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fischerfrey · 3 years

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Chapter 2: Apprentice Curse-Breakers

Summary: The new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher has some extracurricular activities in mind, and Ben struggles with the events of last year.

Pairings: Eventual OC/Merula Snyde

Word count: 3k

Warnings: Mild swearing, canon typical mean Merula

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Chapter 2: Apprentice Curse-Breakers

Their first class of the year was DADA, and that made Verna extremely nervous. Rowan had made it clear they didn’t think Rakepick could be trusted. In their words, she had been shifty at best and suspicious at worst last year when she had worked with Verna. Rowan was not happy about Rakepick’s appointment as a professor and that made Verna uneasy too. She had always known Rowan had far better judgement than her, and most days Charlie and Ben agreed with that sentiment. So, after breakfast, when the Gryffindors were filing into the DADA classroom, the mood between the four friends was not over the moon. Rakepick was already in the classroom, writing something at her desk. The class went through some major decorative changes each year when a new teacher took it over. It had become routine by now. For Rakepick, the theme seemed to be artifacts of various sizes and ages, that were spread all over the room on pedestals and tables, cabinets and other surfaces.

“Cursed items,” Rowan noted, when they took their seats.

“A niffler,” Verna replied, pointing out Sickleworth, Rakepick’s niffler whom she had had an unlikely partnership with last year, while investigating the Sleepwalking curse.

That was when Professor Rakepick got up from her seat, cleared her throat and snapped her wand, closing the classroom door and making writing appear on the blackboard in front of the class.

“Welcome to Defence Against the Dark Arts,” she announced, in a tone that implied not a small amount of unimpressedness. “I realize I am your fifth instructor in as many years, and that most of your other teachers’ methods were as questionable as their characters.”

Next to Verna, Rowan balled their hands into fists. They obviously had a thing or two to say about that.

“This year, I am not only going to teach you how to defend yourselves, but how to attack the Dark Arts,” Rakepick continued. “You will receive the finest instruction from someone who has actually faced the worst the Dark Arts have to offer.”

Something about the speech did make Verna listen. She couldn’t deny being interested in learning combat spells, the more the better, because she was sure to need them. From the corner of her eye, she also saw Merula listening intently. This year was gonna be another one spent trying to beat Merula to the top of their class. DADA was pretty much the only subject where she had any chance at all. Usually, it was Rowan and Merula vying for the title, but Verna wasn’t hopeless when it came to duelling and martial magic.

“They say this position is cursed,” Rakepick was saying now. “But breaking curses is what I do best. Now let’s get started, take out your books.”

After a whole class spent on how to deal with Ghouls, Verna was feeling much better about DADA. Maybe Rakepick wasn’t going to be so bad. Rowan didn’t feel the same way.

“She might know what she’s talking about, but she has no teaching experience, and I still don’t trust her after the way she dealt with you last year Verna,” they were saying, a little heated. “I think you should be careful if she decides to ask something from you, or… something…”

“Don’t you think you’re maybe overreacting a little bit?” asked Charlie.

“I agree with Rowan,” Ben inserted. “I don’t like her either.”

“We’ll be careful,” Verna assured her friends. “But Dumbledore must’ve had a reason hiring her.”

“Yeah, that’s true… I don’t know, I just don’t like this…” Rowan said and slowly the conversation turned to more casual matters, such as Barnaby Lee’s new pet crup puppy. The general consensus seemed to be that it was extremely cute.

After the day’s classes Verna was officially introduced to one Percy Weasley in the library. She and Charlie headed there to get started on charting out how much cramming they’d have to do for their O.W.L.s, only to find Bill and Percy already there, both noses buried deep in books, a scrappy-looking rat sitting on the table next to their study-material.

“Oh, hi Verna,” Bill said with a smile. “Did you two come to actually study?” The surprise in his voice was neither flattering nor unexpected.

“We came to plan on studying,” Verna told Bill, as she and Charlie sat down.

“Well, that’s better than nothing,” Bill chuckled and then patted Percy on the shoulder. “Percy, this is Verna.”

“I know,” Percy said in a manner that seemed much too adult-like for an 11-year-old. “She gave us a rather short introduction of Gryffindor common room last night, but I haven’t had a chance to properly introduce myself, I’m Percy Weasley, future prefect, Head Boy, and Minister for Magic.”

“It’s really nice to meet you, Percy, sounds like you have your future pretty well planned out,” Verna said and emulated her tone and smile to Beatrice from the previous night, with wildly different results. It appeared Percy was not a fan of hers.

“If you let him, he’ll plan your life for you, too,” Bill said, amused.

“This is my loyal rat, Scabbers,” Percy continued.

“Loyal?” asked Charlie. “It runs off every chance it gets.”

“There’s something off about that rat, yeah…” Bill agreed.

“Ron likes him!” Percy defended his pet.

“Ron’s eight, he likes everything except for spiders,” Charlie complained. Both of the older Weasleys seemed to have such a weird aversion for poor Scabbers that Verna felt bad for it.

“I have a rat too; his name is Hamish. He actually belonged to my brother, but I’ve been taking care of it in his absence.”

This seemed to appeal to Percy, whose tone towards Verna changed a little, when he said: “That’s really kind of you, to take care of your brother’s pet.”

Verna considered this a victory.

Their study session was cut short, when Professor Rakepick approached their table something like thirty minutes into Verna and Charlie trying to figure out what exactly to focus most on.

“Mr. Weasley,” she started, and all three of the Weasleys replied with an immediate ‘yes?’.

Verna stifled a laugh.

“William Weasley,” Rakepick specified. “Come with me. You too Miss Malinda, we have work to do.”

Exchanging a glance with Charlie, and Rowan’s misgivings about Rakepick running on a loop in her head, Verna followed Bill and the professor out of the library.

“What is this about?” she whispered to Bill.

“No idea, I guess we’ll find out soon, though…”

Rakepick took them up to her classroom, where Merula Snyde was already sitting on one of the desks, preoccupied with changing the colour of her painted nails to pay much attention to Verna and the others entering. Verna wasn’t happy to see her. Whatever Rakepick had in mind seemed to involve Merula, and that was never good news.

“Cease your activities Miss Snyde, we have important matters to discuss,” Rakepick commanded, and Merula immediately jumped down from the desk and stood straight. Verna and Bill walked up next to her as Rakepick went on to stand beside the teacher’s desk. She was tall and had a bearing of someone accustomed to commanding respect. Verna found it quite easy to believe she was capable of handling anything that was thrown at her. That’s how I want to be, she thought briefly.

“Congratulations you three. Of all the students at Hogwarts, I’ve chosen you to be my apprentice curse-breakers. Mr Weasley for his bravery and determination, Miss Snyde for her ambition and strength, and Miss Malinda for her natural talent, and obvious connection to the cursed vaults.”

“Why is Merula here?” Verna asked without missing a beat. She was not about to compromise her chances of rescuing her brother for the sake of Merula’s ambitions. She knew by now that Merula would never sacrifice her chances of getting whatever power and knowledge the vaults could give her, not for Jacob’s sake, not for anyone’s.

“Because she is a powerful witch and you’d be a fool not to accept her help, after all, I had to save you from Mr Copper’s attack just months ago.”

Merula remained quiet but gave Verna a smug grin.

“Enough. We need each other’s help to find the next vault and end its curse before anyone gets hurt,” Rakepick said. “I’m going to train you so that you can be more of a help than a hindrance to me, starting with the Incarcerous spell. Wands out!”

The three of them spent the next three hours attempting to learn the Binding spell with Rakepick’s instruction. She was a good teacher. Strict, demanding, but very clear in the way she instructed them, not leaning on any extra flash, just taking the simplest route to the desired outcome. Unsurprisingly, Bill was the first one to nail the spell. He had two years’ worth more experience and had always been talented. When Verna finally managed to cast the spell on Merula, she felt a sense of accomplishment far greater than if they had used training dummies. The spell conjured ropes that wound tightly around Merula, trapping her arms and binding her legs together. She wobbled for a while and then stumbled to the floor with a grunt. Verna couldn’t help but grin.

“Verna, I don’t think she can breathe…” Bill interrupted her victorious train of thought.

“Oh, shit,” Verna cursed. “Finite Incantatem!” she pointed her wand towards Merula and the ropes around her unbound. “Are you alright?” she asked despite herself.

“Of course, Malinda, mind your own business,” Merula spat, looking more hurt by the audacity of Verna asking her if she was okay. She got up and dusted off her ropes, avoiding looking at any of them.

Rakepick cleared her throat and said: “This is a valuable lesson; we are a team now. A family. No matter what happens, we must protect one another. Do you understand?”

With a sideways glance at Merula, Verna nodded. She hadn’t had this good of a chance to finding any of the previous vaults. Rakepick was an accomplished curse-breaker and now it started to make sense why she had singled out Verna the previous year. Maybe she had already known she’d work here this year and need Verna’s expertise with stopping another curse roaming the halls of Hogwarts. That was something good to tell Rowan, at least, to put their mind on ease.

“And the rest of you?” asked Rakepick with impatience.

“Of course,” Bill said immediately.

Merula eyed both of them with nothing short of disgust and then said: “Fine.”

“Good, then that’s all for tonight, you can go.”

Rakepick ushered them out of her class, and the three of them were left standing in the empty, darkening corridor. Verna had no idea about the time, but she guessed it was quite late and that they most definitely had missed dinner.

“So that was kind of… strange,” Bill said, but he sounded more excited than anything.

“Finally, someone is doing something in this school,” scoffed Merula.

“And I don’t want you or your megalomania getting in the way of saving my brother,” Verna exclaimed.

“Don’t worry Malinda, you finally have capable people helping so there’s a chance you won’t fuck this up.”

“Fuck off Merula.”

The shorter girl laughed, but there was nothing humorous about the sound. “You like to pretend you’re above the rest of us with your little mission to save your brother, but let’s face it; you’re just scared to admit you like feeling special. You want what’s inside those vaults just as much as me.”

“Shut your mouth about my brother,” Verna snarled. “I’m nothing like you.”

“Of course you’re not, cause I’m not pathetic.”

Verna instinctively reached for her wand and Merula did the same, taking a threatening step closer.

“Verna, we should… probably go… now,” Bill interrupted and placed himself between the two girls. He then proceeded to practically drag her towards the Gryffindor common room by the arm.

“I had it under control,” Verna said once they were out of earshot.

“Maybe, but I’d rather not take either one of you to the hospital wing in several different pieces.”

“Fine, yeah, you’re right or whatever… She just gets on my nerves.”

Bill gave her a curious look Verna couldn’t quite place, and then said: “Yeah, I know. You shouldn’t let her get to you that much, it’s what she wants.”

“I know, it’s infuriating.”

“You’re gonna have to be able to work together somehow, though.”

Verna frowned. “I’m not risking my brother’s, or anyone else’s life because of some school rivalry, don’t worry.”

“Good,” Bill said and then stopped. “Is that… Ben?” he asked and pointed to an alcove not far from where they were standing. It was dark so he was partly concealed in shadows, but when he heard his name, he looked towards them.

“Oh, hi Verna, Bill…”

“What are you sitting out here for?” Verna asked and went to her friend. Ben looked rough, like he hadn’t slept.

“I wanted to be alone and there’s always someone in the common room or the dorm…”

“Oh, sorry, I can go- “

“No, actually, can I talk to you for a second, Verna… I…” he trailed off and looked at Bill apologetically.

“I’ll go on ahead, don’t stay out long though,” Bill said reassuringly. Then he walked off to the direction of the Gryffindor tower.

“What did you want to talk about?” asked Verna and sat on the bench in the alcove next to Ben.

For a moment, Ben didn’t look like he was going to answer. Verna had the sudden urge to hug him, but she didn’t move, fearing that Ben would change his mind and leave like last night. Finally, he cleared his throat and stammered: “I’m scared that someone’s gonna take control of me again, and make me do something worse, or that I already have but I just can’t remember.”

He really was in a state. Gently, Verna laid a careful hand on his shoulder.

“We’ll work this out, you don’t have to deal with all this shit on your own, Ben, I’m the reason you’re in this mess in the first place.”

“I still don’t remember what really happened before I attacked you… Do you… do you really believe me? That I was controlled?”

“I promise you that I do, please at least stop worrying about that,” Verna assured him. Ben huffed out a breath and his shoulders relaxed a bit.

“Thank you, Verna, I don’t know if I’d be as understanding if I was in your shoes…”

Verna bit her lip. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to hear, but she couldn’t exactly blame Ben. Everything had gotten so messed up last year with Rowan and Ben arguing and Verna feeling like she was losing touch with them both. They used to all be so close and now every single interaction was laced with something like doubt. An uncertainty Verna wanted so badly to get rid of.

“We should head back to the common room before Filch finds us here, c’mon,” Verna said and got up.

Ben stood to follow and they were about to head after Bill, when suddenly Ben grabbed Verna’s arm and pulled her behind him.

“Look out!” he yelled and took out his wand but before he could so much as utter an incantation, a purple light hit him and knocked him to the side. Verna looked frantically for the source of the spell, and had her wand out in seconds, but she wasn’t fast enough either. Suddenly she felt her entire body stiffen up, as she was hit with what must’ve been the full body-bind curse. As she hit the ground quite painfully, she saw a hooded figure approach them from the shadows of the corridor. Desperately she tried to move, knowing full well it was not going to work. Her breathing came in shallow gasps as she lay there, helpless to do anything. The red-clad figure walked closer and kicked Verna’s wand out of her reach, as if it would’ve been any use for her in this state anyway.

“I told you death was coming to Hogwarts, Verna Malinda,” the figure said in a voice that was impossible to place or describe. It was modified with magic. “We still need you alive, but before this year ends, one of your friends has to die…”

Verna tried to focus on getting her fingers to move, to do something, anything. Her thoughts were a flurry of desperation and anger. The hooded figure leaned over Verna. She couldn’t make out a face or anything that could be used to recognize the attacker. Verna braced herself for something worse, but nothing happened. Instead, the figure stalked off, back into the shadows.

Verna was still trying to force her uncooperative muscles to move, when she saw Ben move in the corner of her eye. The boy sat up and Verna lost sight of him. She heard his footsteps and a muttered spell, and then felt her body able to move again. Without a second glance at Ben, Verna shot up like a lightning bolt, chasing into the direction the hooded person had disappeared to. She had to catch them, she had to. Her ears rang and when she looked down to her wand hand, it was shaking. She wasn’t sure if it was anger, fear, or both.

“Verna, wait!” she heard Ben’s voice, and footsteps echoing after her.

Of course, there was nothing and no one to find. Verna was getting sick of this. She balled her hands into fists so hard her nails dug into her palms. How could she have let the wizard incapacitate her like that? Ben caught up to her and Verna took notice of him now that she could think a little more clearly. He seemed fine, just a little rattled.

“Verna, hey, it’s okay,” Ben tried to reassure her, but it wasn’t okay. Someone had threatened to kill one of her friends. The thought made her chest feel like it was filled with water. The ease with witch this stranger had knocked both of them out of the game made Verna feel sick all over.

“This is bullshit.”

“Verna-“

She took a deep breath. “Are you alright?” she then asked Ben.

“Yeah, you?”

Verna nodded. “Do you think that was someone we know being used against us?”

“I don’t know to be honest… but we should head back now, before someone else attacks us…” Ben said and there was nothing to it, he was right. Verna knew she wasn’t going to find anything but trouble if she stayed here, so she followed Ben back to the Gryffindor common room.

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drethanramslay · 4 years

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26, 58 and 61 for ethan x mc please? like angst in the beginning but fluff in the end. thanks!! i love your fanfics btw i read it like 100 times and i can’t seem to get over it.

Aww thanks anon ☺️ and thank you for the ask ❤️❤️

You can find the prompt list here.

#26-“Are you angry…?”

#58-“Where have you been?!”

#61-“I’m sorry…I shouldn’t have done that, you can look after yourself…I shouldn’t have…I’m sorry.” this prompt is in the form of a text message

Author's note: okay anon I know you wanted a fluffy ending BUT, I decided to write it as a continuation to Hard for me i.e the prompt in which people demanded asked for a part 2

So forgive me for the ending

Word count: 1.2K

Warning: none, it's just angsty as hell

Cry for me

The next one week was painful.

Ethan's confession in the lift had left Leah in a flux of emotions. On one hand she was joyous that he returned her feelings and that he was all in.

But on the other hand she felt gut wrenching guilt which slowly started eating away at her sanity. She was in a relationship with Bryce. She had a freaking boyfriend but that still didn't stop her from pining for Ethan.

She was so lost in her thoughts half the times, zoning in and out of conversations. Bryce could see something bothering her so he slowly formulating a plan to cheer her up.

"Hey Princess?" Bryce asked as they drove to the hospital.

Leah snapped her head towards Bryce. "Yeah?"

“Are you angry…? Did I do something wrong?"

"Of course not, queen B!" I am angry with myself and the world.

"I just... Can't see you so down and lost. You know you can talk to me, right?"

I don't think I can talk about how I am completely and utterly in love with my boss and the fact that he returns the sentiments.

"Yap I know. It's just been a stressful week, y'know?"

"What if we have a movie night today? We can eat junk food and laugh on trashy movies?" Bryce spoke up as they got out of the car.

"That's exactly the thing I need. Thank you Bryce." Leah smiled at him and wrapped her arm around his waist, giving him a side hug.

Bryce gave her a breathtaking smile and wrapped his arms around her. "Anything for you Leah."

As they stood there, with their arms around each other in the parking lot, Leah failed to notice a pair of stormy blue eyes burning into her back.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- After changing into her scrubs and grabbing a coffee from the coffee cart, Leah made her way towards Ethan's office. June and Baz were sitting and drinking coffee, pouring over the charts while Ethan wrote on the whiteboard.

"Good morning team." Leah greeted them with a smile.

"Good morning, Leah!"

"Good morning, Dr. Garcia."

"You are late. Where have you been?"

Leah's eyes snapped to the clock above the whiteboard.

8:00 am.

"I was getting the charts. And I am not late. We start the meeting at 8am." Leah said as she placed her laptop and coffee on the table.

"Dr. Garcia, this is not your 9 to 5 corporate job where you enter and leave at a given time. You are a doctor and time should cease to exist because our patient's life is in the palm of our hands. Every minute you spend wasting time, that much is cut from our patient's life. Have you forgotten your Hippocrates oath?"

Leah wanted to answer back, but she bit her tongue. NOT worth it Leah, calm down.

So clenching her jaw and swallowing down the humiliation, she responded in a curt voice. "Yes Doctor."

"Tardiness in not acceptable. Is that clear?"

Baz interrupted, trying to diffuse the situation. "Ethan she wasn't even that lat-"

Cutting Baz off, his icy eyes bored into her angry hazel ones. "Dr. Garcia, am I clear?"

"Crystal." Leah spoke up, glaring at Ethan.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- And that's how the entire day continued. When working the case they were like a well oiled machine but outside in the hallways, they would glare at each other as if they wanted to kill each other.

The tension between Ethan was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. They butted heads throughout the duration of the shift that even the staff noticed.

Leah felt like a ticking time bomb, threatening to explode. Anger, frustration and pain is a very dangerous cocktail together, and now she had all of them whirling inside her like a tornado.

I'm gonna fucking confront him. That son of a bitch has it coming. Leah thought to herself, her teeth grinding.

So when she saw Ethan head towards the stairwell, she followed him.

"Dr. Ramsey, wait up."

"If it isn't patient related, don't bother me."

Leah rushed after him and grabbed him by his elbow with incredible strength, causing him to stop and turn towards her.

"What has gotten over you Ethan?"

"I don't know what you are talking about." He crossed his arms and stood there, towering over her.

"You are a smart guy. Acting dumb doesn't suit you. Now, let's try again, what has happened that has made you so pissed with me?"

"Rookie, I'm not mad at you."

"Yes you are!! You said Rookie in B flat and that only happens when I have royally pissed you off. And last time I checked I haven't done anything wrong-"

"What you did wrong, was crash into my life. What you did wrong, was try to cheer me up on a bad day. What you did wrong, was comfort me in my pain. What you did wrong was have faith in me when I was in doubt. What you did wrong, was make me fall for you."

Leah's jaw dropped. What sort of backhanded compliment was that? Clearing her throat and squashing the butterflies in her stomach, she spoke. "Ethan you can't say things like this to me."

"Why not? It's the truth. I like you way too much for my liking." He said in a low voice.

Leah threw her hands in the air. "Because, I am in a freaking relationship! You had your chance and you blew it. Don't Gove me mixed feelings now."

"I-"

"No now you will listen. You pushed me away. You said that you wanted space. You wanted my professional development. You wanted things to go back to normal. This is the new normal, okay? Accept it."

For a first time in a very long time, he looked helpless and guilty. "I was so wrong sunshine..."

Leah stuffed her hands in her coat and looked down at her lavender converse. She was at a complete loss of words. If things would have been easier she would have kissed him and hugged the sadness out of him.

But life is complicated. And everything has a price.

"So that's it huh? So..." Gulping Ethan continued, "You are over me?"

Silence.

Her brain was screaming at her to say yes and to move on from the angsty and painful chapter of her life. But she could not get herself to say it.

"If things were not as fucked up as they were... Do you think we would be a thing?"

Sighing she patted his arm. "I think you are smart enough to figure that out."

Leah side stepped him and climbed down the steps and opened the door of the stairwell to find Bryce standing there, a deer caught in the headlight expression on his face.

Leah greeted him, curiosity laced in her voice. "H..hey?"

Bryce immediately turned and started walking away fast.

"Bryce wait up."

This is some deja vu.

Bryce stopped and turned towards her, pain shining in his eyes. "Is it true?"

"What?"

"That you have feelings for Dr. Ramsey."

Shit shit shit. An alarm went on in her brain which caused her to freeze up.

"I-" Leah started but she was interrupted.

"I heard everything."

Leah took a deep breath. Cat’s out of the bag. No point denying it. "Please don't jump to conclusions. I-" her pager beeped, signalling that a VIP patient had arrived and she sighed.

"I need to go now. I will talk to you tonight. Please don't do anything rash. I beg you."

Without saying a word, Bryce shrugged and walked away.

Why is does it feel like the two important men of my life walked away from me in a span of 2 minutes?

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

It was nine in the night and Leah was finally done with her rounds. Wearing her jeans and jumper, she tied her hair long black locks into a messy bun and stared at her reflection in the mirror.

Letting out a breath, she gave herself a pep talk. Okay Leah... You have to make a decision. You are not Hannah Montana. You can't have the best of both worl-

Her phone pinged, interrupting her. She picked it up to see that it was a text from Ethan.

Letting out a sigh, she picked up her messenger bag and walked out of the hospital, only one thing running in her head.

Who do I listen to? My head thats telling me that Ethan will hurt me again and that Bryce is better? Or my heart which tells me that Ethan is my one shot at true love?

It was painful to write this

Also the last part got 88 notes so lets get this to 90 notes so that I have motivation to write part 3 heheheheh

what do you think will happen in the next part?

ALSO GIVE ME SUGGESTIONS FOR WHAT I SHOULD NAME THIS SERIES

I love you guys

Permanent Tag list: @trappedinfandoms @oofchoices @agent-breakdance @dailydoseofchoices @tyrilstouch @siaramsey @theeccentricbibliophile @ac27dj @ramseysno1rookie @justanotherrookie @openheart12 @jamespotterthefirst @checkurwindow @chasingrobbie @junggoku @bellcat2010 @choicesstan1 @mvalentine @crazynutella @hatescapsicum @anonymously-cool @nooruleman @sanvivrma

Ethan x MC Taglist: @ethandaddyramsey @edith-eggs1 @pixelberryownsme @samihatuli @loveellamae @x-kyne-x @paulfwesley @zeniamiii @binny1985 @an-urban-witch-ig @ramseyegerton @mrsdr-ethan-ramsey @newcolonies @theodorepjames4 @unluckygs @choices-love-affair @kaavyaethanramsey @caseyvalentineramsey @ohramsey @squishywizardhq @junehiratas @lilyvalentine @itsgoingnuts @choicesfanaf @humanpokemon @temptress-of-death-and-desire @rookiefromedenbrook @courtesanofedenbrook @hatescapsicum @sanchita012 @edgiestwinter @fabi-en-ciel @mrsdrakewalkerblog @elwetritsche75 @livingpurpose @drramseysownsme @queencarb @andromedasinclaire @schnitzelbutterfingers @thanialis @floatingmeera @rookieoh @ethanramseyswhore @lucy-268 @big-yikers @have-aheart @whimsicalreader @tsrookie @itschoicesfanaf @lilypills @mals-chesthair @raleigheffingcarrera @utterlyinevitable @choices-fangirl-yeet @rookie-ramsey @papinaveensbitch @custaroonie @helloayzcream @hyperlightgrifter

#anushka writes #writing prompts #oh Ethan #ethan ramsey #ethan x mc #dr ethan ramsey #ethan jonah ramsey #ethan ramsey one shot #ethan ramsey x mc #open heart #open heart mc #open heart 2 #ohsy #choices #choices oh #playchoices #choices stories you play #choices stories we play #pixelberry

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pisceanofinterest · 3 years

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Calanthe and Eist’s Birth Charts

okay so because I’m a fucking nerd I decided to spend upwards of 6 hours a couple of weeks ago making birth charts for Calanthe and Eist, and I figured that I’d share them here since I put so much fucking work into them.

Good to note that all of these traits are heavily influenced by @marvellouslymadmim ‘s incredible fics....

I’ve also taken the liberty to give them birthdays bahaha, and I didn’t do houses because that would have taken me an extra 10 hours so this is just the planets. It’s long so read below cut :)

Calanthe, December 23, 1218 (Sun- Mars + Rising placements)

Sun in Capricorn: center of self, other traits mix with this

Meticulous, dead-pan, practical, they get shit DONE son, very self-assured, sarcastic, need structure or they will literally fall apart (and they often do.. Although secretly), resourceful, intelligent, blunt… need I say more

Moon in Aquarius: rules emotions, moods, feelings

Observant, oftentimes considered “loners,” powerful defense mechanisms, willful, wil deny “irrational” emotions (jealousy, possessiveness, fear) in order to seem “above” others, independent, thrive off of “shock-value,” proud, don’t like “messy” emotions, can seem incredibly distant to the people closest to them, hide sensitivities very well, unpredictable, stubborn, and incredibly seductive and charming

Ascendent in Leo: the “mask” you wear, public persona

GREAT hair, cares about appearance (not necessarily out of vanity but out of an understanding that appearance can be a weapon), aware of how they are perceived, very tender and gentle with loved ones, say exactly what they think, enjoy being the center of attention… but ONLY when they choose to be

Mercury in Scorpio: planet of communication

meticulous→ gets to the bottom of EVERYTHING, great observers, suspicious, tend to focus on the negative, passionate, prone to lecturing rather than listening, however they are excellent at giving advice, better communicators when it comes to subjects that are not close to home→ have a hard time communicating needs/feelings, excellent strategizers, constructive criticism = destructive criticism (they will rip you to shreds), want to WIN conversations (and often do), defensive of people they care about, love a challenge

Venus in Pisces: planet of love and relationships

In love they are dreamy and soft, can be a little moody and irregular, hard to read, like to “feel things out” (HATE decision making), can take YEARS to commit to something/someone, want partners to know that their love is unconditional, like to save people, tender and affectionate, oftentimes hard to reach, flippant, absolutely devoted (eventually)

Mars in Scorpio: planet of sex and aggression

Lovesssss a challenge→ like to set personal goals to see if they can meet them/ bend the rules, formidable opponents, hard to read, high sexual stamina, generally get what they want in bed (ahem), possessive of partners (but will never admit it), can have a hard time compromising, great survival instincts, very protective people, show love through physical touch and sex, extrememly passionate individuals

Eist, June 26, 1219 (Sun-Mars + Rising)

Sun in Cancer: center of self

Protective, caring, nurturing, moody, led by emotions, good at hiding vulnerability but are VERY VULNERABLE, soft, self-sacrificing

Moon in Taurus: rules emotions, moods, feelings

Cherish familiarity, strong-willed, sensory, materialistic, persevering (sometimes to a fault), crave stability and often ARE that stability for others, very romantic, affectionate, sentimental, warm, enduring, hold on tight to their loved ones, loyal, serene, stubborn af, crave routine, need clear lines and boundaries

Ascendant in Pisces: “mask,” public persona, physical appearance

Very very dreamy (and often have dreamy eyes), idealistic, go with the flow, gentle, peacemakers and peace lovers, chameleon- like persona (often can change easily to blend in with their environments socially and emotionally), can be shy or quiet but that’s because they are taking time to observe everything around them, however they loveeee to talk when the time is right, restless and searching, “feel their way through life,” rely heavily on emotions, irresistible charm, soft aura, very likeable

Mercury in Cancer: planet of communication

Communicate through feelings, sensitive, deep thinkers, can take time to respond to situations, excellent listeners, meditative and reflective, incredible memories (especially good at remembering emotional context), has a hard time letting emotions go, gentle, intuitive, sentimental, protective, soothing, nurturing, can get “lost” in another person’s way of thinking/feeling, very good with words (especially along the lines of letter writing and poetry)

Venus in Cancer: planet of love and relationships

Need commitment and predictability, sensitive, need security and care, pay more attention to their partner’s feelings than their words, excellent listeners, can be incredibly moody (especially if they don’t have an outlet for their stronger emotions), hate indifference (like indifference could literally kill them… so don’t do that), not afraid of confronting emotions, a bit anxious in love→ need reassurance, can be possessive, sentimental, tender, attached, cuddly, soft

Mars in Taurus: planet of sex and aggression

Calm and easy going, can have powerful tempers when pushed over the edge (but it doesn’t happen often), value strength and stability, need security, will spend years trying to achieve a goal, will not change their mind (like ever… well almost), immovable, extremely sensory when it comes to sex, long lasting and steady sexual stamina, not necessarily spontaneous but they stick to what they’re good at, very emotionally connected to sex (it’s never just physical)

Shared Placements (Jupiter-Pluto)

Jupiter in Scorpio: Jupiter represents the traits that bring us fortune

Incredibly emotional (but secretive about it), decisive, intense, have great will power, intuitive, creative, in control

Cal and Eist are both emotionally intelligent. They are seekers of truths and are determined in their efforts. Both like to be in control, both are led by emotions and passions rather than logic. When fully tapped into their emotions, they are unstoppable. When cultivated correctly, emotions become their most powerful tools and weapons.

Saturn in Pisces: reveals limitations of the self

Saturn in Pisces people are incredibly helpful and are excellent caregivers; however they are not so good at directing that care towards themselves. In fact, they often shut down when someone directs pity (or what these Piscean placements deem as pity) at them. They like to be in control, so when they aren’t they become paranoid and anxious. Saturn in Pisces individuals have to work extra hard to take care of themselves-- this is one of their greatest faults.

Cal and Eist are both care-givers; they fiercely protect the people they love most. However, they have a hard time taking care of themselves, and letting others take care of them. They believe that they have the ability to protect themselves if they hold onto that self-control, but they often do not have self control as they are led primarily by emotion. Each of them needs coaxing from their loved ones to truly take care of themselves. They rely heavily on their close circles.

Uranus in Gemini: rules friends, relationships, community, transformation, change, ideas

Uranus in Gemini people are super energetic and are incredible innovators. They are quick witted and quick tempered, often moving between emotions and ideas in moments. They are great transformers of thought, and often break traditions and taboos (rather gleefully). They hate authority, and will question it relentlessly.

Cal and Eist are both witty and intelligent people. They’re excellent strategists and politicians. Although they both perform their roles as diplomats and political leaders, they often go out of their way to subvert norms and question authority. They create new rules, they bend tradition. They hide in plain sight.

Neptune in Virgo: to refine, planet of inspiration

Neptune in Virgo people are idealistic and detail oriented. They love to serve others, especially those in need. They value work and health and safety. They are versatile and adaptable. They are motivated by a sense of duty and helpfulness.

Cal and Eist are excellent leaders and they truly value their positions as respective rulers of their nations. They are compassionate, though stern, and are ready to make hard decisions when it comes to issues of diplomacy. They are also quite stubborn, and oftentimes their opinions are conflated with fact. It’s important to note that the two generations following are Neptune in Libra (full of individuals who value harmony and diplomacy and justice-- ahem Pavetta), and Neptune in Scorpio (full of individuals who are secretive, profound, and enjoy solitude; people who also enjoy the search for truth and justice-- ahem Cirilla).

Pluto in Taurus: symbolizes rebirth, change, secrets

Pluto in Taurus individuals are incredibly stubborn and persistent. They value materials and will never be satisfied with the amount of resources they have. They hate change and love their way.

Cal and Eist (and Mousesack and other characters around their age group) were born and grew up in a generation which sought, conquered, and maintained resources effectively. Cal, especially, used her strengths and her resourcefulness to protect and improve her kingdom; and for a majority of her rule maintained diplomacy without surrendering any of her power. However, the generation following Taurus is Gemini. This generation (including Cahir and Pavetta and potentially Ciri) are inquisitive and thirsty for ideas and knowledge. They are the breakers of tradition. Where Cal and Eist’s generation built and maintained some version of stability, Pavatta and Cahir’s generation destroy borders and bring about great change and innovation.

#calanthe of cintra #eist tuirseach #calanthe fiona riannon #calanthe x eist #the witcher #birth charts #planet placements #this is peak nerd shit and my hyperfixations are showing for sure #enjoy #marvellouslymadmim

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strangledeggs · 4 years

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Strange Nostalgia For The Future – or: Death By A Thousand Taylor Swifts – or: This Is Pop?

Holy shit, when did this article get to be over 8 pages? Sorry everyone, Tumblr isn’t letting me do a cut, so this is just going to clog your feed for a while.

This began as a long-form review of Dua Lipa’s album “Future Nostalgia” with comparisons to the styles of a variety of other pop artists, but has since turned into something much broader and more nebulous. Call it my (incredibly subjective) attempt at defining a current “state of pop music” as it stands in the year 2020.

I’ll admit, I have a bias here, so I’ll lay that on the table: I didn’t particularly care for Dua Lipa prior to the release of “Future Nostalgia”. Actually, if I’m being completely honest, she didn’t really register on my radar until the album’s release, and so I didn’t hear any of her earlier songs until I spent a few minutes on Youtube scrambling to remember who she was and why this release was supposed to be such a big deal. I came up relatively empty-handed, with “New Rules” having more interesting production than anything in the way of a vocal hook and “Be The One” sounding blandly forgettable.

But music journalists were spinning this narrative that “Future Nostalgia” was Dua Lipa’s big moment, her “disco” album, her album full of “bangers” (yes, I know, that’s an archaism at this point, but what am I going to do, call them “vibes”?). We’ve seen hype like this before (at least I have), so we should always take some time when an album arrives with this much fanfare to ask that crucial question: is it justified? Does it live up to expectations?

I’m going to answer that question, but before I do, I want to take a step back and place that music journalism narrative within a broader music journalism meta-narrative that has been slowly gaining traction over the last decade. About 7 years ago (so around 2013), I wrote a guest article for the (what I assume is now defunct) blog Hitsville UK on another meta-narrative called “rockism”, by which older listeners and journalists tended to use to justify their dismissal modern pop music through the glorification of (and comparison to) the canon of rock music. This was not a unique article – many music journalists were writing about this same phenomenon that year; it will likely mark some sort of watershed moment in music journalism. Frequently contrasted with the meta-narrative of “rockism” (not so much in my own article, but definitely in others’) was a countering meta-narrative named as “poptimism”. It’s basically what it sounds like: an optimism that current pop music could be just as good as music of the past, or even better. This was, of course, already known in a lot of mainstream music journalism circles, but it did cause a bit of a stir in independent music journalism, especially since it seemed awfully hard to deny; then-recent examples of indie stars like The Weeknd and Frank Ocean* aspiring to make genuinely great pop music seemed like they were making a pretty good case for the poptimist outlook. Plus, as a new generation of music journalists raised on hip-hop began to cover the genre more seriously, it soon became clear that, given the crossover-laden history of rap, they would have to take pop music seriously too.

Needless to say, poptimism gained a lot of traction as a new paradigm, until it became the default outlook of music journalism by the middle of the decade. It has, as far as I can see, yet to relinquish its grip, and that’s not such a bad thing; arguably, a lot more women, queer people and people of colour have had their music taken more seriously since the shift. Before we get back to “Future Nostalgia”, however, there’s one more piece of this puzzle I want to put in place: coinciding with those early years of poptimism, pop itself hit a bit of a turning point in the year 2014. This was, of course, the release of Taylor Swift’s album “1989”.

What was so special about “1989”? It’s still a bit hard to answer that completely coherently, but it clearly changed the pop music landscape in meaningful ways. For one, it demonstrated that the overcoding of global pop music made at the hands of big-name producers was not just an approach reserved for the “born pop star” figures of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera. Taylor Swift, formerly a country singer with pop leanings, now went headlong into Max Martin-penned chart-topping smashes, and just like that, she had become deterritorialized. It was a huge success, and, interestingly, one of the first albums that got a lot of independent music journalists (and me) to take her seriously despite being her most overtly commercially-driven. I think this speaks to the power of poptimism in 2014 from two angles: for the journalists, the lesson seemed to be that if someone is already doing something near-enough to mainstream pop and then breaks through with a mass-appeal hit, why not see this as a kind of fulfillment of artistic intent? And for Swift, if you’re already doing something near-enough to what’s playing on pop radio, why not go all the way with it and sacrifice your country “credibility” for the ability to have hits beyond the genre-specific? “1989” marked a turning point at which pop music, formerly seen as something people “sell out” to make, became something you “sell into”, erasing a specific, localized identity that could be exposed as a construction anyway and replacing it with the ambition to conquer the ears of the masses.

I should clarify here, however: there are two possible conclusions one can draw from poptimism. The one I just documented, that pop music as a global/commercial phenomenon can be great and should taken seriously by music journalism, is the more frequently-taken interpretation, but it’s not my preferred one. I would rather the alternative view, which is that most music that people have tended to hear the last several decades, whether marked by the seal of “pop” or not, has been pop music. Rock is a form of pop. So is country, so is hip-hop, so is jazz, folk, metal, etc. We can distinguish between, say, the commercial radio pop – which I’ll from this point on designate as “Pop” with a capital “P” – and the pop tradition, but everything descends from pop tradition in the end, and Pop is just one more subgenre among many, albeit by definition the most popular at its given moment. Seeing that this is pretty indisputably true (and if you don’t believe me, you a) haven’t been reading my blog for long enough and b) have some serious research to do), we might as well take Pop as seriously as any other form of pop and subject it to the same criticisms, while simultaneously adjusting our criticisms of other pop subgenres in relation to our new appreciation of Pop. Who created the texture of this Pop song? Does this metal song have a hook? Is the phrasing in this hip-hop song conducive to its overall rhythmic feel? And so on, and so on.

I prefer this approach because it doesn’t necessarily assume a supremacy of one genre so much as level the playing field to allow for a more robust and less prejudiced criticism. It also doesn’t let listeners off the hook, as many (non-critics/journalists, most likely), given the opportunity raised by the previously-detailed interpretation of poptimism, would lazily slip back into listening to Top 40 radio without attempting to seek things beyond the charts; this alternative interpretation challenges us to try and hear the similarities between Led Zeppelin, Rihanna, Young Thug and The Clash while recognizing what each do uniquely. Unfortunately, it seems like the former interpretation has won out, at least for most audiences, and we now have a listener-base that, instead of keeping their ears peeled for next-big-thing indie groups like Arcade Fire as they might have circa 2008-2012, is content to wait for an already-famous star to drop the next “1989” crossover smash**.

This brings us back to “Future Nostalgia”, the latest in a line of Pop albums that seem primed to vy for that coveted position. There is, however, a bit of a gulf between “1989” and “Future Nostalgia”, and it’s not just because the moment of “1989” and poptimism has already happened. It’s also not because Dua Lipa isn’t “crossing over” from any outsider genre like Swift did with her move away from country – if anything, Dua Lipa is doubling down on her Pop ambitions here by putting them up-front and trying to make this album as blockbuster-signalling as possible. The biggest gulf is the musical one: compared to “1989” (and, I should add, a slew of other blockbuster Pop albums from the last decade, which I’ll get to discussing soon enough), “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are oddly lackluster.

Let’s start with the good, though. On my first listen to the album, I wasn’t completely baffled that critics were hearing something momentous in it. There are absolutely (again, sorry) bangers on this. Ironically, the two that stood out to me immediately were two that I later learned weren’t even released as singles, which might speak to the marketing team’s inability to judge the quality of the music they were handling here. “Cool”, easily the best thing on “Future Nostalgia”, rides a sort of bouncy warping of the riff from Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” as Dua Lipa gushes about how she just can’t control herself in front of her lover; it’s sweet, both lyrically and musically. “Love Again” (no relation to the Run The Jewels song) is perhaps the album’s most explicitly “disco” song with swelling strings and everything, and expresses a similar sentiment to “Cool”, though perhaps from a more reluctant angle: “God damn,” Dua Lipa sighs in the chorus, sounding simultaneously annoyed and amused, “you got me in love again”.

The songwriting on “Cool” and “Love Again” also happens to be some of the most basic on “Future Nostalgia”; the beat loops, albeit with some nice flourishes and rhythmic quirks, and Dua Lipa cycles through a few simple melodies, the catchiest always winding up in the chorus. “Love Again” is practically a blues song with its AAAB-repeat phrasing. I highlight the virtues of this simplicity because it throws much of the rest of the album into a stark contrast and exposes its greatest weakness: many of the other songs on “Future Nostalgia” feel fussed-over and patched together out of pieces that don’t always fit, as if the several writers*** involved in these songs weren’t in the same room when the track was finally put together. The album seems to be a case study in throwing everything at the wall and not bothering to consider whether it will stick. And yet it seems to have a small army of critics defending it, even going so far as to call it the pop (or at least Pop) “album of the year” – which has me wondering exactly what all the hype is about.

“1989” has something that a lot of other blockbuster Pop albums since its release do not: a personal touch. Taylor Swift worked hard prior to that album at building her brand as a confessional singer-songwriter, and even with the big-name productions and radio-primed hits, she maintains that image: one of her biggest “1989” hits, “Blank Space”, explicitly addresses her (supposed) romantic history and relationship to the media. Elsewhere, she does some fantasizing about classic movie archetypes and the impulse to drop everything and run away from it all, strongly reminiscent of her past work. It’s not as easy as it might sound to pull off this kind of thing, and I think Swift deserves credit not just for the excellent musicality of the songs she put her voice to, but the consistency of the strong personality she built across her career (with misstep “Reputation” sticking out as the glaring crack in the portrait).

So I won’t compare “Future Nostalgia” to “1989” beyond the initial poptimism narrative it bolsters. No, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t particularly personal – its mode seems to be more in line with what Robyn was already doing a few years before Swift, anticipating a poptimism that would effectively result in her deification over the course of the 2010s. Similar to Robyn in her “Body Talk” series, Dua Lipa seems to approach “Future Nostalgia” with a kind of assumed confidence as a dancefloor queen – more celebratory than confessional.

The celebration, however, proves to be pre-emptive; “Future Nostalgia” lacks two crucial things that “Body Talk” had in spades. The first is a general willingness to experiment. Robyn’s albums were packed with silly throwaways, but some of them stuck, and the best are featured on the collected version of the album, from the Snoop Dogg collaboration “You Should Know Better” to the cybernetic-pop-anticipating “Fembots” to the sassy “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do”. The title track of Dua Lipa’s album demonstrates a little bit of adventurousness, but it unfortunately flops, arriving in the form of awkward half-rapped verses that aren’t fun enough to leave a lasting impression. The only other potential outliers are the aforementioned “Cool” (which just happens to sound less disco than the rest but is otherwise a fairly standard, if well-written, pop song) and the album’s absolute nadirs, “Good In Bed” and the closing ballad “Boys Will Be Boys” (we’ll get to that in a bit). Otherwise, the album carries its aesthetic pretty consistently between tracks, giving little impression of any desire to experiment.

The second missing element is the consistency of the songs themselves. When Robyn’s songwriters toss her, say, a pseudo-dancehall song, they commit to it, making sure there are no weird melodic/harmonic/rhythmic hiccups and that the pieces fit together. And unfortunately, the majority of “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are full of exactly those kinds of hiccups and disjointed structural assemblages that leave me scratching my head. A lot of it’s subtle to the point that I can almost understand other critics missing these details, but I pick up on this stuff fast, and once I hear it, I can’t unhear it.

A lot of it’s in the phrasing; too often, Dua Lipa will go for a quick succession of staccato notes in a chorus when a simpler, slower phrase, or maybe just silence would have worked better (see “Break My Heart”, or the post-chorus of “Future Nostalgia”, in which she sings the 100% non-credible line “I know you ain’t used to a female alpha” – side note, has she even listened to top 40 radio in the last decade?). “Physical” is almost fun until you realize that the phrasing, melody and harmonic structure of the chorus would fit perfectly into any godawful Nickelback song.

Actually, “almost fun” is one of the phrases that I feel best describes so many songs on this album. Too many of the tracks set up something great only to follow through with some baffling songwriting choices. The second track in, “Don’t Start Now”, disrupts an excellently-phrased verse and infectious bassline with a chorus awkwardly parachuted in from what sounds like a 90s house song. The more in-character post-chorus that follows can’t help the song recover once you realize that it’s nowhere near as endearing as the original verse melody. That half-assed rapping makes a re-appearance in the bridge of “Levitating”, which is otherwise perfectly acceptable. If not for that moment, “Levitating” would come close to being the third pick of my favourite songs here, although you can’t fool me, Dua Lipa: I know that chorus is just a sped-up re-hash of the Jacksons’ “Blame It On The Boogie”. “Pretty Please” is also fine, funky and subtle, displaying some restraint on part of the songwriters and producers for once – though there’s also nothing about it that jumps out and grabs me. Besides the two standouts, is that the best I can hope for on this album, a song where nothing goes horribly wrong? At any rate, it’s better than the bland, shameless Lily Allen rip “Good In Bed”, which also features an utterly confounding “pop” sound effect in the chorus replacing one of the mind-numbingly repeated words.

There are some exceptions with regard to singers that can make use of this kind of disjointedness. Ariana Grande’s “Sweetener” walks a thin line, but it often pays off. See, Grande is a singer’s singer, at least by Pop standards; she’s known for crooning, for belting, for singing her lungs out. But she also wants to be a Pop icon to young people right now, and that means staying up-to-date in her production and songwriting. The trouble is, one of the most popular genres with the kids these days happens to be trap, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to Grande’s showboating vocals, favouring short, choppy phrasings and half-mumbled half-singing mixed almost low enough to blend with the music. So she compromises: some of the songs on “Sweetener”, such as the title track, have verses and choruses that feel as though they’re pulling in opposite directions, with Grande getting an opportunity to flaunt the long high notes in a percussionless section before dropping into those staccato bursts that suit the heavy 808s of trap. Despite it being more drum’n’bass/R&B throwback than trap, a similar dynamic is at play in Grande’s biggest hit from that album, “No Tears Left To Cry”. Unlike Dua Lipa’s lurching song structures, Grande’s feel intentional and thematic; the songs aren’t always bulletproof, but I feel like I learn something about her by hearing the tension of styles she’s struggling to stretch herself between. All I feel like I learn about Dua Lipa from the messiness of her songs is that either her, her songwriting team, or both are very confused about what goes into an effective pop song.

Of course, Ariana Grande is also operating in a slightly different mode than Dua Lipa in the first place: whereas Dua Lipa is engaging Pop radio in the recent tradition of satisfying formulaic hits like those of “1989”, Grande has one foot (or maybe even one and a half?) in the parallel tradition of R&B. While the two traditions frequently mix and crossover on the radio, they represent very different approaches to music whose distinction might provide some insight into why some of what Dua Lipa is trying to do isn’t working.

To put it simply, the basic unit of what we’ll call traditional pop is the song, and the performer of the song is meant to convey the essence of that song as a relatively unwavering whole – the performer is effectively the conduit for the song, which reaches the listener through the medium of the performer. The singer has some room to “interpret”, but once a given interpretation is found to be effective in its “hook” potential, it’s typically kept as part of the formalized song, written in stone, more or less.

R&B, true to its roots in “rhythm and blues” and, before that, jazz, essentially reverses this. Songs are present in R&B and not necessarily unimportant, but they typically become conduits for the performer’s own expressiveness. In this setting, the performer’s “interpretation” is actually the most important ingredient, as the performer’s style is effectively the product, the listener’s focus. This places greater emphasis on experimentation with phrasing, melody and other aspects of a song, as well as the potential differences between multiple recordings and performances of that song.

These two paradigms have consequential implications for singers of songs operating in a given mode. A traditional pop singer, for example, is going to be more likely to defer to the song as-written in their performance of it for a recording. An R&B singer, by contrast, is more likely to improvise, often delving into explorations of how to make their voice a more expressive instrument – in many cases, actually, it can be a matter of making their voice more like an instrument, full stop. The notes aren’t sung to express words so much as they are sung to express pure sound. Vocals can vary wildly in rhythm, giving off phrasings that might normally be considered unnatural, but, if placed artfully enough, can re-shape our expectations of pop music in the first place. These aren’t ironclad rules, by the way – the genres cross over frequently and the lines are often ambiguous. But I think defining the differences here can at least help us understand the split in the approaches of, say, Taylor Swift vs. Janet Jackson.

Arguably, the biggest R&B star in the world at the time of writing this remains Beyonce, and with fairly good reason: her powerful voice brings a lot to what are often already well-written songs. Take note here: something like “Formation” (which I have previously written about in my article on hip-hop’s inheritance of the post-punk legacy) or even “Drunk In Love” probably wouldn’t fly in the realm of Pop. Tracks like these are mainly embellished not necessarily with flashy songwriting or production flourishes (although they can have those too), but with Beyonce’s vocal interpretations of them, sometimes approaching something more like rapping than singing****. Note also: vocalizations in this context are given a certain freedom, a license to be weird within a certain range of acceptability. Need I remind you of “surfboard, surfboard, / Grainin’ on that wood”?

My point here is that R&B singers are playing by different rules than Dua Lipa. This isn’t just me arbitrarily deciding that what she’s doing isn’t “R&B enough” – you can here it in her approach. My criticism of her awkward phrasing is based largely on the fact that it doesn’t sound like she’s doing it to “experiment” with the songs she’s given. She repeats these phrases exactly the same way each time, as in the chorus of “Break My Heart”, just so you know it’s intentional. If she is, in fact, improvising, the songs aren’t very suited to it and her attempts are mostly unsuccessful; they become hooks that highlight their own weaknesses rather than bold forays into new rhythmic territory.

The most interesting part of “Future Nostalgia” is, by far, the backing music. Even when Dua Lipa’s singing and hooks fail, the production shines through (even here, though, there’s a caveat with regard to the last two tracks). Consider the sublimely gauzy vocal(?) loop at the beginning of “Levitating”; the sweeping disco violins of “Love Again”; the finger-popping funk bassline of “Don’t Start Now”; even the Justice-lite bass synths in the chorus of the otherwise by-the-numbers “Hallucinate”. “Physical”’s best aspect is, in fact, a small countermelody running in the background of the obnoxiously bland chorus.

This is where I can most understand what got music critics hyped up on this album in the first place: superficially, at least, it sounds pretty damn good. But I suspect the willingness to overlook its other obvious faults stems from a tendency among “poptimistic” critics to treat singers as interchangeable in a system they perceive to be dominated more by “sounds” than by music proper. In fact, the singer is a real make-or-break point in much of modern pop music (Pop or otherwise), likely due to the focal point they occupy; a great singer can occasionally salvage a terrible song, while a bad (or even just mediocre) singer can easily bring down the most well-constructed powerhouse hit.

A case against valuing “Future Nostalgia” solely on the basis of its production: the last Pop album I remember listening to where the production outshined the songwriting was Billie Eilish’s “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO?” Eilish’s songs aren’t bad, and are frequently even good – but I was surprised at how conventional, or even “traditional”, most of them were. “Bad Guy” and “All The Good Girls Go To Hell” are basically jazz songs. “Xanny” and “Wish You Were Gay” (the most lyrically immature, it must be acknowledged) are pretty standard singer-songwriter fare. Others tend to play to a type: either sleepy ballads (“When The Party’s Over”) or, the most interesting songs on the album, the hip-hop influenced minimalist pieces (“Bury A Friend”, “You Should See Me In A Crown”).

But of course almost all of these songs are transformed in part by some rather astonishing production. No one who’s heard “Bad Guy”’s synth-squiggle chorus would mistake it for jazz, and the chorus of “Xanny” squirms in a shroud of distorted bass that pull back when you least expect it – hardly typical sonic territory for most singer-songwriters. Even the already-powerful “Bury A Friend” hits harder than it might have without the surging crunches it’s afforded in the production.

My point, however, is not that the production is what makes this album – it doesn’t, at least not entirely. The production is roughly half of what’s interesting here. The other half is comprised by two things: the fact that most of the songs are fairly strong already (though I think Eilish could lose a few of the ballads and come out better from it), and the fact that Billie Eilish also happens to have a very distinct vocal style. Actually, that last part alone is probably the selling point for most people: Eilish’s eerie half-whispered delivery plays more of a role in constructing her album’s overall dark mood than the production. It has its limitations, and I wonder what her future will bring in terms of her ability to move beyond the role she’s effectively typecast herself in, but it has something on Dua Lipa: it has personality.

So vocal style is important, but that’s not all: as I mentioned, Eilish’s songs are also consistently stronger than Dua Lipa’s, even when both are at their lyrical worst. Sure, “Wish You Were Gay”’s self-absorbed whining about unrequited love and sexuality sounds exactly like what you’d expect to come from a undeveloped teenage singer. But the lyrics are the only thing wrong with that song; take those away, and the melodies and instrumentation sound pretty damn great. The same cannot be said for the overblown dollar-store balladry of Dua Lipa’s execrable “Boys Will Be Boys”, which, despite projecting an ostensibly more “progressive” outlook than “Wish You Were Gay”, falls flat on its face anyway. And I’ll take an Eilish ballad over “Good In Bed”, which sports an obnoxiously repetitive chorus – static, plastic, it sounds like a strained smile looks, desperately trying to convince you that this is fun, right?

“But wait,” you might say, “pop music is supposed to be fun! And isn’t that what most of ‘Future Nostalgia’ aspires to? Shouldn’t we forgive Dua Lipa for some of her mediocre songwriting if her goal in making us dance is at least a defensible one?”

And the answer is no, because Pop is already full of music more fun than this. The way I see it, there are several ways in which one could make music more fun than “Future Nostalgia” (better songwriting being one I’ve already discussed to death here), but I’ll wager that a fairly reliable method is that frequently employed by Lady Gaga: do something musically outlandish and downright weird.

“Bad Romance” is the obvious lodestar here, but Gaga’s career is full of the absurd: just take pretty much any song off of “Born This Way”. Even the “normal” songs like “Yoü and I” (at least pre-“Joanne”) come across as weird by virtue of being placed next to something like “Electric Chapel”. And all this is done in the service not only of raising eyebrows, but in the name of fun. Even some of Gaga’s weaker efforts like “Venus” (or many others on “Artpop”) have a winking slyness to them that lets you laugh along with her. It rarely feels like she’s “serious” when she’s singing about love, sex, or dancing all night, but she gets you dancing anyway.

“Future Nostalgia”, by contrast, has few attempts at any kind of weirdness, and those it does have fall flat. I’ve already mentioned the cringe-y pseudo-rapping, but the spoken-sung pre-chorus of “Physical” is just as embarrassing, bringing the song’s momentum (its second-greatest virtue) to a screeching halt with an awkward phrase that feels totally unnecessary. And then there’s that sound effect on “Good In Bed”. These moments detract from the album because they feel half-assed, like Dua Lipa never bothered to commit to the bit she tacked on. And aside from this, “Future Nostalgia” remains pretty conventional Pop – she’s not exactly reinventing disco here, just emulating it for a new generation with mixed results. If only she could pull a “Heartbeat” or “Love Hangover” out of her bag, but the album is so radio-oriented that the songs rarely reach the 4-minute mark even when they find a groove worth hanging on to. It’s as if she mistook the law M.I.A. ironically lays down at the end of her biggest hit for sage advice: “Remember: no funny business!”

There is one more aspect of the poptimism that helped propel this album in the eyes of critics I have yet to discuss: the paradigm’s coinciding with the recent wave (is it the fourth? I’ve lost count) of popular feminism. This was significant for Taylor Swift at the moment of “1989” because it allowed for interpretations of songs such as “Blank Space” to reach beyond a simple commentary on her stardom and discomfort with media coverage, branching out into a more expansive reading of the song as representative of the ways in which women in general are demonized for their past relationships. Feminism, as a cultural framing device, was crucial in shaping listener perceptions not just of “Blank Space”, but of many other songs on the album. It also helped to launch a whole wave of emerging and returning Pop artists’ albums and singles that traded in similar (vaguely) politically-charged lyrics.***** In the years that followed, a veritable opening of the floodgates would happen with regard to public feminist consciousness-raising, culminating in specific incidents such as the #metoo movement.

For the record, I think this was largely good. I’m under no illusion that “1989” is in any way a politically radical album, but I think the return of pop feminism has generally had a net positive influence in getting pop artists of all kinds of re-think their music’s relationship to gender politics. That being said, there are two things I resent about its lasting impact. The first is the kind of forced extrapolation of songs that bring up gender in any way into “feminist” anthems when they’re largely about relations that have little to do with the matter. One case in point might be Dua Lipa’s pre-”Future Nostalgia” hit “New Rules”; inexplicably, I often see fans trying to make the song’s lyrics out to be some kind of political diatribe about the cruelty of men to women or something like that, when in fact it sounds more like a typical “bad relationship” song, the kind that have been on the charts for decades by now.

But the other thing I’ve come to dread from pop-feminist Pop is the inevitable half-assed “message songs” that seem designed to cash in on using feminism as a signifier that an otherwise apolitical artist is still hip and knows what’s up. Whether through “New Rules” fan encouragement or her own hubris, Dua Lipa has regrettably chosen to end “Future Nostalgia” with such a song: “Boys Will Be Boys” (no relation to the significantly better-written song of the same name by Stella Donnelly). I don’t really want to write a lot about this song because part of the problem with it is that it’s bad in a lot of boring ways, but I do think it’s significant that it was singled out by several other critics (even those who liked the album) as the album’s worst song by miles. I’m hoping this shows a change in perspective here, as critics get harsher about flops like this one, and hopefully the eventual end result from this pushback is that Pop stars will stop trying to convince us they’re “real feminists” with empty songs like “Boys Will Be Boys” that are tacked on to the end of their “bangers” album as a kind of placating afterthought.

So a number of critics have indeed placed too much stock in this album: contrary to the feeling you may have gotten from my relentless criticisms here, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t necessarily bad, but I wouldn’t call it “good” either. It sits in a mid-tier of Pop albums over-enthusiastically pushed out during this era of high poptimism. It’s not the next “1989”, or “Lemonade”, or “Body Talk”, or “WHEN WE ALL ETC.” It’s just a mediocre album with a few great songs that were somehow never released as singles.

Is the inflation of “Future Nostalgia”’s reputation a sign of poptimism’s imminent bust? Are we entering a period of critical groupthink and gradual decay? These questions are too big to answer here, or perhaps at all for now (likely we’ll know the answer for sure in another decade). But I want to end this on a positive note by singling out a singer I haven’t mentioned yet as perhaps the greatest Pop artist of the last 20 years: in all these comparisons, I never got around to bringing up Rihanna.

On one hand, much of the poptimist revolution in criticism has involved taking the studio albums of Pop artists as seriously as their counterparts in other genres. On the other, Pop has never really stopped being a singles genre, and few have demonstrated this better than Rihanna. This is not to deny that she’s released some totally listenable, or even great, albums in her own right: “Talk That Talk” and especially “ANTI” stand as excellent records that came along relatively late in her career. But, well, raise your hand if you’ve actually listened to, say, “Good Girl Gone Bad”. Now raise your hand if you know “Shut Up And Drive”, “Don’t Stop The Music”, “Disturbia”, and, of course, “Umbrella”. See what I mean?

Perhaps I could blame “1989” again in part for this shift in focus from Pop singles to Pop albums. It’s pretty remarkable, after all, that the album is as consistent as it is, and I think that might have caught a lot of critics who were expecting otherwise off-guard. I think another problem, however, resides in the dominant mindset among critics in the first place, the idea that albums are the more valuable art form, the standard by which greatness is measured. Even I find myself incapable of breaking free of that format of evaluation – I’m much less likely to seek out more of an artist’s stuff based on a few great singles of theirs compared to if I hear an entire album from them that I like.

This might be slightly unfair of us critics, but there are workarounds to help correct this bias. One of those workarounds is the compilation. If an artist can make an album’s worth of great songs, but they happen to be spread across a number of their otherwise-mediocre albums, they can still win favour by collecting all (or most) of those gems in the same place, a “greatest hits” collection being the most common******. This seems like a pretty reasonable way of enjoying singles-oriented artists for those of us who are still stuck on the old album format.

But compilations have also never been as popular to review among critics as studio albums (I don’t know, maybe many feel like it’s cheating to collect the best stuff in one place?) and, as stated, it seems like poptimism’s paradigm shift has only reified the bias towards albums by putting more weight on Pop artists’ studio albums than before. Further, as compilations have started to die out (since anyone in the streaming age can assemble their own “greatest hits” playlist that will have all their own personal favourites on it), recent Pop artists often aren’t even given the chance to be evaluated at their best in a compilation format. I wonder if this is also a contributing factor in the hype surrounding “Future Nostalgia”; though it would probably be better remembered for its singles which could be collected on a later “Best Of Dua Lipa”, the fact that such a collection is unlikely to materialize pushes critics towards trying to sell listeners (and themselves) on this being Dua Lipa’s “definitive statement” and reason to take her seriously as an artist simply because it’s the most consistent thing she’s released so far.

Regardless, Rihanna is a model artist in terms of being a singles-oriented Pop singer deserving of a great compilation. If someone were to put it together, I’m fairly certain it could rival Madonna’s “The Immaculate Collection”, the former (basically archetypal) gold standard for a Pop artist’s greatest hits. Imagine hearing “Umbrella”, “Work”, and “We Found Love” all in the same place, uninterrupted by the inevitable string of lesser artists’ hits you’d inevitably hear if that place was the radio or some poorly algorithmically-generated playlist. My concern is that with the death of the compilation and shift in the expectation for the Pop artist’s studio albums to be their defining moments, such an album will only ever exist in an unofficial capacity. Which is fine, I guess – if you hate pop canon. But I don’t, so I patiently await the return of a collective memory for singles that extends beyond the radio and the playlist.

*Interesting to see how these examples have aged.

**Don’t get me wrong, I like “1989”! But its potentially negative influence will be detailed further as I continue.

***This isn’t a criticism of songwriting teams in general – certainly great songs have come out of the modern collaborative approach to pop songwriting, and I’ll get to those soon.

****And of course there’s a whole other conversation to be had about the ways in which hip-hop and R&B, formerly more separate genres, have been in the process of merging for the last two decades as performers in each have realized how much their interpretive approaches have in common.

*****It should be noted that this trend started several years earlier in “underground” and “indie” scenes and only just made its way into the Pop mainstream around 2014, but that’s a discussion for another article.

******Actually, even if an artist has only one great song, multi-artist compilations can step in to help. But since I’m focusing mainly on the respective cults of personality of specific Pop artists here, I won’t get into those. I should also add that Pop is by no means the only genre in which this happens: there are definitely so-called “classic rock” artists who I wouldn’t bother listening to outside of a compilation of their best stuff (Queen, for example).

#Music #Music criticism #Pop music #Dua Lipa #Future Nostalgia #Rihanna #Billie Eilish #Beyonce #Taylor Swift #Robyn #Lady Gaga #Ariana Grande

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thethoughtsfromthreeam · 4 years

Text

Sunshine

Pairing: Maxwell Lord x OC (Evelyn “Evie” Blaker)

Warnings: None

A/N: I’m not really sure where this story came from (and tbh, not sure how it’s going to end!), but I had the desire to write a Maxwell Lord fic. I don’t know if I’ll follow the same posting pattern as I have with others simply because I have less written before posting the first chapter. Anyway. Enjoy!

Reminder: I ain’t ever seen Pedro Pascal in FUCK ALL, I’m just coming up with this as I go along, using imdb.com, wiki, and 84,000 tabs I got open to plan out this shit. I also write soft versions of his characters so if you’re craving asshole vibes, I ain’t got any but my own to offer.

Tags: @zeldasayer , @romanticgumchewer, @beskars , @coolmaybelateruniverse , @the-feckless-wonder, @lavenderl3mons , @pascalisthepunkest , @mandoandyodito , @randomness501 , @fioccodineveautunnale

Part 1

Start with the Appetizer

Sunshine.

She was the human embodiment of sunshine, he thought. Her laughter, her smile, her personality, the way she looked – it was like sunshine washing over him. He could not be exactly sure when he realized that he lacked that kind of warmth in his world, but once she shined on him, he craved it. The need to be in her presence consumed him and for a moment in time, he thought he could cage the sun. But like Icarus, he learned that to treat the sun as a folly would burn him. To pay it reverence meant to live in harmony. Once that lesson is learned, life can continue.

She was his sun and he was certain that he would worship at her altar for eternity.

---***---

Evelyn Blaker stood in the doorway to Donovan Bercholder’s office, watching the large man scramble around in a panic-induced pattern. As she stood waiting for his blustery nature to die down, she leaned back to slightly to keep an eye on the conference room down the hall. Chimetech representatives were already in the room, waiting for them. She had noted a tall, blond man walking with them and something in her stomach began to tap its toes.

“Where are the damn reports I asked for, Evie?” The man’s naturally loud voice seemed twice as loud as usual and she knew it carried down the hall. The tapping got worse as she racked her brain to remember who was coming. Clark Gibson oversaw their medical division, but he was a short man, with coke-bottle glasses that made him look owlish, nor was he blond.

“Donovan, will you keep it down? The Chimtech folks just arrived. And the reports are in the conference room where I had Helen put them half an hour ago.” Donovon stopped to look at her. In the year he had been at Bercholder Medics, he had come to know Evie as a sprightly and jovial person and he often called her a little ball of sunshine. He had never met a person so warm and welcoming and nice and being the new guy in town? That went a long way to helping him gain the trust of his very wary workforce.

But the tone she threw at him was hard and her face was stony. Nearly five-hundred people would lose their jobs if this plan failed and she wasn’t going to lose her work family because Grant Bercholder had been a thieving bastard. She had put in too many late nights for the last year trying to save this company for Donovan’s hysterics to suddenly derail everything. On a large markerboard in her office, she had written a quotation from Knute Rockne when this whole Hail Mary pass idea began,

Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.

“You’re right, I’m sorry. Let’s go.” He took a deep breath and gave her a smile. Evie heaved a sigh of relief and smiled back. The gauntlet was about to open.

---***---

Maxwell Lord stood at the window of the conference room, looking out at a view of the Hudson River and beyond it the rise of the Catskills Mountains’ foothills. He had to admit it was a beautiful view and he marginally forgave Clark for dragging him out of the city for this meeting rather than having Bercholder’s people come to him as everyone else did. Everything he had read about the company told him they weren’t worth doing business with, but Clark somehow convinced him to take the chance.

As he continued to look out of the window, he realized it was quieter than it had been moments ago, and he could hear the small talk within the room. A loud voice had been shouting something about reports and he smirked at the panicked tone in said voice. A man who couldn’t control his emotions had little chance of controlling a company. Maxwell suspected that this meeting would be short, and he could get back to the city in a reasonable amount of time. He turned from his perch when he heard two sets of footprints enter the room.

A large burly man – who looked more at home in an Adirondack lumber camp than in a boardroom - and a shorter woman walked into the room. Maxwell assumed the man was Donovan, but he had no idea who the woman was. He sized up his counterpart as Donovan walked up with a hand extended in greeting. Maxwell took the hand and was not surprised to feel strength behind the handshake. He noted the woman was introducing herself to his people and stopped to chat longer with Clark than the others.

“Maxwell, welcome! You’ve had a chance to meet everyone here, I hope?” Donovan’s naturally bombastic, yet cheery nature, was evident in his voice and Maxwell noted that the panic that had been there before was now gone. Intriguing.

“All but the woman that came in with you.” Came the reply

“Evie! Come say hello to Maxwell Lord.” Evie looked away from her conversation with Clark and nodded as she stepped over. The tapping her stomach got worse when she realized that the blond she had seen was the one man who could derail this whole thing. She tamped it down as she, too, extended her hand to him. “Maxwell, this is Evelyn Blaker, our head of accounting. She’s been working with your Clark to broker this deal.”

He was surprised – all the reports he had read recently had been signed off by an E. Blaker. He didn’t realize E stood for Evelyn rather than an Eric or Edward. He silently berated himself for his lack of attention to detail on this whole project and he frowned slightly. This isn’t how he did business and sure as hell not how he became a success.

“Mr. Lord? It’s great to meet you and Mr. Gibson in person.” Her face broken into her characteristic grin and Maxwell felt bowled over suddenly. As they shook hands, fissures of pleasure rippled across his skin, a strange warmth seeping into parts of himself that he thought closed to the outside world. He held her hand longer than necessary before she pulled away. He felt struck dumb, but thankfully, no one seemed to notice as Evie gestured to everyone to take their seats.

As he sat, he noted she was a few seats over, giving him a perfect chance to observe without her noticing. He didn’t understand why he felt changed by her presence and why others didn’t seem to be changed either. She was pretty enough, he supposed. Nothing like the socialites he sometimes dated or the models he carried on his arm at events. And yet here he was, unable to take his eyes off her.

She had blonde hair, too, but hers had a coppery hue that almost seemed like a reflection of firelight. He could tell it was long given how big her chignon bun at the base of her neck was and he noted how elegant that neck was, her skin almost glowing in the late afternoon sun as it streamed into the room. She was shorter than him and he noted her slender fingers as she took notes, causing Maxwell to wonder how those hands would feel on his chest or maybe his cock. He shifted slightly at the thought, attempting to maintain the hard, professional aura he always carried.

Donovan’s voice droned in the background and then Clark’s. He barely paid attention to what they were saying when suddenly, Evie stood up. He was startled, to say the least, when she took the projector remote and brought up a series of charts. He was lost when she began to speak with her honeyed voice.

“Gentlemen, as you look at the projections on the wall you will note that our finances have been less than stellar for most of the last six years. However, since Donovan’s arrival this cash flow bleed has all but stopped. As you can see on this next slide. . .” Evie felt the best offence was a good defense, so by getting the bad out of the way, she was able to move towards a rosier projection that would better sell the company.

She walked around the room, explaining charts and projections with ease and she smiled to herself thinking she could give this whole talk dead. No one knew these numbers like her, and she could see subtle changes in Clark’s face as well as a few others as she moved from the worse of it. Occasionally Donovan broke in to clarify something or to answer a question, but this was all on her, giving Chimtech everything they needed to say yes to this deal. This pass was going to work, dammit.

As Evie talked and walked, Maxwell continued to study her. She carried herself with confidence that he admired and noted that her walk contained a little hop that he could help but enjoy, especially when he realized it caused her breasts to bounce subtly. He decided her golden-brown eyes were her most attractive feature as he found them to be expressive and engaging. And in a strange bit of sentimentality, he thought the color reminded him of dappled sunlight in September. Suddenly, he realized she had stopped next to him as Clark asked another question.

She leaned over Maxwell’s chair to point out something in the projections book that they had in front of them and then pointed to its counterpart on the screen. His heart stuttered a bit and then took off when he got a whiff of her shampoo, something soft and warm. The urge to bury his nose into her neck and breathe deeply nearly overwhelmed him and it took his infamous willpower to tamp down the urge.

What in the hell was going on with him?

“Any questions?” Evie stood back and rested her hand on the back of Maxwell’s chair. She smiled at the group with Donovan beaming back at her. She wanted this to work as much as he did, but Chimtech was notorious for being persnickety with their vendors. She watched as Clark nodded to Maxwell and she glanced down at the man sitting next to her. He looked serious and she noted he didn’t seem to pay attention to anything either her or Donovan said. She began to feel nervous that they just prostrated themselves in front of this man for nothing.

“Let’s get a contract written up and signed by the end of next week.” Maxwell flashed a dazzling smile to the group, but he refused to look up at Evie, fearing he couldn’t contain his facial expressions under her warm gaze. As it was, he could feel her heating up with excitement behind him and he craved to feel that again, but just for him.

“Maxwell, I am pleased to hear this! I’ll have my lawyer work with yours on the language of the contract and as soon as its signed, we can go into production.” Donovan got up from his chair and walked over to the man, shaking his hand. “Our lead point on this is Evie, so Chimtech will be working with her directly.”

“Sounds great.”

Sounds great indeed, he thought.

---***---

As Evie stepped out her car, she still wasn’t quite sure if she wanted to be at this get-together or not. The last year had been rough, the last month had been rougher, and last couple of weeks had been hell. The work she had done to help save Bercholder Medics was starting to catch up with her and she wanted a quiet evening to herself and maybe a week to catch up on much needed sleep.

As she spent most of last week in the city working with Chimtech’s lawyer and Clark on the final contract, she hardly slept. It was as if she was waiting for Maxwell Lord to swoop into the room and take away everything that she had fought for. He had shown up a few times, but never said anything and left before long. She wasn’t sure what to make of the man, but every time he came in, she found herself strangely drawn to him.

She felt something similar during the presentation meeting, too. She found his initial demeanor to be harsh and a little cold, almost as if he were detached from the whole thing. And yet, the times he sat in on the meetings for the contract, the aura he gave off was different. She wondered if had been because they were on his turf and he was more relaxed. Regardless, he invaded her thoughts and she seemed relieved when the contract was signed, and she was back in Poughkeepsie.

As she walked into the Bercholder house, she realized that Donovan needed to celebrate this win and more importantly, her coworkers needed to have some happiness in their lives after such a rough time at it. Earlier in the day a large party had been held at the factory for all the workers and everyone was sent home with pay for an early weekend. Now all the department heads and a few extra guests were treated to a nice evening at Donovan’s home at the foot of the Catskill Mountains.

“Evie!” The voices calling her name sounded cheery and excited and she could feel their joy seeping into her, giving her the energy boost she needed. She found herself slowing passing through the Bercholder house, hugging people and shaking hands, all grateful thank yous that came from her peers, who wanted to express their gratitude for her role in keeping the company open. Soon, though she was ready to be alone, despite how pleasant everyone was being.

She finally wandered out into Donovan’s garden, a large sprawling greenspace that was inviting with fragrant blooms waving in the breeze. Towards the back of the yard was a bower with a swinging bench that had a perfect view of the mountains and at this time of day, the spectacular sunset. She sat down on the bench with a glass of wine that had been pressed into her hands and just relaxed, letting the late summer evening weave its magic around her.

She stayed in place long after dusk overtook the sky and she was so lost in her own thoughts that she didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind her. When the person spoke, she jumped a mile, letting out a little shriek and dropped the glass on the ground. She spun around with a hand on her chest.

“Oh my god, you scared me Maxwell!” Her voice came out breathy and rushed, her heart beating wildly in her chest. He bowed his head and extended his hands towards her.

“I’m sorry Evie, I thought you heard me call your name as I walked out.” He had been watching her from the house, as mesmerized by her beauty as he had been when they first met. When he realized she was here; he ignored all attempts at conversation so he could step outside and join her.

“No, I didn’t.” She shook her head and now that she was calming down, she started to laugh as she bent down to pick up the wine glass that thankfully had not shattered. She set it up right and off to the side before turning towards him. She was surprised to see him here, thinking he wouldn’t have come so far for such a small celebration. And yet here he was, and she was grateful for the coming twilight – it hid the growing blush on her cheeks.

“May I?” He gestured to the open space next to her and she smiled at him and scooted over, patting the cushioned seat. When he sat down, she almost felt dwarfed by him. She didn’t think she was particularly short at five foot six inches, but for some reason the six inches Maxwell had over her seemed extra pronounced up close.

“Would you like more wine to replace what you lost?”

“No, I wasn’t even drinking it. Someone handed it to me, and I didn’t have the heart to say no.”

“Not a wine drinker?”

“Not a drinker at all.” He nodded and for a moment they lapsed into silence. It was quite comfortable between the two of them, given how little they knew of each other. Maxwell moved his legs slightly and the swing began to sway. They sat enjoying the quiet night, occasionally broken by noises from the party, but both were lost in thought about the other.

“Thank you for the portfolios, our staff thought it was a wonderful gesture.” Evie’s voice was soft but carried easily in the quiet and Maxwell nodded. The boxes came only a few days after that first meeting, so the company took it as a sign that the company-saving move was secured. Donovan burst into Evie’s office and pulled her into a giant hug before waltzing her around the room. She laughed as he left and the thrill that what she had done worked shivered up her spine.

When she opened her box, she found that she too had received a portfolio, but hers was a deep plum – her favorite color – whereas all the rest a classic blue to match the Bercholder logo. She ran her fingers across the gold embossing of her name before opening it up. She had received a note like everyone else, but unlike the form letter found in other portfolios, hers was handwritten by Maxwell himself. As she read the spiky handwriting, she was grateful she was alone in her office.

“You’re welcome.” His voice was equally soft, and it struck her that in the handful of times that she had talked with Maxwell that soft wasn’t a word that she would have described him. And yet. . .

“Did you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“Don’t play stupid Maxwell, you know what I’m asking about.” He smiled and she could see his teeth gleam in the dark. She thought that maybe she should be scared to see such a smile from a man known to be so ruthless, but it didn’t seem dangerous to her.

“I did. I want to take you to dinner.”

“Why me?”

“I don’t know, but I do know that I want to see more of you.” She smiled softly. She never felt like the kind of woman who would be so attractive to a man that he had to see her. So, she couldn’t help but preen internally at his comment. She was quiet for a beat before she spoke again.

“If I do agree to a date of some sort, you must promise me that regardless of what happens, Chimtech keeps Bercholder as a vendor.”

“Of course.” She placed her hand on his shoulder and turned him towards her. He was struck that even in the darkness she seemed to shine like the sun, as if her hair stole the light from the stars. The look on her face was serious and for a moment he paused. She took his hand into her own and squeezed, hard.

“I mean it Maxwell; you promise me that you won’t let whatever is going on ruin this for Bercholder. People are relying upon this contract to keep their jobs and I will not do a damn thing to hurt them.” Her soft voice was now hard, with a harsh undertone that surprised him. She didn’t seem to glow anymore, instead it was as if she had been eclipsed and something cold left in her place. He was taken aback by the sudden change.

“Evie, I promise. Bercholder is Clark’s responsibility, I never had a hand in anything but approving the contract.” She relaxed and nodded but to his surprise, didn’t let go of his hand. The hardness left her and the golden aura he had come to crave from her returned. The moment had passed, and the silence returned, surprisingly as comfortable as before.

Evie would never admit to anyone but herself, but she wanted to accept his proposition the day she got the letter. She had thought of him often over the last few weeks, with each meeting dragging her further and further into thoughts she shouldn’t be having about the man. She recognized at the very onset of all this that Maxwell Lord was a powerful man and he oozed that every time they had meet, but she sensed something else was there and whatever it was, it drew her in like a moth to a flame. When he kept hold of her hand longer than was usual, she felt herself breakout in goosebumps.

During the presentation, she could feel his eyes on her, and she pointedly avoided looking at him in the eyes. But when she leaned over his chair, she had to grip the seat’s back to keep her hands to herself. Up close, she could see his golden locks and wondered if they felt like silk since they certainly looked it. Her palms itched to touch him, and she was confused as to why she was feeling this way about him. Yes, he was handsome, but never had she yearned so much for a single touch as she did in that moment.

When Donovan put her in charge of the contract, she was lost. Every time he sat in on a meeting, she could feel herself grow warm under his eyes and she willed herself to ignore him lest she get caught up in his gaze. On the second to last day, he smiled at her and she felt her thighs clench with want. She was never anything but professional around him, but within the confines of her home, too many nights ended with his name on her lips as she came by her own hand.

---***---

She wasn’t sure how long they sat on the swing, holding hands and enjoying the night, but the sudden increase in party sounds caused her to look over her shoulder. She saw Donovan coming her way and she squeezed Maxwell’s hand once more before removing hers from their embrace. She almost felt sad to break the connection, but there was no need for Donovan to see the two of them be so chummy.

“Hello you two! I’d ask if you were enjoying the view, but it’s dark as hell out here and you probably can’t see shit.” It was a surprise to people that he was the CEO of a mid-size company. He looked the opposite of Maxwell and yet both carried that same indominable energy of a leader comfortable in their position. Bercholder’s staff was happy to have him in charge and that’s all that mattered to him.

“I enjoyed it earlier, Don. The sunsets are always spectacular here!” Evie smiled at him. “And I was just so comfortable I decided to just stay and enjoy the evening. Maxwell came to say hello and I think the Catskills are wrapping him under their spell.”

Donovan laughed and Maxwell smiled. All three knew the man was city born, city raise, and it would be a cold day in hell before he’d leave it all for a small place like Stone Ridge. As it was, Donovan was surprised Maxwell had accepted the invitation to the party, but he was pleased and hoped this was a sign their recently agreed upon contract was safe.

After chatting a little longer, Donovan went back into the house to continue playing host. The evening quieted down after the boisterous man left and the faint sounds of crickets filled the air again. When it seemed like they’d no longer be interrupted, Maxwell reached out and grabbed Evie’s hand, resting it on his thigh. He lightly brushed his thumb over her knuckles, moving to the back of her hand when she didn’t pull away from him.

If Maxwell knew Evie touched herself while thinking about him, he probably would have been pleased and more than a little smug. But the reoccurring dreams that he had been having about her didn’t give him much leverage. He woke up many mornings to a cold and empty bed that seemed all the harsher given how warm and light his dreams had been. He had thought throwing himself into his work would render this little crush meaningless until she arrived for contract negotiations.

It seemed the dreams were worse after those meetings and when he woke in the morning, he was hard as hell. It didn’t matter if he jerked himself off, his hands never seemed to live up to the softness of her lips and cunt that he experienced in his dreams. He couldn’t ever get over the sensations he experienced while asleep and Maxwell wondered if maybe his brain got addled at some point and that he was imagining that such warmth could exist from a single person.

But as he brushed his thumb over her hand, he could feel it creeping into his chest and spreading to his limbs. He itched to touch her everywhere, to kiss her, to fuck her, anything to crawl inside of her and stay there. He didn’t know what it was about her that had him so obsessed, but he was. Maxwell was known for his will power, but he found it slipping away from him whenever he was around her and suddenly, he raised her hand to his lips and gently kiss the palm.

Evie drew in a sharp breath at the sensation, a mix of surprise and arousal. She turned her head and looked at him, only to find him looking back at her. It was almost as if he was waiting for her to say something, do something. So, she curled her fingers around his chin and squeezed lightly. They continued to look at each other as he pressed a kiss to her wrist and then a string of them up her arm until he reached her shoulder.

He scooted over until he was pressed against her and leaned down to kiss the juncture between her shoulder and neck. Her breath hitched and a small moan sounded in her throat, the sparks of pleasure beginning to spread across her body. He smiled against her skin and continued to kiss up her neck while rubbing her knuckles with his fingers. When Maxwell reached just under her ear, Evie turned to him and even in the dark, he could see her eyes blazing with lust. Reaching up with her other hand, she rested her fingertips on his jaw and leaned in to lightly kiss him.

In that moment, the infamous Lord willpower that made or broke companies was abandoned, and he surged forward to meet her lips. He dragged his tongue along her lower lip, encouraging her to open and submit to him. When she did, he groaned at the sensation of her heat. As they deepened the kiss, he dropped her hand and brought both of his to her waist, pulling her onto his lap. He could feel the soft yield of her breasts against his chest and then her hands as they snaked up his back.

Evie could feel his erection growing against her thigh and she sighed against his lips, wanting to feel that hardness elsewhere. His hands rubbed circles on her hips and the sparks that began with that kiss on her throat seemed to cover her skin. It took everything in her to not throw her leg over his and to straddle his lap to feel friction where she needed it the most.

She broke off the kiss first, leaning her forehead against him, their noses lightly brushing against each other. Their breaths were heavy, and their eyes were darkened by their mutual desire. But they both realized they couldn’t very well keep making out in Donovan’s garden like a couple of horny teenagers trying to hide from their parents. He spoke first.

“Thursday night, in the city. Dinner with me at seven. I’ll send my car to pick you up from the train station.” The roughness of Maxwell’s voice caused a shiver to run down Evie’s spine, but she nodded, not even bothering to push back against his demanding tone. “I’ll text you with the information that morning.”

He lightly kissed her again before pulling away and sliding Evie back onto the bench. But he kept her flushed against him, as if he wasn’t ready for reality to intrude in on the moment. Evie laid her hand on his thigh and her head on his shoulder, marveling at how comfortable she felt around him. He placed his arm around her shoulder, and he began to rock the swing again. They sat there for a long time before they knew they had to leave. As Evie stood up, Maxwell grabbed her hand and looked at her.

“Thursday.”

#maxwell lord #maxwell lord x oc #pedro pascal #pedro pascal x reader #ww1984 #wonder woman 1984 #fanfic

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justasparkwritings · 4 years

Text

Codename Cupid: Chapter 11

Previous: Tailing Taehyung

Pairing: Min Yoongi X OFC

Genre: Angst, Secret AgentAU, AgentAU, Government Agent AU

Rating: PG15

Word Count: 2.9k

Warnings: Swearing, Kissing, Mentions of Consensual Sex

Summary: The final part of Suga’s orders are carried out.

Codename Another Shot at Love Pt. 4

Winter After Graduation

December and January passed without much to report. That being said, everything that OT7 had planned went swimmingly, with one singular exception.

The dinner at the Lee estate had sent a wave of insecurity through Euna, which made it easy for Yoongi to feign ignorance when he began, deliberately, to pull away from her.

The first few weeks after dinner were filled with Yoongi convincing Euna that he was going to stay, that he was all in, that he wanted to be with her. She believed him, and by believing him, started the early drafts of their futures together. He hated the deception, the lies he strung together as easily as breathing, the files and documents charting his deception updated daily by Hoseok.

Hoseok had the unpleasant task of transcribing all conversation and interactions between marks and members of OT7, his specialized training and exceptional hearing made his job easy. Yoongi was instructed to record everything, except sex or any hooking up that went down. Being in charge of most of the tech, he wielded his glasses and watch, set to record when they were on his person, set to turn off when they couldn’t detect his body heat. He could manually turn them off, a button on his watch near the band allowed him to with ease. He’d only fucked up once or twice, not recording when Cupid spilled important info, which angered Namjoon to no end. They weren’t amateurs, Yoongi should know better. Regardless, everyday Hobi transcribed the conversations between Yoongi and Cupid, adding more to the list and charts of the lies being told.

“Jun-Seo said that Jimin wanted to send you something, a welcome to the gang, gift,” Euna said over dinner.

Surprised and pouting, Yoongi responded, “A gift?”

“Knowing Jun-Seo and Jimin, it’s probably a Dae-Seong voodoo doll,” Euna shrugged.

“Okay, did they want to drop it off or give it to you?” Yoongi shrugged it off.

“Jimin wants to have dinner, the four of us,” Euna told him, sipping her wine.

Nodding again, Yoongi asked, “How do you feel about that?”

“I would rather not,” Euna said.

“Then we won’t.”

“Isn’t it part of being a family?” She asked, unsure what the protocol of a functioning family was.

“Having dinner? Didn’t we just witness Guadalcanal? You think the troops wanted to hang with the natives after they slaughtered them?” Yoongi scoffed. He hated how docile Cupid was towards her family, always doing what she thought was right, rarely what she wanted.

“Eh, it wasn’t that bad,” Euna responded.

“You’re shitting me,” Yoongi’s eyes were wide. “War is not normal, I mean, besides Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s normal.”

“No, I’m not. We’ve had far worse, that one was honestly, average. At least my mom made it through the entire meal, and no one broke a glass or threw a plate at Dae. They weren’t on their best behavior, but it was better than most meals we share,” Euna informed him.

“That’s toxic, psychotic, that’s fucking horrifying, Euna. You don’t have to put up with that.” Yoongi took her hand in his while she watched her roll her eyes.

“Didn’t you know that, though?” She snapped.

“Know what?”

“The Lee family, and Lee Enterprises, breeds nothing but toxicity and wages psychological warfare on every member of the inner circle. That’s why no one leaves,” Euna’s temper continued to flare throughout the night, sleeping as far from Yoongi as possible, barely acknowledging him as he slipped from her home the next morning.

Arriving at work the next day, Yoongi and the OT7 team spent an additional week tracing the longevity of careers at Enterprises, as well as tracking hirings, firings and workers who just disappeared from records.

“Who’s been there the longest?” Namjoon asked, files scattered across the conference table, writing strewn on the glass between offices. He was growing tired, a sign from the cold he’d acquired running a surveillance mission with their recent acquisition, a trainee ready to be put into the field.

“Not including the Lee family, that would include a somewhat distant Vanderbilt relative, a Henry Claypoole,” Yoongi said.

“Not a Korean?” Seokjin asked.

“No, the Lee’s didn’t rise into prominence until, well, it looks like the late 80s, when they did a market sample and it became apparent that an Asian-American owned company would serve better in the future than another fortune 500 owned by a white family, that and Vietnam had ended and American sentiment towards Asians of all kind was changing,” Namjoon responded.

“Once the Civil Rights Act passed, and the government continued to allow Asians immigrate, opinions were changing.” Yoongi added.

“It wasn’t that long after Vietnam though,” Seokjin was skeptical.

“It didn’t go over well, they hadn’t gone public until the early 2000s, so it balanced out. It was pretty hush-hush until the mid 90s when Claypoole died.” Namjoon pulled up the paperwork, passing it to Jin.

“Still, Vietnam, AIDs, their investors were okay with this?”

“At the heart of the Lee business model, is a relentless grab for power. They were making ins with the wealthiest families in Asia, Europe, UAE, Middle East and South America. There wasn’t a royal family or billionaire who hadn’t put their money in,” Namjoon told the men.

Curious, Seokjin asked, “Before it was Lee Enterprises, what was it called?”

“Claypoole & Lee Enterprises,” Hoseok responded. He’d forged a few older documents with their old insignia and water mark.

“CLE?” Jin had looked at their old stocks, comparing them to other companies when he was in college. They were a fickle company, always hard to pin down or predict.

“Yes,” Hoseok answered again.

“They changed their name?” Jin confirmed.

“It was a complete rebranding to help with their demographics, but it also made sense once Claypoole was six feet under.” Namjoon replied.

“The less American, the better?” Jin clarified.

“Exactly, better for the global image,” Namjoon adjusted his glasses before running a hand through his hair. Dark and quaffed, it fell back into place in gently swoops.

“Claypoole worked in the bank from day one,” Yoongi addressed the three men.

“Claypoole was just a figurehead, the original chairman of the board while Lee and his crew ran the company,” Namjoon said.

“How do their hiring practices measure up?” Hoseok asked, he spent zero time reading and understanding the internal workings of the company unless he has to write in a specific person’s voice.

“They accept applicants in pools, hiring in spring/summer, train in fall, then reevaluate the following spring. Their classes or cohorts are no more than ten people, with a few exceptions based on the market demands and company growth. Some years, specifically at the beginning of the tech boom, they hired fifty people, other years, six. It is fairly unpredictable,” Namjoon passed around another set of documents.

“The most tenured staff has been there for thirty years,” Yoongi said sipping his coffee.

“Yoongi, you haven’t had to sign an NDA?” Hoseok asked.

“No.”

“What about retention?”

“No one talks about retention. It wasn’t in my contract at all, no blind clauses or double language.”

“Has anyone left in the year you’ve been there?”

“Not that I’ve seen. No one talks about contracts or negotiation outside of the speculation of what will happen come May.”

“Their plans for negotiating contracts also vary by years spent, first years going through a level of hell that slowly descends as you work your way up the ladder,” Yoongi informed.

“Why would they want people to stay?” Hoseok asked.

“They’re all complicit? They knowingly are committing felonies, so staying means no one can hold it against them?” Yoongi suggested.

“An entire company of 200 people, all insider trading? All embezzling? That’s inconceivable,” Namjoon was unsure how realistic the possibility was.

“An entire company, minus one,” Jin whispered.

“Yoongi, how is our Cupid doing?” Hoseok smirked.

“She wants to move in,” Yoongi muttered.

“What?” Seokjin yelled.

“Yeah, oh, and her clothes have begun to infiltrate my closet,” Yoongi sipped his iced americano, his own making, a product of the espresso machine he had begged Namjoon to buy. The coffee ice cubes, a stupid idea from a pop-up video, had turned Yoongi’s favorite addiction into a godly experience.

“She wants to move in, with you?” Hoseok was shocked.

“Fuck off,” Snapped Yoongi.

“What else?” Namjoon asked.

“She’s been calling a lot, at random times in the day. She’s got snacks in her apartment for me, like really niche stuff. She bought a thousand-dollar bottle of whiskey for me, bought me a pair of silk pajamas that cost near $550. The worst of it all, and I swear, I swear, she’s developing an impregnation kink.”

Namjoon and Hoseok laughed, doubling over to hold their sides as they became consumed by the idea.

“Seriously?” Hoseok gasped.

“Whatever happened at that dinner has her scared shitless,” Seokjin remained calm, though the shock etched into his ageless features. “She’s never wanted kids.”

“Which is why it’s concerning,” Yoongi said.

“You stopped using condoms?” Namjoon dropped the laughter to stare at Yoongi. “Don’t tell me you stopped using-

Yoongi’s eyes widen, cheeks tinting pink as he blushes. “No, no, that’s how I know she’s developing this, obsession. She very vocally, wants my fucking seed.”

“Does she ask you not to use one?” Hoseok inquired.

“Yeah and tells me I can take it off and I don’t need to because she’s on birth control, which she isn’t.”

“Pull out?” Hoseok suggested.

“Oh yeah, the second least successful method to avoid pregnancy,” Namjoon laughed again.

“You can tell her you don’t want STI’s,” Jin offered.

“She’ll ask if I’m sleeping with other people,” Yoongi had gone through every option, there was no good solution. He pissed off Cupid, or he put himself at risk. Unwanted pregnancy was not how he was going to start off his mid-twenties. Fatherhood was not on the table, especially not with someone he at his core, didn’t love.

“Are you?” Jin wondered.

Rolling his eyes, “When would I have the time?”

“You’ve always been a one partner kind of guy,” Hoseok responded.

Confusion in his eyes, Yoongi tilted his head. “What does that even mean?”

“Just that-

“Yoongi, start distancing yourself, as gradually as possible,” Namjoon redirected.

“Roger that.”

It was a cliché, become a horrible partner to get the other person to break up with you so you didn’t have to. It’s even more of a cliché for the person hoping to be dumped to revert back to their pre-relationship behavior in order to get their partner to dislike them, as much as he didn’t want to admit it, that was exactly what Yoongi did. Frankly, he didn’t have to try very hard, though, to get Euna to be hurt by him.

Introverted in nature, he began by closing himself off to her, cancelling plans, bailing at the last second. He became withholding of sex and general intimacy, being standoffish when she tried to get him to open up, annoyed when she tried to use her wiles against him. He tapped into all the flaws past partners had accused him of and let them run wild.

It was slow at first, building up Cupid’s resentment towards him, for every step away from her he took, she took three more towards him. Her internet searches became solely based on ways to keep Yoongi, entrapment through a hole in the condom, or preying on him after a night of drinking. She lost all sense of what was acceptable, what was normal, and spun out completely. Cupid tried to track his phone, bought burners to call and catfish him, put extra security in place in his corner of Lee Enterprises to ensure she had eyes on him all day. Paranoia and obsession have no place in a healthy, stable relationship, but Yoongi couldn’t fault her for feeling both towards him.

The final straw, on Yoongi’s end, was a confrontation the night following Cupid’s weekly family dinner.

“Why didn’t you come to dinner? Who were you with?” Cupid demanded when she called Yoongi.

“I told you, I have a deadline and Matthew needs the plans before the market opens on Monday,” Yoongi reminded her.

“You’re not at work,” She snapped.

Calmly, Yoongi exhaled, “I’m at my apartment.”

“Why are you lying to me,” It wasn’t a question, but an accusation.

“I’m not lying, Euna, I am at home working,” Yoongi answered.

“Why don’t you ever come to dinner?”

“You said I didn’t have to, after the first one,” Yoongi reminded her.

Cupid scoffed, as if that was a true reason. “Jimin’s there, and recently, Dae’s wife has been making an appearance.”

“I would prefer to not engage with your family unless I have to. It blurs the lines of work and personal –

“But you’re dating me! You’re fucking me, you’re in love with me.” She rattled off, “Why does my family have to be the problem? What’s really going on?”

“What do you mean?” Yoongi was already tired of the conversation.

“You’ve been acting weird for months. You don’t want to sleep with me, you hardly stay over, you’re distant and weird,” Accusation after accusation, Yoongi had made a list himself of what she could potentially throw at him.

“I have been going through a lot, can’t you understand that?”

Scoffing again, Cupid responded. “You’ve been going through a lot? What about me?”

“Euna, I know I’ve been shit, I just-

“You don’t love me anymore, do you?” Bingo.

“What?” Yoongi feigned hurt.

“You’re not denying it,” She snapped.

“Do you really think that?”

“Yes, Yoongi, I do. I think you used me to get into good graces with the company so you can move up the ladder. Now that you’ve got some traction, you fucking don’t care about me or our relationship.”

“That’s crazy! When have I ever shown any sign of wanting to move up the corporate ladder? It wasn’t my idea to fall into bed with you, Euna, your mother set this up,” The angrier he pretended to be, the faster this would be over.

“Why are you acting like this if you’re still in love with me?” She demanded to know.

“I told you, works been chaotic and I –

“If work’s chaotic, why not tell me? I can change that.”

He held in a laugh, “That would be like nepotism but worse.”

“Are you saying this to make me feel better?” She asked, voice softening.

“Euna,” If only she could see him, eyes closed, glasses on his desk, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. He was tired. Tired of Euna, tired of working at this company, tired of lying. He didn’t often burn out on missions, but this had taken him to his edge.

“You don’t want to have sex, you don’t want me in your space, you cancel plans, you never answer my calls. Yoongi, are you cheating on me?”

“What?”

“You are, aren’t you?” She could feel the tears breaking through, the resolve of anger she had disappearing.

Yoongi took a deep breath, knowing she was going to throw up whatever she could until it stuck.

“Euna, stop,” Yoongi sighed.

“Then tell me what’s going on,” She whispered.

He had to say it, he had to otherwise this fight would continue on, resulting in an in person confrontation. “We should break up.”

The silence on the other end was worse than her screaming at him.

“What?” Her voice was still soft, a heartbroken whisper.

“We want really different things, and I don’t know if I can or will ever be able to give you what you need. I’m sorry, Euna, I am,” Yoongi said. He wasn’t a heartbreaker, he loved fiercely and passionately. But Cupid was a mark, plain and simple.

“Fuck you, Yoongi,” She spit.

“I’m sorry, Euna,” He laid on the apology.

“You had my heart,” She sniffled.

“I know,” He sighed.

“And you stomped on it, ran it over with an 18-wheeler, and threw it into a blender. Fuck. You.” Cupid was back to anger, coursing through her like lava down the side of Kilauea.

“I’m sorry,” He repeated.

“I want my stuff back, and I want you to put in your transfer at Lee Enterprises,” Her voice was fueled by anger and sudden heartache.

“A what?” Yoongi was shocked.

“Transfer, you can’t work under me after this,” She had switched to business mode. There was one thing Yoongi had remained impressed by, and that was Cupid’s ability to put the job over everything else, everyone else, not because she had to, because she wanted to.

“That’s unlawful,” Yoongi warned.

“I don’t care.”

“Euna,” He pleased.

“Transfer, or I will fire you.” An ultimatum, something she never wanted to be faced with.

“You can’t –

“Don’t. Test. Me.”

“Okay, I’ll do it Monday,” Yoongi compromised.

“You can send my stuff back, I don’t want to see you.” Cupid hung up. In her home, she threw her phone against the wall, watching it rebound onto the carpet before she fell to the floor, tears abounding. How many heartbreaks could she withstand? How many tears would fall at the emotions of another man, breaking her spirit? In some deep recesses of her subconscious, Dae-Seong’s words played through without a scratch. Maybe he’d been right.

Yoongi texted OT7, who no doubt had already known through the rapid transcription Hobi was almost certainly completing, or through listening to the fight go down. The receipts would show that Yoongi had followed orders as directed, he completed his mission, his mark had been hit. Hook, line and heartbreak. Looking at the calendar, he laughed darkly. Of course, he would break up with her days before Valentine’s Day.

Next: Codename The Mochi of It All

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cloudslou · 4 years

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louies tag game!!

thank u lovely emma @essercipertuttienonperse and dear ollie @voulezloux for tagging me!! hopefully i do it right fjjhdhdh

When did you become a Louie?

hmm double-sided question bc i got into one direction early 2012 when i was 11, bu ti was a niall girl and then became a harry girl mid-2014, and then dropped out of the fandom soon after that? and then last September i got back into 1d/solo careers bc i got into louis’ solo stuff. i guess i ended up following a louie w/o knowing it (ik exactly who this blogger is still) and so the day he performed in madrid suddenly i saw posts from her that were like “he said WHAT??” and i was #curious so i digged on her blog and saw she was talking about louis and the fact that he sang “princess park” in habit, and like That all the info about HL that i had let fade away came back and i was like he sang WHAT so obvs i did some more exploring and watched the vids uploaded of his habit performances and moved on from there, and basically like That was back in... i was casual for that school semester and then some time mid-late december last yr i was lurking on blogs and realized “oh shit, i wanna blog about this myself” and then made this sideblog <3

One thing that drew you in specifically?

his lyrics!!! the first song i heard upon my return was habit, and then all the other ccme/madrid performances and i just loved his lyrics and voice so much

Why did you become a Louie?

ugh so many reasons!!!!!! from the moment i got back into 1d and started narrowing in on louis, everything about him made me love him so much. his lyrics felt so honest and unique, and his voice was so light and yet rich, so dynamic but so able to carry emotion!!!! every video and interview i watched endeared me more and more, and it became so clear to me how compassionate and talented and caring he is and how FUNNY i know he was styled as the funny/loud one of 1d but it is just a genuine part of who he is to have fun and joke around and make people feel comfortable and safe via that trait if his. he’s such a leader and so so so intelligent and careful and purposeful and it shows in everything he does.

Who would you want Louis to collab with?

ugh taylor obviously. the songwriting and STORYTELLING skills would b off the charts!!!!! and then idk if this question means vocally so im gonna say more ppl he should write w: any member of all time low, sam fender, jesse thomas (who wrote on JLY), st. vincent/annie clark

Favorite song on walls?

habit!!! idk if its my legit fav song or im extremely sentimental so my fav song is obvs the song that pulled me back in, but it is what it is

Favorite hairstyle?

ummmm i will always be weak for like 2014-2015 hedgehog-fringe hair. BUT i also love a softer look so an unstyled, no-product kind of look so like the fan vs artist video?? or the GQ video where he makes online accounts and answers fan questions. yeah that. ik he probs has product in his hair in those vids but the point is that he does LOOK like he has lots of product. soft baby.

Back to you, just hold on, or miss you?

miss you!!!!!!!!!!!!! shes my baby

Louis in suits or sweaters?

sweaters!!!!! he looks so good in sweaters its absurd... so cozy and all too. every sweater he wears looks like it was made for him

Favorite tattoo?

the triangle!!! shes so small and perfect

Favorite Louis photo (currently)?

in honor of the fact that we just got this one..... THIS ONE

Random extra? random extra is my earliest memory of louis is me and some friends in our last day of the class, our creative writing elective, early 2012, we were in 6th grade, and we were in the corner writing in a whiteboard. just DAYS ago we as a collective has gotten in to 1d, and we were trying to learn how to spell their names, and i SO distinctly remember us writing out “tomlinson” and just like... memorizing the letters and the sound of it.

ok i suck at tagging ppl so im tagging @starryharry @tourhome @sunflwerlou @burntbromances @wlwalls and @louisau !! sorry if you’ve already done this, i have not kept track :-)

#thank u emma and ollie for the tag!#sorry it took several days to do this #about me #also no pressure to do this lol

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itsakpopalypse · 5 years

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Ayno/ No Yoonho (VAV) Astrology Ask: Romantic Breakdown

“Would you also be willing to do astrology for Ayno from VAV? Please?”- @excindrela

A/N Happily, again, this is based mostly on what I know of the chart itself. I hope you enjoy!!

AS ALWAYS, 18+BELOW THE CUT

I had to use this gif now I’m soft

Let’s do this

Okay first of all his big three placements are a bit haphazard

Leo Rising, Taurus Sun and Libra moon

in that you can probably guess where this is going

Oh boy

one fire, an earth and an air

that is storm energy right there

slightly chaotic I cannot even

Leo rising means that when you meet him he is charismatic, maybe flirty and a bit of an attention whore hog.

Luckily, since Taurus is one of the least attention seeking signs this won’t be unbearable. it will be charming and make you laugh probably

it’s cute

If he likes you he likes you he will be doing dumb stuff to get your attention

really dumb stuff

stuff that makes you wonder if he realizes how dumb that was

he is trying so hard pls don’t judge him

He will have your attention and once he has got it the full charm comes out

he will be fiery and full of life and absolutely can compliment the pants off anyone but it will feel so honest and sincere that it will nearly knock the breath out of your lungs

definitely uses humor to deflect

Taurus sun means steady slow action

(See how contradictory that is with his rising???)

that means that his INSTINCT will be to rush in but if he is unsure, even for HALF of a second he will wait it out until he has decided it’s safe to move forward

they are artsy and emotional but keep a cool head

so he may try to express himself through means other than words too

make you something or very gentle barely there touches,

you’re watching a movie and his hand brushes your thigh

if you look over he isn’t even looking at you he seems unfazed

he was watching your reaction though so if you seem flustered expect a smirk and a few more accidents like that

Taurus suns have beautiful complex minds full of so much more emotion than they display

so since his rising is more expressive you’ll get something in between . bursts of shyness and bursts of being the life of the party.

Taurus seem detached but are hoes for physical affection

give the man what he wants okay it’s not much

kiss his forehead

tell him he looks nice

he’ll eat it up and be like “Hey can you hold something for me?”

and you’re all “Okay, Sure.” and he just puts his hand in yours and says thanks with a shit eating grin

that kinda sofffff shit

he will be unsure of his own ability oml pls protec

let’s talk Libra moon

as a Libra i would like do defend my entire sign but many times there’s no defense for us

it’s not intentional but we are a bit... light headed and flighty?

if we have a close placing earth sign (he does) then that is HEAVILY lessened so that’s a positive for him

and it MAY even tone down how stubborn Taurus tends to be since Libras do not like conflict and would rather bend instead of hurting the feelings of another

the problem is

if any insecurities slip through he will be a door mat

i am serious someone wrap him in bubble wrap he is doin me a concern

probably a low key perfectionist

has either the cleanest space or the messiest one

this all means in a relationship he is going to have moments of severe insecurity and uncertainty

he will be friendly to a fault and probably is the king of “I can help you with everything” even though he is already overloaded.

loves beauty in all things and probably will 10/10 just stare at you and compliment every feature sometimes just because he happened to notice that he hadn’t in a while

attention to detail in relationships

everything you have ever done together is locked in his mind and will be used

this is not a forget birthdays or anniversary type, sentimental!

Taurus Mercury means his communication is slow, he’s not lost or not following the topic he is just trying to make the words go i feel you dude

once he has figured out HOW to express it, he will not beat around the bush. straight to the point

he doesn’t want to hurt feelings but he absolutely doesn’t see the point in softening it

either way it’s the truth right?

Venus in GEMINI

whew

that is going to be interesting to write in the 18+ section you have been warned

he is HIGH KEY adventurous in romance

tolerant and understanding, warm hearted and affectionate

basically once he has got you he is going to get your attention constantly

cute texts and snapchats

“I’m eating lunch missing you “ - queue pout face

probably whines to get what he wants

it will work cause he’s cute or whatever

gloats when he gets his way

but probably immediately does something SO CUTE

N Node is Libra so he needs human contact constantly

you are a human teddy get used to it

do not ask him to make a decision ever without weighing every option

probably never is sure about anything

but really likes to pretend he is

constantly sacrificing himself to support others

18+ below you were warned !

I been saying that neck tick thing some idols do is a whole kink and it keeps happening wtf pls for the sake of my lungs stop

I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE FOR THE SMUT no i dont

Leo rising means fiery and needy

this man is not the sort to wait long

Even with the Taurus energies this poor boy has HOE signs slut dropping through every other house of his chart i swear

All his Libra and Gemini are in the exact places necessary to make him hella switchy

That Libra moon is literally begging you to WORSHIP HIM

Libra can be a bit vain and have a huge words of affirmation kink

literally never stop telling him how good he feels or is doing

incoherent babbles are acceptable as well

his venus being in Gemini is uh

uh well

i’ll throw some possible kinks out and let you decide my dudes

threesomes

gags/bondage

restraint

being being edged but giving overstim

so many people pleaser signs in here and honestly it fits

Rapper tongue anyone???👀👀👀👌👌

A++++ champion of eating you out until you literally implode

Yikes you better be well hydrated you losin fluids tonight

how many rounds can YOU keep up with HIM cause is not satisfied with only one

could probably have a poly relationship happily provided all other parts of the puzzle agreed to love him equally

he needs it okay

Taurus is a very hands sign

hands on and hands driven

taking that and adding it to Gemini’s open mindedness sexually I see possible public teasing kinks

we’ve seen the boy dance

he can put it down no one is questioning it

if they do send them my way and they can catch these hands have a debate with me about it

needs you just as into it as he is

probably gets REALLY emotional after

like he’s not going to cry, but he will start saying the softest stuff and you will melt

probably to make up for the rough beating your guts just took

for what it’s worth, he isn’t sorry in the least

probably kind of a “roll over and cuddle we will clean up in the morning” type

i don’t see anything indicating meticulous aftercare so he probably sees physical closeness as the best way to show you that he loves you

you mean the entire world and he wants you to know it!

I hope you have enjoyed! I have a few requests pending but more are welcome if you don’t mind waiting a day or 2!

thank you for requesting!

#ayno #vav fanfiction #ayno vav fanfiction #vav smut #kpop astrology #astrology asks #requested #noh yoonho

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parkeraul · 5 years

Note

Omg! Your “cancer Mars is screaming.” comment has me has me dying. Lol! You seem to really in Astro and obviously Shawn. I know a little about Astrology but not enough to be confident. How would you describe Shawn based off his chart. ( I’m the same non that asked about his Sagittarius rising and wished we knew his birth time, bye)

i study astrology during my free time since 2017 so i know a few things

like, from what i remember, shawn has the following positions:

leo sun

aquarius moon

mars in cancer

venus in cancer

jupiter in pisces

saturn in taurus

we have some trouble, ngl, because shawn has a sun sign that’s opposite to his moon sign BUT, since i don’t have his ascendant, i can’t say that his sun and moon are making an opposition (if they do, there might be a few issues but let’s talk about the things we have).

if u wanna know about shawn’s chart, click read more bc i’m gonna talk my capricorn ass off.

leo sun: we know how this shit works mostly, right? a leo sun is an amazing characteristic (because the sun rules over leo just like all the other planets rule a specific sign | which means that leo gives the sun the right requirements - sun is about your character overall, your identity and your ego). i don’t know the house (which applies a HUGE influency) so i can only assume that shawn acts like a regular leo: cares about the way he looks (not only apparently speaking), wants to stand out from the crowd by doing his thing as perfectly as he can, uniqueness and ego is a thing.

BUT that’s where his leo sun gets broken by his amount of water signs (cancer/pisces) and his aquarius moon, the sign that makes opposition with leo. see, the ego in leo isn’t about selfishness in a pejorative way (unless we’ve got another aspect that leads to it) — is about putting yourself first and in this case, it’s a big internal fight for shawn. the moon talks about your feelings, your emotions and aquarius is on it: very confident with his own ideas, believing in himself no matter what. keep that in mind, i’m gonna get back to this. and we’ve got in here someone who makes friends very easily and surely stands out from the rest, making a strong first impression — but there’s this battle me (leo) x what the world thinks (aquarius). oh, and quick note about moon in male charts: in all charts, moon talks about your relationship with your mom and, in male charts specifically, it talks about the woman he sees as an ideal pair. REMINDER: ASTROLOGY IS SYMBOLISTIC — nothing about it is a fact, these are tendencies. so yeah, probably something “perfect” for shawn is someone whose characteristics match with the aquarius sign characteristics. don’t get attached to this, the only way to see if charts match is doing a synastry chart between both maps.

cancer mars is a terrible position (in my opinion) to a leo sun extremely workaholic. see, mars rules aries & scorpio and gets exalted in capricorn — which means that if you’ve got mars in libra (aries’ opposite); taurus (scorpio’s opposite) or cancer (capricorn’s opposite), you’re not delivering mars the energy it asks for. mars is about the way you fight for your goals, your vital energy and in male charts it’s about sex also. so, that way, we see in here a mars that’s VERY emotionally sensible — this way, the planet can’t focus on going after his objectives rationally, the feelings kick in and makes shawn act following his heart, whatever he’s feeling at the moment. which can be an impulsive mars, sometimes, because it can rely more than recommended on the current mood. we can see by the way he writes and had been writing surprisingly honest. and, not to forget the sex, shawn’s probably the guy who gets even more excited about it if it’s with someone he loves — so like this he’s not only loving body parts, he’s immersed and completely involved with EVERYTHING the person has.

cancer venus! venus is about romantic relationships so, even though the sun is in a more playful sign (like gemini, sagittarius and leo), it’s a venus that is definitely sensitive. he shows how much he loves you by the way he cares about you — so he might probably pay attention to ALL the details (how you’re feeling, noticing easily when you’re acting differently, listening to each and every word and watching each and every move) because the tendency is that he goes for a moody relationship and SURE a serious relationship is something that he wants more than fool around only. venting sentiments, making him sure about what you feel is something that feeds this venus CRAZILY — go with all your heart, rationalizing or being impersonal is something off the list.

quick note: people with lots of cancer in their charts tend to be the person who makes terrible jokes (like that old uncle of yours, joking about the same “funny” thing every xmas dinner? yup)

pisces jupiter: remember the being confident + believing himself part? here enters the most amazing thing. jupiter’s about your personal growth and in pisces, it means that the person pictures the goals more than actually doing it. in other words, shawn’s a person who daydreams a lot about the things he wants and it’s all in his head. so, his personal development comes from his dreams. ISN’T IT AMAZING? he’s got the power of a leo sun — that demands attitude, with the depth of a cancer mars & venus — talking about what crosses him the most: emotions, and coming to realize his dreams by a jupiter that matches with his dreamily desires.

taurus saturn: here comes stubborn shawn. saturn in taurus mostly throws a tendency to self-judgement and it’s anything but gentle. he’s probably someone who’s becoming more serious to his responsabilities (specially household things). and a quick curiosity: saturn in taurus is a very good professor/teacher (shoutout to taurus’ patience) and is someone very loyal (adding to the leo sun then... oof. loyalty-_-rihanna.mp3)

this is very confusing because i don’t have his birth time to get the rising but i hope this helped

#asked #mine #anon

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internetremix · 5 years

Note

In IR lore, what are the personalities of your personas? Basic likes and dislikes?

Kristen: Goggles is An Child and behaves as such. She's very cheerful, very curious, a bit mischievous and also 100% obsessed with making fanwork of her internet family... like a goddamn weirdo. She'll usually be hanging out with everyone, spot some sort of inspiration, squeak with joy and then rush off to write or draw. She's also the defacto leader of the Smol Squad, which is composed of herself, Shyner, Jojo and Chi-chi, and she's usually the one squeaking out ridiculous plans in muppet for dumb shit like stealing cookies and trying to trap people in fanfiction scenarios. She likes to help and can often be found doing such things as assisting Xander in his many schemes or just popping up to provide shit like charts or hold things for other people- basically whenever it would be funny to have some goddamn muppet backing something up.

She loves plush toys, particularly Crockernanner, and also loves sugar, star decorations, and cuddles. She likes being picked up and loves attention, and she's pretty consistently attached to at least one person, often her big brother Split if she's not with the Smol Squad. She is in eternal war with Phill since he bullies her constantly, and will occasionally try to set up elaborate traps for revenge only to fail miserably. Also she's a huge weeb. She does not like to sleep and will often go days without it before being dragged off by some bigger person to take a goddamn nap you ridiculous child. She is also very afraid of thunderstorms, she doesn't like loud noises or the dark.

She also has... various flaws and problems. But those are spoilers and I have no idea when/if we’ll be doing story stuff with IRsonas so I don’t want to give too much away with that.

Sorry this is very long, I think about my child a lot.

Jojo: JoJo is also a very happy child... like, stupid happy all the time. Like, they don't really have a concept of being angry. they're either manic happy or a bit sad. They love to find any way to make anybody smile or laugh, whether it be a somber happy, or a crying fit of laughter. They thrive off of happiness. They're a bit mischievous as well, and will try to play pranks and swipe things to chew on. They'll just appear in random places you'd never expect. like, in the pantry, the vent, or in your drawer. They chew things all the time to keep their dragon teeth sharp! They do tend to come off as obnoxious and kind of useless sometimes? But that's ok.

They love happiness, rocks, swimming, sandwiches, Vanilla coke, coffee, pianos, stars, ghost stuff(horror genre), and laughter. JoJo is pretty similar to Goggles now that I think about it x_xJoJo is best friends with Phill, and will always be on him in some way. Like his leg, back, holding onto his scarf by their teeth, etc. They're also very close with Goggles and Shyner, and Scott (even though Shyner tries to chase JoJo off with knives, JoJo will take it as a game of tag or something)JoJo doesn't like being yelled at or being told to go away. They get spooked easily by loud noises. They always get paranoid when they think someone is mad at them and will go to ungodly lengths to make them not mad or slightly annoyed with them, which sometimes makes people more annoyed with them than they were before.

JoJo is just an exaggerated version of me XD

Atwas: Atwas is fairly easy going. They make light of things often, and often hide serious sentiments behind jokes. They’re the type to roll with goofy and silly situations, and are very “yes and” type that enjoys escalating things in the name of light-hearted fun. They enjoy playing pranks, especially ones that take advantage of their hologrammatic nature (being able to enter and ‘possess’ electronics is something that they take advantage of often). Being technically in the cloud and a part of the internet at all times, they will often chime in with fun (often unrelated or humorous) metrics about situations and people as they occur—and often forgets that having a HUD isn’t something everyone has access to.

Being ‘technically’ invulnerable, atwas isn’t phased by the more dangerous things that go on in the IR tower, but usually prefers being a spectator or commentator as opposed to being an active participant in general shenaniganry. They don’t have any particular animosity towards anyone, and will occasionally help manage technical parts and functions of the tower.

They enjoy things like tech, cold weather, tea, fun statistics, darkness; and aesthetics like Film Noir and Retrowave.

They dislike things like excessively hot weather, being interrupted, getting too personal, having to put in a lot of “effort”, and being out of the loop.

Shyner: Shyner can easily be summed up to a tsundere in denial, and is the definition of an agent of chaos. If something goes wrong, she’s the one pouring a trail of kerosene to let the fire spread. She's loud, impulsive, and really doesn't give two shits. While quirky and charismatic, she’s also sarcastic and witty, reveling in the amusement of making fun of others. She’s often stubborn and impatient, thinking highly of her own beliefs and angered by those who dare to challenge her ideals. She also lacks a filter, and enjoys garnishing her words with colorful profanities. Filled with gripes of past trauma, she’s engaged in a constant internal war of turmoil and grief. She’s incredibly cautious and closed off around those she doesn’t trust, and can be very selfish. Despite this, she’s loyal to the few people she cares about, going out of her way to put them first if a dire situation were to arise. She’s also very sneaky and mischievous, often finding amusement in spying on others. Her MBTI is INTP-T.

Her hobbies include stargazing, ghost hunting, spying, and Satanic worship. She enjoys melancholy vibes, horror movies, animals, thunderstorms, and has an unhealthy obsession with sweets. Yes, this child will stab you without hesitancy if you take her cookies. She dislikes seafood, big crowds, kiddie leashes, and is afraid of experiencing intense emotion she doesn’t understand.I love my satanic smol bean very much. If I may be so bold as to dive into the nitty-gritty psychology, Shyner possesses many flaws, a lot of which I personally struggled with growing up. She is a reflection of my past self, some gripes with my current self, and the perception of how I could have turned out if I hadn’t met my family at IR. Hiding behind the exterior of being a merciless bully, she still has an intense internal desire to be a good person, but gets frustrated and often derails herself in the process of fighting her desire to act on impulse. She keeps most relationships with people at arm's length, fearing that if someone were to think highly of her, it would only be a matter of time before they’re disappointed. If we were to go full-fledged story mode, she would most definitely have an intense character redemption arc, making the revelation that being shitty to those who care about her isn’t the way to run from her problems and hide away from her own sense of self-insecurity/hatred.

Phill: Phill likes mischief, bad jokes, sexual undertones, Jojo, sexual overtones, bullying Kristen, and the colour pink. That's it xD

Jojo: :D yay

Alex: Alex don't give a shit but is for whatever reason the bossman and is also as powerful as silver age Superman, just don't try actual murder of the crew and he won't yeet you into the sun

Moon: 2019 Moon is an idiot. If we didn't know any better, we would assume he was born from nothing but an old head of lettuce in Satan's refrigerator. Think like Scott from Monster Prom, but different. He knows his right from his left, but the compass is still just "NESW" to him. Impulsive, lovable, and kinda loud, this muscley dumbass will do practically anything you tell him to if he finds it enjoyable. When paired with a few people, he works well as a second to many dynamic duos. Brodingles and Moon/Split and Moon are two really good ones, dangerous shenanigans ensue. Can and will rap like a beast, any challenge to a freestyle will result in a career ending and a death being sentenced. Extroverted people pleaser, definitely shooting high to perform and when adapting to a character, goes a little too hard. This man played Gander in Charlottes Web and didn't stop making goose sounds for months. Did I mention he's also a disney princess? Singing, animals, mortal enemy falling to their death? Everything

Dawn: ToonWolf/Dawn's personality falls within the confines of recklessly adventurous who doesn't think things through entirely. They like to try and rope others into going on various hikes, treasure hunts, mythic/cryptid searches, etc. Unapologetic sailor mouth. They will fight for friends and family. Various animals, trinkets, treasures, and cool but useless garbage are brought back to the tower often (oops theres a liiiiiiitle bit of hoarding). Sometimes those animals consist of dogs, cats, lizards, bears, wolves, The Great Noble One, horses, lions, elk, you get the idea (Can I keep them?Pleeeeeeeaaaaaaaaseeeeee??????????).

Overall they are most comfortable and relaxed in/around water and likes a whole lotta things including sailing, swimming, adventure, stargazing, animals, mythology/legends, friends, family, and drawing.

They dislike waking up early, limitations, being talked down to, boredom, desert/hot/humid/dry weather, coffee, and the movie "Cube"

Tex: Tex is an avid cryptid detective + has a surprisingly good intuition when creating conspiracy theories about them to follow. Mm lots of memes and disguises. Smart, but usually just off on their own thinking about other stuff.Totally has a wall in their room dedicated to figuring all the cryptids out with like, red string and everything.

#whole crew #ask the ir crew #irsonas #sorry I know this isn't everyone we have a big crew and not everyone is up to answer this stuff #Anonymous

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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

Video

youtube

BILLIE EILISH - BURY A FRIEND

[7.76]

Why you always play that song so loud? Oh.

Ian Mathers: Over a series of songs and videos, Eilish has practically offered a survey of fears and bad feelings: spiders, isolation, drowning, physical assault, mental illness, poison, other people as monsters, the self as a monster, etc. and here she leans harder than ever into the horror tropes, both sonically and visually. The sampled dentist drill, lyrics equally evoking the monster under the bed and sleep paralysis, the haunted house/nursery rhyme lilt of the verses, the bravado that at least partially stems from her narrative persona already feeling bad enough about herself that you sure as hell can't touch her, and of course the line that recurs over and over: "I wanna end me." It's the sort of thing you can imagine parents freaking out over, and even possibly the (yes, yes, very young) Eilish looking back years from now and thinking the better of. But, much as plenty of pop music conjures up outsized romantic sentiments that listeners gravitate towards despite not actually wanting to follow through with them in a literal sense, it also feels like the kind of darkness that I know many people who don't struggle with suicidal ideation still identify with in the context of a pop song. I'm not actually arguing for its total harmlessness so much as admitting that I don't think total harmlessness is necessary or even desirable in pop, maybe especially when it is from someone as young and who seems to be as tapped into a new vocabulary (sonic and gestural as much as linguistic) as Eilish is so far. The line and the song make me uneasy even as I love it and feel seen by it, as opposed to (say) Juice WRLD's bullshit which doesn't to me feel like it has any redeeming element at all. Eilish and "Bury a Friend," meanwhile, don't need a redeeming element unless you have a problem with the rich history of darkness in pop (as opposed to the rich history of misogyny in pop). Not for nothing does my friend Jess Burke describe her as "Fiona Apple for a Blumhouse future" and of all the paths to go down, that honestly feels like a pretty great one right now. [9]

Tobi Tella: Billie Eilish is one of the first true Gen Z pop stars, and as someone only a year or so older than her I'm impressed with how fresh her music feels on the pop landscape. The sense of dread that appears in most of her music is in full force here, and while I have found some of her music to be a little "2edgy4me," this works by fully leaning into it. It's unlike anything anyone else is making right now. [7]

Alfred Soto: If "Bury a Friend" is a gesture, an experiment -- as if Billie Eilish said, "Let me show how minimalist my music can be, and put in cool noises too" -- then its failure to be more than this is my failure. She's been tuneful before, which means she knows what she's doing. [6]

Jonathan Bradley: "Bury a Friend" sounds like the product of a musical landscape where anything can be heard on demand and none of it comes with context. Billie Eilish's artless murmur suggests that her roots lie in the DIY aesthetics of bedroom folk, but while her music can be wispy and personal in that mode, it wanders into other realms in which it seems not to realize it doesn't belong. This song is punctuated by producer Crooks intoning Eilish's name like a mixtape DJ's drop, while the shrieks that tear into the dark low-end pulse seem torn from Yeezus-era Kanye. There's even some Fiona Apple in the stops and starts punctuating her phrasing. Like Lorde before her, Eilish is adept at playing up the adolescent's attraction to darkness, and the haunted house atmosphere and lyrics about stapled tongues and glass-cut feet settle into a delicious murk. Perhaps most unsettling and most unexpectedly novel about it all is that Eilish doesn't sound like a paralysed gothic heroine. She sounds like one of the monsters. [8]

Katie Gill: Insert that Marge Simpson 'kids, could you lighten up a little?' reaction image here. It only makes sense that the hot new pop sensation is the musical distillation of nihilistic memes and the lolz I'm so depressed joke culture that's permeated the popular consciousness. To her credit, Eilish has her finger perfectly poised on the zeitgeist. Unfortunately, we've been dealing with the zeitgeist for at LEAST two years now. Such ironic detachment and 'I want to end me lmao' already feels out of date -- the fact that the song seems tailor-made to score an American Horror Story scene only dates it even more (those backing screams were a baaad choice). The main thing this does is make me wish that Eilish leaned in more towards her lighter fare. [5]

Vikram Joseph: I've been a Billie Eilish sceptic, but "Bury A Friend" is, if not quite Damascene, certainly revelatory. It feels deliciously, obscenely engrossing; that minimalist pulse, the mocking, nursery-rhyme motif ("What do you want from me? Why don't you run from me?"), those swift, decisive industrial gut-punches, the breathtaking turns of pace and time-signature tightrope-play. Most of all, it's fun, especially when her vocal affectations come off like a demonic sonic negative of Lorde. It feels like her entire aesthetic coming together, a camp horror-flick dark-pop queen finally wearing the crown she's been threatening to unveil for a while now. [8]

William John: At 28 I feel far too old to be pontificating about Billie Eilish, but what I will say is that if their new formula for chart success is to mine the aesthetic of Róisín Murphy circa Ruby Blue, then I'm ready to submit to our new zillennial overlords. [7]

Iris Xie: I've been hearing Billie Eilish everywhere I go, and her music always vibrates with a moody, dark warmth while I move through thrift stores, coffee shops, and sidewalks. Reclaiming whisper-singing from Selena Gomez is a fantastic move, especially when paired with that slight rhythmic drumming, sudden starts and stops, and that little omnipresent danger that I miss so much from f(x)'s Red Light. Our times are escalating faster to some kind of destruction, but in the air, there is exhaustion and energy of both a defiant joy and a quiet numbness. "Bury a Friend," and her album overall embodies that energy in spades. [7]

Will Rivitz: Jump scares in horror movies suck; they're cheap, calculated cash-ins on human predilection to react badly whenever something threatening pops out from the underbrush. Much more difficult to pull off, and much more impressive in its execution and creativity when it succeeds, is the slow-burn thrill. When a ghoulish, uncertain threat is buried ever so imperceptibly below the surface, it roils adrenaline in the most painfully pleasant of ways, as we fail to put our finger on anything about what's about to destroy us except that, make no mistake, it will indeed destroy us. "Bury a Friend" nails that most sublime skin-crawl. The lowing bass and teeth-scraping industrial synths roll around the aural triggers that make every hair on a back stand up with the cold impersonality of coins circling a hyperbolic funnel forever, the end always implied but never achieved. Appropriate, too, since Billie Eilish's main triumph is capturing the slow-burn existential dread of living as a young person in a world thoroughly ruined by those who won't live to see out the ramifications of their present actions. Obliquely, that's "Bury a Friend," a nightmarish Borges y yo resurrection, endlessly Genius-ready especially given the original story now has a Genius annotation itself. (The internet continues to be bizarre.) Instrumentally and lyrically, it's a warped and terrifying celebration of a muddling and destruction of identity supercharged by the less savory bits of our constant interconnectedness; it is, in other words, the best summary of Billie Eilish she could possibly present to us. Eilish affirms our base fears that things are fucked, we're all irrevocably in shambles, and there's absolutely jack shit we can do about it; we might as well learn to celebrate where we're at, since there's nothing else awaiting us. [9]

Alex Clifton: I can't remember the last time I felt this astonished by a song, nor can I remember hearing anything this sublime. I mean this in the gothic sense -- something beautiful and terrifying and subsiding where you've just got to stand and soak it all in. "Bury a Friend" is every nightmare and melodramatic thought I had as a teenager set to music, the suspicion that I was a monster who was better off dead and everyone knew. It felt so plainly written on my skin. But it's not just dark and monstrous. Billie feels scared and sad on the chorus: when we all fall asleep, where do we go? Something in her voice is so vulnerable that I feel cut open myself just hearing it. I fear some older people may hear "Bury a Friend" and write it off as emo teenage poetry, but it's so much more than that. It's the honesty of Lorde's first album mixed in with the sharp crunch of being a teen in 2019, living in a world constantly on fire with questionable prospects for a future. I would expect nothing less from a teenager to be honest, especially one as talented as Eilish. I just wish I had had the courage to be this dark and messy when I was her age. [9]

Will Adams: So much of the Billie Eilish discourse concerns her aesthetic and how it relates to Gen Z, but it often misses a key part of her appeal: how electrifying her music sounds. Tactile, confronting and claustrophobic, Billie and her producer brother Finneas create music that tightens its grip and refuses to let go, and "Bury a Friend" is as good an example as any. Alternately screeching, skittering and booming with sub bass (like "Black Skinhead" crawling with spiders), it conjures up a nightmare you can't look away from. [9]

Katherine St Asaph: A game that is both fun and great for making yourself acutely aware of how fast the grave is yanking you down is asking yourself, and being honest: if you were a teen today, who would you stan? Would you be an Ariana Grande Teen? A Blueface Teen? A Billie Eilish Teen? The depressing truth is that I probably would've been a Lana Del Rey Teen, but I could see myself reluctantly liking this for its weird drama, its dramatic weirdness. I'm convinced people confused about why Billie's dark music appeals to teens have never themselves been teens, the time of life where you endless-repeat Nirvana (ask Dave Grohl) or Sarah Brightman's cover of "Gloomy Sunday" or "Bury a Friend" and often make it out regardless. The flavor of darkness here is more than a little Tim Burton, in the twisted-nursery-rhyme melody, but there's also more than a little "Black Skinhead" and "Night of the Dancing Flame," and how many teen sensations can you conjure those references up for? [9]

Stephen Eisermann: Billie Eilish, especially here, is the exact representation of what would happen if Lorde pulled a Jack Skellington and entered the portal in the trees to find herself in Halloween Town. The same intriguing vocal tics, off-beat metaphors, and bold production choices -- just decorated with horror-tinged jack-o-lanterns and ghost sheets. In other words, I love Billie and I love this song. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: "Bury a Friend" is less a song and more an intentionally jarring collection of phrases -- even Eilish's individual lines sound cut off, as if they've been reassembled from a previously coherent whole. Not every piece works -- Crooks' vocal additions are unnecessary and some of Eilish's longer phrasings in the bridge are too stylized. Moreover, the picture that this collage is supposed to be forming never gets cleared up. And yet there's almost an illicit thrill to listening to a pop song that sounds like this, in all of its chaotic terror and joy. [6]

Edward Okulicz: In truth, this song feels like it runs out of gas, but its first 30 seconds are incredibly arresting. It's not that the rest of it is bad, I mean there's a bit where she sounds exactly like Róisín Murphy and that's never bad. Over the course of a bunch of singles, Eilish has used lots of existing musical tropes in an interesting way and built up a style that's unmistakeably her -- maybe I'm just disappointed she's taken it to complete fruition in half a minute and maybe there's nowhere else for her to go but to do a full-on macabre Glitterbeat thing. She's got fans that'll go with her to any place she chooses. [8]

Taylor Alatorre: I'm inclined to dislike most of the well-manicured teenage dramascapes that make up Billie Eilish's discography so far. Maybe it's the narcissism of generational differences -- sure, I was moody and disaffected as a 17-year-old, but I wasn't this kind of moody and disaffected. You're doing anhedonia all wrong, kids! Yet somehow, "Bury a Friend" is able to dislodge me from this self-consciousness by brandishing its own self-consciousness as a weapon and waging a merry war on itself. It's a staging ground for a bunch of one-off experiments and on-the-nose signifiers and 2spooky vocal tics and vintage 2013 alt-pop tropes, all of which seem to communicate: "This is a song that I wrote, and I can debase it however I want." It's squeamish about its own existence yet sure of its purpose, with a simple driving beat that yields to miscellany while warding off the specters of musical theater. Its high point is an archly written low point: the sneeringly drawn out "wowww." in response to a blunt confession of suicidality. If it turns out that reducing the stigma doesn't always lead to better outcomes, at least we got some good banter out of it. [8]

Joshua Copperman: Huh, I guess we are seeing the beauty at the end of culture. And it's suicidal, it's offensive, it's ugly. Then it's fake-deep, and it's edgy, because Heaven forbid we legitimize the concerns of teenagers. The common thing is supposed to be how, as a teenager, everything feels like it matters, but today's teens are growing up in a political moment when nothing feels like it does, if it ever will again. Okay, that's a bit much -- there's a chance that actual teens aren't like this, and this is what people whose brains have been poisoned by Twitter pundits think teenagers must be like. It can't be a huge coincidence, though, that "I wanna end me," "why do you care for me?" and "I'm too expensive!!!" all wound up in a Top 20 hit by a 17-year-old. Like any good writer, Eilish sublimates those fears into a horror movie song from the point of view of the monster under her bed, a pure Tumblr or r/writingprompts move. But with this many Spotify plays, with this much success, it's hard to shake the feeling that along with the stellar "idontwannnabeyouanymore," Eilish is actually onto something with The Youths. Finneas O'Connor's bonkers production, with dentist drills and the 12/8 "Black Skinhead" bounce, certainly helps this stand out. (Rob Kinelski, too, has crafted a mix more interesting than anything his more successful contemporaries like Serban Ghenea have done lately.) Underneath the grimdarkness, what really separates Eilish is the sense of humor; the nursery rhyme bridge seemed a bit obvious, but after hearing songs like "Bad Guy," Eilish sounds completely aware of the tropes she is using. I have no doubt this blurb will age badly if her music gets worse after this, but who cares when there's not much aging left to do? Lead us into the apocalypse, Billie and Finneas! [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Billie Eilish #pop #music #music review #writing

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lets-talk-appella · 6 years

Text

The Underwear Incident

Bechloe Week Day Two - Jealousy

Summay: Beca Mitchell is one of the most famous music artists in America. She gets a lot of attention from her fans, which occasionally makes Chloe a little jealous... established Bechloe. For Bechloe Week Day 2 - Jealousy.

Word Count: 3.9k

AO3 and FFN

Chloe isn’t quite sure how her life got to this point. If someone had told her seven years ago that Beca “I don’t even sing” Mitchell would one day sign with DJ Khaled to headline a national tour, she would have laughed in their face.

Moreover, if that same someone had told her that one day, she’d be dating that grumpy little alt girl, she’d never have believed it.

But now, as she watches from backstage as Beca commands the entirety of the St. Paul Target Center arena, her lips still tingling from the kiss they’d shared before Beca started her show, she wouldn’t change a thing.

It was the eleventh performance of her nineteen-date national tour and Beca seemed to be savoring every minute of it. Chloe smiled to herself at the roar of the audience, warmed up by opener Hayley Kiyoko. They loved Beca. Why wouldn’t they? Beca is so loveable, her beautiful features and breathtaking vocals only accentuated by the theatrical stage lights and the slight echo of the sold-out stadium.

Beca’s eyes flash, as they often do, to her at the side of the stage. Like always, Chloe sees the dumbfounded ecstasy Beca feels at having actual fans showing up at her concerts. And, like always, Chloe grins back her endless support, having chosen to accompany Beca on her tour before beginning her semester at vet school. She knows Beca appreciates having her there to ground her.

As Beca’s fourth song of the night ends, a group of fans in the front row tosses a bouquet of roses on stage. Chloe sees Beca’s smile widen even further as she stoops to sweep the flowers into her hands. She leans in to smell their perfume, grinning, and says into the mic, “For me? Thanks, they smell amazing! I’ll just set them here for now.”

She turns to place the bouquet delicately near the back of the stage where they will be safe from her movements and dancing. As she does, Chloe spots another fan, a teenage boy, leaning forward, holding out what looks like a piece of paper.

Beca reaches over the heads of her security team to grab it. Chloe smirks; Beca had always wondered at the necessity of having security and often did things like this just to annoy them.

“Holy shit, this is beautiful,” Beca says for the arena to hear as she examines the paper. She holds it up to cover her face so the screens can see it and broadcast the image. The boy had drawn Beca’s likeness extremely well, somehow capturing the light shining from her dark eyes.

“Absolutely gorgeous,” Beca compliments again, and Chloe can see from the smile that overtakes the boy’s face that she’s just made his day. Beca turns again to take the art to safety, catching Chloe’s eye and dropping her mouth open in a look of utter awe. Chloe merely smiles back and shrugs. She loves how kind Beca is to her fans, as if she still can’t believe they’re all there for her.

“Thank you guys so much!” Beca calls once the art is safely stored with the flowers. The crowd roars, her fans screaming in support.

“I think, as some extra thanks, I’ll sing a new song I only just finished writing.” Even louder screaming follows her announcement, and Chloe laughs as Beca has to wait for the tsunami of noise to die down before she can speak again.

“It’s called ‘Your Body,’ and I’ve never performed it live like this before, so bear with me.”

She glances to the side at Chloe to ask permission and Chloe nods her assent. Beca had written the song for her during the first leg of her tour.

“It’s for someone pretty important to me,” Beca continues over the sound of even more screaming. “You know who you are.” She grabs the mic stand and uses it so that her hands are free.

Chloe smiles at the sentiment. Their relationship is, at this point, a secret. It had been Beca’s idea to hide her identity, not wanting the media or intense fans to pursue Chloe or interrupt their privacy. Of course, there were countless rumors online and in the tabloids about who Beca might be involved with; anyone from Tom Hiddleston to Hayley Kiyoko herself were considered possibilities, much to both her and Beca’s amusement.

As the opening slow notes of the song play, a hush falls over the arena. Beca begins what is probably the sexiest song ever, at least in Chloe’s opinion. Beca’s lyrics ring out, full of the love and lust that describe their relationship perfectly.

Chloe shivers, awed by how different the song sounds belted out on stage as opposed to sung softly in her ear while in bed. Her eyes rake up Beca’s body, lingering on the slow, sensual twist of her hips and the flexing of the lithe muscles that stand out under her skinny jeans. The back of Chloe’s neck warms when her gaze rests on Beca’s hands, twisting and moving in the air without hindrance of the microphone, as she recalls vividly what those hands are capable of. Beca’s eyes are closed, the look on her face one of complete concentration, her perfect lips forming every word of the song so tenderly it makes Chloe’s heart ache.

Beca looks both absolutely beautiful and incredibly sexy at the same time and Chloe finds herself staring, admiring her girlfriend’s entire being.

However, it seems she’s not the only one admiring Beca in that moment.

A sudden movement catches Chloe’s eye, shattering her concentration on Beca. Her attention shifts instead to the front few rows of the audience, specifically to an arm raised back and poised to throw something small on stage. The arm shoots forward, the hand releasing the object, and Chloe watches the gift to Beca fly through the air, twisting over other fans and over Beca’s security to land on the stage near her feet. Chloe cranes her neck to see what it is. When she finally does figure it out, her stomach twists painfully.

It’s a lacy black thong, clearly a piece of lingerie. Someone had thrown their panties on stage at Beca. While Beca was singing an incredibly sexy song. Written for Chloe.

Um. No.

Chloe searches the audience for the culprit, finally spotting her. There’s no mistaking her; the girl is grinning proudly, unembarrassed even as others in attendance turn to stare at her. Her eyes are focused on Beca, clearly waiting for some sort of response. Chloe’s jaw clenches in anger. The girl is gorgeous. And she’s a redhead.

Chloe tries to shove down her immediate jealousy, knowing instantly that she’s overreacting. It’s just another intense fan, no big deal. Besides, Beca’s probably really weirded out by it. She’s not usually the type to enjoy something so forward.

She looks back to Beca, expecting her to ignore the panties entirely. However, Beca, finally catching sight of the garment, raises her eyebrows in surprise and smiles awkwardly at the girl who threw them. Then, without pausing her singing, Beca bends down to snatch up the thong, twirling it around her finger a few times before tucking it into a front pocket so that it hangs out for the whole arena to see. Then, she winks directly at the girl.

The air rushes out of Chloe’s lungs. Her first reaction is one of mild disgust. Who knows where those panties have been? Well, actually, she has a pretty good idea, and ew. Beca needs to wash her hands, like, now.

However, her disgust is almost instantly shoved aside by furious disbelief. Her Beca just put some other girl’s underwear in her pocket. No. Unacceptable. Now that girl is probably getting all sorts of mixed messages, especially because Beca’s relationship status isn’t officially known. How dare Beca do that? No. Just no. Did Beca forget who she was dating? Is that all it takes? Some lacy panties tossed up on stage during a sexy song? During her sexy song?

Chloe sees red. She’s so angry that all she can do is glare at Beca, who finishes the song only to sing three of her other chart-topping hits immediately after. Chloe barely hears them, blood still pounding in her ears. She knows Beca keeps glancing at her, confused by the death glare she’s transmitting, but she can’t bring herself to stop. Beca should know by now how jealous she gets.

“Okay, I’m going to turn it over to an instrumental piece I composed and produced a while ago, so hang tight and I’ll be back soon!” Beca’s voice, resonating over the arena, crashes into Chloe. Beca’s taking her usual intermission about three songs earlier than she normally does.

Chloe looks up to see Beca jogging off stage and directly toward her, concern written over her flushed and slightly sweaty face. Chloe raises an eyebrow, waiting. Beca has some explaining to do.

“Chlo, you okay?” Beca asks when she arrives next to Chloe. “You’re looking a little off.”

“Oh, am I?” Chloe fires back, taking satisfaction in the way Beca hesitates before responding.

“Yeah, um, you look kind of pissed.”

“Hmm, I wonder why,” Chloe spits, feeling her temper rise again. No way can Beca be that clueless.

Except – “Um,” Beca says quietly, looking lost. “I wonder why, too.”

Chloe raises her eyebrows imperiously and gestures sharply down at Beca’s pocket, from which the offensive black thong still dangles. Beca’s gaze follows her point, and Chloe can tell from her puff of breath that she’d forgotten the panties were still there.

Beca looks up at her sheepishly, but Chloe doesn’t give her time to defend herself.

“Beca Mitchell, you put some – some floozy’s panties in your pocket right in front of me!” she yells, knowing that the sound of Beca’s instrumental break and the screaming of Beca’s fans will prevent her voice from traveling far.

“That?” Beca asks incredulously. “Ah, come on, don’t call her that. It was just so the girl wouldn’t feel bad. You know I like to make them happy!”

That was the wrong thing to say. “Now she thinks you’ll be making her very happy!” Chloe argues back, leaning forward to get into Beca’s face.

Beca rolls her eyes at the implication, making Chloe’s hands clench into fists. “Chlo, you know it isn’t like that. It’s just something fun, a joke. It went with the song.”

Chloe opened her mouth to tear into Beca again when Beca interrupts, looking at her seriously. “Besides, babe, how many pairs of underwear have you thrown at random singers?”

Chloe blinks, sidetracked. Damn. Beca knows her too well. She can remember at least three separate incidences where she’d thrown either panties or a bra up on stage. And those were just when she was sober.

Forcing herself to rally, but already feeling her anger abate, Chloe replies, “That’s… that’s beside the point! You shouldn’t have done it! She’s basically asking you to cheat on me!”

Beca smiles at her slightly, as if sensing that their fight is already on its way to being over. “Dude, calm down, it doesn’t mean anything! And, remember, they all think I’m single, so….”

Chloe crosses her arms with a huff, glaring away from Beca off to the side.

The concluding measures of Beca’s instrumental break permeate the air and Beca raises a hand to reach out to Chloe. Chloe only turns away further, still annoyed. Beca sighs and says, “Look, I gotta go. I’m sorry, I swear it’s nothing. Here –”

Chloe glances at her to see that Beca has taken the panties out of her pocket and is trying to hand the garment to Chloe. Chloe wrinkles her nose and says sharply, “No, thanks.”

Beca takes her hand back and sighs again. “Can we talk about this after?”

Chloe doesn’t respond.

She feels Beca’s eyes on her, full of worry, and has a flash of guilt for making such a big deal out of it. Before she can say anything to amend it, though, Beca turns away to jog back on stage to her yelling fans. She moves to where she’d already placed the flowers and the beautiful drawing and drops the thong with her other souvenirs.

As Beca greets the crowd without glancing at her, Chloe lets her stance and posture relax, dropping her crossed arms to let her hands play with her jeans. She knows she overreacted. Beca’s right; she’s thrown enough undergarments on people’s stages to know that it really doesn’t mean anything. It’s a fun joke meant to flatter the artist, not meant to lead anywhere. And even if that girl did have hopes for a good time in return, Chloe knows in her soul that Beca would never do that to her. To them.

What they have is too important.

Chloe sighs, already regretting how she’d handled that. She glances up at Beca, who has still not looked her way. Chloe bites her lip; she hopes that Beca’s not distracted now, worrying about the status of their relationship instead of focusing on her music and her fans.

Releasing her lip to quirk her mouth thoughtfully, Chloe knows she needs to think of some way to make it up to Beca. She wants to capture her attention and make the biggest apology possible. She thinks for a moment until her eyes fall on the pile of souvenirs. She smiles slightly, a plan forming.

With one last look to Beca on stage, her eyes closed and singing her heart out, Chloe turns and rushes away, down the backstage steps until she finds an exit sign. She follows that to end up near the side of the fan section. Ducking and weaving around the hordes of hysterical concert-goers, Chloe makes her way to a stadium exit. She flashes her security pass at a guard, who lets her leave the arena and move into the main part of the building where Beca’s voice is much more muted. Her eyes land on the main front doors, and she dashes out and onto the street.

Her head swivels as she tries to spot any kind of convenience store or retail outlet, anything that might have what she’s looking for. Not seeing anything, she jogs around the Target Center, eyes scanning desperately. She knows Beca’s going to notice her absence before long, and, while a small part of her takes petty satisfaction in knowing it will teach Beca a lesson, her rational side knows that she needs to minimize Beca’s anxiety over their argument. She pulls out her phone and types frantically into Google Maps, knowing she won’t get anywhere by running around.

The first result to pop up is just over two blocks away. Perfect. Glancing at her phone to confirm the street name, Chloe starts jogging again, moving quickly to get where she wants to go. She can see people stopping to stare at her, and she doesn’t blame them. She knows she must look insane, now running at full speed to get to her destination.

She’s there in minutes, breathing hard, thankful for her gym routine. She dashes inside the store, moving immediately to the section she needs. She grabs the first item she sees and flies toward the register, not looking at the size or price, only wanting to check out and get back to Beca as soon as she can.

The saleswoman stares at her when she practically tosses the item onto the counter and bends to dig in her purse for her wallet. Chloe sends her a bright smile, trying to hide her heavy breathing. The woman doesn’t comment, only smiling tightly back before scanning the purchase and taking Chloe’s offered debit card wordlessly.

“Can you cut the tags off, please? I don’t have scissors on me,” Chloe remembers to ask at the last second. The woman – her name tag says Karen – only nods and grabs scissors on her desk, removing the tags with a quick snip.

Item paid for, Chloe shoves it and her card back into her purse, denying the offered bag. With a rushed “Thank you!” she sprints back out of the store and all the way back to the Target Center, nearly plowing down an elderly man on the way.

Legs burning, she launches herself into the building, holding up her security pass in a sweating palm like a shield. She’s granted access into the arena and backstage area again to resume her previous position just off stage and in view of Beca. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen minutes.

Chloe doubles over, her hands on her knees as she catches her breath, a stitch in her side. She dimly wonders if she should focus more on cardio and less on her arms at the gym, but she really likes how her shoulders look. Finally drawing in one last huge gulp of air, she stands upright to see Beca still singing powerfully on stage. She’s got Beca’s set list memorized and is relieved to have only missed about four songs.

As Beca’s current song draws to a close, her eyes flick to where Chloe stands. Even from off stage, Chloe can see the relief in Beca’s eyes as she sends her a small smile. Chloe’s heart pangs; Beca had definitely noticed she’d left. Guilt claws at her, but she knows exactly what to do to make it up to her girlfriend. She digs in her purse, pulling out the gift and holding it at the ready, hidden behind her back.

Chloe waits patiently as Beca’s show winds down, reaching the finale before too long. Beca had chosen to end every show with a mashup of the two songs she always says started it all. Chloe approves of her decision wholeheartedly. As the opening chord of the mix of ‘Titanium’ and ‘Cups’ permeates the arena, goosebumps rise on her arms and a chill runs down her spine.

Chloe waits until Beca reaches the chorus of the song, the part of ‘Titanium’ when Beca’s eyes will lock, as they always do, onto hers as they are both sent back in time to Barden’s showers. Her heart thuds in time with Beca’s voice, waiting, straining her patience until –

Beca’s gaze meets hers, open and loving as always. Chloe pulls her arm out from behind herself to reveal the panties she’d just purchased. Beca’s eyes widen in surprise, and Chloe laughs as she lifts her arm to throw the panties, tumbling through the air only for Beca to catch them deftly in her left hand.

Miraculously, Beca’s singing continues uninterrupted by the flying lingerie. She winks at Chloe, then lowers her hand to half slide the panties under the waistband of her jeans, letting them flop out at the top. The audience goes absolutely wild, as does Chloe’s pulse. She glances into the crowd, already knowing what she’ll see. Sure enough, several members of the front rows, including the girl who first threw the underwear, are looking in her direction, clearly wondering who had tossed the garment from backstage.

Chloe looks back to Beca, who’s still staring at her. Chloe takes a deep breath, tilting her head to the side in a question. Beca nods once, heading into the final bars of her song. Chloe steels herself with a roll of her shoulders, ready for what this decision will mean for her. For them. She had guessed this would happen when she first ran out of the arena. It’s time, and it’s a good way to ensure that everyone knows Beca is hers and hers alone.

Beca concludes the show on a high note (literally) and the arena erupts with sound. Beca bows once, an awkward smile on her face that makes Chloe laugh; Beca always has been bad with compliments. She turns to Chloe, eyebrows raised in one final question, giving her the chance to change her mind. Chloe falls even more in love with her at the gesture, but she’s sure about what she wants to do.

With a final deep breath, Chloe steps out onto the stage, dazzled by the lights and the noise and the people, but keeps her eyes on Beca. Beca will hold her steady. She reaches Beca’s side in almost no time at all and automatically winds an arm around her waist. Beca throws an arm over her shoulder, drawing her even closer until Chloe can feel Beca’s heart pounding, strong and steady.

Beca raises her free hand, gesturing for some quiet. The noise level drops instantly, making Chloe revel at the power Beca has.

“So, I know there have been some rumors going around about me lately,” Beca says into the mic, still slightly breathless from her finale. “And while Tom and Hayley are both good friends of mine, I just have to say – the only person I want in the entire world is this girl next to me. Everyone, meet Chloe.”

Chloe gives an awkward sort of half wave as she senses the eyes of almost 17,000 people landing on her. Not sure what else to do, she does what comes naturally. She turns to Beca, reaches out to touch her face, and leans in to kiss her fully.

A wave of sound washes over her. Anyone in the main area of the building might well think an explosion had occurred; Chloe knows her ears will be ringing for days, but she doesn’t mind. When the kiss breaks, Chloe looks at the crowd, squinting against the bright lights to see that everyone in residence is standing, clapping, screaming, giving her and Beca a standing ovation. It’s overwhelming. It’s excessive.

It’s beautiful.

They stand there for what feels like an hour but is surely only a few minutes before the stage lights are turned off and Beca’s leading her backstage again, scooping up the gifts her fans had given her.

“So, that was okay?” Chloe asks quickly as they walk, wanting to make sure Beca is fine with going public with their relationship.

“That was more than okay,” Beca replies, her voice hoarse from the performance. “It’ll be different now, but also easier in some ways.”

Chloe smiles slightly. “No more excited fangirls,” she teases gently, gesturing to the thong Beca had picked up.

“Nah, I just need you to keep tossing panties at me and I’ll be good,” Beca responds, glancing at her out of the corner of her eye.

“Mmm. Did you like that?”

“I did,” Beca nods. “I’m assuming that’s where you disappeared to? Because I know they aren’t yours. Unless you wrestled them off some poor girl?”

Chloe wrinkles her nose at the thought. “Nope, bought them. Look, I’m sorry I went off earlier,” she adds, glancing at Beca.

Beca smiles and stops walking. Chloe looks around to see they’d somehow arrived at her dressing room already.

“It’s okay,” assures Beca quietly. “I’d probably be a little jealous if someone was throwing their underwear at you, too.”

“Well…” draws out Chloe, thinking. “I bet I can make it up to you?” She draws her lower lip into her mouth, moving close to Beca and trailing her fingers over Beca’s stomach.

Beca’s eyes darken and she moves closer as well, her breath ghosting over Chloe’s lips as she replies, “Gonna throw more clothing at me?”

Chloe smiles sweetly and whispers, “No. I’m going to tear clothing off of you.”

Quick as a flash, Beca opens her dressing room door to gently toss her gifts inside on the floor before turning back to Chloe. She grabs Chloe’s hand and the next thing she knows, Chloe is being ushered into the room and lifted onto the couch before Beca slams and locks the door behind them.

Oh yeah. She’s definitely buying lingerie more often.

#bechloe #bechloe week #my writing #beca mitchell #chloe beale #pitch perfect fanfiction #beca x chloe #jealous chloe #bechloe fic #established bechloe

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yourcoolfriendwithallthecandy · 6 years

Photo

Day 2 of @ravus-week a Modern AU/ Movie AU crossover with the Bourne Series with a twist.

Rated Teen and up for language and mentions of sex and violence.

Ravus Week- Modern AU – Movie AU- Bourne Series (with a Lucy and Mr. and Mrs. Smith twist)

You Didn’t See That Coming?

Selena sailed her little sailboat and managed to make it through the storm that suddenly appeared out of nowhere on the Mediterranean.

And when she felt her boat hit something in the water, she rushed to the bow, hoping it wasn’t a rock. To her horror though, it was a man. Was he dead? But then he moved in the water, trying to stay afloat, so that meant he was still alive. He was in a diving suit, wearing a small life jacket that had a light that was flashing. He must have been diving when the storm hit.

She dove into the water with her lifesaver and got to him and put the lifesaver on him and swam back to the boat and with some difficulty, she hauled him onto her boat. He wouldn’t wake up, but he was breathing. Then she noticed the blood stains on the floor of her boat draining underneath him.

“Fuck,” Selena cursed and got him inside and below deck, getting him on her couch before she tried undressing him to find out the injury. She got him undressed and turned over to see three gunshots to his back, two in his shoulder and one lower, but they looked pretty superficial, but still bullet wounds in the sea that could could get infected or probably already were.

“Shit,” Selena cursed again and got her first aid kit just as the storm finally relented. She went back outside and dropped her anchor so that the boat wouldn’t crash and rushed back inside.

With some difficulty she got the three bullets out and got him patched up to the best of her ability, which for a seemingly simple fishing girl, was on par with the best surgeons. She inspected the rest of him and found he had something embedded in his hip, just under the skin. She took her scalpel and cut at it and found a little device.

“What the hell?” Selena murmured before she squeezed it and a red light flashed in her eye. “Ow,” Selena frowned before she pointed it to the wall and found that the light was actually just the name of a bank and the city it was in and then just a bunch of numbers. This didn’t make sense. She stitched up her incision and checked everything else on his body and couldn’t find any other injures. She took special attention to his head, no bumps or scrapes or anything. She pried open his eyes and flashed a light in them to make sure his eyes were still responsive at least and he wasn’t showing any signs of a stroke or a concussion.

Selena spent the next few days trying to get this man to wake up. She dressed him in her brother’s clothes since he used to sail with her, years ago before he died but she never had the heart to take the clothes off the boat, too much sentimental value. She was trying to do some fishing when she heard him wake up and stumble around.

“Hey! Hey! Easy, easy!” Selena softly tried to ease him as she came below deck and put her hands up as she approached him.

“Where am I?” He asked as he struggled to find his footing and balance before she came up and tried to steady him.

“You’re on my boat, we’re about 10 miles off the coast of Athens, my name is Selena, what’s yours?” Selena asked.

“I...I don’t know.” He said as he shook his head. “My head hurts.” He complained as he swayed and had to sit down.

“Well you haven’t eaten in days, I’ve been trying to get you drink some water, you’ve been passed out for three and a half days on my boat.” Selena informed him gently before getting him something to eat and a bottle of water. The man practically inhaled the food and the downed the bottle of water.

“Easy, not so fast, you’ll get a stomach ache.” Selena urged him before she got him some aspirin too and another bottle of water.

“What am I wearing?” He asked as he looked down at the clothes he was wearing.

“Those would be my brother’s clothes, he used to sail with me sometimes.” Selena answered.

“Why does my back hurt?” He asked her as he tested his shoulders by trying to roll them.

“When I found you, you had three bullets in your back and something else in your hip,” Selena answered and got up and got the little try she put everything in. “The thing in your hip is some kind of laser pointer.” Selena explained as she handed him the little dish she had put the bullets and the little laser pointer in. He moved the bullets around before he picked up the little pill like thing and squeezed it and then pointed it at the wall and frowned as he read it and memorized it.

“Thank you,” He managed to say.

“You’re welcome.” Selena smiled warmly and smiled wider when he mirrored a small shy smile back.

“Do you need to go home?” Selena asked, her voice and her face showing clear concern.

“I don’t, I don’t know.” He shrugged and shook his head no. “I don’t know where home is.” He finally admitted.

“You must have bumped your head.” Selena frowned and he frowned in confusion back.

“I’ve checked your head for bumps but I didn’t feel anything, maybe I missed something, do you mind if I look again?” Selena asked as she came just a little closer before he reached up and felt around his head on his own.

“No, I didn’t, I just, I don’t know who I am and my head hurts.” He concluded.

“Well, here, eat some more, drink some more, but slowly and rest, just get some rest, and I’ll do some fishing and hopefully catch something. Not unless you’re not allergic to shellfish.” Selena gently urged as she showed him where she kept most of her food and gestured to the stack of cases of bottled water and the gallons of water.

“I don’t..I don’t think I am.” He shook his head no.

“Well good, I’ll see what I can get.” Selena smiled and left and went back and tried an alcove that she always seemed to have luck with. She dropped anchor and got into her own dive suit and flippers before getting her harpoon and her own goggles and jumped off the side and dove down to see if she could see anything before she spotted a decent sized fish and aimed her harpoon before she heard another splash and saw the man in the water with her, wearing her spare pair of goggles and his own wet suit before he gestured to her to hand the harpoon over so she did and watched as she dove down and harpooned a large fish that Selena hadn’t even noticed before they both swam back up to the surface.

“How’d you do that?” Selena asked as she caught her breath.

“I don’t know.” He answered before he climbed back up with the fish as she did the same.

“Well, hey, I’m happy you can do that. It works for me, I was getting hungry anyway.” Selena shrugged before she got one of her knives and started to filet the fish and get it prepped for cooking.

“You know if you could do that for a big tuna, I’d be most appreciative,” Selena playfully encouraged him and he smiled. A true, bright happy smile and Selena felt her heart swoon.

After she cooked it and they ate and Selena took her meds and downed a gallon of water doing so, the sun was starting to set. Selena took off her wet suit and got dressed in her pajamas and took one of her pillows and blanket and made a little bed out of one of the benches before she picked back up on her reading from her phone. She had a special program downloaded on her phone where she could read books at thousands of words per minute, she usually read two or three every night, on everything. From medicine and psychology, to guns and cars to fighting and training manuals, to science, biology, to learning languages to computers, to just...everything, whatever tickled her fancy.

“I should sleep out here, you should have the bed.” He insisted.

“No, it’s ok, I’m not the one recovering from something probably traumatic. You can have the bed in the cabin, it’s not going to rain tonight, I’ll be fine.” Selena reassured him. “You need your sleep, hopefully when you wake up, you’ll feel better and you’ll start to remember something.” Selena encouraged. “You’ll be ok, I promise.” Selena reassured him.

“Are you sure?” He asked.

“Positive, get some sleep.” Selena repeated. And he got dressed out of the wet suit and got redressed in the clothes she had given him and noticed she tried and failed not to leer at him.

He went back inside the cabin and tried to sleep, after least an hour of tying, he could still hear her humming to herself, it was a soft, soothing sound that relaxed him and helped his headache go away. He noticed when she stopped he sat up and snuck back out and noticed her asleep. God she did look beautiful though. He used the time she was asleep and snooped around her boat, he found maps and charts and he could read them all. He took a pen and a ripped a page out of a notebook and wrote out a question. ‘Who am I?’ Well at least he could read and write, he just...had no fucking clue who he was.

After another hour, he couldn’t take it anymore and picked Selena up bridal style and brought her back into the cabin and set her down into the bed and tucked her in before taking her place on the bench and laid down and watched the stars and let the subtle waves rock him to sleep.

“Coffee?” Selena asked in the morning as she handed him one of her mugs when she noticed him wake up.

“Yeah,” He nodded and took it and drank it.

“Do you feel any better? How’s your headache?” Selena asked curiously.

“It’s still there.” He answered.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Did you remember your name yet?” Selena asked curiously as she mixed some ingredients together and made an omelet for him.

“No,” he sighed. “Can I have some more coffee please?” He asked politely as he handed her the empty mug back.

“Sure,” Selena nodded and took the cup from him and refilled it before she handed it back to him then she handed him a plate with the omelet and fork.

“Thank you,” He thanked her graciously with an appreciative smile.

“You’re welcome.” She smiled back before she worked on her own omelet, trying to mentally calculate how long her food stuffs would last before she would need to go back to port. With feeding both of them and with how much he seemed to eat, she cut down her numbers from half to a third. Which meant barely a week. She needed to catch something big to have something, anything, to sell to restock and refuel and take care of him.

She needed to get this guy on shore, he didn’t look like he belonged out here, but at the same time, she knew he needed help. If he had amnesia, going to shore and dumping him off was the equivalent to feeding him to the wolves and that didn’t sit well with her. And he was handsome. Between his almost ghostly pale skin, almost white blond hair and those storm gray eyes, oof, he was gorgeous. And he was nice so far. He put her in her bed and tucked her in and she didn’t think he touched her otherwise. He was polite and respectful and honestly it was nice to have company again. Decent company at that. She needed to help him.

“So I’ve been thinking.” Selena began when she plated her own food and came back up and sat down on the opposite bench as him before getting her giant pill bottles out and took out 12 little green pills and 12 little blue pills and put them into a little cup and swallowed a few after eating a bite of her eggs.

He looked up and paused in eating to listen to her.

“You need a name, so how about I give you one until you remember your own ok?” Selena proposed.

“Ok, what did you have in mind?” He asked before he took another bite.

“You look like a Ray.” Selena seemed to decide as she considered him.

“Ok,” Ray nodded in agreement to that.

“So I have good news and bad news Ray.” Selena began again before she swallowed a few more pills.

“Good news is, I was just in port last week, that’s why I’m stocked up on food for the moment. Bad news is, with both of us, we’ll only last a week, week and a a half ish on what I have. You should probably get back on the mainland sooner than later but if we go back now, I don’t have much of anything to give you. If all you have is the name of a bank, then you should go there. But I can’t get you there with what I have so if you’ll help me fish, if we could land a tuna or something big that sells well, I can split the price with you and hopefully it’ll be enough money to help you get to wherever you need to go. But good news is, you apparently can fish and I like you so I think we’ll get along just fine and it’ll give you enough time to hopefully remember something. Deal?” Selena proposed.

“Deal.” Ray nodded in agreement before he offered his hand for her to shake.

“What’s with the pills?” Ravus asked, as they looked vaguely familiar but his head hurt just watching her swallow them.

“My medication.” Selena answered.

“For what?” He asked curiously and Selena hesitated and have him an apologetic look.

“Cancer?” Ravus concluded based on her reaction.

“Something like that.” Selena smiled sadly as she finished the last of the pills.

After breakfast, Selena did the dishes because she only had the two plates and two forks as Ray went over all the maps before he located three spots that he thought they might find a tuna. He even worked on her boat and made the opening to the tank where she would stash her fish- bigger, just in case they got a big one. Selena gave him all of Nyx’s clothes she had stashed away and thankfully had a spare stick of deodorant.

Within four days they had worked out a really good working relationship together and had even become friends, they played cards and swam and usually worked together to catch their lunches and dinners and Ray was, thankfully, not allergic to shellfish because they had found a large lobster and a crab and ate it and Ray was happy. In fact the more time he spent with her, the less the question of who he was or where he was bothered him. They had even gotten to the point where they both laid out on the boat and fell asleep under the stars on the calm nights and shared the bed when it was raining, both of them starting off with keeping their distance but the more time passed, the closer they both figuratively and physically became. But every time Selena had to take her medication, he became somber. She took 12 pills of each color with each meal, three times a day and drank gallons of water and thankfully there was an on board water converter that turned seawater into drinkable water after boiling it but it was a slow process and a pain to get working when she had drained all her gallons, she worked and refilled them and in the mean time finished off a case of water while the converter was working because of how long it took. She said her medication caused severe dry mouth and seemed to pee at least 5 times a day. It worried Ray to no end.

On the fifth day, they tried Ray’s last spot and to their astonishment, they caught a very large tuna.

“Oh my God! We did it! We got a tuna!” Selena cheered when they got it on board and put it into the tank that they had stocked with ice from the ice maker before putting even more ice on it before Selena hugged Ray tightly before she pulled up anchor and they sailed back to the harbor, which thankfully was only hours away.

Once at the docks Ray helped her unload it and they sold the fish to a restaurant directly because they offered the most. Selena split the money evenly between them and packed up the remainder of Nyx’s clothes that she had into a bag before she walked with him to the train station where Selena ‘loaned’ Ray her last name. Having already looked up the address of the bank on her phone.

“Here, if you need any help or remember anything, I want you to call me ok?” Selena offered before she wrote down her phone number and gave it to him.

“Actually, I could use some help right now.” Ray admitted as he took the piece of paper her phone number was written on.

“With what?” Selena asked curiously as she tilted her head.

“Look, you’re the only person I know and I know you don’t know me, hell, I don’t know me at all, but could you come with me? Please? I don’t...I don’t want to do this by myself. And I don’t...I don’t want to leave you.” Ray confessed.

“I understand, ok, I’ll go with you.” Selena smiled before she went back and got herself a train ticket, this time using her ‘emergency’ card her mother had gotten for her in her name, her cell phone and that card seemingly the only ties she had with anyone anymore before she called her mother to tell her where her boat was so she could come get it for her because her friend needed help and she needed to be a friend and go with them. Being specific yet vague at the same time.

“Let me go back to the boat and pack and I’ll be back ok? But if the train comes before I come back, I want you to get on the train, with or without me.” Selena urged.

“I’ll go with you. I don’t want to be alone.” Ray confessed because the thought of being separated from the only person he had a connection to seemed to be almost physically painful.

“Come on.” Selena waived and took his hand and walked with him from the train station back to the dock and took her remaining bag and packed her few belongings in it along with her pills and left the key in a special spot she always kept it that her mother would be able to find it. She locked up the boat and took her bag and Ray helped her off the boat and they walked back to the train station, stopping at Selena’s “pharmacy” which was actually a drug dealer but he had what she “ordered”.

“Why don’t you use a real pharmacy?” Ray asked as they walked from the place back to the train station.

“Because these medications aren’t technically on the market yet, they’re still being tested and aren’t even allowed in the country but it’s the only medicine that helps and works. That guy has a connection in the country that makes them and “orders” them just for me and he has a guy who steals them from the company who makes them and fudges the numbers. Thankfully he doesn’t make me pay for it because I’m a charity case for him. I don’t want to think of the thousands and thousands of dollars these pills must cost.” Selena admitted as they came into the station and they sat on the bench as they waited for the train that would take them to Switzerland.

“I have no idea how we’re going to get you across the boarders.” Selena murmured as she intertwined her fingers with his and stroked his hand. Not sure what else what to do with her hands. Ray was eternally grateful she was coming with him, he really was lost without her. The whole train ride which took all night, Selena slept on his shoulder and Ray was happy to have her resting on him and stared at his reflection in the window as everything passed by before he got some sleep himself.

After traveling, he went straight to the bank and Selena waited in a cafe across the street as she looked up where they could stay for now.

Ray took a deep breath and walked into the bank where a bitchy and uptight looking woman was the receptionist.

“Are you lost?” She asked snidely in German.

“No, I have an account.” Ray answered and she blinked in surprise.

“Write down your account number and I’ll direct you to the proper officer.” She informed him as she offered him a piece of paper where he wrote it down and she took the paper and gave it to a banking officer who left for a moment before he returned and led Ray to an elevator and brought him up to an upper floor. Ray put his hand on the scanner as he was directed and his hand print and fingerprints were accepted, that was something he supposed.

He was brought to a little room that had a phone and fax machine on a desk against the wall and a chair and sat down and tried not to fidget as he felt his nerves start to fray.

His ‘account’ which really was a special box was brought in and unlocked and then he was left alone. He opened the box and found a United States passport. Ravus Nox Fleuret, born in Michigan and he lived in Paris. He blew out a breath of relief. That’s why Selena calling him ‘Ray’ felt so natural and familiar. She had guessed exceedingly well and the thought made him smile fondly. He looked and found a really nice watch and put it on and blinked when he seemed to have a small tan line around it, which meant he had just been wearing it recently. He saw colored contacts to make his eyes brown, green, blue and even violet. That was odd he supposed. There were various other things, like club cards to restaurants in Paris and bank cards, credit cards and a drivers license and even car keys, there was even flash drives and a cell phone and a portable battery pack, he turned the cell phone on and when it turned on, it asked for a code to unlock it and Ravus’ thumb punched in the code seemingly on it’s own, 011790 before he put his thumb in the circle and the phone scanned his thumb print and accepted it and unlocked. He only had one message. “Forrest” was the last message he sent out to a contact H.Q.. He frowned and slipped the phone into his pocket. His driver’s license and his passport said he lived in Paris and gave the same address which he again quickly memorized. There was a multi tool, a folding pocket knife and a thing of special tape. It wasn’t really electrical tape or even duct tape, like it was a mix between the two. There was even a shopping list written in french and he recognized his handwriting. Ok, so he was an American living in Paris. That wouldn’t explain why he was in the Mediterranean and near Greece. Until he found a copy of a plane ticket, from Paris to Athens. Oh, ok, maybe that explained it. But that didn’t explain the bullet wounds. Maybe he found drug runners? Maybe he had rented a pleasure boat for a vacation. Ok that made more sense, that was the most logical explanation he could come up with but it didn’t feel right. He wished Selena could have come up with him and seen all this, she would have made more sense of it. He didn’t see any jewelry other than his watch, no rings or anything like that. Good, he didn’t seem married. Maybe he was single? He could only hope.

There was a wallet there too, a really nice one. He opened it and found more money in the billfold part along with a single condom and put the cards and driver’s license in it and put everything that seemed like it went into a wallet into it before he slipped that into his back pocket before taking the pocket knife and the multi tool and putting those into his pockets as well.

But then he realized that it was just the top shelf like tray and lifted it and saw more money than he thought would fit into the box, all brand new bills, in several denominations from different countries. But on top of all of that, was a gun and three magazines and several more passports, from Italy, from Spain, from Brazil, from Russia, the United Kingdom and even one from Japan. All the pictures were the same, they were all of him but all the names were different. They all had a passport and then a single card with the name on it together with the passport but there was a name with no passport. Raymond White. He recognized the color as it belonging to a Canadian passport.

What the fuck?!

He felt himself panicking, this didn’t make sense and this didn’t feel right. His headache returned with a vengeance and he saw a prescription bottle for migraine medicine and took it and amazed himself by dry swallowing it. The taste was almost familiar. He took a red bag from the drawer and dumped everything in it. Except the gun and the magazines of bullets, those he put back into the box. He put the draw strings over his shoulder and carried it out of there like a back pack and returned the box to the desk.

“I’m having trouble remembering, when was the last time I was here?” He asked in German from the receptionist who was upon first impression much nicer and sweeter than the first down stairs.

“About two weeks ago.” She answered in German back. “Is everything ok?” She asked.

“Yes, it’s fine, thank you.” Ravus nodded and got back into the elevator and went down to see Selena at the cafe but frowned when he saw that she was now surrounded by men who were harassing her.

“Let go of me!” Selena yelled as she yanked her arms out of their hold.

“Hey! Let her go!” Ravus yelled, reached into his pocket to get his pocket knife and flipped the blade out and tightened his fist around the handle and took a flying leap and within moments he had used close quarters combat and martial arts and rendered all of the men incapacitated, broken and stabbed.

“Ray!” Selena gasped in shocked horror as she clutched the red bag that he had thrown to her in between fighting the men off and breaking their joints and stabbing them in a way that Selena very vaguely recognized but she couldn’t place where she had seen it.

“Are you ok?” Ravus asked worriedly as he wiped his blade off on the pants of one of the guys and put the knife back in his pocket before getting the bag back and inspected her.

“I’m, I’m ok, what was that?!” Selena asked before Ravus took a hold of her hand and led her away from the scene, walking quickly as Selena put her own bag and his on along with keeping up with him.

“I don’t know.” Ravus answered as he kept walking and ducked into an alley before he spotted an older car that didn’t look like it would have an alarm but yet it was well maintained and got his multipurpose tool out of his bag and began to unlock the car.

“Get in.” Ravus ordered as he unlocked the other car’s door and Selena was too in shock to argue or be disobedient. “Hold this and don’t look inside.” He ordered her again as she took his red bank bag and put it in her lap as she watched him hot wire it. Once he did she seemed to follow his lead and put her seat belt on when he did and kept her own bag between her legs on the floor before she noticed him pull out his cell phone and bring up an app that would take them to his home. ‘Home’ was already a setting and the address was the same as it was in his passport.

He just needed to drive and to get away from this place as quickly as possible.

When he got on the highway, Selena chanced speaking again.

“So who are you?” Selena asked, a fearful wariness putting a slight edge to her voice that made Ravus feel like an ass. He didn’t want her to be afraid of him.

“According to the passport that was in a bank box, my name is Ravus Nox Fleuret and I’m an American citizen living in Paris.” Ravus answered.

“Mm hmm,” Selena hummed and pressed her lips together as she looked from him out into the window. “You don’t sound like you believe that though.” Selena noted.

“I don’t.” Ravus answered. “I still don’t know who I am, nothing is coming back to me.” Ravus admitted.

“So where are we going?” Selena asked as she side eyed his phone.

“The address listed as my home.” Ravus answered. “Look, if you want me to take you back to Greece I will, I just, I need to figure this out and I don’t want to be alone while I do it. You’re the only person I know, I know you more than I know me and you’ve helped me and rescued me. That’s what that was back there, I was just trying to rescue you.” Ravus explained.

“Well thank you for doing that then. I don’t think you needed to break every bone in their bodies or stab anyone to death though.” Selena murmured lowly as she grimaced.

“Look, it just came naturally to me ok?” Ravus tried to reason with her.

“Ok,” Selena nodded and decided to change the subject. “Could we listen to the radio at least?” Selena asked.

“Go for it.” Ravus invited.

“Do you still want me calling you ‘Ray’ or would you prefer for me to call you ‘Ravus’?” Selena asked as she turned the radio on and flipped though the different channels to try to find something decent.

“‘Ray’ feels better.” Ravus admitted.

“Ray it is then.” Selena nodded in understanding before she found a station she liked.

After a while Selena seemed to settle in and sat more relaxed than she did before as she kept looking out the window as her mind whirled. What was she doing? This man was clearly capable of becoming dangerous but if he cared enough about her to come to her rescue and was capable of taking out a group of guys all on his own to protect her. She sincerely doubted he wanted to harm her. And if he did he would have tried to do it already. So maybe she was safe after all...in a stolen car...driven by an amnesiac but clearly knew how to drive, how to fish, how to dive, how to sail, how to tie knots, how to cook, how to play cards, how to make coffee, could speak several languages, how to navigate maps and currents and how to beat up people to the point that when he knocked them down, they didn’t try to get back up.

Selena absentmindedly rested her arm on the middle arm rest and fidgeted with the chord that closed the bank bag as she continued to look out the window. Then she couldn’t help but grin when she felt Ravus hold her hand and squeezed gently and grinned wider when he squeezed back.

Meanwhile back at HQ.

“So what happened?!” Drautos demanded as he pressed the number to the floor he needed in the elevator again as he hoped it would get him to the right floor.

“Our contact at the bank called, Fleuret came and cleaned out the box and left the gun, what does that mean?” Luche asked as he rode the elevator with his boss.

“I don’t know.” Titus growled angrily before the doors opened. “Reports, now!” Titus boomed as he came into the room.

“We have video of Fleuret coming to the bank with a girl who stayed outside in a cafe but shortly after Fleuret left her, she started to get harassed, Fleuret returned and sent all five men to the hospital, where three died shortly after arriving the other two are in critical condition. His phone is on and he’s using it to go home.” Tredd answered.

“Who’s the girl?” Titus demanded.

“We’re looking into it now sir.” Khara answered.

“Find her, now, I don’t care how.” Drautos barked. “And send a message to his phone, demand that he code in. I need to know what the fuck is going on and why he failed.” Titus barked.

“I found something!” Pelna piped up. “I have Fleuret and the girl on a train, they came from Greece to Switzerland. His name on his ticket is Ray Ulric and her name is Selena Ulric. She owns a sail boat slash fishing boat registered in Greece she uses as her home. Only comes into port once every month or every other month to restock has a cell phone and credit card in her name but isn’t paying for them, she has a living mother, we’re still looking for siblings.” Pelna reported as he read off what he was able to find.

“Ok, I want phone taps, I want everything on her and her family, try to find friends, I want that cell phone tapped too, I want to know everywhere she’s been for the last 6 years.” Drautos ordered.

“Yes sir,” his men answered him.

When it got time to sleep, Ravus pulled off and got them a hotel room for the night and ordered room service using one of his credit cards before his phone dinged while he was in the bathroom.

‘Code In’ was all the text read. But he couldn’t think of anything as his head started to hurt again and panic gripped his chest so he just took a chance and texted ‘Forrest’ back and held his breath before there wasn’t another message sent to him.

Meanwhile back at HQ-

“Drautos! Fleuret just coded in- he coded Forrest. Which means he is still on assignment. He must have failed and is regrouping to try again, they’ve just stopped at a hotel for the night, he used his credit card. Also we have more news on Selena Ulric. Her brother is one of ours, he’s our agent in Athens, she’s a friendly. We’ve contacted him and has requested to extract his sister and sustains she’s much too innocent to get involved in any of this. Also the other Fleuret offered to reach out as well to do an assessment and will bring him if need be.” Luche informed his boss before Drautos blew out a breath of relief.

“Keep on eye on them for now, notify me of any movement.” Drautos nodded in understanding before he called his higher ups to notify them of the update.

Meanwhile back in the hotel room, Ravus was going through his bag, trying to organize it and it’s contents to see if anything would come back to him. But his mind was still blank. None of this felt right. When he heard Selena finish with her shower he quickly put everything back into the bag and got the spare clothes out of the other bag.

“Everything ok?” Selena asked as she came out of the bathroom.

“Yeah, everything is fine.” Ravus nodded before he got his things together to get a shower himself.

Selena plugged her phone in and got into the king size bed, keeping to one side and looked at the red bag that sat on the other side of the bed at the foot of the bed. She wanted to get into it so bad but she needed to be respectful.

Selena rolled over away from the red bag and tried to go to sleep before she heard Ravus’ phone go off in the bathroom and Selena lifted her head and stared through the wall as her hearing trained on the sound. She heard movement from Ravus in the shower but the phone continued to ring. Then it was silenced. But she didn’t hear talking. She frowned and huffed and settled back into bed, sleeping on the very edge of the side of the bed until Ravus came out of the bathroom, wearing nothing but the boxers and Selena fought not to stare.

“Who called?” Selena asked curiously.

“I don’t know, it was just a number. They left a message but I don’t remember the code to get into my voicemail to hear it though.” Ravus lied, a woman by the name of Lunafreya Nox Fleuret called and he had been terrified it was his wife.

“Well maybe you should call them back tomorrow, for now we should get some sleep.” Selena gently urged him. Ravus nodded as he got in bed with her and plugged his phone into the charger and frowned when she didn’t roll over to face him like she usually did, in fact her back was to him and she was so far on the other side that she’d be out of it if she moved another inch. He hated that she was retreating away from him. Ravus frowned as he watched her, he wanted to be close to her again.

“So...are you mad at me?” Ravus asked cautiously as he read her body language.

“No, I’m not.” Selena exhaled and rolled over to face him with an apologetic look. “You just scared me is all.” Selena finally admitted and let him take her hand in his own and scooted closer to him when he pulled on her hand and held it in both of his own before he kept a firm grip with one hand and rolled over to turn out the light before turning back over to hold her hand with both of his again.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to scare you. I just wanted to protect you. I never want you afraid of me.” Ravus confessed in a low murmur.

“I never want to be afraid of you either.” Selena whispered.

“Come here,” Ravus invited and scooted closer to Selena as she in turn scooted closer to him until he wrapped her up into his embrace and blew out a breath of relief when she relaxed and wrapped herself around him possessively. Ravus wanted to kiss her so badly. To do a lot more than that but he hesitated, that if he had a wife waiting for him, he should probably be faithful to her. As much as that hurt and as much as he wanted this woman in his arms more than anything else in the world.

“It’s not you I’m afraid of.” Selena whispered in a whimper as Ravus pet her now much softer wet hair.

“Oh?” Ravus asked.

“I’m afraid...I’m afraid you’re married and I think your wife tried to kill you.” Selena confessed and Ravus paused in his actions as that suddenly felt right for once, not the wife part but the someone tried to kill him part.

“What?” Ravus asked.

“Yeah, the part of the Mediterranean I found you in, is close to the outer islands, lots of tourists come all the time, I think you were on vacation with your wife and she tried to kill you. People die from scuba dives if something is messed up with their dive tanks all the time. I think she sabotaged you and your tank, she may have tried to do a ‘Jaws’ thing where shooting your tank will make it explode and I think she missed your tank but shot you instead and I think that trauma is why you can’t remember and I’m terrified that when you go home, she’ll be in the process of cleaning you out and moving out or moving someone else in if she’s been having an affair.” Selena speculated.

“Oh my god, that makes sense.” Ravus breathed in relief. If his wife tried to kill him, that means their marriage was off and he was good and free, no wonder he couldn’t remember anything, that would be one hell of a traumatizing event and before he knew it, he had ducked his head and kissed Selena, finally letting all their pent up sexual tension let loose.

Selena made a little keening noise before she hiked her leg up around his hip and kissed him back for all she was worth and almost cried tears of joy when the kiss began to escalate and faster than she thought possible, they were both undressed and he had rolled on top of her and was currently kissing and licking and sucking on her pulse points on her neck which practically lit her on fire with lustful desire. It had been way too long since the last time she had had sex and he clearly knew exactly what he was doing.

“Wait, wait,” Ravus remembered.

“For what?” Selena asked as her chest heaved and sat up when he rolled off of her and turned the light on and got into his wallet that was on the nightstand.

“This,” Ravus grinned when he found what he was looking for. A condom.

“Oh, get that on and get back to me right now.” Selena purred and Ravus did as he was told and quickly opened it, rolled it on and turned the light out before he completely lost himself in her and did much more than have sex, but actually made love to her the way he had wanted to since he woke up on her boat.

The next morning, they leisurely got breakfast before doing some clothes shopping, Ravus buying her some really pretty and adorable clothes, some amazing makeup and personal care items and even perfume and a dress and some heels because he wanted to take her out to dinner along with a lot more condoms and rented a decent car.

“Ok so am I allowed to ask what’s in the bag?” Selena asked as they drove back to Switzerland to get his gun out of the box because now he was going to use it, on his cheating soon to be ex wife who tried to kill him.

“Lot’s of money, you’re free to look in the bag, maybe you can help me make more sense of it, if your theory is right, which more than likely it is, maybe it was a miracle that she didn’t get to it before I did and really clean me out.” Ravus answered as he gestured to the bag still in her lap before she opened it and gasped.

“Oh my God, Ray, there’s more money in here than I’ve ever seen in my life.” Selena admitted as she dug through it.

“You’re welcome to it too, you’ve shared what you had with me, now I’m going to share what I have with you and I’ll split it with you if you want.” Ravus offered.

“Aw, you really don’t have to do that. I’ve already taken enough advantage of you.” Selena tried to reassure him. Even though she was actually really relived and happy he trusted her enough with even this much. But she didn’t want to take advantage of him any more than she already had.

“Ok, this is weird, why do you have...so many passports..looks like one is missing though? Raymond White?” Selena asked as she showed him the card. Ravus could only shrug. “Ok, I need to think about this for a while. Let’s just drive and we’ll go back and if there’s anything else in there, we’ll get it and we’ll see what we can do. What did you leave in there anyway?” Selena asked.

Ravus took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “A gun.” Ravus answered as he gulped.

“A gun?” Selena repeated in surprise. “Well maybe you should have brought it with you.” Selena couldn’t help but grin. What kind of heartless bitch would kill her sweetheart of a husband? Not unless he was worth more to her dead than alive and was cheating on him and a gold digger. Well this bitch had what was coming to her.

Within hours they arrived back at the bank and Selena waited in the car Ravus reappeared, a second bag just as full as the first and wearing a smug grin. “Don’t you look like a fox who got into the hen house.” Selena cooed to him when he got back in the car.

“This Darling, is all for you.” Ravus offered her the second bag, with just as much money as the first but without all the passports.

“Did you get the gun?” Selena asked as she took it from him and put it next to her own bag on the floor between her feet.

“I got two.” Ravus grinned before he put his seat belt on.

“Gimme,” Selena demanded as she held out her hand expectantly before Ravus looked at her strangely.

“Ok, I had an ex who was a very bad guy who was very much into guns and taught me how to use them.” Selena explained and Ravus frowned but got his extra gun and gave it to her along with the magazine that went with it.

“What’s his name? I feel I should pay him a visit.” Ravus asked and he narrowed his eyes as Selena seemed to recall the last time she had seen Ravus’ moves. Nyx had used them, years ago on her ex.

“He’s dead, my brother got into a rage and killed him, I don’t know how my brother didn’t go to jail but he died too shortly after joining the army anyway not long after, it’s just me and my mom now.” Selena informed him as she looked the gun over and checked the clip and the gun and Ravus smiled sadly when she appeared to know exactly what she was doing.

“Well at least you have her.” Ravus nodded before he got the car into gear and they drove back to his ‘home’. Not seeing at all how there was a car following behind him all the way form the hotel to the bank and back again.

“You know, I’m thinking after I deal with all this, I think I might want to join you back on that boat of yours.” Ravus proposed.

“Oh, I’m thinking I’m gonna upgrade.” Selena grinned.

“Yeah it is a bit cramped isn’t it? Maybe a yacht would be nice but nothing bigger than what only the two of us could handle. Wouldn’t have to keep fishing, not unless you really wanted to. We could just, sail.” Ravus offered.

“Perfect.” Selena smiled as she put his bag down towards her feet too and put the gun in her coat pocket before taking his hand again as they drove to his address in Paris.

Once there, Ravus took a deep breath and parked and the two of them went to the address and Ravus blinked when he saw that there were two Nox Fleuret’s listed, one L. Nox Fleuret, the other R. Nox Fleuret.

“Which one will you hit first?” Selena asked curiously.

“Let’s go with R.” Ravus said before he buzzed it and there was no answer before buzzing it several more times.

“So you’re not home?” Selena asked, a playful smirk on her lips before an older woman came to the door.

“Monsieur Nox Fleuret!” She exclaimed in French as she opened the door. “I haven’t seen you in a while, I thought you said you were supposed to be back from vacation last week?” She asked before she seemed to notice Selena and her face went from worried to knowing.

“Sorry, I lost my keys.” Ravus answered back in French.

“Ah, brought back a souvenir I see.” She winked at him before Ravus blushed hard and she let him in and they walked upstairs to his apartment and she opened the door for him there too before she left to go make more copies for him.

“Wow, nice place.” Selena appraised as she followed him into the apartment and they looked around. “Is anything coming back?” She asked again.

“No.” Ravus shook his head as he looked around the apartment and frowned when he didn’t see any feminine looking items in it. It was minimalist and simple and uncluttered.

“Well, I’m going to go to the bathroom.” Selena said before she left and wandered around until she found it and refilled her water bottle that she kept with her always.

Ravus sat in the chair of his desk and looked over at his phone. Which had no new messages and decided to go ahead and redial the last number that was dialed and listened before a receptionist at a hotel answered.

“Hi, I’m looking for someone, do you have a Ravus Nox Fleuret staying with you?” He asked hopefully.

“No, sir, we have no one here by that name.” She answered.

“Oh, thank you, wait, wait, can you look up another name, could you tell me if um, Raymond White is there?” Ravus asked.

“One moment, I’ll have to put you on hold.” She said before she did so.

“Hello? Are you looking for Raymond White?” A different guy who sounded like a manager answered.

“Yes, he’s my friend.” Ravus answered.

“Well I’m so sorry to tell you this, but Raymond White has passed away, there was a scuba diving accident and he died at sea.” The manager informed him.

“Oh, thank you, thank you for telling me, goodbye.” Ravus said numbly before he hung up and Selena reappeared and there was a knock at the door and Selena had her gun drawn on the door before Ravus could even reach for his.

“Ravus?” Lunafreya asked as she knocked and put her ear to the door. “Ravus, it’s Luna, open up.” Luna insisted as she knocked again.

“Oh come on I’ll only bug you a little I promise, you haven’t called and I’ve been worried.” Luna explained. “I called you last night, why didn’t you answer? Or even call me back yet?” Luna asked as Selena watched Ravus’ facial expression closely before she intervened.

‘Stay there.’ Selena mouthed to Ravus before she put her gun into her pocket and opened the door.

“Hi,” Selena greeted.

“Hi, who are you and why are you in my brother’s apartment?” Lunafreya asked.

“Your brother?” Selena repeated in disbelieving confusion.

“Yeah, brother, we live across the hall from each other, he left a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t heard back from him since then and I’m worried.” Luna explained as Selena sized her up.

“Ok, come in.” Selena invited and let Luna in.

“So what’s your name?” Luna asked Selena as she passed her.

“My name is Selena, I found your brother floating in the Mediterranean just off the coast of Greece with two bullets in his back and weird little lazer pointer in his hip. He was in a dive suit and unconscious by the time I hauled him onto my boat and it took three and a half days to get him to wake up. He has amnesia and has no idea who he is or what his name is even. Thankfully that little laser pointer had the name of a bank in it and once he got to the bank he found his bank box thing and his home address was this so we’re here, trying to jog his memory but it hasn’t worked.” Selena informed Luna.

“Aww, so you’re just playing good Samaritan, thank you, thank you so much for taking care of him and for getting him home. I should take him to the doctor, I can take care of him from here, I’m sure you’d like to go home now wouldn’t you? Can I take you to the airport or the train station or something?” Luna asked politely.

“Actually I’d like to stay with him for a little while at least, just to make sure he’s going to be ok.” Selena noted and looked past Luna to see Ravus nodding yes adamantly to that notion.

“No you really don’t have to, you should really go home, consider yourself relieved of Ravus duty.” Luna tried to insist again with a chuckle. But Selena’s gut told her something was off and wrong.

“Ray, come and help me get my bags from the car. I’m staying.” Selena affirmed.

“Yes Darling.” Ravus nodded in agreement before he walked passed his sister, staring at her, hoping maybe her face would jog his memory but it didn’t.

The moment the door was shut and Selena and Ravus went down the stairs, Luna called Drautos and didn’t hear Selena sneak back up the stairs and put her ear to the door to eaves drop. “Ok we’re fucked. Ravus failed his mission and self scrubbed. He doesn’t know who he is or who I am and he’s broken rule number 4 and is practically in love with this girl who is being a good Samaritan and brought him home. The Hero needs to extract her immediately and I’ll bring him in and we’ll see if we can get him reloaded.” Luna informed him. “Honestly I have no idea why he coded in, he is not on mission, I doubt he even realizes he’s supposed to be on a mission or that he knows he failed it. He doesn’t even know he’s an agent. He’s being stupid and using his phone and his cards and is making tracking him way too easy, he should have known better. If he was himself he would stay off the grid. But that’s just it, he’s not him, he’s practically a blank slate, we’ll have to scrub him again before we reload and probably dart the girl so she thinks this was all a dream because she’s very protective of him.” Luna reported.

“Yeah, ok, they’re getting their stuff now, I’ll go down and detain him while she’s extracted, I have two shots in my pockets right now, they’ll be out like a light.” Luna informed them and Selena’s heart and mind raced.

‘We need to leave right now.’ Selena breathed to Ravus as they both speedily took off down the stairs before they ran to the car and got in and sped away. Then Ravus seemed to finally notice someone tailing him.

“Give me your phone and your wallet Ray, I need to destroy the phones and the cards because that’s how she said they could track us.” Selena demanded and Ravus gave her everything in his pockets and handed them to her before she used his multi-tool to break open the phones and rip everything out of them before stabbing them and chucking them out of the window and using the scissors in the multi-tool to cut up all the credit cards, especially the chip in the cards before throwing all the pieces out of the window as Ravus did everything in his power to loose the tail they had acquired but it was as if he knew exactly which way Ravus was going to turn to try to get away.

“I can’t seem to shake them.” Ravus informed Selena.

“It’s ok, I know you can do this Ray, besides, I think I know who and what you are. You’re a secret agent of some kind. That woman who claimed to be your sister said that you were on assignment and you did something called ‘self scrub’ and you’re supposed to be on a mission right now. That explains your bullet wounds. You had a target who fought back. That explains all the money and the passports and the phone. She reported that and then told whoever, I’m assuming your boss or bosses that she was going to tranq us and scrub you again so you wouldn’t remember any of this or me. And do the same thing to me and said that someone she called ‘The Hero’ is supposed to extract me and I’m pretty sure that’s who is following us. You can do this Ray, I know you can, I have faith in you.” Selena encouraged as she tried not to panic before the Landrover who had been tailing them rammed them and made them tailspin and that was when Selena got a good look at the driver and gasped. No. It couldn’t be. Nyx? They locked eyes and Selena’s jaw dropped as she stared in stunned, disbelieving shock.

“What?! What’s wrong?!” Ray asked worriedly as he tried to get the car back under his control.

“I swear that’s my brother, back from the dead.” Selena breathed before Ravus finally got control of his car again and tried to drive away but the Landrover was in hot pursuit but by this point there was an army of police cars chasing both of them.

“So uh, there’s a bump coming up.” Ray tried to warn her.

“What?” Selena asked before she looked out the window to see that Ravus was about to drive down a very large and a very long flight of cement steps.

“Oh my God!” Selena screamed as she curled in on herself and clutched her bag that had her pills to her chest as she rode down the flights of stairs.

“Oh my God we made it,” Selena breathed in relief once they made it to the bottom and Ravus drove away, thankfully putting some space between them the police and the Landrover.

Ray found a parking garage and pulled in and parked in it and had himself and Selena take out what they needed but only a few feet away from the vehicle the Landrover found them again.

“Fuck.” Ray and Selena cussed before they both drew their guns on the occupant before the door opened and Nyx stepped out with his gun trained on Ravus.

“Selena, you need to come with me and Ravus, you need to stand down.” Nyx ordered before Selena sidestepped and put herself between Ravus and Nyx, Ravus moving the line of sight of his gun from the top of her other shoulder.

“First of all, who the fuck are you, how the fuck do you know my name and who the fuck do you think you are thinking you can order me around?” Selena growled angrily as she aimed the gun at what she could still swear was her brother’s head, as crazy as that was.

“Selena, it’s me, it’s Nyx, look, you’re in way over your head here, you need to come with me, so I can get you somewhere safe, take you back home.” Nyx tried to reason with her.

“My brother died 3 years, 4 months and 15 days ago, you ain’t him, you look like him, you sound like him, but you ain’t him.” Selena sustained.

“Selena, I don’t have time for this right now, any minute the Princess is gonna be here and she’s not gonna ask nicely. This is me asking nicely, trust me, you don’t want me to ask roughly.” Nyx warned before he noticed Selena’s gun start shaking as persperation started beading on her forehead and her labored breathing as her limbs seemed to loose their strength.

“Selena, what’s wrong, talk to me,” Nyx asked.

“She has cancer, she’s late getting her meds.” Ravus answered.

“Really?!” Selena growled as she glared at Ravus behind her.

“You what?!” Nyx asked as he dropped his gun and put it away. “Look I’m not gonna shoot,” Nyx admitted which got Selena and Ravus to finally lower their weapons before Selena finally lowered hers and had to brace herself on her knees and bed over before dropping to all fours before Nyx and Ravus went to her.

“She needs water, lots of water.” Ravus said as he got her bag.

“Selena, please believe me, it’s me Nyx, what kind of cancer do you have? What kind of meds are you on?” Nyx demanded as he watched as within a minute Selena deteriorated quickly.

“Fuck, I’ve never seen her miss her dose before.” Ravus breathed as worry and panic gripped his chest again. “Will you help us?” Ravus pleaded before Selena passed out and collapsed.

“Yes, of course, she’s my sister, help me get her in the back seat.” Nyx agreed as he and Ravus got Selena into the back seat of the Landrover and got their bags before they wiped the car down and got their bags into the back seat of the Landrover except for Selena’s purse that had her pills.

“Ok, open that bag, I need to see the pills,” Nyx demanded as he started to drive back to Ravus’ apartment and Ravus did as he was told.

“Oh no fucking way!” Nyx spat as he took one and took it.

“Why would you take her medication?” Ravus asked as he watched Nyx in shock.

“She doesn’t have cancer. Fuck, fuck, how did she get into this, how did she find this? How many does she take?” Nyx asked.

“She gets them from a drug dealer, she gets them for free from somewhere in Asia, she takes 12 of each as a set, three sets a day, so 36 pills of each color, 72 total and drinks three gallons of water doing so.” Ravus explained.

“She should desalinate with that much water.” Nyx stated as his mind raced. “Ok, your sister said you self scrubbed, so is that still true? Do you have any idea who you are?” Nyx demanded.

“No, I still don’t, I have these horrible headaches, I have no memories before a few weeks ago when I woke up on your sister’s boat, she rescued me.” Ravus explained.

“Because she’s bleeding heart.” Nyx cocked a half grin and shook his head and huffed a laugh through his nose.

“Ok, so what these pills are, do they look at all familiar to you?” Nyx asked.

“A little?” Ravus shrugged.

“These are Chems. These are what make us, you and me and your sister, super soldiers, how my sister found them and has been taking them for who knows how long I will find out when she comes to, we took these, greens are for your body, your performance, they enhance us physically, fine tune our senses, blues- those are mental, mental elasticity. We need to go back to your place, you need to get your go bag, your ghost bag. Does that ring any bells? Every agent should have one, mine is in the back already. You should take out your pill from your hip so they can’t track you anymore that way.” Nyx advised.

“Oh the laser pointer? Selena removed that when she removed the bullets from my back when she rescued me, she found me floating in the water in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, off the coast of...” “Athens, I know, you failed your mission. Any memory of that? Do you know why? You’ve never failed before.” Nyx questioned.

“Nothing, the more I think, the more my head hurts.” Ravus shook his head no and closed his eyes tight. Fuck this hurt.

“Yeah, you’re definitely not you.” Nyx noted with a small smirk.

“Why do you say that?” Ravus frowned.

“Because usually, you’re the most self absorbed asshole there is and usually I would rather be tortured in a third world prison rather than be stuck in a car with you for any real length of time.” Nyx chuckled.

“Why do I sense that the feeling is mutual?” Ravus slowly returned as a slow grin quirked on his own lips as the two shared a look of amusement and understanding before Selena woke up and gasped again.

“Where’s my purse?!” Selena shrieked as she sat up.

“Here.” Ravus said as he gave it to her. “So your brother said he would help us.” Ravus informed her with a hopeful smile.

“Why do I feel like there’s a ‘but’ in there?” Selena asked warily as she looked from Ravus to the man who claimed to be her brother.

“But good news is you don’t have cancer, but how did you find those pills Selena?” Nyx demanded.

“I don’t answer to you.” Selena firmly rebuffed him before Nyx slammed on the brakes and turned around to face her.

“Selena! I swear to God, I am so close to loosing my patience with you, it’s me ok?! We grew up in Athens, our mother’s name is Sabrina, our father’s name was Dorian, Libertus was my best friend growing up and we said that when we grew up we would open a bar together. There was tower on the roof of our house where we would camp out on and look out for pirates, even though they were nothing more than fishing boats. Your favorite teddy bear, Scuzzie, is probably still on your boat and you probably still have my blue hoodie too.” Nyx ventured and Selena’s jaw dropped as her eyes watered.

“Then why did you leave me asshole?!” Selena screamed at him before she slapped him and Ravus put his hand over his mouth to keep from gasping, or laughing.

“Long story.” Nyx huffed as he shook off the slap.

“Long story my ass, just wait until mom gets a hold of you, you son a bitch.” Selena grumbled in Greek under her breath as she sat in the back seat and crossed her arms over her chest and glared at her brother in the rear view mirror.

When they got back to the apartment Luna was still waiting inside and gave questioning look to Nyx.

“Look, things have changed, I need like 72 hours and access to the plant in Soel.” Nyx informed her.

“What exactly has changed? Because that’s a lot to ask, that’s a full mission in of itself.” Luna asked warily.

“Somehow, Selena is in possession of Chems, she’s been taking them for I don’t know how long, she needs to be viraled out. But I don’t trust headquarters to not yellow her.” Nyx tried to discretely explain and something tried to come to Ravus’ memory but it was blurry and fuzzy and he couldn’t make sense of it before he left with Selena to the kitchen to get her some water so she could take her pills.

“Selena, do you know what you’re really taking?” Ray asked her softly.

“Some kind of enhancement drugs, I feel like a superhero when I take them and I feel like death when I don’t.” Selena finally admitted with an apologetic look to Ray.

“Plus they’re inseperable, but if push comes to shove, I think we can use this as leverage, if we can get Ravus to come with us and get Selena fixed and feeling better, he’ll do whatever it takes, he’s that much in love with her.” Nyx whispered to Luna once Ravus and Selena left to go to the kitchen.

Lunafreya huffed and texted Drautos and Regis before getting clearance.

“Deal, we’ll take your car. If we can get them to go for it, I’ll do it. We might as well take out Izunia and Iodolas while we’re out and about huh. And if Ravus comes to his senses, then we’ll still scrub him.” Luna offered her hand for a handshake. “But for their sake, I think it’ll make a bigger impression if it looks like we’re doing this off the books.” Luna ventured.

“You’re right, as always,” Nyx nodded in agreement before they both heard Ravus and Selena come back to them.

“So now what’s a yellow?” Selena asked Luna warily.

“Let me see your pills.” Lunafreya insisted as she stood and held out her hand. “I promise not to take any I just want to inspect them.” Luna proposed before Selena begrudingly handed them over.

“Fuck, these are Chems, how long have you been taking them?” Luna asked as she looked them over.

“A while.” Selena answered vaguely.

“Selena, let me try to put this into perspective for you. These are special drugs designed to make normal humans into super soldiers, so I’m going to ask you some questions because your life and your brain hangs in the balance, if you miss a dose of these blue pills especially by any more than 16 hours you may go into a catatonic coma and never recover if you’ve been taking them too long, so answer my god damn questions truthfully so help me God, I’m helping you as a favor to Nyx and if you sass me, I’ll stop. Got it?! Now how long have you been taking the Chems?” Luna asked again.

“One year 10 months, 16 days and 14 hours.” Selena answered.

“Jesus Fucking Christ.” Nyx and Luna both cursed and groaned as they exchanged a worried look.

“You need to get viraled out ASAP. Ok so these Chems, are actually made from a live virus, but the virus is stored half way across the world, we need to get you there and infect you with live virus and just make all this permanent so you don’t have to keep taking the pills so you won’t fall if you miss any either, if we tried to order it through the proper channels, those channels would probably switch it out and...”

“And the pills would kill her,” Ravus guessed more than remembered. “Guess, not memory.” Ravus clarified as everyone looked at him hopefully before they looked a bit disappointed-ly.

“Ok, I’m gonna get my ghost bag, Nyx, try to help Ravus find his, we need to fix this.” Luna ordered and gave the pills back and Selena put them away and Nyx helped Selena and Ravus search through the apartment.

“It’s not this is it?” Selena guessed when she found a large white bag on the top shelf in his closet and when Ravus retrieved it and pulled it down and opened it and found guns, a sniper rifle and money and even more passports and all kinds of secret spy gear.

“Yup. Of course your ghost bag would be white.” Nyx snorted a laugh before Luna returned, a large white bag of her own over her shoulder.

“Good you guys found it.” Luna grinned proudly. “Ok, I don’t know how much time we’ll have on this excursion before they’ll notice that something is up. So Ravus, here’s the deal, we’ll help her, but after we do and she’s safe and on her way home, you have to come back in with us, you just do.” Luna proposed to Ravus.

“I knew there’d be a catch, ok.” Ravus agreed before Selena could stop him but he squeezed her hand reassuringly.

They packed up Nyx’s car and drove to the airport, Nyx had a clean passport for Selena already in his ghost bag ready for her. On the plane, Luna and Nyx sat behind Ravus and Selena for the long flight, thankfully Selena managed to buy a little notebook and was able to write notes back and forth to Ravus during the flight.

‘Why did you agree so readily?’ Selena asked Ravus.

‘I didn’t want to but it was the only to help you. But I’m trying to figure out a way to ditch them once you’re better, I don’t care if I have to live on the run, I just can’t risk you being sick.’ Ravus wrote back.

‘I’ll go on the run with you.’ Selena offered. ‘I don’t have much at home anyway, as long as I have you, I’ll be ok.’

Ravus’ heart melted and he took her hand and intertwined their fingers and kissed the back of her hand sweetly.

‘I love you’ Selena wrote.

‘I love you too’ Ravus wrote back. ‘We’ll find a way.’ Ravus wrote before they settled in and a few hours of sleep, Ravus letting Selena sleep on his shoulder as he wrapped his arms possessively around her. He didn’t know how they were going to get through this. But he had to find a way.

They woke up just a few moments before they touched down and Luna had made them all passes to get into the plant on the trip over and they got two hotel rooms, one for Selena and Ravus and one for Nyx and Luna to get changed and cleaned up and changed and dressed the part of ‘doctors’ coming in to do some research.

Both Selena and Ravus gave each other wary and suspicious looks because of how easily they were granted access to the plant and both started looking around at possible exit points and strategies. This didn’t feel right, this felt like a set up, the biggest set up there could be. But Selena follows her brother and hopes and prays that he would protect her and holds Ray’s hand as her eyes grow glassy.

When they get to the lab, it’s deserted and several other projects are in several other locked compartments and sections. Selena stops in her tracks as she looks curiously at them as Lunafreya goes right towards what she’s after, the technition giving her orders in her earpiece in her ear.

Luna washes in and goes through the procedures of getting the live viruses out and fills both syringes.

“Is she going to be able to handle viraling out both at the same time?” Nyx asked Luna quietly and Luna paused as she waited for the doctors and technitions to discuss that and then give an answer back to her. There was a long moment that Selena and Ravus seemed to note before Luna finally nodded.

“Selena, come here, it’s time.” Luna instructed before Selena took a deep breath, Nyx held one hand while Ravus held the other while Luna prepared the IV. Selena took deep cleansing breaths as Luna first took a blood sample then injected both sets of live virus into Selena’s system.

“Why did you take my blood sample?” Selena asked. “Because I’ve been studying the Chems myself and I want to see what self regulated looks like, hope you don’t mind.” Luna explained with a small smile before she pulled out the IV and put a bandaid over the injection site.

“You’re gonna be really sick for the next few days, but we’ll be with you the whole way through ok? We’ll keep you safe and secure.” Luna offered encouragingly and Selena wished with all her heart that she could believe her but something in her told her run for her life, that now that she had the live virus, all bets were off.

Luna cleaned up the trash and when she did Selena saw the ear piece and knew an ambush was immenent, would they even leave the building? Luna and Nyx led the way out of the lab but at the last moment, Selena panicked and yanked Ravus back into the lab and sealed it off and locked it.

“What the fuck?! Selena! This wasn’t the deal! Open the door!” Nyx roared as he banged on it as Luna cut her eyes but smirked.

“Selena?” Ravus asked as he stood and looked at her curiously.

“Ray, Luna was wearing an ear piece, this was all a set up, it’s an ambush, we gotta find a new way out.” Selena answered.

“Ok.” Ravus nodded and went around the room looking for anything that could help while Selena went back to the boxes that had caught her attention and for some reason, she just had the urge to eat the contents of them. These bright blue crystals just looked like candy and she felt an overwhelming urge to eat it. So she busted the lock and got in it and started scarfing it down while Ravus was too busy and distracted to notice or stop her and she was out of sight to Nyx and Luna.

“Ok, do we have anything in there that could actually hurt her?” Luna asked the doctors and nurses in her ear. “I don’t know, I’ll ask.” Luna said into the mic hidden in her necklace.

“Nyx, what are the chances your sister would break into the locked boxes in there?” Luna asked him.

“Like a percentage? 85%” Nyx guessed.

“Wait, what?” Luna said into her ear piece before her eyes went wide and she gasped. “Ravus! Ravus! Where is Selena?! What is she doing?! You need to make sure she’s not getting into anything!” Luna practically screamed as she beat on the glass door before Nyx got scared.

“What the fuck is in there?!” Nyx demanded.

“There’s a substance in there, it’s bright blue shimmery crystals, it’s a new drug that’s a take on C.P.H.4 and a bunch of other stuff that’s supposed to replace every drug on the market, a drug lord dumped millions and millions into developing it and the whole supply is in that room and if she gets a hold of it as it is, she’ll get high as a kite for 48 hours and then die because the brain overloads itself on it’s own chemicals and burns out, they’re still trying to tweak it so that you don’t die but instead only become addicted for life.” Luna gravely informed him.

“Selena!” Luna and Nyx screamed as their back up and ambush finally arrived in full force.

“Everyone better just have darts in their guns!” Nyx barked angrily as hot tears came to his eyes before the lights and all the power came off.

“Selena what did you do?!” Ravus yelled as he came to Selena convulsed on the floor but every electronic around her came to life before she started levitating.

“OH SHIT! OH SHIT!! FUCK! SELENA! SELENA!!” Ravus screeched as he held onto her and watched in horror as if she became a woman possessed by the devil himself as he held onto her so tight he was lifted off the ground until both of them bumped into the ceiling.

“Please let this just be a bad dream, please just let this be a bad dream.” Ravus cried as he clung to her tightly and squeezed his eyes shut. This had to be a nightmare.

Very slowly Selena floated back down to the floor or what Ravus hoped was the floor and Ravus used the lights from the electronics that were turned on around them that were now going nuts to look into Selena’s eyes that were glowing an eerie bright blue before she blinked and seemed to come back into herself and licked her lips and the lights came back on.

“Selena? What just happened?” Ravus asked as he held her face and searched her eyes.

“Oh Ray,” Selena whispered in relief before she hugged him and clung to him. “I’m ok, I’m better than ok. Everything is going to be ok, don’t worry.” Selena reassured him as she held his face before putting her thumbs to his head and unlocked his memory.

“Ow!” Ravus grimaced as his eye screwed shut before he blinked. “What did you just get into?” Ravus asked as he felt himself become whole again and stared in awed wonder at the woman before him. “Something that should have killed me but because of the Chems and because I’ve been taking them for so long, I literally had the perfect chemistry for them to work like they were supposed to, my brain is working at much higher percentages. I feel like a superhero and basically am.” Selena smiled brightly.

“So what are we working with?” Ravus asked as he helped her to her feet.

“Nothing we can’t handle. Your sister and my brother have thirty one guards armed to the teeth at the door, your sister and my brother are panicking and there’s 387 people in the plant just working their normal jobs and so far I’m corrupting all the digital data that we were even here because I can control electrical signals and impulses to a degree.” Selena grinned.

Ravus just stared with his mouth slightly agape, horribly impressed and eternally grateful she was on his side before Selena stood on her tip toes and pulled him down to kiss him.

“I love you too.” Selena cooed. “So? Do you want to stay working for the government and Treadstone or do you want to just walk away? It’s up to you. I wouldn’t mind joining you in Paris and frankly you’d be the most feared and respected agent in the agency and with me by your side, everyone would have to think twice if they tried to double cross you.” Selena offered.

“Your morality would be ok with that? I’m basically a hired killer and you’re a good samaritan who pulled a half dead man out of the sea and risked your lively hood to help him, granted I’m eternally grateful...” Ravus cocked his head to the side and considered her curiously before they could hear banging on the door.

“Look, I don’t care what we do, I’m not leaving you, from this day forth, not unless you want me to.” Selena vowed and Ravus couldn’t help but kiss her again. He framed her face and kissed her with everything he had.

“I don’t, I never want you to leave me, ever, you’re the best thing to ever happen to me and I would be so lost without you.” Ravus confessed. “But are you sure you’re going to be ok? Will you need anything?” Ravus asked as he stroked the apples of her cheeks with his thumbs.

“Nope, I’m good, no more drugs, no more Chems, nothing, just food and water and the occasional drink, date night and sex and I’m good.” Selena smiled brightly.

“Deal.” Ravus quickly agreed and kissed her sweetly before taking her hand. “Ready?” Ravus asked before they walked side by side and re emerged so they could be seen. Both Luna and Nyx both looking surprised yet relieved to see that Selena was ok.

“Hey! Tell them to put their guns down or I’ll put them down!” Selena yelled at Nyx through the glass as she pointed to the small army behind them.

“What?!” Nyx and Luna asked as they looked at her like she had lost her mind and Ravus just grinned smugly.

“Do it now. In 5...” Selena held up her splayed out hand then counted down from 5. “4...3...2…1...Down!” Selena snapped and pointed down and all the guns pulled to the ground, as if magnitized to the floor before the guns crushed in on themselves.

Luna and Nyx looked at each other and then back to Selena. Selena put her hand up pushed it forward and the men behind them all were pushed back too.

“Did you need to snap?” Ravus asked her softly.

“No, it’s for dramatic effect.” Selena answered as she kept her gaze on her brother and others outside the lab.

“What the fuck did she get into?” Nyx breathed to Luna.

Selena moved her hand over the door and it unlocked and Ravus opened the door for her and she stepped out.

“Ok, here’s the deal, no one touches me or him. You do, I snap, you’re out and I will unleash a hell you can’t begin to imagine.” Selena warned as her eyes glowed an iridescent blue again as the guns began to levitate and then break down into simple components until it was nothing but light. “Lunafreya, set up a meeting with Drautos and Caelum. There’s going to be a new negotiation.” Selena told her.

“Who are you and what have you done with my sister?” Nyx demanded, she looked like Selena, but this wasn’t Selena.

“I’m still me Nyx, just, very...enhanced.” Selena tried to explain as she gave him a hug. “I’m ok, I’m sorry for worrying you, I’m ok.” Selena whispered before she allowed herself to be escorted out of the plant, Ravus making sure only he touched her.

Several hours later Lunafreya, Nyx, Selena, and Ravus were sitting in a row in front of Director Regis Caelum and Drautos.

“So let me get this straight.” Caelum began as he focused on Ravus. “You failed your mission, self scrubbed, were lost at sea, you found him.” Caelum continued as he shifted his gaze to Selena. “You took care of him, nursed him back to health, brought him back home and somehow you got into chems and had been taking them and while you were getting viraled out, you got into something else in the lab and now you’re superhuman?” Caelum continued.

“Yes.” Ravus, Selena, Nyx and Lunafreya confirmed at the same time.

“And now, you want to work for us?” Caelum questioned warily.

“That’s an oversimplification. You see, the only loyalties I have are to the people beside me. I will work with them for as long as they want to work for you. We are your dream team. If you want us to work with you, you will give us more free reign, let us cherry pick our assignments and we would answer only directly to you, no middle men. But what you get in exchange is the results you can only dream of, for instance...” Selena began before she turned on the monitor with a waive of her hand to show a video of Iodolas giving a speech at a gala across the globe.

“His doctors really should run more thorough checkups more often, to think they missed so many blood clots hiding in the most peculiar places.” Lunafreya practically sang as she and Selena shared a mischievous grin.

“That will hit him and cause a most unceremoniously embarrassing way to die on national television no doubt, such a pity.” Ravus grinned as he reached out and held Selena’s hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze as Selena focused extra hard on Iodolas as she mentally moved everything into position as she closed her eyes for a moment.

Selena prompted Ravus by squeezing his hand back.

“Director Caelum, if you’d like to count down his death if you will,” Ravus invited.

“Me?” Caelum asked and Ravus, Selena, Nyx and Luna all nodded yes.

“Ok, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1?” Caelum counted down and Selena squeezed her eyes tight and suddenly Iodolas’ face scrawed up and his body contorted in a very strange, undignified way before he seemed to walk around like a chicken in his white tux before doing a face plant into the ground, his bony ass in the air and promptly died and shit himself, through the pants of his tux, staining his tux red and brown as Caelum and Drautos both stood and gasped as they both covered their mouths before they both couldn’t help but start erupting into a snickering out right giggle which turned into deep belly laughs as the gala was thrown into hysterics.

“Oh that was perfect!” Caelum cheered as he turned on his TVs as it was suddenly reported world wide that Iodolas had indeed, just died.

“Son of a bitch. You guys actually killed him and made it look like natural causes.” Caelum couldn’t be more pleased. He was going to celebrate tonight. “So what if we refuse your terms?” Caelum questioned a bit warily though.

“I snap.” Selena grinned and held up her hand and pressed her thumb and her middle finger to prime the snapping motion and suddenly every firewall was on the verge of collapse as the whole building seemed to sense that it was suddenly under attack as alarms suddenly started to sound and alerts started popping up on every single device.”

“Uh oh? Is there a problem?” Ravus taunted smugly.

Selena’s eyes narrowed as she focused and suddenly the stock market started to show signs of imminent collapse before her other hand flipped rightside up and did a crushing motion and suddenly the walls of the room started to crush in the building’s structural integrity started to become compromised.

“Easy.” Nyx smirked and Selena relaxed her hand rearranged the walls and the broken things around the room and the building but the electronics she had a firm grip on, she had already read and uncovered and had created fail safe after fail safe for them. So that if want or need be, they could all walk away and never be touched again, either on or off the grid. No one would ever touch any of them or their family ever again. They would be safe. Governments would topple before danger would come to them.

“I believe you’ve made your point, young lady, consider your terms agreed upon.” Caelum agreed. Thoroughly impressed and took the pen and signed on the dotted line in front of him before he gave the pen to Drautos who begrudingly signed too. Granted he didn’t trust any of them but he didn’t have choice in the matter. Once they both signed Selena dropped her hand and everything returned to normal.

“Pleasure doing business.” Selena offered as she, Ravus, Nyx and Lunafreya all stood and shook Caelum’s hand before they took their copies of the terms and agreements.

“We’ll be in touch.” Lunafreya offered before the four of them saw themselves out. Lunafreya taking Nyx’s arm and Selena taking Ravus’. Off to the next adventure.

#@ravus-week #ravus week #Day 2 #Modern AU/Movie AU Ravus Bourne

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