face. He would look down at his phone, see Akechi’s name light up his screen, and his eyes would get all wide and scared.

You’ve been alive all this time?

They would meet up, and Kurusu, he’d be miserable, he’d probably cry or do something equally sappy, and – once he really processed – he’d be mad as all hell. Akechi would laugh at him, say something as snarky as the situation demanded, and watch the anger melt right off of Kurusu’s face in real time.

Akechi would finally have pulled one over on him. He’d finally win. He could feel the rush already.

Kurusu wanted to lose so bad, it was embarrassing, really.

Right as fantasy Kurusu threw himself at fantasy Akechi, real Akechi felt a wave of cold dread wash over him.

He walked to the sink and poured his final few sips of vodka water down the sink.

No. Hell no.

He turned on the tap and splashed cold water on his face. It dripped down his neck. He couldn’t bring himself to mind as it trickled down to the collar of his undone shirt.

He was better than this. He knew damn well that the only one ‘losing’ in the situation his addled mind had cooked up was himself.

It had only taken half a drink to get him there.

Fuck. He doused his face in more water for good measure.

He walked back to his bedroom, unlocked his phone, and scrolled through his message logs to find his last conversation with Akira Kurusu. Taking care not to click anything damning, he swiped to delete it.

There. It was over. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t done that sooner.

He rinsed out his mug and poured himself a glass of water from the tap. It didn’t need ice – he’d already confirmed that it was sufficiently chilled.

His laptop was still on his kitchen floor. Akechi took a seat, cross legged, and reloaded the webpage he had been on previously. Surely, he’d have more luck this session. Maybe he’d even find a place larger than 150 square feet. 175 seemed like a reasonable goal.

He would make this work. He was moving apartments, and he was moving on. He’d managed far more difficult things in the past.

He looked at his phone, sitting on the floor to his right. He tapped the display once.

No new messages. And why would there be?

He sighed and got to work.

#p5r fanfic #p5r #goro akechi #shuake #post-canon akechi #akechi drinks vodter

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grumpygreenwitch · 8 months ago

Text

The Witches and Wizards Job 23-24-25

Advance warning, the wizard cuts a little bit loose here. Tagged for some fantasy violence.

I'm aware the links to the back chapters are borked up, but it's nearly midnight right now and I just finished uploading everything to the queue. I'll try to fix them between Thursday and Friday.

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TWENTY THREE

I think no one expected to get together that night and count nothing but wins. But no one was hurt and our knowledge of the situation had grown by leaps and bounds - at least, that was what Ford claimed.

"I'm not happy that you all have Dresden working on the side," he told the room, throwing me a quick look.

I put a hand up; I really didn't mind. I was still trying to digest the truth both Eliot and Hardison had offered me. I'd done my job, and I'd done it well, and with their help I'd done it so quick I was still trying to get used to the fact that both cases were done, had been done nearly as soon as they'd been picked up. But the technology Hardison had used just wasn't something I could ever, would ever, have permanent access to. On the other hand, my expertise, my knowledge, everything I knew about magic and the creatures of that world, was information to be found in no database, no internet search. It was maddening.

"But it's done, so we move on to the auction. Odds are both our targets, as well as the mark, are going to be there: the lady, the portrait and the man in black."

The last bit seemed to startle the night's guest, who'd been lounging sedately on a brand-new couch near mine while nursing a vodka neat. Ford had introduced him as the client. He'd introduced himself as Vanya Fedorov. His accent had introduced him as part of the Russian mafia. Mouse had lifted his head from the moment the man had walked into the loft, and he'd never once looked away. Between him and my dog, I was getting more than a little nervous.

"Nate, there's a problem with the auction," Hardison pointed out as he rejoined us around the coffee table with its sharpie'd circle and anti-tracking ward, as well as a few other newly added protections. He'd left his phone behind by the row of desks after sorting out the delivery of the selkie skins, and he gestured at me.

"Most of the people attending aren't human," I informed the room.

Fedorov's drink paused on the way to his mouth. "My uncle is a hard man," he said levelly. "But his first loyalty is to our business. He knows I am good for it. He would not betray me."

"I don't think he has," Sophie replied. "The bird-woman, the -"

"Alkonost," he supplied.

"She wasn't there to harm you. She was there to protect you."

I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this gorgeous woman had decided, on the fly, to bluff one of the most powerful creatures of Russian lore, and she'd stuck the landing. God but I could only hope Ford knew how lucky he was.

"We were immune thanks to Harry," Sophie pointed out, "but you weren't affected at all. She did come looking for you, but to keep you safe."

"Safe from what?" he demanded restlessly.

"The man in black?" Eliot suggested.

"He doesn't want Fedorov hurt." Ford said mildly. I was beginning to recognize that tone as a warning signal. "He very nearly derailed one plan already for you," he told the Russian.

"For me?"

"The museum!" Parker exclaimed in sudden realization.

Nate nodded, then looked at Fedorov. "You made plans to go visit the Sokolov collection. Made them in advance. I had a look at your electronic ledger. You did have plans - for the day after, the last day of the exhibition."

"I did," the Russian admitted readily.

"You changed those plans when someone told you we were there."

Fedorov grinned ruefully. "I thought to press my case and enjoy Sokolov's work. Two birds with one stone. It seemed efficient at the time."

Nate nodded thoughtfully. "See, I was wondering about that. Because our presence there wasn't really important enough to merit derailing anyone's plans. It was you. When he came up to the room, it was to make sure you were there and he had to cancel the plan. You weren't supposed to be there that day."

"But then he did come up, and saw Grandmother," Sophie pointed out. "And getting her was worth more than protecting you."

"Mm," Nate nodded. "It was a rush job; the sort of rush job that happens when someone first says 'go', then 'stop', then 'go' again, and tempers are getting frayed, the timeline is off, everything just this much out of whack…" He waved a hand at us all. "You know the sort."

I did know the sort; I couldn't help but be amused that, from the look on their faces, so did the rest of the Leverage team.

"Explains why the guy was still there fiddling with the system when I got there," Eliot muttered. "He was waiting to put the Witchwell back in place. That's why the nitrogen tank was attached, but still closed."

"How do you know all this?" Fedorov demanded.

"The cameras," Ford replied. "Our… consultant pointed out that it's only the presence of beings like the man in black that blows up technology, and Hardison has created a number of failsafes so we can tell when a screen is about to fail. Turns out you can track someone by their absence nearly as much as by their presence."

The Russian took all of this in slowly, carefully, and finally frowned minutely. "I don't think I care for the Blackbird's interest in me. Or my family. Or my business."

Ford said nothing, but I could see in his face that he was holding back. I risked a glance at the other deadly intelligence in the room. Sophie was looking at the mastermind very closely. She caught my eyes and shook her head tinily.

I said nothing. I had just noticed that, behind Sophie, Parker was frowning, staring at nothing. Apparently Ford was contagious.

"I think your uncle's loyalties are a matter between you and him. For what it's worth, I believe he honestly thinks meeting with these people will help you take over from your father."

"By binding the family to these creatures." Fedorov scoffed. "What do they know of the family business?"

I didn't need to see the look Ford shot me to recognize a cue when I heard one. I picked up the printed photographs next to me on the couch and started handing them out one by one. "The lovely lady in white? Fey. Specializes in erasing evidence. The man next to her in red? Also fey. Specializes in erasing memories." Another picture. "Fat toad-looking man? He's actually a toad. His people love toxic waste. If someone gets a contract with them, they'll never see another fine for dumping again. The gorgeous thing next to him might be the deadliest we've identified so far. She's from Bangkok. Jade Court. Vampire. Human trafficking. This one? I'm not sure, but gosh, things sure do seem to catch on fire whenever he's around, mostly out at sea. Mostly when they're well-insured."

Between Hardison and me, while the 3D printer churned away and I stuck mirror-masks to everything it was spitting out, we'd sifted through enough information to identify thirteen of the twenty four people who we knew were going to the auction. It had been risky, using Koschei's invite to create a resonance spell that would let me find where the other invites were, but God it had paid off so well. We'd done weeks, maybe months of footwork in one long afternoon and half an evening.

It was enough to impress Fedorov - and to worry him. "No. I will not deal with these creatures. They are no better than the Blackbird, and if he's involved then each of them is a trap."

"I'm not telling you this to impress you," I corrected him. "I'm telling you to warn you. They might wanna make it look like you have no choice but to agree with whatever they say. You need to be prepared."

Fedorov took the stack of printouts and stared sightlessly at them. He looked oddly familiar at that moment, as if a touch of deja vu had come at me out of nowhere; he looked like something out of antiquity, like one of the paintings I'd seen in Hardison's screens while he studied Sokolov's work. "Can they die?" he asked.

Ooops, nope, we were back in mafia mentality. "Depends what you shoot them with. And in some cases, where."

"Then I believe you and I should speak, wizard." He shook his head and gestured impatiently. "He just stole the damn portrait. Why is he turning around and selling it already?"

"Because after the auction he won't need it anymore. Or at least that's what he thought, until he met Parker and she stole his key, and all of those." He waved a hand idly at the table's worth of knick-knacks. "So between now and the end of the auction he has to get that key back. You," Nate told Fedorov, "are going to trade it for the portrait. Make sure to tell them that when you RSVP."

"You are sending me into a den of monsters alone, Ford," Fedorov gritted out. "If you want me dead have the decency of doing it yourself."

"Not alone, no. You're bringing Sophie with you. If Dresden can get the tracker off of the other invitation we have, we'll even send Eliot in with you. And we will all be nearby to provide support. We don't want another 'situation', Fedorov, no one wants that."

Fedorov eyed Eliot, who shrugged calmly. He eyed Sophie, who smiled at him. "No offense," he told Eliot, "but I will feel safer with her."

Eliot beamed at the man. "None taken."

I had to agree with both of them, honestly.

"What about Grandmother?"

"She'll be there," Ford assured him. It was the only part of the plan I didn't like, because Ford had no explanation, no reason as to why he believed Baba Yaga would show up at the auction when Koschei was sure to be there. Last I'd checked, and from all Bob had taught me, those two were not on speaking terms, and got along about as well as fire and gasoline.

Fedorov looked thoughtful. "Wizard."

Oh, I did not like where this was going. "Uh."

"Since you are taking jobs on the side, will you take one more?"

"Uh." I looked at Ford, but he said nothing. He was giving me a keen, level look. I liked that even less. "That depends on the job."

Fedorov grinned at me. "He has tried too many times to harm Grandmother. Perhaps to kill her outright. I don't know if this is possible, if he can do this thing. I know he's trying, and I do not like it. I will pay whatever you ask, wizard. If you're there and do your best to protect her."

I felt as if the silence in the room were crushing me. "You want me to protect Baba Yaga."

"You are what I have."

"This is Baba Yaga. Grandmother Winter. Close to a living god as it gets. Not to mention I've already met the Blackbird. He won both times, in case you weren't listening."

"Did he? You walked away and he did not follow. Twice. The way I see it, you won the only victory that matters."

I wanted to scream. To walk away. I would have laughed in Fedorov's face but the truth was, I was scared. He was asking me to stand between what I saw as an unstoppable force and an immovable object. However, and I hated that he was right, but he uh. He was right. I'd stood up to Koschei twice, and I'd walked away both times. Either the man sucked at killing people, and I knew that wasn't true, or I was doing something right. I just didn't know what.

I felt as trapped as Fedorov did, but I could also see his reasoning. Koschei was an asshole. An unparalleled one. No one disagreed on that. But Baba Yaga, even if she was mercurial, alien, inhuman, still cared about the land and the people in a way her pupil didn't. If there was a line on the sand, I knew which side I was on. "I'll do what I can," I couldn't make the words come out civil, but at least I could make them come out.

Fedorov nodded at me. "In that case," he grinned minutely, leaned forward and picked up one of the chicken bones and the little carved wooden cup from among the many knick-knacks on the table and dropped the one inside the other. The bone let out a little rattle. "Let me tell you a fairy tale about Koschei and Grandmother."

TWENTY FOUR

The leshy came back that night, and they brought friends once again.

I was dead asleep in spite of every thought and worry wrecking chaos in my mind. I was worried, and I was pretty sure I had a right to be. We were about to throw a bluff in the face of some of the deadliest, smartest monsters ever to come out of the Nevernever, Leverage also wanted to steal from them at the same time. There was just so much going on that I'd given up trying to keep track of it all, and resigned myself to doing my part of it and never figuring out what, other that stealing, these people did.

Mouse's low growl woke me up as if someone had punched me. He'd been asleep at the foot of the bed, which was big enough for five of me or two of him, and when he stood up I could see his ruff standing up on end, outlined against the faint light coming in through the window. I sat up just in time to hear a muffled yowl of pain, and the creak of the door swinging open.

They'd found me. Of everything we'd picked up, all the trinkets, all the traps, I was still the easiest source of magic to find. I just hadn't known if they'd be willing to gamble that Koschei's stuff would be with me and not in a vault somewhere, or with the Leverage people.

The house had no lintel to speak of, no doorway. It was a safehouse, a fancy storage unit where I'd spent two nights. I'm sure the leshy had expected some trouble getting through the door, but I already knew they had humans in the roster, and humans could pick a lock or break a window, slip inside and invite the leshy in. There wasn't enough of a presence in the house, mine or otherwise, to kick up a passive defense out of habitation alone.

Which was why Eliot had lined every doorway and windowsill with iron nails.

Another muffled yowl and I was quietly on my feet, reaching for my shirt and my duster. There were a few traps between the leshy and what they sought, but once again I was counting mainly on them not being able to use magic to find the stuff. I drew a deep breath, stepped back from the bed, called Mouse to me, and flicked a throw blanket on the bed.

I'm not good at Veils. I know people who can hide entire stadiums worth of people, sight, sound, scent, every sense. Me, I was counting on it being dark so that when the leshy came up, as they must, it would look like I was still asleep on the bed. It didn't make sense for them to risk waking me up while they tore the place apart, which they'd likely do. Not to mention they could always ask me where everything was, and provide all sorts of incentives for me to tell them.

I managed to get my sneakers on before I heard the stairwell creak minutely. I fell back into the shadows of the closet, Mouse by my side, staff on one hand and wand on the other, and waited.

The door to my bedroom opened very slowly. The same dim, reflected streetlight glow that had shone on Mouse showed me the paw-like hand of a leshy as it stepped forward, sniffing the still air in the room. Its eyes locked onto the bed and it moved forward with a little more confidence. It cleared the door and another one came in behind it. They moved to flank the bed. A third one came in.

The moment it was clear of the door I surged forward, slammed the door shut, and pointed my staff at it. "Forzare."

It might have come out a little angry. I was getting real tired of leshy, to be fair. The blast of force threw the leshy through the window in a shower of glass and wood; it screamed as it went, the iron nails on the windowsill scraping it raw.

Mouse flew at another leshy with a snarl. Its nature betrayed it; not only was my dog very big and fairly terrifying despite his youth, leshy were creatures of the field, their nature very close to rabbits, to hares, to moles. It shrieked in immediate terror and went down, scrabbling and writhing, all the fight gone from it, wanting only to get away from its natural predator.

The last one didn't stop to think. It leapt up and kicked me in the chest. I went through the bedroom door like the old oak wasn't even there. The pain was immediate, immense, blinding. Next thing I knew I was on my knees out on the hallway, and I couldn't breathe. I'd be lucky if nothing was broken. Leshy kick like the hares they look like, and the fairy-thug's reaction had been so quick I'd had no time to summon my shield.

Mouse was barking furiously in the bedroom; I couldn't get wits or breath enough to get back on my feet, but I had just enough of them to see motion coming up the stairs. I swung my wand around and let a stream of fire blaze out. The figure in front shrilled inhumanly; behind it, someone cursed entirely too humanly.

I had to get up. I had to move. I was easy prey if I didn't. I got one leg under me just in time for one panicked leshy to come sprinting out of my bedroom, and we both went down in a tangle. It tried to bite my face, and I just barely put an arm up. Its teeth caught it, but couldn't quite punch through the duster's defenses. It didn't feel like roses, though, and someone let out a very undignified howl of pain. Couldn't have been me.

I'd lost my wand when we'd gone down, and I didn't have enough room to bring my staff to bear, so I let go of it, put my free hand on the leshy's face, and let go with all the electricity I'd collected the past day. I didn't have the breath to call it - the words aren't part of the magic as much as an exercise in focus, a visualization aid. I could throw everything around without them, but I'd been using the word to try not to get zapped myself. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

Electric fire lit up the leshy's skull from within, made its ears stand up on end; it rolled down my hand and up my arm, but I was far more interested in the fairy-thug not getting another bite in. Fortunately, it crashed down limp on top of me, smoking faintly.

I shoved it aside and groped around for my staff. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I threw my shield up instinctively.

A net crashed over it and came to rest on the gleaming half-bubble, and I was in trouble. The net had magic, unknown magic, probably meant to counter mine. I couldn't let go of the shield without getting caught in the net. I couldn't do magic without dropping the shield. The hallway was narrow, and they couldn't get to me any more than I could get to them, but that left them free to tear my house apart.

Which was apparently the going plan. The leshy I'd singed on the stairwell called out something to the human behind it, who shouted in Russian down the stairs. I heard the door to one of the rooms slam open, and a crowbar start work on the crates.

I forced myself to draw a deep breath. Mouse was still engaged with the last fairy-thug in the bedroom. My ribs were still screaming. My lungs had mostly forgotten how to work. But I needed that breath, I needed the focus of it.

At the peak of it, I dropped to a crouch, dropped the shield and called out, "Ventus!" more or less at the same time.

Have I mentioned I'm a hammer when it comes to magic?

Wind roared out, coming out of me in every direction. It threw the net for parts unknown, it sent the people on the stairwell flying back, stumbling down the steps with startled squawks and something that sounded very much like cursing. I wouldn't know, I don't speak Russian. I found my wand under my foot, lifted my staff and for good measure threw a second gout of wind down the stairwell. "Mouse!"

He came charging out of the room. I peeked in. The leshy was crawling away for the gaping hole in the wall that had been a window, both legs a ruin of greenish blood. I closed what was left of the door between it and us and began to inch my way down the stairs.

There was a hissed, angry argument going on at the bottom of the stairs, probably wondering if I was worth the trouble. Oh, I was not. So many people could've told the thugs, I'm very much not worth the trouble. I'm a burr, and at that point I was an angry burr, and to compound their misery I was an angry burr that could do magic.

Someone shouted a warning in the dark of the first floor. I threw my shield up.

Three bullets bounced off it, along with a shower of sparks. Oh, ok. Uh. I hadn't expected them to decide I was that kind of trouble. Hell's Bells. Boston had powered up my shield, but I'd apparently finally hit on the limit of what the damaged bracelet could do. If it hadn't been made to hold back more mundane threats as well as magic, I would have been very much in trouble.

I could see, vaguely, four of them gathered in what was supposed to be the living room. I was pretty sure there was at least one more crashing and wrecking one of the rooms. I saw one of them grab and yank at another, and some tiny part of me was glad to know the leshy themselves didn't want me shot, but that didn't mean one of their number, likely one of their human buddies, didn't have a gun he was entirely too willing to use. I had to finish this quick, before someone else got trigger-happy.

I dropped the shield. Mouse leapt the moment it was gone, with a snarl like a roar. I love my dog. I know my dog. At that moment I was absolutely terrified of my dog.

So were the thugs. I slammed the butt of my staff on the ground before any of them could get any ideas. "Forzare!" The shockwave sent two of them tumbling - the humans. The leshy tottered, but managed to stay upright. One of them immediately went down with a panicked screech when Mouse slammed into it.

The other twisted one hand sharply and threw something at me that glittered in the dark. I threw my shield up automatically.

The night's breath powder settled on it and began to burn.

I heard a howl, realized belatedly that it was mine; my shield-bracelet had gone instantly white-hot while it tried to defend against the very thing that was attacking it. I dropped the shield, felt the poison sink into my magic. The leshy charged me, as aware as I was that I couldn't throw magic around wildly anymore; I could very well run out of energy mid-fight.

So I swung the staff at it as hard as I could.

The impact drove it into the wall and it staggered back, dazed. I stepped into its space and punched it. Hey, it worked for Eliot. It went down on its knees with a cry.

But the two human thugs were getting up, and one was lifting his arm in a familiar fashion. I couldn't gamble, I called up my shield, gritting my teeth against the pain. The goon slammed the taser into it, electricity arcing from it over the roiling surface of the half-bubble.

I put my hand out, the one with the wire bracelet, dropped the shield and called the electricity to me. It burned down my already singed fingers, and into the bracelet, and I threw it at the other man before he could get it into his head to start shooting again. He made a sound like a broken police siren and crashed down, twitching.

I'd been keeping my eye on the group in front of me and that open bedroom door, but in the middle of the chaos I forgot that leshy are like roaches: there's always more than the ones you see. Something came at me from the kitchen and hit the back of my head. It wasn't even painful; it was just instantaneous darkness; everything shut down. My cheek hit the floor, but I didn't feel it so much as vaguely registered that my perspective on things had changed radically. I heard Mouse snarl, and someone screamed - the natural order of things.

Things went blurry and uncertain for a while. I heard the group talking, and Mouse barking furiously, but I was only aware of it because it was Mouse, and I was worried that they'd hurt him. The night's breath had settled on me like the weight of the world, burning, hissing in a way only I could hear. I felt crushed. I couldn't breathe. My magic felt sluggish and foul, like blood poisoning.

"It's not just the circle, he's got a ward of some sort around them," a man's voice said in English. Someone else spoke in Russian. I was beginning to understand Hardison's comment about learning a language by infection.

"Koldun", a hoarse, gravelly voice said. Something grabbed my face and picked me partially up, talons prickling my cheeks. "Wizard," the leshy said in terrible English. "You hear me?"

"I thought leshy didn't speak." I was trying to get myself in the game, but the night's breath was burning into my bones, my ribs hurt like someone had kicked them out of my chest, and my head was pounding.

The leshy growled - its way of laughing, I realized. It said something to one of the people around. We were in my basement. There were glow-sticks all over, illuminating my work: the brass circle on the concrete floor, closed and holding strong around a small shoebox full of Koschei's knick-knacks. Inside the circle were two more wards: the tracking foil I'd copied from the key, and a little bubble of force, very much like my shield, meant to keep things and people from this side of the Nevernever from getting through.

See, I could learn. I'd remembered that the leshy had been working with humans back at the museum, and I'd been ready.

"He says, 'the world changed, we changed with it'." It was the man who'd shouted a warning earlier, likely the one who'd shot at me. He was wearing all black, the better to be impossible to distinguish from the rest of the group. The leshy growled something at him. "You will dismiss the circle and remove the rest of your protections."

I gritted my teeth. Those talons were like shoe cleats, sharp and solid, and the fairy's grip was incredibly strong. They'd stripped me down to my pants and tee, and I was pretty sure they'd taken off anything that wasn't nailed down. I couldn't even feel the familiar weight of my pendant around my neck. My arms were bound behind me and my shoulder was really unhappy about that. They'd even taken my shoes off. "Bite me."

The leshy growled again and it occurred to me that it probably wasn't a good idea to invite him to do that. It said something a little longer this time. I was trying to figure out if I could use their ignorance to my advantage: the outermost circle was just that, a circle. Any of their human buddies could have made it past it. But because the leshy knew magical circles to be impregnable, they apparently hadn't thought to have the humans try.

"You will dismiss the circle," the translator said. "Or we will shoot your dog."

My lunge was instinctive. And pointless. The leshy stopped me before I could get an inch closer and slammed me back against a wall. It was just hard enough to be painful, but not enough to knock me out again. He even gave me a few minutes to find the wits he'd just send scattering all over with that casual bit of controlled violence.

"I drop the circle, you shoot us both."

The translator spoke. The leshy examined me, head cocked, golden eyes throwing an occasional red gleam when the light hit them just right. He said something long-ish.

"He considered it," the man translated. "But is not worth a death-curse, and you obviously love dog. What assurance can he provide?"

"Lock my dog up in the bathroom. Everyone else waits outside. I'll break the circle for him, and him alone."

"Nyet." The leshy wasn't stupid, though I'd hoped. He spoke at length, the translator asking a couple of questions.

"The dog stays in the net, goes in the bathroom. Three of us stay here. You drop the circle, remove the wards. We take you to the bathroom with your dog. You do not follow."

"I get your gun, you keep the bullets," I added.

That created a brief argument between the man and the leshy, but the translator caved eventually. Not that I didn't think they had a dozen other ways to kill me and Mouse, but the gun was the quickest one.

"And I'll need my hands free."

The leshy didn't wait for the translator. "Use feet."

"Fine."

He dragged me to my feet. Off to one side I could see Mouse, all but wrapped into a net, bound up inside a blanket that had been secured with duct tape. Ah, the net hadn't been for me, it'd been meant for him all along. He snarled, but didn't bark, probably out of pity for my throbbing skull. In the basement the sound would have echoed like thunder. Two humans picked him up warily, and while he tried to snap at them, he couldn't do more than twitch and drool. All but two leshy and the translator followed them out of the basement.

The translator pulled out the gun, removed the clip and the loaded bullet, and I twisted so he could give it to me. He didn't look happy. I made a show of muttering under my breath and calling up some magic. The effort bent me over double and I nearly felt my legs go to jelly. Bile rose up in my throat, and the lead leshy had to hold me up. I had to make it look like I was doing something, though, otherwise the leshy would catch onto my bluff about the circle.

But Boston, ah, Boston. The night's breath couldn't corrode what the city was giving me fast enough. If I could just get away, purge all of the corroded magic, I'd be fine. As it was, I had the power to throw a punch, I just had no way of knowing if it was going to blow up in my face or theirs.

I took a couple of deep breaths, tried again, and scuffed my foot over the circle and the two wards beyond it. And very calmly said, "Ignitum".

The circle broke. The lead leshy gestured the other two forward. The shoebox was plain, empty of anything but the rough dozen or so things Parker and I had got from Koschei. Everything was there, even the feathers and the invitation.

Except for two things.

The leshy grabbed me by the throat. "Key, koldun." He snapped at the translator.

"You are missing things. Where are they?"

"I only agreed to break the circle. It's not my fault if you didn't check your shopping before you paid the bill."

The leshy didn't like that. It slammed me against a wall and snarled. The translator opened its mouth -

The other leshy, who'd managed to grab the box, squealed in pain when something hot dripped down on it, then shrieked, clawing at its shoulder as a sizzling sound and the smell of burning fields began to fill the room. One of the ceiling tiles crashed down.

Everyone looked up. I just grinned at them.

Eliot had set up the trap for me, and he'd honestly had a blast doing so. The basement was bare concrete in every direction; to hide the fact that he was putting iron everywhere he could reach, he'd put up styrofoam ceiling tiles. He'd glued them to the concrete.

He'd laced the glue with iron filings.

Throwing a magical punch? Fifty-fifty. Melting fresh silicone that wasn't even hard yet? Child's play.

The lead leshy barked an order. The translator started for me. While they were both distracted I balanced myself on one foot, lifted the other, and kicked the leshy as hard as I could in the gut. He went sprawling back and crashed down on the floor. I snapped out the word of command. The circle snapped into life and cut him in half.

I dropped to my knees, most of my focus on not throwing up. The rest I channeled into forcing all the corroded magic the night's breath had poisoned out of me. I didn't even bother giving it shape, I just threw it out. It flattened the last two thugs and sent me crashing down on my face, even as I tried to force myself to get up, get to the box, I couldn't let them have the box -

More melted silicone dripped down. The last leshy squalled something that didn't sound nice, and the one human cursed. He came at me, trying to take his gun back. I drew in a deep breath and threw what little clean power Boston had given me in his face as a flash of light. He staggered back, blinded, swearing.

His buddy caught him and they both ran out of the basement, and I was left there, breathing hard, wondering if I should pass out. Or throw up. Or both, maybe. Somewhere above me Mouse was barking fit to bring the house down.

Passing out it was.

TWENTY FIVE

The gunshots woke up the neighbors. The neighbors woke up the cops, who expected to be summoned to such an address to bar brawls or petty theft, not to shots fired in a staid, elderly Boston neighborhood.

The gunshots also roused Nate. He came sprinting down the block to find half a dozen people peering out nervously, each one demonstrating vividly what they considered a safe distance, and none of them agreeing. The mastermind, who knew exactly how far a bullet could travel on kinetic energy alone, never mind inertia, didn't want to think of what would happen if there were more shots. He began taking stock of the problem by waving his phone at three of the people on the street. "Did someone, uh, did someone call the cops?" When the neighbors confirmed, he let out a long breath. "Good, good. Hey, those weren't gunshots, were they?" he asked as he dialed. "Hardison."

The Leverage team roused like a nest of wasps. A Crime Scene van and a two-man team nearly beat the cops to the site; the truck from Animal Control rolled in with them, and the one man joined the two masked people at the door, the cops making a path for them. All three of them winced as they walked in, pausing to yank their earbuds off.

"He's here," Eliot confirmed to the other two as they lit their flashlights, everyone taking a moment to hold their breath and see if they held - which they miraculously did. "You go ahead with the distraction, I'll find him." They had to find Dresden, get him out of the line of fire, and set up something appropriately gunshot-like but wholly accidental before the cops started looking in earnest. At the moment they weren't setting foot in the house, but Leverage could only guess as to why, rather than confirm.

"I need three minutes in the kitchen," Hardison said from behind Parker.

"I need two in his bedroom."

"I think we can buy you that," Eliot assured them.

"We?"

Despite the worry gnawing at him that the wizard had gone and gotten hurt (again), Eliot could only smile faintly. He whet his lips and whistled lightly.

From somewhere in the dark Mouse started barking immediately in response, a sound like thunder. Nate and Sophie, part of the crowd outside, saw every cop wince and twitch away. None of them went for their guns; none of them looked willing to go into the house. The crowd shifted restlessly, and stepped back without being urged to it. They crossed a look, but said nothing.

Parker threw a clean suit and a mask at Eliot and they split up. Alone in the dark, Eliot launched himself to the guest bathroom, just to one side of the stairs. "Harry!" When he got no answer he tried again, just a little louder. "Dresden!" No answer. He sniffed; there was a faint, familiar scent in the air that he couldn't readily place, but which left his gut tightening in anticipation of a punch he couldn't see coming. That, however was immediately set aside when he opened the bathroom door and found Mouse trussed up like a Bolivian hostage. "There you are."

Tied up or not, the Temple dog wagged his tail at him. Eliot started sawing on the duct tape, then paused; there was something sticky on either the ropes of the net or the blanket. Or the dog. Eliot considered shining the light on it, then decided he was better off not knowing. "We need to be quiet," he told Mouse, who whuffed nearly soundlessly at him. "And we need to find Harry, fast."

The moment he was loose, the mastiff sprang up on his feet and charged out of the bathroom. Eliot followed him down the stairs to, where else, the basement. The air was hot and full of the scent of burning plastic. Styrofoam tiles had fallen and shattered, leaving the tidy space a wreck. Eliot smelled rotten candy and recoiled. "Mouse, don't!"

The dog froze, and stepped back, whining.

Eliot knew that smell. He'd only smelled it once before, but sometimes that was all it took. He'd smelled it again, faintly, by the stairs. Rotten candy. Burning licorice. The basement cloyed his senses with it. Someone had come in prepared to take down both wizard and dog, and the hitter gritted his teeth. "Night's breath," he murmured, looked down at the dog. Moused looked up at him, ears perked. "You gonna be alright in there?"

Mouse eased himself gingerly into the basement. Paused. Whuffled.

Eliot followed. "Harry?"

A groan answered him, and he charged in. His boots squished on something very much not blood, but he didn't stop to check what it was. "Harry!"

"I'm gonna be sick," the wizard moaned. Eliot found him slumped in a heap against one side of the basement, tied up very efficiently, looking ashen under the light of the flashlight, Mouse licking his face enthusiastically.

"Place reeks of night's breath, man."

"That was me," Dresden admitted as Eliot worked to free him. "Someone dosed me upstairs. Burned it off here." He let out a vague sound of pain when his hands came loose and he started working feeling into them immediately. "They took the box."

"Who's surprised," Eliot grimaced when he nearly lost his grip on his knife sawing at the ropes around Harry's feet. "What… Why is everything slimy down here?"

"That was me, too," the wizard admitted. "I killed one of the leshy. Things from the Nevernever kinda melt when they die."

"They m- You mean- " Eliot found himself suddenly realizing he was, apparently, wading knee-deep through someone's equivalent of bodily fluids. "You mean we're covered in fairy blood?"

"Blood, guts…" Harry waved a hand to encompass a nebulous whole.

Full of violence as his life was, Eliot definitely had feelings about the situation, and none of them were good. "Damn it, Dresden!" he snapped as he helped the wizard to his feet and dragged him up the stairs.

"It'll evaporate to nothing soon!"

"And what part of 'don't get hurt' didn't you get?"

"You also said 'make it believable'," Harry protested wearily. "And they had humans with them. Again. And the humans had guns so. You know. The night's just been full of surprises."

Eliot hissed a breath out. Of course they would. "Alright. Get dressed." He thrust the clean suit and the mask at Harry. "We're going out the front door."

"Out the - They're gonna notice there's more people going out than came in."

Parker choose that moment to pop up next to them, making them both jump. "I'm not going out the front door." She had Harry's duster on, which made her look even more elfin than she already was, and looked terribly pleased with herself. "I found everything. They had it all stashed together. Amateurs."

Eliot merely imagined strangling the thief. Only a little. Just to soothe his rising temper. "They weren't thieves, Parker." When she gave him a pointed look the hitter realized what he'd said. "Ok, yes, they were thieves, but they weren't here to rob Harry!" Her brows went up. "You know what I mean! Is Hardison done?"

"I'll go check." She turned to look at Harry, and frowned minutely. "Are you hurt?"

"If I answer that, Eliot will get mad at me," he told her as he zipped up the clean suit.

To the hitter's chagrin, she took in that answer solemnly, nodded, and raced off for the kitchen.

"You are hurt," Eliot accused mildly.

"Leshy like to kick."

"Is anything broken?"

"No." Dresden breathed in, deep and very slow. "I don't think so. I'll get back to you on the concussion, though."

"You have a helluva sense of humor for someone I just found hogtied in his own basement."

Eliot saw the wizard grin, hard and bitter. "Eliot, I'm used to going down. I'm also used to waking up in a cell of one kind or another after." He popped the medical mask in place and put up the hood. "This is a distinct improvement."

The hitter had to pause at that. "Harry, don't you have anyone? Anyone that has your back?"

The wizard paused, went very still. "People… don't do so good when they get involved in a wizard's affairs," he admitted slowly, and the burden of pain and guilt and regret in his voice brought Eliot up very short. It had been years since he'd heard such a refined, complex mix of exactly those emotions from someone, but he remembered the day well enough.

He'd been staring in a mirror at the time, and he'd been horribly young.

"And not a lot of people accept that 'men in gray and big swords' trump a lot of the answers they sometimes want out of me."

The hitter caught the wizard's good shoulder. "Harry, for what it's worth," he said evenly. "I know it's hard. I know how it is when you've drawn a line on the sand and no one sees you holding it. Me, I'm here to keep my team safe. Twice, so far, I wasn't there - but you were. And that's enough for me. Thank you."

Dresden blew out a long breath. "Don't suppose you guys want to move to Chicago?"

"No more than you wanna move to Boston." Eliot looked up to see Hardison coming out of the kitchen, passing his backpack to Parker and taking hers in exchange. "Come on. The timing Hardison cooked up is tricky."

They marched out, the Animal Control guy first, leading the friendliest, most gigantic and slobberiest ball of fur out, leaving all the cops vaguely embarrassed that they'd been afraid to step into the house. Mouse hammed it up, tongue lolling to one side and tail wagging cheerfully. The crime scene people cleared out, the cops poured in, and everyone jumped into their respective vehicles.

It took a while to put both the Animal Control pick-up and the Crime Scene van back in place, none the worse for their small adventure, and everyone reconvened back at the loft. Sophie reported that there had been plenty of cops in the kitchen when the same security system that had destroyed the bedroom window interacted badly with an ancient electric board, entombed in the walls. The system had blown the garden door out onto the overgrown grass, and the antique board had gone off like a gun once again. A report had been written; fines would have to be paid. The owner had been summoned, and she'd been most grateful for everyone's prompt response, gracious and elegant even in her concern. Everyone had gone home somewhat disappointed and secretly reassured that life could go back to what it should be: quiet.

While Sophie soothed the mood at the safehouse, Nate came to see Dresden as Eliot, once again, patched up the wizard in the small spare bedroom behind the kitchen. Harry's entire chest was a rising, ugly bruise. When Eliot moved away to wash his hands, he spoke very quietly to the mastermind. "You know, when I said I'd like a job where I wasn't a punching bag, this wasn't what I meant."

"I know." Nate's mouth was pressed to a thin line. It wasn't just the injuries, or the attack. Violence threatened them all, that was just part of the job. But the violence that kept coming at Dresden was unpredictable and far too big for any countermeasures to readily work. "He's getting more hurt than you have in our worst jobs," he murmured quietly at the hitter.

"He's a civilian, Nate."

"So are you," the mastermind pointed out. "But I know what you mean."

"He doesn't have the training, he doesn't have the mental firewalls."

"Can you teach him?"

"In what, two days?!"

Nate gave the hitter a very keen, very level look. "I think he'd be grateful, and better off, with whatever you do give him." He pitched his voice to carry. "Dresden, what did they get?"

"Everything," Harry replied, testing his arm until Eliot flung a sling at him. "Everything but the key and the Witchwell."

"Mm. But he doesn't need those two back nearly as urgently as everything else. Not once Fedorov's offer gets to him. And he already has the portrait, he doesn't need help stealing it."

"He does if the Witchwell's not his and he needs to return it to the proper owner," the wizard pointed out, frowning thoughtfully.

"Does he?"

"He might. I'm guessing," Harry admitted, "but I don't think it's his. It's too modern, it doesn't fit what we know of the guy."

"I agree with Harry," Eliot added.

"So do I," Nate replied. "His reaction at the bagel shop was very telling. But the man in black has to know we can't destroy it, and he has to know it'd be much easier for him to recover it after the auction." He seemed momentarily lost in thought. He was wondering if Koschei would think of the many ways in which the Witchwell could be turned against him; if that potential danger would force him to divert attention and effort to its recovery.

And in three days' time, I will grant you and your people your heart's desire.

"He'll wait. He'll wait until he can simply take it back."

"He could take it back right now," Harry muttered.

"Could he? That's twice you've faced his hired thugs, and twice you've survived, Dresden. Twice you've almost won, until an external factor stepped in. Have a little faith in yourself. From his side, his odds don't look good."

Eliot understood. "He doesn't gamble. When he wins, he likes it to be by overwhelming force."

The mastermind nodded. "And every time Dresden steps in, it doesn't matter what the man in black throws on the field, it never ends up with a clean victory for him. He'll wait. We go on with the con. Get some rest, Dresden. You're no use as a monkeywrench if you're in pieces."

"I live to please, boss," the wizard declared wearily.

#the dresden files #leverage #my writing #fanfiction #crossover #harry dresden #alec hardison #nathan ford #parker #sophie deveraux #eliot spencer #urban fantasy #fantasy violence

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aspiring-interpreter · 2 years ago

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Starting out thoughts

Here goes...

Throughout my Bachelor's degree, I jumped between different courses, trying out new things every year. I wasn't doing this because I was especially dissatisfied with my major, which turned out to be in English Literature, but because I legitimately had no concept of the future, of having to find a job, or of a degree being supposedly being *for a career*. I suppose I still find the idea of transitioning from student life to adult life hard, but it's been a few months since I went back and did Honours, and now I have a clear intention for what I want to do in the future. This Tumblr is a weekly chronicle of my efforts to make that aspiration, the one career aspiration I really have, come into being.

I've realised that I love language. I love the feeling of becoming more proficient in a second language, and I love the idea of using that foreign language every day for work. Interpreting seems like the natural choice, with its variety of work, its harnessing and improving of interpreting skills, and if I can do a master's then I'll be able to work as an interpreter across many domains, not just in the community, and not just to aspire to interpret at global conferences.

Right now, I'm a heritage speaker of Mandarin Chinese. My parents spoke it to me all throughout childhood and throughout high school and university, and I sometimes used it to talk to relatives in China. But I often find myself tripping over words, unsure of my sentence structures, and missing certain words in my vocabulary. This is especially clear when I video call my parents, which happens fairly frequently, and I need to use an English word to fill in the blanks.

Right now, I'm in Melbourne, a city that is new and fresh to me. I've been here for a month, and being here comes with new opportunities. I have the chance to pick from a wider variety of Chinese classes, and there is a Master's I would really like to do in Interpreting and Translating. However, they need me to be close to fluent. The semester 1 classes start in February - what I essentially need to do is reach an advanced level of fluency before December, either this year or next.

All across the internet, people say it takes a really long time to be comfortable using Chinese, and that there is so much cultural information embedded within the language that you never stop learning it. However, I haven't started from 0, and really believe that if I can work on it consistently, and with focus (sorry German), I'll be able to get there.

So, here is my goal. By the end of next year, I want to pass an oral proficiency exam and be admitted into the Master's course for 2025. This is a long term goal, and I know that when I'm in the course there'll still be more for me to pick up. One thing I'm also conscious of is age in relation to career opportunities. I'm 24 now, so by the time I enter I'll be 26, and by the time I graduate I'll be 28, if it all goes to plan. It's a long road ahead of me, but I think I would be so grateful to myself for putting in the hours if I got there. I would be rewarded with something I could do for the rest of my life to earn money with, a job where being a person and a communicator is first.

Otherwise, I'm really subject to the winds of time. Maybe I'd still go somewhere I'd like, but it would be from chance and other people I meet, not because I'd worked long and hard for it.

This will be first and foremost a discussion of what I've done for my Chinese learning, as well as setting goals (accountability and progress checking). It will also touch on my energy levels and mood, something that will change a lot when I start working, and when I move out of this hostel. It will also be a place to record thoughts, dreams, hopes and despairs, and hopefully recuperate and come out of things clear-headed. This is the one career path that really resonates with me, and I want to follow it with my heart.

#language learning #translation #interpreting #mandarin chinese

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olderthannetfic · 3 years ago

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I actually really like the Tumblr format for a specific type of fandom experience. It hit a sweet spot between interaction and passivity for me that discord, twitter and LJ never managed. I'll be sad to see it gone.

But hey, I'm sticking it out until they take this thing down. Like hell I'm moving to twitter and all my mutuals are here and still posting. I'm already on discord but that's more it's own thing rather than a replacement. I'll probably go to reddit once Tumblr finally stops thrashing after getting bludgeoned by the censorship-stick one too many times. Until then, this is nothing I can't make some work-arounds for.

Though... this Apple store thing continues to concern. It's a growing trend I've seen, not just in fandom... OnlyFans, credit card companies pulling from Pornhub, Youtube taking down classic well-known vids for "violence".... I know we like to mock Tumblr for only being so good because the bar has been set so low recently and Tumblr is still trash, but this really isn't a Tumblr-specific problem. It's probably more noticeable to us when it happens on Tumblr because it's disrupting our communities, but sex workers and even sfw content creators have been noticing this stuff for a while now and it just seems to be reaching its final stages. At least for a large chunk of the mainstream, centralized internet.

You are absolutely correct, both in the sense that there's no need to preemptively run off and in the sense that this is a broad and disturbing problem that stretches far beyond Tumblr.

I advocate everyone having a plan so they can re-find mutuals if we all wake up one day to find Tumblr has literally been deleted in the night, but there's no sense in leaving if you're enjoying the current form of the site.

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theji · 3 years ago

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Things Yizhan Made Me Do

It's BXG Day today! 🐢💛

To commemorate the occasion, I thought of making a list of 13 out-of-character things that I've done since falling into the fandom. (OK I'm a bit late I meant to do this sooner, the day is ending soon in a couple of hours).

1. Start a blog

And a public one, no less. I had a blog when I was in my teens but that was private, like a personal diary. My day job already involves writing so off-work I would usually like to indulge in mindless activities. Now, here I am, maintaining a Yizhan blog. I have not even used Tumblr prior to this but I'm enjoying it now, rambling about our fav boys. Writing is not a chore if it's about them.

2. Join a fandom

I joined a boy band fan club once upon a time, some 15 years ago, but I was never as invested in it as I am now with Yizhan. Back then it was just buying some merch, attending their concert/autograph sessions, listening to their songs. Apart from work, dog mum duties, personal relationships, other hobbies like kombucha brewing, most of my free time is now spent on the fandom. My Netflix account is crying. There is just so much to do and catch up on (I'm not complaining). I also enjoy interacting with and learning from other bloggers here. Antis are no fun and some industry news/developments/hate messages are upsetting but ultimately, you curate your own fandom experience. And I choose positivity and rationality.

3. Indulge in RPS

I don't ever 'ship'. What is 'ship'? 😆 I was always a dutiful audience, just enjoying whatever drama series and moving on after that. I started with CQL like most people and I didn't even notice/like GGDD until much later. Didn't even set out to 'ship' anyone but now I'm a self-professed turtle. SZD is SZD, and anyone can see something special between them if you keep an open mind. I wrote about my SZD reasons here previously. That said, GG & DD are individuals, each with their own successful careers. They come first, the ship comes second. That I'm very clear of.

4. Use Chinese apps

Gosh, my phone and tablet are now full of Chinese apps. I used to have only WeChat cos I needed it for work but now I have Weibo, Oasis, Douyin, WeTV, MangoTV, Youku, etc. Some of them are not even available in the app store so I had to find alternative sources to download them. haha..I even have paid membership for some of these apps. And now, browsing Weibo daily becomes a routine. If you wish, you can just get stuck browsing Weibo for a long long time. It's entertaining.

5. Read fan fic

I only started about 6 months ago but now I'm hooked and fics are largely the only thing I read these days, apart from news. But I only read Yizhan or WangXian fics (p.s. calling for fic recs of other pairings!) I know some might have different feelings about fan fics but to me, I really just see them as fiction, with characters (and sometimes traits) bearing similarities to GGDD. Similarly, I separate the platform from the incident so I have no problems going to A03 despite GG's incident. I just enjoy seeing the characters named XZ/WYB having happy endings in many different timelines and universes. While most of the fics I read are explicit (by design), I don't use them as tools to play out certain fantasies or to think of GGDD in a sexual manner. In fact, I really hate fics that have little substance and just go into the explicit parts without plot development. I like those with interesting premises too, like one I read recently where XZ is a serial killer and WYB is a police officer investigating the case but also in love with him. I do have plans to share my list of fav fan fics some time down the road so keep an eye out for it!

6. Willingly read Chinese

Yes, Chinese may be my mother tongue but I don't use it much in daily living unless I have to. I also find it tedious to read Chinese cos the characters are just so squashed together. If I have a choice, I will always pick English. But now, I read so much Chinese from my daily weibo browsing. I even read fan fics in Chinese! Who am I? On the plus side, I think my Chinese comprehension and translation skills improved. I also picked up some internet lingo used by Chinese netizens, which are pretty interesting like doi, 🐮🍺, 🖍. My all-time fav is yyds.

7. Act like a cougar

In real life, I have always maintained that younger men are childish. At least those I have encountered. But look at me now, fangirling over two younger men (I am closer in age to GG, but still..). I even jokingly call them my 'China Boyfriends'. I look at them very respectfully most of the time.

8. Buy merch

Seriously, once you start, you can't stop. At least that was what happened to me, although I'm still quite selective when it comes to supporting their endorsements. I usually go for consumables like food, cosmetics vs collectibles cos I'm more practical. Also, GG says to support their merch within reasonable means so that's what I'm doing. Just buying things that I'm interested to try and not because it has their faces or names slapped on it. In a way, this suits me cos I like trying new brands and stuff anyway.

9. Keeping a Yizhan archive

Photos, weblinks, videos, songs, fan fics list..my phone is full of these things now. I think my Yizhan photo gallery is only second to the folder with my dogs' pictures. But how can you resist when we are blessed with new pics of them almost every week?

10. Camp for livestreams

I'm lucky I live in the same time zone as the boys so I don't have to wake up in the wee hours of the morning just to watch something. But that's the thing, being in the same time zone sometimes make me feel like I HAVE to watch that thing live because, why not? Why wait? Not shy to admit that I once watched a live programme in the middle of work but I made sure I finished what needed to be done. I think so long as we don't let these livestream schedules run our lives, there's no harm in camping for them.

11. Watch c entertainment

I am one of those who used to pass over Chinese productions, simply because it's a Chinese production. Not in a scoffing manner but I'm just genuinely not interested in them nor the celebs. I was more of a US/UK production kind of person, occasionally Korean/Japanese. Now, I'm learning to enjoy them although I just watch those with GGDD in them. No energy to follow other Chinese celebs anyway. The other programme I'm contemplating watching even if it doesn't have them in it is Who's the Murderer (GG was only in one of the cases) cos I like the premise. On the flip side, now my sis and partner keep making fun of me cos to them, all I do now is "watch China shows". That is so not true. Or is it?

12. Write fan mail

I wrote a letter to GG once. A long-ass letter. I hope he read it. That's all I'm gonna say. 🙈 hahahahaha

13. Desire to visit China

China was never on my list of to-visit places. Just wasn't interested. I have been to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou a few times in the past for work but even then, I never felt the urge to revisit for leisure. Now, I wanna visit GG and DD's home town, visit Chongqing to see the graffiti wall with Bobii Zanbii on it, eat mala hotpot and try out their sauce recipe, attend BXG events, dine at the CQL restaurant... Watching TTXS also made me realise that there are many beautiful places in China with natural landscapes and all that. I used to be clouded by my disdain for the regime and some behaviour of its citizens but now, I recognise that the country is separate from the regime or a smaller group of poorly behaved citizens. China is a beautiful country and I would love to visit some day. I will fly over immediately on my own if someone gives me tix to ADLAD!!

Well, I hope some of these things resonate with you. Feel free to share the OOC things that Yizhan made you do.

Once again, Happy BXG Day! 🐢💛🐆��🐷🌶🦁🍑🐶🍍🛹🎋

#yizhan #bjyx #things yizhan made me do

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adhd-adept · 3 years ago

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I have self diagnosed adhd and i was wondering if you could provide some advice regarding reading. I used to be able to just pick up a book and read when i was younger, but now that I'm older it's a bit difficult to just pick up a book and read for the sake of reading. I love reading, but i just can't seem to motivate myself to.

Any advice? I'd really love to get back into reading, but I'm trying to find a way to do it easier

Hello! I’m sorry this took me so long to answer, I’ve been mostly off Tumblr for a little while. I saw this some time ago at 3AM and thought “this deserves a more coherent response than I can give right now” and then forgot that this blog existed for several days.

That said, I absolutely have some advice for reading! I was a big reader as a kid, too, and I’ve recently had to re-discover reading after a long gap in any time spent sitting down with an honest-to-goodness book. There are a number of things you might consider!

DISTRACTIONS

First and foremost, recognize the reason it is difficult to read! For me, it is because reading isn’t the most interesting thing available. That doesn’t mean I don’t love reading! If I can manage to sit down and read a book, it is immensely satisfying - but it’s the satisfaction of the effort you put into something paying off. My favorite hobbies - drawing, writing, reading - are my favorite because of that sense of accomplishment that they give me.

I love the feeling of holding a book and watching my bookmark move through the pages each time I set it down. However, it doesn’t give me the same instant gratification of reading wikipedia, or tvtropes, or scrolling Tumblr, or checking notifications on social media; even when I am unsatisfied, or even frustrated, with the internet, it can be very hard to put down. I know that people will tell you all the time “You need to put your phone down more!!” It gets old. But they have a point. What people don’t tell you is how to do that.

For me, that tends to be about making it inconvenient for myself to get online, or do whatever is distracting me. This doesn’t necessarily mean making it completely unavailable. The distraction just needs to be less available than the task I want to do. I am the kind of person who gets online out of muscle memory, and then gets stuck there. Thus, many of my tricks rely on disrupting the muscle memory that lets you pick up distractions. I will put my laptop charger in another room, so that my screen time is limited to its battery life. I might tie a string around my laptop, or tape it closed, so when I go to open it I will be reminded “Oh yeah, I don’t want to do this right now.” I will occasionally rearrange the apps on my phone, so when I try to open Instagram and end up with the weather app instead, the thought of “wait, how did i get here” will snap me out of the thoughtless habits that led me to pick up my phone in the first place. I’ve even gone so far as to tape my phone to the ceiling. Whatever works.

If the weather permits, I might also walk a little ways down the block and find somewhere to sit and read. This can come with its own distractions, but it gets me away from my laptop, and I get a tiny bit more exercise and sunshine than I would have otherwise! This depends, of course, on whether you have transportation and whether you feel safe. But getting yourself out of the house can be a great way to get away from the things that would otherwise draw you away from reading. If you have a local cafe or library that permits you to sit and stay, those are also great options! I will bring my phone when I leave the house, but I might put it at the bottom of my bag, or put a bit of scotch tape over the power button, so that I have my phone in case of emergency but it’s just slightly inconvenient to get to without thinking about it.

It may not be the internet distracting you. But whatever the distraction is, it doesn’t need to be less compelling than reading. It just needs to be less readily available than your book is!

ENTHUSIASM

Another thing that prevents me from reading is that it often doesn’t have the same sense of urgency that other tasks might, whether that urgency is real or not. Give yourself a time limit! I may own books I haven’t read yet, but I will get to a book sooner if I have borrowed it from the library, because I know there is a deadline to return it!

You can also get other people involved. If you have a friend who wants to read the same book, commit to a chapter or two a week and then call to discuss it.

Or, if you have a friend who would be interested, and you are comfortable with your reading voice, you could read to someone! It might feel weird to offer, but you’d be surprised how many people really do enjoy being read to. If you both have time in your schedules, you could try to set up a regular call to get through a few chapters at a time.

Generally, having a friend who likes the book is great for maintaining enthusiasm, even if they’re not reading it with you - I get to books faster if someone with similar taste says “This is one of my favorites! You would love it!” If you have a friend who has read the book you plan on reading, announce to them that you intend on reading it. Their enthusiasm might help you feel more compelled to read it, and there’s a good chance that if you don’t sit down and read it, they will remind you by asking “Have you read it yet? What do you think?” the next time you talk to them.

PREPARATION

Another great way to make reading easier is to set up a reading space beforehand. It’s one thing to pick up a book and say “I’ve been meaning to read this.” It’s another thing to put on some pajama pants, make a cup of tea, and curl a soft blanket around your shoulders before you settle down to read. For one thing, it’s just nice. But more importantly, it can function as a signal that tells your brain “it is Reading Time now. We are in the Reading Zone.”

Do you ever watch a TV show or listen to a podcast, and you let the theme song play on the first episode, and then skip it for the rest? Even if I’ve watched a show before, I will play the theme song on the first episode I watch that day. It’s the same principle - it serves as a transition, an intro that says “this is where I am now, and this is what I’m doing.” Give yourself an intro for reading! Have a certain spot that you like to sit when you read. Have a certain snack you eat beforehand.

I have all kinds of tasks with little “rituals” before them that help me focus on that task, or certain items that I interact with which I associate with it. I call them “declarations of intent,” and once I’ve made a declaration it’s easier to commit to it. Sometimes that means simply saying out loud, “I am going to do the laundry now.” Sometimes it means I wear a certain shirt if I’m planning to go for a walk that day, or drink from a certain mug at breakfast if I want to get some homework done. I have a specific hat that I put on when I want to write a certain character. Try to find something you can do to act as a cue that says “When I do this, then I will read a book.” Because of this, it can help to really lean into whatever the “aesthetic” of reading is, in your mind. Embrace a reading atmosphere!

It may also help to recognize that reading is something you can work your way up to! There is no shame in being out of practice with a hobby. I took my reading proficiency for granted for a long time because it was just a part of my life. It may help to think of reading as a skill! Start with something smaller and work your way up. Pick up a book of short stories or folktales before you tackle that six-book series you’ve heard good things about! Set achievable goals for yourself when you’re setting out. An early success can make a huge difference to morale, and it’s much better to start “too easy” and accomplish something than to jump in at the deep end and be frustrated by an early setback.

FORGIVENESS

On the topic of working your way up to things, I would like to say a word about mindset. It is easy to feel self-critical about things. Things that you think should come more easily to you. Things that you feel like you have no reason not to be able to do. One of the biggest things I’ve done for my ADHD is recognizing that there is always a reason why I behave a certain way. Accepting that allows me to actually address my struggles, rather than just feeling ashamed of them. I’ve had to accept that I won’t always do things that I set out to do the way I set out to do them.

I bring this up because not all of my advice here may work for you. In fact, some of it doesn’t work for me every time - a technique may work once, but I might fail to make a regular habit of it. I may make a regular habit of something, only to have it become less effective as the novelty of it, or my enthusiasm for it, wears off. I may eventually talk myself out of implementing an effective strategy because there is some part of it that I find unpleasant; or an intentional unpleasantness I once found motivating may eventually become intolerable.

That’s okay. I’m telling you now, it’s okay if that happens. It’s okay if the first method you try doesn’t work. Don’t set yourself up to feel frustrated. If you become frustrated, take a step back. If you borrow a library book and you still haven’t read it by the due date, just give it back. If you don’t actually enjoy the first book you pick up, put it down and try a different one. If you feel badly about not reading something your friend wants you to read, be honest and tell them you have a hard time sitting down, and that you don’t want to disappoint them if they keep asking, but that you will let them know once you have started it!

It can be easy to convince myself that feeling badly about something means it’s important to me, and that maybe if I feel bad about not doing something, it motivate me to do it. There is a balance between making commitments, and not committing to anything that is just going to distress me. Sometimes there is a benefit to a sense of pressure, but I have to recognize when the pressure I create turns into frustration. That’s a fine line to walk! For all I speak of inconveniencing yourself, or holding yourself accountable, your strategies should ultimately feel satisfying, and show results fairly quickly! You may not see immediate results, but if it has been several days and your strategy isn’t working out, change tactics! And the moment you feel apologetic or ashamed about the thing you are trying to do, drop that strategy. Again, this can be easier said than done, but it is so worthwhile to learn how to allow yourself to “give up” on things that aren’t actually helping you, without feeling like you’re giving up entirely.

You want to get back into reading again because you want to enjoy reading again. If you set it up to feel like homework, or a chore, or an obligation, you may make it more difficult for yourself! Getting back into reading is about focusing on what you love about reading.

And hey, I’m always happy to help! I do only check Tumblr every couple weeks right now, but I’ll do what I can to be supportive. If you’ve tried these suggestions and they don’t work out, no worries! Everyone is different, and it’s no insult to me if things that work for me don’t work for you. But feel free to reach out again, let me know anything you have learned about how you function best in the meantime, and we can reevaluate your strategies!

I hope that helps! Happy reading!

#thanks for asking!!#nezjazz #let me know how this works out #a lot of the advice i have for reading is advice i have for Doing Tasks With ADHD in general to be honest #i use the same tricks i use to get myself to read sometimes to get myself to do things like wash dishes #it's about making yourself more interested in what you want yourself to do #and making it easier to do the important things relative to the ease of doing the less important things #i will just straight up delete apps off my phone if i spend too much time on them #most of the time i dont miss them #and tumblr i can access from my laptop it's just slightly more steps to actually log in and type in my password #(i ONLY use tumblr on incognito mode so it doesnt save my login and i have to actually enter my password every time)#(that way i know that if i actually take the steps to log on it's because i WANT to)#(because something about doing that is worth it to me)#(i did that today to come and answer this question lol)#(but that's also why it's taken me so long.)#(do let me know if you have any other questions! i'll be back eventually to help as best i can!)#(and i love feedback)#(if you discover something that works better for yourself let me know that too so i can share with everyone!)

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xxisxxisxxis · 5 years ago

Text

Gateway Drug | Part Forty-One

Table of Content or Part Forty

Read here on wattpad.

Words: 3.2k

Warning(s): Explicit language, minor sexual situations, drug abuse, drug over dose

A/N: Had to cut this chapter in half because tumblr was being sketchy w the length of it for some reason. Anyway, second half will be up asap but I'm about to pass tf out. Also, this chapter was gonna have some smut but I put it in with the second half instead because the vibe didn't mesh well with it included in this one. Have a good night, update coming tomorrow/late tonight (Jan. 3). Goodnight!!

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I can't help but laugh a little as Nikki presses kisses up and down my neck, bottle of Jack in one hand, part of my ass in the other as our car takes the both of us through London.

Valentine's Day, 1986, started out as one of the best Valentine's Days we'd spent together.

Nikki's mood wasn't too good or too bad, it was a tolerant neutral, I suppose it's because we hadn't done much talking at all.

He'd woken me up with his tongue between my legs and it stayed that way until I had soaked the sheets and was practically begging him to give me a break because I couldn't take it anymore.

Then we proceeded to screw around, then got ready to leave to meet everyone at the Hammersmith Odeon where they were due to play that night.

"How much longer?" I ask him, pulling away from a tongue filled, lust fueled kiss, referring to the time left before we get where we're going.

"Like, ten minutes, maybe." He tells me.

My hand reaches between us, rubbing over the obvious bulge in his pants, before he reads my mind.

After our quicky, I'm pulling my panties back on while he's pulling his gear from his boot.

I just let out a breath.

"Nikki--"

"--I'm fucked on blow right now, Viv. I gotta get myself leveled out." He tells me.

I just nod a little, not bothering to argue.

Once we arrive, Fred's meeting us in the back to escort us inside as fans are already crowding around the front entrance.

Nikki's grabbing at my hand once we get out, as he and Fred start talking.

"And there's a surprise for you." Fred tells me as we walk in.

I furrow my brows before he's nodding to our left.

I see the massive, teased, blonde hair and flashy clothing and I'm leaving Nikki's side before I can help myself.

Mike's just as happy to see me and I am to see him, the both of us hugging each other tightly before pulling away to examine each other with wide smiles.

He looks incredible.

He's glowing.

He's gained back the weight he lost dramatically after Razzle died, and it's so obvious that he hasn't touched a drink or Drug in months.

He looks at peace.

"You look great." I tell him, looking him up and down.

"I feel great." He replies. "You look..." He starts, examining me similarly.

I look like I've been dragged through hell.

"Like shit." I finish for him and he rolls his eyes.

"Beautiful, Vivian. You've always been beautiful." He argues.

The shining of a silver band around his left ring finger catches my eye, despite multiple rings decorating his hands.

"Now, I've heard about this." I take his hand and look at the wedding band and he gets giddy. "But I have yet to even see her."

He's pulling his wallet out of his pocket and pulling a picture out, showing me a photo of a woman with dark hair, arched brows, who's no-bullshit demeanor is practically jumping out of the picture.

Jude Wilder had been working at CBS when she'd met Michael while working on Hanoi Rocks' project called "Two Steps From The Move."

She was nine years older than him, but that didn't surprise me. Michael's always been nine years ahead of everyone else in maturity, and they were perfect for each other.

They got married in 1985, and were inseparable.

When she died in 2001, after suffering an intracranial hemorrhage, Michael sunk into the excruciatingly low place he sunk to when Razzle died. But in true Mike Monroe fashion, he didn't allow himself to be down very long, threw the drugs out, and was remarried to a gorgeous, sweet, ball of light named Johanna by mid-2003.

"She's gorgeous, Michael." I tell him in admiration, although I know he's never necessarily been into looks as much as he's after a good personality and clear head.

"Thank you. She'll love to hear that." He chuckles, tucking the picture back into his wallet. "Have you seen the other guys here?" He asks me and I raise my brows.

He motions behind me and I see Andy, Sami, and Nasty, talking to Tommy and Nikki.

Nikki beckons for me and I go to them, trying not to be overly motherly upon seeing them, the three of us sharing the same exchange Michael and I did.

Tight hugs, and an invisible thankfulness that they're in a more positive headspace than the last time I saw them.

Well, except one.

Andy's still on heroin. It doesn't take me two seconds to pick up on it and I can tell it's gonna be a priority to keep him and Nikki separated after the show.

I don't need them fueling the fire under each other's spoons.

Sami and Nasty look better than the last time I saw them, which is amazing.

I'm surprised any of the guys want anything to do with us after the thick of their grieving.

"Are you staying for the show?" I ask Andy.

"Absolutely." Andy states, pointing at Nikki. "And I'm showing him around when it's all over."

A protective chord is struck in me, and I'm finding myself having to pull back on the reins before I offend Andy.

Nikki seems to agree, before I shit all over it.

"It's Valentine's Day." I cut in. "I was hoping we could hang out." I look to Nikki.

"You can come with us, babe." He suggests and I try to hide my true emotions about it, but Michael sees through it.

"Oh, c'mon, Nikki. It's Valentines Day." He interjects, picking up on my concern of Andy and Nikki out on the town, binging.

Nikki's pulling a handful of bills out of his pocket before handing it to Michael.

"You take her out, then." He tells him casually, and Michael looks at me, caught off guard, able tell this isn't the first time Nikki's acted like this towards me and it's as if he's saying, "he's like this now?"

"Guys, c'mon, you gotta get dressed." Doc pulls at Nikki and Tommy.

The show goes smoothly, despite a few hiccups and—as predicted—Andy and Nikki are thick as thieves.

I help Nikki get his white and black polka dotted suit off, before he's pulling on his tshirt and jeans, pulling his boots on.

Before I head for the door when he's dressed, he's grasping at my hand and stopping me.

"What is it?" I ask, raising my brows.

"C'mere." He tugs me to him and I chuckle a little.

"What is it?" I repeat, grinning, and he leans down and presses his lips to mine, sweetly.

"I really wish you would come with me tonight." He tucks some of my hair behind my ear and I shake my head a little.

"Nah, I'll just hangout with Mike."

"No, I wanna hangout with you." He argues lightly.

"You and Andy are gonna be doing things I'm not into." I point out.

"Like what?" He asks.

"You know what." I reply.

"Alright, how about you and Mike come with us so you aren't by yourself?"

"How about you just don't touch heroin?" I suggest and his smile falters, his jaw rolling. I don't even let him say anything else.

I kiss him one last time before trying to sweep whatever argument is brewing, under the rug.

"I'll see you when you get back tonight, Nikki, okay?" I ask and he sighs out.

"Whatever, Viv." He mumbles as I step out.

I find Mike and Tommy telling Nasty and Sami "goodbye", and I step to them, glancing around for Vince, who isn't anywhere to be seen.

It's obvious he's keeping his distance.

"Leaving already?" I ask the two dark haired boys.

"Got to get back home for a bit. We'll see you around, eventually." Nasty tells me, grinning as he squeezes my hand assuringly.

"I'll be meeting Mike back in the states in about a month." Sami adds. "We'll he sure to stop by."

"Okay." I nod, smiling at the both of them. "Be careful, I'll see you later." I them.

"See you, man." Mike tells the two of them, hugging the both of them.

"Big plans tonight, Viv?" Tommy nudges me and I point my thumb in Mike's direction. "What about Nikki?"

"He's married to Andy's dealer tonight." I reply and Mike raises his brows, not saying a word, and Tommy seems like he doesn't quite know how to respond.

"We're outta here!" Andy exclaims, he and Nikki stepping to the exit with Fred escorting them out to their car.

"He's really not spending tonight with you?" Tommy asks me, disappointed, and I raise my brows.

"Are you surprised?"

"..." He says everything with a single look and I nod.

"Exactly." I scoff, going to the dressing room to grab my purse.

Once I get back, Fred is waiting for Mike and I.

"Press talks." Fred warns us right before we step outside.

The paps aren't horrid here like in America, but there's enough here to spin a narrative if they choose.

"So does bullshit." I reply as he opens the car door and I slide in with Mike following me.

"Be careful, guys. I'll see you later, Viv." Fred tells me and I nod before he shuts the door.

Michael looks at me with a smile.

"What now?" He asks me and I shake my head a little.

"Food." I tell him. "And a lot of it."

Although I would have loved to spend the day of love with my husband, spending it with Michael Monroe while stuffing my face with London's very best take-out, was nice.

But there was someone who upstaged Nikki, aside from Mike.

I step into the hotel after dinner with Michael and his wife, carrying my heels in my hands because my feet are killing me, ready to go to sleep.

"Mrs. Sixx, there was a delivery made to your room by your management earlier." The woman at the front desk tells me as I walk by to the elevator.

"Alright, thank you." I reply.

When I get to my room, I unlock the door and I'm met with a large bouquet of classic red roses.

I furrow my brows, knowing they can't be from Nikki, but already know who they can be from when I see two little plastic water guns tucked into the flowers, a bottle of Pepsi and a bag of gummy worms beside them.

I pick up the card and nearly start crying.

"We miss you! Happy V-Day, V!

Love, more than Jack and Marlboro (or Pepsi and gummy worms), Tansy, Steven, Axl, Izzy, Slash, and Duff."

It's etched in Doc's handwriting, and I chuckle at the thought of Doc on the phone with Tansy while she dictates what he writes on a card for flowers she probably begged him to get me before the show ended tonight.

I keep myself from crying, a strong sense of homesickness washing over me.

I pick up the phone, trying to calculate the time difference.

It's 2:00am here, which means it's only 6:00pm in L.A.

I'm dialing their apartment—damning the overseas charge that I know will be billed to us—knowing they're probably getting ready to go out or head to a club for a gig.

"Yo." I hear Steven's voice on the other line.

"Hey, Steven, it's Viv."

"Viv?" He asks excitedly. "Aye, Viv's on the phone!" I hear him say, hearing indistinguishable sentences in the back ground.

"Yeah, I just called to let you guys know I just got back to my room and saw the flowers." I explain, fumbling with the phone chord, sitting down on the bed.

"Do you like 'em?" He asks me and I nod to myself.

"Yes, they're beautiful." I reply.

"Well, Tansy mentioned getting you something for Valentine's Day and she and Duff called the guys' manager and told him some stuff you'd like." He informs me.

"I-Is Duff there?" I ask.

"Uhh, yeah, gimme a second." He tells me. "Duff! Man, it's Viv!" He calls into the apartment. "He's comin', baby." He assures me. "Alright, here he is."

"Bye, I love you." I tell him.

"I love you, too." He replies as I hear the phone being handed off.

"Hello?" Duff answers and I rub my lips together.

"Hey, I know you're probably busy so I wasn't gonna keep you long, I just wanted to say 'thank you' for the flowers and the junkfood I really shouldn't be eating but I'm going to eat anyway." I state and he chuckles.

"I'm just waiting on the guys, and I thought about Coke and potatoe chips but I knew that would be kinda mean so I played it safe." He informs me.

"You don't have a mean bone in your body, Duff." I point out. "Oh, guess who I ate dinner with tonight?"

"Nikki?" He asks and I scoff.

"That's an entire conversation on it's own." I reply. "Michael Monroe and his lovely wife, Jude, took me out to dinner."

"You can't just say it that casually, Viv." He tells me. "You gotta cry tears of joy or something, holy shit."

"Well, I suggest you learn how to keep your cool because him and Sami Yaffa will be visiting L.A. soon and I will be introducing you and the guys, if you're interested."

"Shut up." He says it in disbelief and I smile.

"Guns N' Roses came up during dinner and I may or may not have bragged about one W.Axl Rose, Steven Adler, Izzy Stradlin, Slash Hudson, and Duff McKagan and piqued his interest."

"Shut up!" He says it louder. "Viv, I know it's not a big deal to you because he's one of your friends but...holy shit, Sixx, you didn't have to do that."

"I did, Duff. You guys deserve it." I argue. "You deserve it."

"I fucking love you." He tells me, genuinely. "And I'm not just saying that because you did something nice, like, I can't say 'thank you' enough or tell you how much I love you for being just as enthusiastic as we are and believing in us as much as you have for the past year."

"You guys are great people, Duff. And God's given the five of you incredible musical gifts. It's against my religion not to help expose those gifts to the rest of the world and I know you guys can do it, as much as you guys know you can."

"Thank you, Viv." He tells me again. "And where's Nikki at?" He asks me and I close my eyes for a second, not wanting to say something that will put a damper on his mood.

"He wasn't feeling well so he came back to the hotel while the three of us went to dinner. But he's feeling better now and he's in the shower so we'll spend some time together when he's out." I lie.

"Okay, good. The guys are about ready to go, now, so I'm gonna let you go." He tells me.

"Alright, have fun." I reply, trying to force back tears. "And tell the guys I said 'hey' and that I miss them." I add.

"I will, Viv. Goodnight. I love you." He states, and a tear topples over my lashline, pretending, just for a moment, I'm hearing those words from Nikki.

A sad, broken smile cracks at my lips.

"I love you, too, Duff." I reply. "Goodnight."

I hang up, stepping to the bathroom to take off my makeup and get a shower.

By the time I get out of the shower, I'm so tired my mind practically shuts down the second my head hits the pillow.

Typically I wouldn't be able to sleep due to being alone, however, I'm not technically alone.

A loud, startling bang rattles at my door, and I jerk awake, confused for a moment. I glance at the clock, seeing it's only 3:30am, and I roll my eyes, knowing it's Nikki and he probably left his key somewhere.

Without even looking in the peep-hole, I open the door to see a frantic, panicking Andy.

Before this continues, I need to clarify that I understand it isn't anyone else's fault that Nikki did drugs. He had his struggles and demons all without anyone offering him anything to shoot up, snort, swallow down, or drink. He could have easily said "no" to these things, but for some reason just couldn't.

But back then, I knew people knew he couldn't help himself. So no one who could have been considered an enabler was off limits. And Andy was an enabler.

All it takes is for him to say the words "Nikki's in bad trouble" and my face twists, tears toppling from my eyes, an entire wave of emotions rocking through my body, before I'm throwing both of my fists at him.

"Vivian!" He's screaming repeatedly as I'm yelling out nonsense at him, sobbing, weakly hitting him.

Once I've gotten calmed down in a couple minutes, Andy's grabbing at my shoulders, his cheek bleeding from my ring cutting him.

"Get your head clear." He practically has to pull me together for myself.

I'm running down the street from the hotel as fast as my bare feet can take me, Andy leading me to the run-down apartment he and Nikki were hanging out at.

I walk into to this rat holding a baseball bat of Nikki, about to hit him.

"What the fuck are you doing?!" Andy barks at him as I snatch the bat from his hands.

I'm about to hit him with it instead, but Andy's grabbing at me. "Viv, keep your head clear." He tells me again, pulling the bat from my hands and I glare into the sunken in eyes of the stranger, silently promising he'll get his when I get my blue husband awake.

I'm overwhelmed and feel defeated at the sight of him.

Blue, soaking wet from being wet down in an attempt to be woken up, and the deterioration of his body from his use is even more evident in his current state.

Andy is screaming at the guy for hitting him with a bat instead of continuing to give him mouth to mouth and pumping his chest like Andy had been doing before he came and got me.

I start CPR, trying to keep my shit together, but I obviously fail.

My stomach cramps like shards of glass are scraping at me. Except it's not my stomach, it's my uterus.

"Andy." I cry out, keeping my hands on Nikki's chest, but the Finnish rockstar keeps yelling back and forth with the dealer. "Andy." I repeat, louder, but he still doesn't hear me. "Andy!" I'm pleading in a holler, catching his attention. "I-I can't do this, I'm sick, just call an ambulance!" I beg and Andy heads to the phone hanging on the wall.

"No!" The living dead-rat argues roughly, fear in his pinned eyes as he practically snatches the phone off the wall, refusing to hand it to Andy.

"My husband is dying if not already dead! He needs help!" I argue, sweat beginning to perspire thinly on my skin, my own pain intensifies, my vision starting to blur slightly as I feel hot liquid rush from between my bare legs, and I'm blacking out along with Nikki.

#nikki sixx #vince neil #tommy lee #mötley crüe #the dirt #gateway drug

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jawnkeets · 7 years ago

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hello sorry to disturb you lovely person but i was wondering if you had some advices to have a better literary analysis, or a better culture well, i mean how can i improve my literary intelligence basically ? ( it may not be really clear but i hope you'll understand because i feel like i'm lost... )

hello anon! no need to be sorry, ur not disturbing me at all :+) feel free 2 send an ask at any time ✨✨✨

i’ll attempt to answer this by splitting ur ask into 2 parts. first i’ll try to give some tips on literary analysis, and then i’ll try to talk about the sort of wider awareness of lit (or the culture as you call it).

a little disclaimer: pls bear in mind that i am by no means qualified to speak about this in any way (i still very much consider myself a learner). i’ve generally been left alone throughout my education to do my own thing, which is a good thing in some respects and a bad thing in others; i don’t have the solid foundations that most ppl do, never following things like paragraph structures throughout lower school, and i didn’t know a thing about metre until the start of this month. however, because of my education i think i’ve managed to avoid a few conventional pitfalls. so, in short, you can take as much or as little of this advice as you like!

PART 1: literary analysis

• an excellent way to boost your analysis straight away, dull as it is, is to learn some literary devices beyond, say, alliteration and personification. being able to spot things like chiasmus and epiphora not only wows an examiner, but also enables you to talk about more things within a poem/ book/ play and thus broadens your literary scope in close reading.• remember that for each literary device you mention you should say what it REVEALS (DO NOT just list!!!). the best essays move from a literary device to an explanation of why this device is used - what does it reveal about a character, the speaker, or even the society that the poet or author was writing in?• rhythm and meter in a poem tick boxes in an exam, but can also lead to insightful analysis. how do the rhythm and meter add to the overall message of the poem? does, for example, the metre give a regularity to the poem? why might this be? is it broken at any point? how is this significant?• the above can be applied to rhyme scheme, too. look out for rhyming couplets at the end of a poem, which may give a sense of finality to the poem (or may seem to give a sense of finality when in actuality the speaker of the poem is far from decisive…).• it is important to remember that a particular rhyme scheme (or metre) doesn’t ALWAYS mean anything; it can mean different things in different poems, so instead of applying a ready-made formula, try to go into the exam knowing how to identify these aspects of a poem and then try to work out why you think the poet has used them in that particular poem. flexibility is key, which can be daunting but also somewhat liberating.• i personally find a ‘scribble method’ quite useful. this is where, when first approaching a piece of writing, you write down everything that comes into your head, regardless of how messy, or how basic. you then sort through your ideas, expanding upon what you think is worthwhile and discarding what you think is not. this method is generally more handy when not under time pressure, though, as it can get you into a muddle in the exam.• start simple and build up. it can be tempting to jump straight in but sometimes when you start simply new things can reveal themselves as you work your way up into more complex ideas! • perspective is extremely useful to consider. who is speaking and why? are they biased or objective? who are they speaking to and why?

unseen exam tips

• in an exam, i would approach a poetry or prose extract first by simply reading it, and trying to find out what it is about. then i would go through and highlight words/ phrases of interest, and label literary devices. finally, i would go through it again and build the main analysis. a brief paragraph plan can be useful before writing the essay.• acronyms can help sometimes as a go-to in an exam when you don’t have much time. for example, i use CFTTSOL - content (basic story, characters, who is speaking and why etc) form (poetry, prose, drama etc), tense (past/ present etc), tone (happy, sad, why? is the tone at odds with the subject matter? in emily dickinson’s ‘because i could not stop for death’, for example, the poem is about something dark but it is very jolly), structure/ syntax (rhyme, caesura, enjambment, any disrupted syntax, etc) other (anything not mentioned in the rest of the categories) and language (similes, metaphors, assonance, etc). i would recommend finding one that works for YOU and makes sense for YOU, because creating your own can really help to ease you into analysis.

PART 2: literary awareness

• read, read, read! i cannot stress the importance of wider reading enough, and also the importance of thinking whilst you read (making notes/ annotating books whilst you read is advisable). i am speaking from experience here - i didn’t read outside of the curriculum at all until the end of last year, and since i have started my literary analysis has increased tenfold. this is partly because practice is vital, but also because wider reading gave me an awareness that i could never have expected to gain. it enabled me to start making links between texts, genres, periods, etc – i began to see patterns and conventions in literature. for instance, a poem that breaks convention is easier to spot and talk about – to use a very basic example, a sonnet (usually a form of love poetry) about brutality/ violence toys with genre. if you had read some of shakespeare’s sonnets, you could then compare the violent poem with sonnet 18, to elucidate your point. this isn’t to say that you didn’t already know that sonnets were love poems, or that you wouldn’t have picked up on this without wider reading. but having read sonnets outside of class means that you can talk about this with greater clarity, authority and confidence.• i would also advise you to push yourself with the literary material you explore. it is difficult, but try to find nothing intimidating - read thick victorian novels, read modernist authors, read kant if you want, and even if the prospect of reading ‘harder’ texts doesn’t thrill you then try them anyway - you may be pleasantly surprised! part of the difficulty of studying this subject is that preconceived ideas can erect barriers and put you off. it is important to totally bulldoze these barriers and remind yourself that nothing is above you, and that you are capable. that’s not at all to say that you can’t read ‘simpler’ texts, and of course it is probably wise to admit to yourself when you perhaps need a greater literary background before you tackle a text (for example, i tried joyce’s ulysses, a modernist text full of allusion, when i have a barely working knowledge of greek mythology, and i admitted to myself that though it would not be impossible for me to read it, i would like to read more widely and then return to it in the future).• w i k i p e d i a. it’s often sniffed at but honestly don’t be afraid of using it! it’s an excellent way to absorb info fast. also don’t be ashamed of using websites like sparknotes if you don’t understand a poem to begin with! u shouldn’t rely on them for the crux of your analysis but they can be helpful to get started!• it’s perhaps obvious, but it helps to remind yourself that literature isn’t just fiction - try to read some critical essays if you can, and look at philosophy, history, psychology etc and how they relate to literature as studied in school. this is actually wayyyy more fun than it sounds (!) and will improve your general literary knowledge.• tumblr, whilst being a killer procrastination station, can also really help to broaden your knowledge. reblogged quotes from famous writers often stick around in your memory, and period moodboards can help you get a sense of different ages and help you to visualise what you’re studying. it’s also great to be in a community of passionate people - the passion of others on this site has definitely rubbed off on me!• make it relevant!! all of these texts and literary movements have shaped our society profoundly. as overdramatic as it sounds, look for the romanticism in a house party, or existentialism in internet memes, or hamlet in yourself. legacies are all around us, and seeing the world in this way can really bring literature to life.

literature is a subject where you get out what you put in. it’s relatively straightforward, if you work hard, to get very good grades in lit; if this is what you want, then having a solid knowledge of metre and literary terms, being able to spot them in texts, and then being able to describe what this reveals can get you top marks. but, in my opinion, to develop true literary intelligence you really have to let the subject permeate every aspect of your life. this is a subject where you really can take risks, be original and unique, and explore a huge amount of periods and ideas. if you see it reflected in the world around you, and think deeply and thoughtfully about everything you are reading, then the classwork honestly sorts itself out.

i hope this has been useful in some way and that it answers ur ask adequately!! if u have any further questions or require clarification please do not hesitate to let me know. i hope u have a wonderful day 💘

#sorry abt the length!!#this is longer than the essay i've been trying to write all day lol #asks #studyblr #litblr #english literature #literature

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millennial-review · 7 years ago

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If I may ask, what is the goal/point of your blog? Sometimes it is seemingly to just update people to things going on, while other times it is a very personal approach to what's going on. I am not meaning to sound rude or disrespectful, I'm just curious.

Basically both of those things. I started this whole thing as Students for Bernie Sanders with my friend Trevor, who has never really been that hands on with the tumblr, but basically runs the Facebook page and helped build the website. Since he’s been hands off this thing has really become both the brand we’re trying to build and a really personal view on politics from my perspective.It’s kind of straddling the line between both of the things I want this to become and hopefully both of those things can coexist. I’d like it to become a place where you can get a broader view of the day from a reasonable pragmatic and progressive point of view that appreciates the history of politics and the fact that it’s inherently messy and difficult. And also you can also get a personal view from me, Justin. And whoever else decides to jump on board.I’m considering vlogging, but making politics the medium through which I present my day. Well politics and law school. I’m kind of fascinated with vlogging as a medium and I don’t really know of anyone that is doing what I’m interested in trying to create, with the exception of John Green sometimes when he chooses to discuss politics. Basically go throughout my day and discuss the news or some broader political issue. So that’s the personal side which will hopefully come in the months to come. We’ve also got a podcast in the works and plans to produce more regular written work but my friend just started his Phd and I’m working full time and start law school soon so it’s been difficult to get the infrastructure in place. That should change in early July though and I think things are looking good. And a lot of the goal there is to make the website more functional and produce more content that reaches more people.Our website, Millennial-Review.com, at this point has basically been a two year long experiment in analytics and social media. Figuring out how to manipulate reddit to get traffic, what does well on tumblr vs. what does well on our facebook page, what gets shares and what gets clicks. So far it’s basically just been a big experiment in how to get traffic and clicks producing content with a progressive lefty view. When I post things like buy this sweatshirt it’s mostly just to see if anything would happen, I was genuinely surprised when 2 people went out of their way to spend $30. But it’s all kind of part of the broader plan to create a place for high quality progressive think pieces and channel the spirit of the Bernie Sanders campaign in a genuinely practical way. I supported Bernie Sanders because I thought his policies were the way forward and could actually be passed and sustainable. I still don’t buy the idea that a society based on social, economic, and environmental justice is outlandish or impossible.So to the extent that I/we can turn this place into something that channels those views and creates a broader discussion, that’s our goal.In the long long term I really want to produce content on par with Vox or some major outlet, but hopefully more grassroots. Sorry, Ezra Klein, but I don’t want to sell my soul to the Democratic Party for access or Comcast for money to produce content.We’ve had offers to help us with marketing and someone even offered a decent amount of money for the brand itself and all the social media channels (nothing crazy but more than a few paychecks). Someday I might look back on that and think it was silly to turn it down, but we’ve got a plan and it’s kind of slow moving, but I think it could work. I don’t want to get too high minded or pretentious with my goals for this thing, because it could very well just become me typing paragraphs like this and talking into a camera or microphone every now and then. Which would be cool too, but until the internet or the politics of the day prove me wrong I’m going to keep trying to make it work, because honestly I don’t see anyone out there pushing that particular point of view in a fashion that doesn’t veer to far to the fringe or too far to the more establishment view. And I think it’s valuable, important, and like, I really enjoy doing it, so either way it works out for me.

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i-like-your-genitalia · 7 years ago

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You are going to kill me... buuut all 200 questions? I'm keeping you busy and thinking about your life

200: My crush’s name is: Jennifer  

199: I was born in: a hospital? (Jks 1998) 

198: I am really: funny  

197: My cellphone company is: Lebara 

196: My eye color is: boring ol’ brown  

195: My shoe size is: a ladies 9 

194: My ring size is: I actually don’t know 

193: My height is: 5'10  

192: I am allergic to: nothing surprisingly  

191: My 1st car was: 1998 Subaru Legacy (the station wagon) 

190: My 1st job was: Checkout Worker 

189: Last book you read: The Accident Man 

188: My bed is: a king  

187: My pet: I don’t have one atm  

186: My best friend: Anushka  

185: My favorite shampoo is: I don’t have one (but I like anything coconut or tropical scented) 

184: Xbox or ps3: don’t care  

183: Piggy banks are: lit 

182: In my pockets: I’m a girl, only 20% of my clothes have pockets big enough to put anything in  

181: On my calendar: “Spotify Premium runs out on the 27th of August" 

180: Marriage is: Not married  

179: Spongebob can:  

178: My mom: is awesome  

177: The last three songs I bought were? Whatever I listened to last on Spotify?  

176: Last YouTube video watched: review on Aztec clay face mask  

175: How many cousins do you have? 4 step cousins and then 6 blood related cousins  

174: Do you have any siblings? Just a younger sister  

173: Are your parents divorced? Nah they still together and in love  

172: Are you taller than your mom? Only just  

171: Do you play an instrument? I used to play the piano  

170: What did you do yesterday? Worked

[ I Believe In ] 

169: Love at first sight: kinda  

168: Luck: yes  

167: Fate: not really  

166: Yourself: sometimes  

165: Aliens: yes  

164: Heaven: yes  

163: Hell: no  

162: God: yes  

161: Horoscopes: I mostly enjoy the zodiac memes and compatibility and personality horoscopes  

160: Soul mates: yes, but I believe you have more than one  

159: Ghosts: yes  

158: Gay Marriage: big yes  

157: War: nope 

156: Orbs: it would be cool but I’m neutral  

155: Magic: yes

[ This or That ] 

154: Hugs or Kisses: Hugs  

153: Drunk or High: Drunk  

152: Phone or Online: Online  

151: Red heads or Black haired: Red heads  

150: Blondes or Brunettes: Blondes  

149: Hot or cold: Hot  

148: Summer or winter: Summer  

147: Autumn or Spring: Autumn  

146: Chocolate or vanilla: Chocolate  

145: Night or Day: Day  

144: Oranges or Apples: Oranges  

143: Curly or Straight hair: Curly  

142: McDonalds or Burger King: Maccas  

141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate: Milk Chocolate  

140: Mac or PC: Mac 

139: Flip flops or high heels: High Heels  

138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor: Sweet and Poor  

137: Coke or Pepsi: Coke 

136: Hillary or Obama: OBAMA 

135: Burried or cremated: Cremated  

134: Singing or Dancing: Dancing  

133: Coach or Chanel: Chanel  

132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks: who are they? 

131: Small town or Big city: Big city  

130: Wal-Mart or Target: I haven’t been to either  

129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler: Ben Stiller  

128: Manicure or Pedicure: Manicure  

127: East Coast or West Coast: East Coast  

126: Your Birthday or Christmas: this is too cruel to answer  

125: Chocolate or Flowers: Chocolate  

124: Disney or Six Flags: Disney  

123: Yankees or Red Sox: um don’t care

[ Here’s What I Think About ] 

122: War: It’s expensive and unnecessary and should be a last resort. It’s not worth the lives lost, people injured and relocated. The monetary cost is ridiculous and it barley solves anything. It cause more issues and potentially more wars

121: George Bush: did 9/11 

120: Gay Marriage: It’s actually crazy how long and how much effort it took to get this accepted. And I just hope this right isn’t taken away!  

119: The presidential election: Donald Trump and Pence need to die or be locked up forever, I don’t even understand how anyone thought that Hilary Clinton would be worse.  

118: Abortion: Pro-choice for the win  

117: MySpace: I wasn’t old enough for this  

116: Reality TV: my guilty pleasure tbh  

115: Parents: I love my parents and they are good to me. But it would be great if they could be less homophobic.  

114: Back stabbers: I don’t know why people feel the need to intentionally hurt and embarrass someone, especially someone who isn’t prepared for it or trusts you  

113: Ebay: I don’t really use eBay  

112: Facebook: I use it to tag my non tumblr friends in memes and to stalk people  

111: Work: I’m sick of my job but I’m having to stick it out for now.  

110: My Neighbors: They are seasonal but if their kids could not move and rearrange the bedroom at the ass crack of dawn that would be fantastic  

109: Gas Prices: New Zealand, especially in the towns. Gas prices are so high. Spain isn’t so bad 

108: Designer Clothes: I’d rather have more clothes than one designer one  

107: College:  

106: Sports: I have zero hand eye coordination and therefore hate sports! But I will watch the Olympics  

105: My family: They are cool for the most part  

104: The future: is scary and it makes me wanna throw up if I think too much about it

[ Last time I ] 

103: Hugged someone: like a week ago  

102: Last time you ate: I’m eating chocolate right now  

101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile: my grandparents and my cousins today  

100: Cried in front of someone: it’s been forever  

99: Went to a movie theater: like a good 6-8 months ago 

98: Took a vacation: ummm like 4 months ago  

97: Swam in a pool: yesterday  

96: Changed a diaper: not since my babysitting days  

95: Got my nails done: literally before I left New Zealand so 5 months ago 

94: Went to a wedding: it’s been years  

93: Broke a bone: never actually broken anything in my body  

92: Got a peircing: I got my ears pieced when I was 12  

91: Broke the law: Probably when I was driving, speeding or something but nothing I've been charged with lmao 

90: Texted: like a couple of hours ago

[ MISC ] 

89: Who makes you laugh the most: my sister  

88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is: having consistently good home cooked meals  

87: The last movie I saw: probably shrek  

86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most: being back in New Zealand! Or doing some travelling  

85: The thing im not looking forward to: working  

84: People call me: gay 83: The most difficult thing to do is: be honest  82: I have gotten a speeding ticket: I actually haven’t  

81: My zodiac sign is: Leo  

80: The first person i talked to today was: my girlfriend  

79: First time you had a crush: the first crush I remember, I was in year 4 (so 8 years old) and it was on this boy named Joseph  

78: The one person who i can’t hide things from: I’m good at hiding things tbh  

77: Last time someone said something you were thinking: my sister when my mum and dad were talking shit  

76: Right now I am talking to: my sister and my friends from New Zealand  

75: What are you going to do when you grow up: Hairdressing tho I kinda would like to do pre school/nursery/kindergarten teaching  

74: I have/will get a job: currently working as front of house at a little supermarket  

73: Tomorrow: I’m working and doing house work 

72: Today: I slept and then worked  

71: Next Summer: I will hopefully be enjoying the sunshine  

70: Next Weekend: Working yet again and having dinner with my grandparents  

69: I have these pets: Definitely a cat, and also a dog  

68: The worst sound in the world: chalk or finger nails on a chalkboard  

67: The person that makes me cry the most is: myself  

66: People that make you happy: my sister, my friends and my girlfriend  

65: Last time I cried: when I watched beauty and the beast  

64: My friends are: absolutely incredible, I don’t deserve them 

63: My computer is: I don’t have one anymore  

62: My School: I’m not in school  

61: My Car: I don’t have a car atm  

60: I lose all respect for people who: are snakes  

59: The movie I cried at was: beauty and the beast 

58: Your hair color is: brown and boring  57: TV shows you watch: Atm limitless, shooter, Shetland, Rewatching Criminal Minds, AHS and Black Mirror 

56: Favorite web site: boohoo.com or iherb  

55: Your dream vacation: A cruise or a historical/relaxed tour of the ancient world  

54: The worst pain I was ever in was: in a tie between slamming my fingers in a car door or when I got a virus (it’s a really bad version of food poisoning) and I actually thought I was gonna die.  

53: How do you like your steak cooked: medium to well done  

52: My room is: relatively clean and currently got that minimal plant theme going  

51: My favorite celebrity is: Dua Lipa  

50: Where would you like to be: with @dysfunctionalgroup 

49: Do you want children: yeah one day  

48: Ever been in love: yes  

47: Who’s your best friend: Anushka  

46: More guy friends or girl friends: it used to be a balance but now mostly girl friends  

45: One thing that makes you feel great is: cute underwear and a good nights sleep  

44: One person that you wish you could see right now: 

43: Do you have a 5 year plan: yes 

42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die: mentally but it’s not written down anywhere  

41: Have you pre-named your children: no, but I have some names I really like lined up  

40: Last person I got mad at: my sister  

39: I would like to move to: the Uk or NZ  

38: I wish I was a professional:

[ My Favorites ] 

37: Candy: Reece’s pieces or skittles  

36: Vehicle: Kinda want a Range Rover or a Land Rover but in the old style. Or a classic car 

35: President: Obama 

34: State visited: ive never been to America  

33: Cellphone provider: Lebara  

32: Athlete: my bio teacher, she played for a big women’s netball team  

31: Actor: Jensen Ackles  

30: Actress: Gal Gadot  

29: Singer: Dua Lipa 

28: Band: The Internet

27: Clothing store: h&m or boohoo 

26: Grocery store: I don’t have one  

25: TV show: Brooklyn 99 

24: Movie: I have too many  

23: Website: this hell hole 

22: Animal: Cats or Goats  

21: Theme park: I’ve only been to Disney  

20: Holiday: Christmas and Halloween  

19: Sport to watch: Gymnastics  

18: Sport to play: None 

17: Magazine: who reads magazines anymore  

16: Book: the Mysterious Benedict Society  

15: Day of the week: Friday  

14: Beach: as long as it’s sandy I’m cool  

13: Concert attended: J Cole 

12: Thing to cook: Pizza and Sweet and Sour Pork  

11: Food: Cheesburgers  

10: Restaurant: Any that sell food I like  

9: Radio station: ZM

8: Yankee candle scent: most of them

7: Perfume: Dolce and Gabbana, Floral Drops

6: Flower: forget me nots

5: Color: Green

4: Talk show host: don’t have a fave

3: Comedian: don’t have a fave

2: Dog breed: Border Collie

1: Did you answer all these truthfully? Guess you’ll never know

#all done #my asks #answered asks #ask me anything

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anghraine · 8 years ago

Note

Having been wowed by your fanfic ("wandering inside this night" holds a special place in my RO heart), I'm curious: what is your writing/editing process like?

Oh, thank you!

My writing process really varies depending on what I’m doing, but I can explain it in terms of wandering inside this night.

It’s long and rambly, so you can scroll down for a very concise tl;dr version of The Process.

1. Eureka!

I pretty much always start out with 1) a vague sense of something I want to write about, and I sort of mentally fish around until I land on an idea, or 2) an idea pops into my head, or 3) some combination of both.

The last two are the most common for me—I have more ideas than I could ever write. With wandering, it was definitely that way.

I was hollering into my tags about the Cassian-Leia parallels pretty early, which … Jyn-Han is obvious, but I felt like the Cassian-Leia ones went relatively unnoticed but were probably more profound. And as spies in the ragtag ANH-era Rebellion, it’s more than possible that they’d know each other; I’d made babbling posts, but I really wanted to do something with it. So I sketched out a backstory in until the last chance is spent, but I still wanted more, and also to get into Han-Jyn at the same time, and also just—have something fun! And suddenly (I was actually at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert, lol) the idea popped into my head of jumping to the Han/Leia meltdown of 1980 with established relationship Jyn/Cassian.

2. Percolation

This is particularly important for longer fic (or any long-form writing, really), but it helps with shorter things, too. It’s where you’re not actively working to figure out details or more ideas, much less writing, just passively letting your mind wander. It’s best if you’re actually doing something else—something that doesn’t take much attention, but enough that you can’t completely focus on your thoughts, like showering or washing dishes or something.

When something does come to mind, I scribble it down (or stick it in a doc in some form that will hopefully make sense to me later). Sometimes it’ll be scraps of dialogue, or a phrase I want to make sure gets in somewhere, or a plot-point, just anything that pops up. Ideally, though, I don’t write anything beyond that—just note down anything I might forget and let my ideas develop freely.

Normally, I’d only do so much of that with something like wandering (fairly short, fairly light). But I ended up snowed in with my extended family, where I was both bored and unable to sit down and write. So I’m sitting there entertaining myself by imagining Jyn and Han, drinking buddies, and how that’d work with the Cassian-Leia brotp of ruthless idealism (Han would be jealous!), and just having that percolating in my head while I read fic and let stray thoughts pass through my mind. (‘Okay but Cassian would fucking hate Han’ being uppermost among them, lol)

3. Brainstorming/Outline

At this point, I try to pin down the free-floating ideas and/or organize what scraps I have into something coherent. With something longer, like ad astra, I generally do a pretty traditional outline—decide what the story is specifically going to cover, and where the things I’ve actually written fit with that, and what’s going to go in the spaces between.

It’s not classroom-style brainstorming; I usually brainstorm ideas by trying to put together an outline. I’ll be “okay, I want to start with something like that shot of Jyn on the platform with an Imperial ship at the end, but it’s Bodhi” and “they get sucked into the Death Star and Jyn exploits Cassian’s injuries to get in” and then I sit down and figure out how I’m going to get from one to the other. “Okay, so—there’s no way they can actually get Kaytoo, but maybe something—yeah, she just up and grabs his dismembered head l o l, okay, and there’s the jump into the ship which rattles Cassian further, and she’d try to treat him with whatever supplies are available, and we’d have Bodhi trying to get out without being shot down, and maybe I can work in the your father would have been proud of you line, and Jyn goes to check on Bodhi and they see the Death Star and…”

Also, it helps a ton to actually talk ideas over with someone else. With me, it’s generally @steinbecks—not some strict ‘this, then this, then this, tell me what you think’, but ‘I had this idea’ and ‘OK BUT IMAGINE IF’ and ‘haha yeah exactly’ and ‘shit you’re right they do change outfits’ etc.

4) Drafting (The Big One)

Ideally, I only get to this after nailing down an outline or at least getting a lot figured out in chats/notes to myself. That’s what I did for pretty much all my most successful longfics—First Impressions (f!Darcy/m!Elizabeth), Season of Courtship (Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement), we get dark, only to shine (AU of The Borgias that moves the canon pairing getting together from S3 to S1), and now ad astra. It helps a TON if you have trouble with discipline and direction, as I do, because you can always go back to it and figure out where you need to be headed when you’re muddled/uninspired, even if some details change along the way. (They always do, for me.)

I did some of that with wandering, but … I was snowed-in, lol, and finally everyone had gone to sleep and my head was full of ideas. So I laid down with my laptop and just dove right in with the only clear line I had in mind:

Han Solo once had apleasant conversation with Cassian Andor.

Just once.

That was where I planned it to begin! The actual beginning came later, because I very quickly ran into a problem—the sentence worked to jump into exposition, not an actual scene. And with the exposition, I needed to introduce 1) Cassian’s hatred of Han, 2) Han’s lesser but firm dislike, 3) Cassian and Leia’s history together as spies, 4) Han’s brief and half-hearted attempt to suck up, 5) Jyn and Cassian being married, 6) Han’s friendship with Jyn, 7) Han’s jealousy as contrasted to Cassian and Jyn’s mutual trust, etc. Yikes.

So I kept getting mired down in explanations and flashbacks (I actually wrote the scene where Jyn drunkenly complains about finding something for Cassian’s birthday, lol) that slowed it down. And I wasn’t really happy with anything—I constantly niggled at sentences and moved things around and rephrased and it just didn’t work right. I actually have the document I worked in (I didn’t have Internet at the time), so you can see this sort of intermediate stage:

I niggled with it for the rest of the vacation, then it hit me that the issue was that starting a fic with exposition was the real problem. Starting with ESB-era Han just being ESB-era Han could let me work the exposition section in, and without the pressure of it being the opening section I could keep it to a tangential aside and move the jealousy around and so forth. And from there I could just leap to the canon scene with bonus Cassian-Leia shared indignation, and impulsively I added Kaytoo at the end.

Moral of the story: if you keep trying to make something work and it just won’t, there’s probably something deeper going on. Take a step back and figure out why it’s not working, and often you’ll be able to correct course. Once I tacked in that little ‘Han sulks’ section at the beginning, it all fell together easily.

5) Revising!

You can probably guess from #4 that I do a lot of this as I write rather than after I write. That’s true, to an extent.

It can be a very … I wouldn’t say discouraging, but sluggish way to write, because you end up struggling over phrases you might not even keep in the end. I genuinely think it’s best to at least try to restrain the impulse to polish everything, but at the same time, there are some of us who genuinely can’t keep going if the current section isn’t working (again, see #4!). So I allow myself a certain amount of freedom in polishing-as-I-go, while restraining the impulse to do anything more substantial. The single best way of doing this is sprinting—writing in short, timed bursts with little to no editing, ideally with a partner that you check in with. (Again, I generally do this with @steinbecks.)

However, even if you edit as you go and turn out pretty clean drafts, you should still revise at the end. What I generally do is, first of all, just quickly re-read. The writing process is a lot slower than the reading one, and it’s easy to get so focused on particular passages or sections that you lose sight of how it’s working as a whole. So that quick read-through is a way to back up and see how it’s holding together. It’s best if you give yourself a break before you do this—a day or two at least, to get your mind out of the writing mode and look at it with relatively fresh eyes.

(I will say that I almost never wait. But I do pretty much always end up editing chapters yet again in the first couple of days after I’ve posted them. Sometimes it’s contuinity, sometimes a passage that isn’t working quite the way I thought, whatever. There’s always something. It’s why the chapters I post at Dreamwidth are generally cleaner than the ones at Tumblr, which are cleaner than the first versions posted at AO3.)

However you do that read-through, the most important for me is the next one. At this point, I read the whole fic/chapter/essay/whatever from start to finish—out loud. In fact, if it’s possible, I’ll do a full-on dramatic reading. By reading aloud, you can catch things like typos that your mind silently corrects for your eyes, but also it’s easier to notice sentence-level problems like repeated words/phrases and unvaried sentence structure. If something makes me cringe when I read it aloud, I cut it or rewrite. If saying it aloud makes it sound wrong for the character, it probably is wrong for the character. Sometimes I do the dramatic reading revision two or three times.

And then I either post or print!

The short version:

1) I get an idea, 2) I let the ideas develop without thinking too hard about them, 3) I nail down and think up specific ideas, mostly through chat and/or outlines, 4) I plow through a draft, rearranging/adding material if things just aren’t working, and 5) I revise, once with a quick re-read of the whole thing, and then again by slowly reading it aloud to myself to catch problems with (primarily) mechanics, voice, and word choice.

#faithfullyfalse #respuestas #nice things people say to me #fic talk #esb au #words about words #thank you for this!#in my other life i've taught writing so this was like SING THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE

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