#Rachel remains a beautiful woman no matter how old she gets

[chieftyphoonchaos]

Their second new film together ?

Please give Daniel this as soon as possible

😂🤣😛

[leigh-kelly]

If She Never Showed Up What Could Have Been

Happy Brittana’s 6th Anniversary my fellow shippers! I’ve had this idea in my head since Folklore came out last summer, and I figured what better time to share it than today? Obviously, it’s based on “The Last Great American Dynasty.”

Her husband was dead. The doctors had warned them about it for months, that his lifestyle was going to kill him with his weak heart, but Bill hadn’t cared. He’d told her one night as they were lying side by side on the beach that he’d rather live the life he had the way he wanted then live a longer one with no fun. Brittany struggled with that a bit. She thought of the sunny day she got off the train in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, so far from home in St. Louis, and how she’d been madly in love. Their love hadn’t waned over the years, even as Bill traveled for work and Brittany did the fundraising that any young socialite was wont to do. But then, she’d woken up and found his lifeless body next to her and something inside her just snapped.

Everyone in town talked about her. Watch Hill wasn’t a very big place and it was difficult to get away from the gossip. More than once, she’d heard someone casually mention that it was her fault that he was dead. She’d let him party too hard, she was too concerned with having fun herself, some even said that she’d poisoned him for his money, despite what the coroner’s report had said. He was the heir to Standard Oil and they seemed to care more about what losing him meant to the company, not what losing him had meant to her. He wasn’t her first husband, but he was the one she’d truly loved and she missed him dearly. But Brittany was Brittany and she wasn’t going to let that end her life, no matter what everyone else said.

In the first months after Bill’s death, perhaps Brittany went a little mad. She was lonely and she was looking for anything to fill the emptiness. One day, she got it in her head that she wanted to swim in a pool full of champagne. Bill would have thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and he would have indulged her, so she bought case after case and her groundskeeper drained the pool and filled it up for her bottle by bottle. The bubbles effervesced around her when she got in and she breathed in the sweet alcoholic scent. When she got out, she was sticky from head to toe, but the only way she was surviving was to give into whims like that. The neighbors talked, of course they did, but one, Rachel Berry, was so callous and cruel to her that the next time her dog—a yappy little thing—wandered into her yard, Brittany dipped him in RIT and let him dry a perfect shade of key lime green. After that, everyone had said she’d stolen him, but really, Rachel was always letting the thing out of her sight, and the dog was fine.

After a while, Brittany got tired of Watch Hill. It was the same thing every day, the big salt box house that reminded her of Bill, the gossip that seemed to persist everywhere, so she started going to New York. She’d always loved the ballet and she took in performance after performance. She spent more money than she probably should have, despite the fact that she was rolling in it, but it was the first thing that made her feel alive again. Then, she started flying her friends in from New York and St. Louis and spent even more money entertaining, showing suitors, both men and women, a good time.

It happened when she least expected it. Her friend Mercedes had brought a girl along with her on one of her trips, and when the woman stepped out of the cab, Brittany nearly fell to her knees. Her heart did something that it hadn’t done in too long to count, possibly ever, and she struggled for breath. Standing just outside the house was the most beautiful human being Brittany had ever seen. She wasn’t sure what was darker, her hair or her eyes and she stood with such a poise that Brittany could only dream about having. Her dress was cut low in the front and Brittany’s eyebrows raised a little thinking about what was beneath it. Mercedes came up to the door first and Brittany was stirred from her fantasy when she gave her a hug. Brittany smiled, probably wider than she’d smiled in a year and Mercedes looked at her knowingly.

“A little treat for you, maybe?” Mercedes whispered in her ear and Brittany’s throat went dry.

“I—”

“Hi.” The other woman came up to her, extending her hand. “I hope you don’t mind that Mercedes brought me along. She just couldn’t stop talking about you and I had to meet the famous Brittany Harkness in person, and of course, see this Holiday House that Mercedes is in love with.”

“Oh, um, no, I absolutely don’t mind that you’ve come. There’s plenty of room, though I’m not totally sure who else will be joining us this weekend. I hope you don’t mind a party.”

“That I don’t.” Santana laughed, and the sound was like music to Brittany’s ears.

As Mercedes and Santana settled themselves into the house, the other guests began to arrive. Brittany was so likely to offer plane tickets to her friends that she never knew who was going to take advantage of it and show up, always, much to Rachel Berry’s chagrin. By the time the maids put dinner on the table, it was set for seventeen and Brittany tried to figure out a way to get Santana seated next to her.

“Santana,” She finally said softly as she sipped her old fashioned. “Since this is your first time a Holiday House, I’d love it if you took a place of honor beside me.”

“This house is full of your friends, Brittany, are you sure?

“I’m sure.”

Dinner was, as always, a boisterous affair, and Brittany hardly had the chance to speak two words to Santana that weren’t interrupted by Tina, or Mike, or much to her annoyance, Blaine. But she was staying for the whole weekend and Brittany kept reminding herself that there would be time for all of that once everyone had settled. After dinner was through and the dishes were cleared away, everyone trickled out into the backyard, wanting the cool sea air to settle their stomachs as they began to drink more heavily. Brittany noticed that Santana lingered near her and it caused her heart to flip, wondering, perhaps, if the woman saw something in her as well.

“I’m sorry, you know.” Santana murmured as she and Brittany stood beside the pool. “Mercedes said it hasn’t been easy for you since—you know.”

“Thank you.” Brittany nodded. “I feel like a fish out of water in this place sometimes. But now that I’ve thrown myself into founding the Harkness Ballet, my life seems to have some purpose again.”

“I’m looking forward to the first production. I just adore the ballet.”

“Do you?” Brittany smiled, glad to have found something in common with her. “I wanted to be a dancer when I was young, but my parents warned against it.”

“Would you like to dance now, with me?”

“Oh—”

“I’m sorry, was that too forward? I just…thought I saw you looking at me a certain way.”

“No, no…I was, I mean, I am, I…yes, I would love to dance with you.”

Santana stepped into Brittany’s arms and they danced to the sounds of the cellist who had set himself up on the other end of the pool. It was strange, that Brittany had only known Santana a few hours, but found herself in a state of perfect security once they began to dance together. Brittany looked into Santana’s eyes and found that she longed to kiss her. She couldn’t do it here though, not right in front of everyone, there was something far too taboo about that, but she pulled Santana closer and they shared a soft smile.

Hours later, Brittany had more than her share to drink and everyone had began retiring to their rooms. It was just her and Santana, who still had a martini, who remained in the backyard, and Brittany looked down over the railing of the walkway to see that the ocean looked especially beautiful that night. On so many nights, she’d gone down there herself, sat herself in the sand and just stared out at the wide ocean, wondering what was next for her. In that moment, she had a strange thought, wondering, perhaps, if it was Santana that was next for her. It was an odd thought, definitely, but she just couldn’t seem to shake it.

“I normally go down to the beach at night before bed, what do you think?”

“I could go up to bed if you’d like the time alone.”

“I’d like to share it with you, if that’s alright.” Brittany told her, gently taking her hand.

Together, they walked down to the beach and Brittany found a spot for them in the sand. Santana was clearly very tipsy—not that Brittany wasn’t—and she rested her head on Brittany’s shoulder. Brittany touched her hair and suddenly, Santana lifted her head up, looking Brittany right in the eyes. Even in the moonlight, Brittany could see the softness in them and she pressed her hand to Santana’s cheek.

“Would it be alright—”

“Kiss me, please.” Santana whispered, and Brittany did just that.

[pluviophile-bookworm]

AWAE 3x1 rewatch: thoughts and reactions

So we’re finally here, up to the (unfortunately) final season of AWAE. I will be rewatching and reacting to the first half of the season only, since I’ve already posted my reactions to episodes 5-10 when they were coming out. Just thought I’d say that here. 

For this rewatch, I will be adding onto the notes to myself I made when first watching the episode. Also, this is dedicated to Amybeth McNulty for her birthday today.

So, without further ado, I suggest we dive right in.

Can we talk about how Anne’s beautiful green ribbon gets untied and flies into the air while she is riding through the snow and she doesn’t even seem to care? I mean, she looks back and smiles at it, but doesn’t even think of trying to retrieve it… If I were her, I would have turned the horse around. Although it did seem like the ribbon was too high up in the air for her to reach. Also, her hair is beautiful flying loose in the wind… like we’ve never seen it before. [Present-day note: of course we’ll see it like that again, and from Gilbert’s point of view. That scene was magical. Truly magical]

So… Ruby still has it for Gilbert… and she has it going on strong… she’s supposed to be covering the hockey game for the school newspaper, but she’s dropped her notebook in the snow [Present-day note: again, my dislike of ruining material objects speaks here, but - I felt really bad for that notebook. It’s done nothing to deserve being ruined by the snow] because she only has eyes for one of the players… and so does Anne. I really hope the budding love between her and Gil doesn’t shatter poor little peach Ruby’s heart. [Present-day note: I’m so beyond happy she got over him before Anne realised that she was, as they would say on Friends, ‘under’ him.] She’s a dearie and deserves the best.

The hockey field (probably nothing more than a frozen lake, but this is the 19th century, so, you know) has apparently turned into a place of courtship, as Billy is giving his attentions to Josie and Moody to Diana… but her parents won’t allow it. “Too rich to be a minister’s wife?”, Josie teases. But then the attention shifts to Gilbert who stares at something undefined between Anne and Ruby, leaving it ambiguous which girl his affections are directed to. The whole thing is very awkward to watch, and with no Cole around to reassure Anne that Gilbert has a crush on her, and her only, she may as well think he’s finally returning Ruby’s sympathies. That scene is intense.

The natives appear – a man and a little girl, presumably his daughter, the girl that was mentioned in the articles promoting this season. It turns out the man is the one who makes the hockey sticks for the boys, and the difference in nature between Gilbert and Billy is once again emphasised by how they each treat him. Billy is superficially polite, saying “Thank you” when receiving his new stick, but he says it in a sort of patronising way, like the subtext here is “We whites are better than you”. Gilbert, on the other hand, is just as polite and respectful as he would be to any white man – or woman, for that matter. I mean, he lives with a black couple, so he can’t be racist at all. I mean, he’s an absolute cinnamon roll.

Anne is even better with the natives, as in, she doesn’t even notice anything about them that would make them superficially different than her and her peers. She asks if she could write an article about the man, but not about his lifestyle or different standards, but about the sticks he makes. She sees the quality work, not that the man doing it is non-white. And I bet she’ll be learning a lot about their life and culture later on, in a perfectly respectful and inclusive way. This is beautiful.

Billy comes back and is all kinds of disrespectful, so the girl, Ka’kwet, shows her dislike of him very clearly, and her father warns her against “stir[ring] trouble with the white man”… the tension can’t be ignored anymore. It can practically  be cut with a knife.

The man offers a great judgement of Billy – “The little man with the big ego” – in his own native language, so only Ka’kwet understands. But he couldn’t be more right.

Billy walks away, muttering “Savages” under his breath. Anne, however, isn’t shaken for a millisecond in her wish to visit and interview them later.

So, Billy won’t even be coming back to school, as he’s stepping into the family business. I’m hoping we won’t see much of him anymore. [Present-day note: Unfortunately, we will. And when I say unfortunately, I mean devastatingly. Before this season, I didn’t think this excuse of a guy could get any worse, but in the latter half he’s proven to be an absolute entitled monster. I loathe him, and I’m not even sorry for allowing myself to feel such negative emotions.]

Jane is “chaperoning” Josie and Billy as they walk back from the game? I mean, yes, she is his sister, but she’s younger than him, I think. But well, I’m not sure how chaperoning works in such a situation.

Anne arrives at the natives’… village? What is it, exactly? Anyway, her new budding friendship with Ka’kwet (which, the poor thing says, just means “starfish”; now she and Anne can bond over wishing they had a different name – although Anne isn’t as resentful of hers anymore, now that she’s signed the family bible as “Anne Cordelia Shirley- Cuthbert) is just so beautiful… this show is pure aesthetic. [Both visually and in terms of content.]

Marilla disapproves of Anne’s having fraternised with the natives… the tension builds up. I guess Anne won’t be stopped from seeing her new friends so easily, though.

At the Pye household, Josie’s mother is pressuring her to “get a hold” of Billy before someone else does. I mean, she’s a Pye – an unpleasant person as per the book, so she deserves him. Let her have him, as long as Gilbert is reserved for Anne and Anne alone. [Yeah, in retrospect, not even Josie deserves this imbecile. But I didn’t know back then just how bad he could be.]

So Anne’s words “seems to me I was destined to be the bride of adventure” from the teaser are part of her evening prayer – a change from the (apparently) usual plea to make her good-looking, which she now, on the brink of age 16, sees as a childish wish and not a real prayer. Anne has grown!

“Many suitors or even just one…” Come on, Anne, are you blind? You have one – The One at that. Take Notice of him… I mean, the Take Notice board will be returning as per a gif set I saw here on Tumblr, so I really hope Shirbert moves on a bit quicker than it has so far.

Bash and Mary have a baby! Since when? I don’t know, but I love it. Is Gilbert the godfather? Seeing as he is Bash’s best friend and honorary brother, he must be… oh dreams…. [Either way, he’s her Uncle Gilby]

Her name is Delphine? That’s beautiful. Also, Gilbert just kissed her forehead before going out to school… the dream has come true.

The unlikely duo of Rachel Lynde and Miss Stacy takes centre stage in the next scene where Miss Stacy says she doesn’t need a man as she has discovered self-sufficiency after her husband’s death. Mrs. Lynde, of course, wants to play matchmaker for her. As I said, this is an unlikely duo and I would very much like to know how this relationship turns out further.

Anne and Diana are dreading the nearing day of their separation as Di goes to finishing school in Paris and Anne goes to college in Queens. I really want to know how this separation will turn out. [Fortunately, I won’t have to find out, and neither will they.]

 Another line of tension builds up with the resurrection of the Take Notice board, as the girls discuss the pressure to get married soon and Josie teases Anne about becoming an old maid, as seen in the trailer.

Poor Ruby takes the blow instead of Anne as she, who will apparently be going to Queens with Anne and Gilbert – only in order to remain close to him (poor unfortunate soul), is desperate to receive any advance from him. I really don’t want her to suffer, but here she is now, crying about him not noticing her. I almost want her to not end up going to Queens, as that will most probably be the place where Shirbert’s relationship will finally bloom, and I don’t want her to witness that. [AWAE Ruby would have loved to be Book!Ruby, as she gets much more attention from him there - but she doesn’t care as much. However, seeing as how Book!Ruby ends up, AWAE Ruby should be glad she’s not quite her.]

Anne “bet[s she] can help” Ruby’s Gilbert issue – but if she is the root of the problem and she doesn’t know it, how can she possibly be of any use to poor Ruby?

I’ve never seen Anne ignore someone so hard as she just did Moody – he greeted her and she barely turned her head in his direction, muttering a quick “Hi” before returning to her conversation with the girls… good thing he is not one of her suitors. Although she doesn’t pay much more attention to Gilbert, you know. 

I see Moody has grown up a lot since last time he was seen, and he’s now a close second to Gilbert, at least the way I see it. That’s quite a glow up he’s had. But I kinda wanted Diana and Jerry to be a thing – and now I’m low-key shipping her with Moody “your dress is very… blue” Spurgeon. The poor guy has always been awkward around her; it’s obvious he likes her. [See, I told you I only ship couples that have explicit signs of potential to happen. Even though Diana and Moody didn’t happen even for a second, I’ve apparently seen something in her and Jerry stemming from that one single conversation they had. I mean, he did call her ‘the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen’, so that must have been what made me ship them - even before I had the slightest idea they were going to be a thing this season. I still can’t get over the fact that they were not endgame. In my mind, at least, they are - somewhere in that future we didn’t get to see.]

 And now the super famous “take notice” scene between Anne and Gilbert is happening… oh the tension. [You know, this scene reminds me of Vanessa Hudgens’ Rather Be with You. If you haven’t heard that song, go listen to it and then try to tell me I’m wrong here.]

Anne was apparently talking about Ruby in this scene, and Gilbert was blabbing on about “the right person” and stuff… Shirbert is on!!

Well, that was a turn of events! The second Anne mentions Ruby you can actually see Gilbert’s emotions change. Kudos to Lucas for portraying that only with his eyes. How to those kids do that? 

And poor Ruby has been observing him during the conversation, of course… she is so deluded, the unfortunate thing – she thinks his reluctance to post means he’s looking for a much more romantic advance to make… Poor thing. Shirbert will break her heart and might just ruin her friendship with Anne forever… and she dies young in canon. I just hope Moira finds a way to give her the happy ending she deserves… [And, as we know, Moira didn’t disappoint there. I’m so glad things turned out for Ruby the way they did]

Jerry can read long complicated texts now… he’s reading Frankenstein [Little did I know how important this book would be for his story arc this season], for goodness’ sake! I stan one (1) beautiful [inside and out] French farm boy!! And I ship him with Diana even more now. Although if her parents won’t allow her a future minister, how will they allow a farm boy?

Diana has actual royal ancestry… but that ancestry is “keeping [her] from Queens; from [Anne]”. Isn’t this a tragical Bro-mance right there? It is indeed.

Marilla is helping Mary with the baby… makes me wonder if she has been dreaming of one for so long but never got to have it and this is why she’s so attached to this one… this series is beautiful but dramatic… it really tugs on my heartstrings.

Diana stands up for herself and her own wishes in front of her parents… but she doesn’t achieve more than angering them that way… poor little rich girl, indeed.

Also, I just love how the Barrys express their anger. Diana sits at the piano and starts playing angrily, while her mother embroiders angrily and her father reads his newspaper angrily. [I had no idea two out of those three things could be done angrily. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which two.]

The Take Notice board has a note on it saying “Susan has her sight on Moody Spurgeon”. Who is this Susan and why is she eyeing Moody if he’s courting Diana?

Anne is super excited about turning 16… “Once upon a time this was the happiest day of my parents’ life”. I really want her to find out about her ancestry eventually. But I want her and Gilbert to finally get together more. [Of course, both of these will happen in this season. I sort of knew that even back then.]

Let’s sum up: Anne has beautiful hair, but, more importantly, dreams of finding out her family history; Ruby has it bad for Gilbert - but we already knew that; Ka’kwet and her father make their first appearance and create tension in the process; Billy is racist on top of everything - but we all expected that; courting is in full swing; Rachel Lynde plays matchmaker; lots of tension caused by the Take Notice board; eye (and eyebrow) acting; Jerry reads Frankenstein; Marilla is a really good mother, and not only to Anne; who’d have known embroidery and reading could be done angrily; who is Susan; Anne is nearing 16 and things are about to change forever.

[the-dc-killjoy]

4x12 - Old Souls

Wynonna Earp's over. I'll do pretty much anything to get another season, but shows (not that I think that this show could ever get to that point. id still love WE even if it turned into whatever Grey's Anatomy's doing rn) shouldn't overstay their welcome. If this is the end, than it was a damn fine ending!

-

The cute.

I've been watching Martina sing since I was 11 years old, and it still puts a smile on my face. Rachel was iconic as always, and I'm gonna miss the most recent addition to the Earp family. I can just imagine the chaos of her, her not really but kind of boyfriend, and Randy Nedley on a tiny boat in the middle of nowhere. Poor Nedley. Let's hope Chrissy remains the only one of his many daughter figures to catch mono.

Speaking of mononucleosis- that's such an awful transition that i'm keeping it, I believe that Wayhaught has officially christened the entire homestead. Bedroom, The Stairs, kitchen floor, barn- short of just going to pound town (i'm not getting any better with sex references tonight. am i) in a patch of grass outside, they've got everything covered. Or nothing covered if you know what i mean. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Am I getting better now?

-

The random.

Nedley walking Nicole down the isle, Wynonna walking Waverly down the isle, Doc being Waverly's best man, and Wynonna being Nicole's best friend (no she will not take a secondary title. best friend will go on her tombstone)- sigh, i'm so gay. i can't really explain what that has to do with these circumstances, but i am and this makes me happy. Rachel and Nedley (and Billy was there somewhere right?) being the only people in attendance made this the perfect pandemic wedding even though there wasn't actually a pandemic in Earp land. I was the living embodiment of the pleading face emoji when they panned over the chairs. Doll's chair hurt me. like deeply. like i'm still suffering. there aren't words. fuck, i miss him.

On a lighter note, Waverly said fuck (like eight times)!!! She technically said it already, but chainsmoking-angelic possession doesn't count, right?

I'm glad that Jeremy has this new thing with Damon, but I kinda wish things had worked out with him and Robin. He officiated a wedding, got promoted, and got a handsome date in one afternoon, so I can't be too sad about his adorable self.

Charlotte Sullivan, the jilted dress shop owner/witch, played one of the earliest (in my knowledge at least. this show was my brother's thing not mine) representation of a bi woman in Canadian media. I don't know too much about her Rookie Blue character, but if you can have tolerated the will-they-wont-they, end of the world romance of the main character's kinda mediocre relationships for a couple more seasons, I'm sure you'll find out! By the nature of Canada having 16.87 actors in total, I tend to see a lot of overlap, and I have to infodump about that somewhere. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Earping callbacks! Wynonna's truck, her motorcycle, the bullet proof vest, Nedley and Nicole's father-daughter thing, Waverly never saying the f-word (and subverting that), i'm all in, even Rachel always being stuck with juice while the adults are drinking- perfect! We had a little bit of the usual supernatural insanity, but this episode was wall to wall fanservice, and it was perfectly in-character fanservice. That's the way to go! It didn't feel forced or awkward and the edited mailbox will make me tear up on rewatch

-

The relationship. (aka i wanna talk about wyndoc and had no outline when i started this thing)

The Wyndoc goodbye was beautiful. I'm not into the whole you need one person to complete you kinda thing, but the implication that it didn't have to be romantic (implying that Wynonna's person was Waverly) was great. I felt that the scene worked perfectly, and might have been fine leaving it there if there was another season clearly on the horizon. With the fact that this was the series finale (i sighed so hard typing that. my poor lungs), I'm glad that they got their own happy ending.

-

The analysis.

Nicole's and Wynonna's as individual characters mirror each other in so many ways, but I'm just gonna wax poetic about one: their relationship with the GRT. Wynonna was hurt by the town, badly. She grew up with a steady stream of shitty adults and a few who told her to shake the demons out of her head and embraced the tough love mantra. It made a lot of sense that she left as an adult. Waverly was most likely the only reason she didn't skip town before that.

Nicole had a negative integer of adult role models in her life, with the murdered aunt and uncle and the whatever-the-fuck her parents were trying to be. Sure, a little trip to the Ghost River Triangle left her with trauma that she spent a lifetime repressing, but what's a little surviving a massacre under the six year old girl bridge. Am I right?

In their early lives, these characters had nothing but negative experiences in the aptly named town of Purgatory. Wynonna was drawn back into town by Curtis' letter just in time for her 27th birthday, and Nedley applied for Nicole to start working as a cop. Neither of them directly chose to come back to the Ghost River Triangle, but both of them did have the final say.

Wynonna decided pretty early on that she was going to stay no matter what. She already abandoned her sister once. How could she do it again with all of these monsters lurking in the shadows. As time went on, her circle of people expanded, but Waverly has always been the person that fight through hell and high water for. Even when fighting wasn't necessary, when it hurt her much more than it helped anything, she did it anyways because it was the only thing she could do to protect her sister. Wynonna thought it was the only thing she could do at all. This entire season, she's been fighting a war with herself, and her leaving, Waverly telling her that it was okay to leave, was the first time that took a break, took a breath since she arrived in Purgatory on her 27th birthday. Her child and the man she loves are out in the world, but she will be back with them at her side. Maybe after a quick road trip, maybe after a few years, but she will be back.

Nicole spent a majority of season 1 and 2 feeling like an outsider. Season 3 came with the realization that these people were her family and the Ghost River Triangle was her home. Early season 4 kinda shat all over that, oops. The rest of this season has been her finding her footing again. Nicole was a wandering soul, but she voluntarily staked herself to the land, vowing to protect it and the people within its borders for the rest of her life without the ability to leave, and she doesn't regret it. Her wife, her family, her people are all in this one not-so-sleepy Canadian town.

Nicole found her place, after a lifetime of searching, and Wynonna left, temporarily, after a lifetime of feeling trapped. They might seem like opposites, but both women call the same place home.

-

Originally, I watched this show was to cope with the ending of Agents of SHIELD (which I kind of used to cope with the ending of Killjoys, which featured Emily Andras as a writer in season 1 and has near identical humor, found family, and a healthy serving of gay and wow this is turning into a bit of advertisement isn't it), but it wormed its way into my heart. I've never quite seen a show like this. Never seemed interested in a western, even a sci-fi western. Never saw the gay couple reach OTP status both in fandom and canon. I've never seen so many fan conventions dedicated to just one show. I usually stay for just one character (and Wynonna has become one of my all time favorite characters), but I find myself connecting with so many of the beautiful people being brought to life on my screen. Wynonna, Waverly, Nicole, Rachel, Dolls, Jeremy, Doc, Nedley and so many other hilarious and heartbreaking characters make this show, and every single human who played a part in this self-proclaimed shitshow deserves a round of applause and a swig of whiskey.

The end.

[fizzip0p]

Favorite Kurt? Rank Season 1,2,3,4,5, or 6? And why?

Hi! Oh boy. Easy!

Season 4 is my favorite Kurt. He FINALLY got out of Ohio! He's THRIVING at Vogue. THAT HAIR?! That WARDROBE?! He wins fair and square against Rachel fucking Berry in a SING OFF?????? But not before SLAPPING HER DOWN WITH THE HAND OF GOD ABOUT DEFYING GRAVITY SOPHOMORE YEAR. Befriending Santana and making pacts with her?! Going through his first heart break and rising above it while forgiving and remaining friends with Blaine?! And also finding the courage to ask a guy out FOR THE FIRST TIME! My guy! THAT SELF-CONFIDENCE GROWTH IS JUST, MMMM!!! More of this please. More, more, more! Also good for him for getting into NYADA? They didn't deserve him, but he's happy so that's all that matters.

Then we have season 5 Kurt. His confidence continues to grow but he's also proving that he has faults during his growth period still (assuming Elliott is going against him for one thing - Kurt please, not everyone is out to get you). But he's still proving he's still not a helpless lamb who mindlessly goes along with things gladly like some people portray him as. He has dudes fawning over him (and me, I'm right there with them) so he's getting the hot damn recognition he's been owed for a while. He gets challenged with his relationship, and we actually get to see how he (and Blaine) handle it and CHEFS KISS. GIVE ME THAT ANGST AND GROWTH WITH FURTHERING THOSE STEPS AFTERWARDS, DUDE. YES.

Season 2 Kurt. Not AS sassy as season 1, but still proving he is stronger than he looks and can dish it well. Goes through hell to whole new extents of his bullying, but rises above in the end and is FINALLY HAPPY! He got to go to New York and fly on a plane for the first time! He got his first boyfriend finally! He got a new step-mom & step-brother! Good for him! And he discovers different hair styles that don't make him look as cherub, my boy is growing up into a MAN. Also, kurtcedes reigning supreme still.

Season 1! It's the sass for me. The comebacks. The 'I'm better than you, move' attitude that gets him through the day. The angst is beautiful as well. Also, CHEERIO KURT & FOOTBALL PLAYER KURT IN THE SAME SEASON. Also all the Kurtcedes. All of it.

Season 6 Kurt! HE. WENT. TO. THERAPY. He got his happy ending. He got a kid. He got married (not in a barn officially tho no fuck you glee writers, unacceptable. Where the marriage licence at? No where. It didn't happen officially here. Literally how the law works. Next). He's successful. He's winning at life. (Except with the hairstyle of the middle part and just Kurt no, that's why he's bumped down this low - that damn middle part. Kurt please). Could care less about returning to Ohio (though he is a better teacher than Rachel as he offers actual advice to Jane and Mason, instead of immediate validation which I am into). Walter exists, Kurt Hummel has a sugar daddy confirmed though so, good for him. Make him buy you all the things, dude. You deserve it.

Season 3. This isn't Kurt's fault. This is the writers fault for deciding he can't have anything this season. No lead in the play. No acceptance into college. No school presidency for you! Oh and someone is going to try and come for your man and belittle you constantly about how you're not good enough for him because you look like an old woman who dresses like a woman because lol original insults are original - did you guys know Kurt looks and sounds like a woman???? Also, your attempt at being supportive and encouraging is going to be shot down over a rendition of a straight guy singing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun! And you know the guy that sexually assaulted you, caused you terror, and gave you PTSD your entire sophomore/junior year while also threatening to kill you? Well, because you're a good person, he has decided he's in love with you now because you've shown him kindness like a human being. Then he's going to get upset when you reject him - because how dare you don't leave your boyfriend who just had eye surgery for HIM?? Ugh, Kurt, you're terrible! Let's make you feel MORE terrible by making YOU feel the guilt of your past bullies attempt at taking his life after you rejected him!! YAY! BOUNDARIES?! What boundaries?! Fuck boundaries! YOU SHOULDVE BEEN CONSIDERATE TO HIS FEELINGS, even if he hasn't been considerate of yours clearly up til this point. Not to mention - Kurtcedes who?! No, no, that doesn't exist this season. You're Rachel Berry's best gay this season and you only matter if it involves her now, okay? Okay. By the way, everyone needs to be reminded that you're GAY. Did you guys know he's GAY?! So gay, look at all the rainbows and unicorns. So gay Rachel wants to see her best gay in a bridesmaids dress too because he's GAY GUYS! He's soooo jealous that she's getting married her senior year of high school and he isn't because ugh he totes could get married in Ohio at that time right?! Besties4life!!! He has no other purpose except to be Rachel's BEST GAY!!!! Oh yeah, and he has a boyfriend but eh we won't focus on them too much - maybe...three episodes total. AND ONE OF THEM INCLUDES FIGHTING! Yes. Good. Only good thing to come out of this - you getting to be a lead vocalist in one competition! YAY! About time! Yep. That's all season 3 Kurt is. But he still looks good and has amazing performances as it's the season with my favorite Kurt solo. He's just background footage majority of this season if it doesn't involve Rachel so, there isn't much growth just pain. What a good senior year for him. Wow. I hate it. Return it, try again.

[literaryspinster]

Oneshot: It’s Just Emotions Taking Me Over

I wrote a quick thing based on s3 news and the @dickkorysource february prompt, trust. Yes, I know it’s October, nobody’s perfect. Enjoy! Her scream is piercing, bone rattling, heartbreaking. He hears it from all the way across the lair. They infiltrated this old, retrofitted warehouse to find Jason, to bring him back to himself before it’s too late. But it may be too late for someone else now. The fear toxin is in her and there’s no telling what damage it can do if he can’t get to her in time. 

He forgets everything, forgets his number one mission, forgets about the others, and runs toward Kory’s intense screams as fast as he can. This is what he was afraid of the first time he realized her powers had left her. It never would have happened had they been intact. She could have blocked it. And although she’s still one of the best and cleverest fighters on the team, she wouldn’t hurt Jason. 

Kory, his kind, compassionate warrior, so convinced that Crane getting his hooks and his drugs into Jason wasn’t the boy’s fault. And now, she may die by his hand unless Dick can stop it. 

She’s on the ground by the time he gets to her. She’s alone, convulsing and writhing on the cold, concrete floor, seeing something that he can’t. Jason has fled, and Dick grits his teeth in anger at his wayward charge as he falls to Kory’s side. He understands nothing she says in her flailing, shrieking horror. The only word he recognizes is “Komand’r,” because she mutters it in her sleep enough for him to know that it’s a thing. Who or what Komand’r is, Kory hasn’t disclosed yet, all he knows is that the fear toxin has zeroed in on it bigtime. 

He moves closer, careful not to get hit. No such luck, the second Kory spots him in the corner of her eye, her fist lands solidly into his jaw. She jerks back from him and against the wall, yelling her mysterious alien language, her eyes frenzied and flooded with tears. He shakes off the hit as well as he can, and swallows hard, trying to keep a cool head in spite of his racing heart.

“Kory,” he says, too lowly to be heard through her anguished screams. And he starts again, inching forward, little by little, his hand creeping toward an escrima stick. But just then, before he can touch her, something happens that he hasn’t seen in months. The deep sea green of her eyes transforms into that beautiful but deadly neon glow, and her skin begins to crackle with light. He only has one move, and it needs to be perfect or she’ll turn him into a pile of ash.

“Dick, no!” Dawn’s voice bellows behind him, he knew it wouldn’t be long before the others caught up, but he pays no one any mind but Kory, grabbing her tight around her jerking shoulders. He expects her glowing skin to be painfully hot against him, but it isn’t, she just feels like Kory. The same woman he’s held and touched so many times before, but never for reasons of violence. 

The only difference now is that he can barely contain her desperate thrashing. No more hesitating, it has to be now.

“I’m so sorry,” Dick cries, then without another second of thought, he presses the end of his electrified weapon against the side of her neck. She’s abruptly silenced at the contact, her body and vocal cords seized by the blue voltage now coursing through her. And he hates it, he hates hurting her. Thankfully, it’s only a few more seconds before her fire subsides and her eyes go dim again. When it’s over, she looks up at his face with so much confusion, pain and fear in her eyes that his own begin to slightly mist over.

“Is Kory okay?” Connor says, worry for his friend shaking his voice. Dick looks up at his team, then back down at his girl before she goes limp in his arms, finally resting.

“She will be,” Dick says.

**** 

Back at Wayne manor, Kory lays in the infirmary, still sleeping off the trauma of the mission. It had been for nothing. Jason was still gone, and Kory had been through something he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. He knows the sort of terrors one sees on Crane's toxin. He'd been the victim of it himself as a younger man. It can feel like dying over and over again, without the peace or absolution. Just the pain, and the dread, and the wishing like hell that it would end. So he sits with her, waiting for her to wake up to a face that she trusts. His chin is resting in his hand as he stares at her sleeping form. So he sits with her, waiting for her to wake up, his chin resting in his hand. There’s simply nothing else to do. If he falls asleep then it will be right here in this room.

“Hey,” Says Dawn, who’s appeared by his side with a cup of steaming coffee. “I thought this might make the waiting a little easier.”

He takes it and thanks her, and she takes the seat next to him.

“How did you know?” she asks after a long silence.

“Know what?”

“That touching her wouldn’t burn you?”

He thinks about it again. Her clothes never burn, her pink nail polish remains perfect on her fingernails, her jewelry doesn’t melt into liquid gold, the idea that there may have been some sort of protection around her that might apply to him when he touched her body was a flimsy one, but it was all he had to go on if he was going to save her life back there.

“I didn’t,” he admits. He takes a sip of his coffee, Black, with a single spoon of sugar to take the edge off, just how he likes it. But it does little to ease his mind.

“Hey,” Dawn says, a hand reaching his shoulder. “She’s going to be okay.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just…”

“What?”

“It wasn’t just this one mission,” he says. “Something’s wrong and she won’t talk to me. Something’s been wrong for months.” 

Dawn nods in agreement. And they both watch Kory as she sleeps, her chest slowly rising and falling, her red curls cascading across the pillows.

“She’s really quite beautiful,” Dawn says, and he agrees without a second thought, making her chuckle.

“What?” he says, taking his eyes off of Kory and looking at Dawn, the amused smirk on her face.

“You have feelings for her, don’t you?”

“Dawn…” he says in frustration, looking away again, not wanting to have this talk even a little.

“What? I see the way you look at her, do you really think I don’t know? That the whole team doesn’t know?”

He scrubs a hand over his forehead. “It’s complicated.”

“No, I don’t think it’s complicated. I think it’s really, very simple.”

They’re quiet again. He won’t confirm Dawn’s suspicions, but he doesn’t deny them either. Because it is true, and it is simple. He’s had feelings for Kory as long as he’s known her, and they’re only getting stronger. And if she doesn’t talk to him about what’s going on he might just lose it.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Dawn says, those traces of humor at his expense still in her voice, and she goes.

Before long, in spite of the coffee, he begins to nod off. It’s been too long since he’s slept. He’s better now, isn’t he? At being a good leader, a good friend, a good… whatever he is to Kory. And yet, Jason is still gone, still fighting them at every chance, Rachel is still with Donna in Themyscira, helping her adjust to the trauma of death and resurrection, and Kory is still hiding something. For all of these reasons he hasn’t slept a full night in three months.

He only comes to again when Kory starts to stir and sigh, at that, he’s wide awake and standing to join her next to the bed.

“Hey,” he says in a soft voice.

“Hey,” she says back with a warm, sleepy simper. “What happened?”

“You had fear toxin in you, but it’s okay. You’re okay now.”

She nods, but then screws up her face as she recalls something. “Did you taze me Grayson?”

He cringes from the guilt, “I don’t want to lie to you.”

She lets out a little laugh, and he laughs too, relieved that she’s better, and that she doesn’t blame him.

 “Kory,” he says, serious now, gently touching her hair. “Remember a little after we first met, when you told me I was afraid to say who I was?”

She answers with a light nod.

“Well, I feel like these days, you’re afraid to talk about what’s going on with you. With your powers.”

“I haven’t been off my game,” she argues.

“No, you haven’t, that’s not what this is about. I’m just worried. That’s all.”

She leans a little into the hand still softly stroking her hair. “I’m not scared to talk about it.” She says, her voice cracking. “I’m sad.”

“What are you sad about?”

There is so much in her eyes that he can’t decipher, so much pain that he can’t truly feel. And maybe she doesn’t want him to. He’d hidden who he really was from everyone for so long, because he didn’t think they’d like what they saw. But Kory is different, she wants to protect all of them, not just herself. It’s as clear as day. But no matter what she tells him, or doesn’t tell him, she has to know that he’s right here. 

“I felt them come back, my powers,” she says, looking at her hand, she tenses a bit, as if trying to do it again, to no avail. “Because when I was drugged, there was nothing holding me back but fear. Fear is nothing compared to having them all come true at once. That’s what happened to me three months ago.”

As she continues to talk, to unburden herself, he listens, and holds her hand and thumbs away her tears. And maybe this is the first step towards her finally healing. He wishes so hard that she didn't have to go through what she did back there for it to happen, but they’re past that. All that matters now is the two of them figuring it out, together.

[twoidiotwriters1]

Déjà Vu (Or are we losing our minds?) XI -Modern!Shirbert

A/N: Ngl This is one of my favourites -Danny

Words: 3,377

Series’ Masterlist

Previous Chapter // Next Chapter

Chapter Eleven: Everyone's enemy is on their wrist.

'She was not a chapter,

                 She was the whole story.'

The date had gone alright, though the girl wasn't very interested in having a second meeting. He couldn't blame her, he'd been absent half of the time. Whenever a red glimpse of something would catch his eye he would perk up in his seat only to be met with disappointment.

However, he lied to his friends saying he'd had a blast and maybe he'd go out with the girl another day, though he already knew that was never going to happen.

He fell face-first on his bed with a groan, not even trying to change into his pyjamas, and in a matter of seconds, he was fast asleep.

__________________

Anne was officially having a bad Christmas break.

She was alone in her room, binge-watching movies and bawling. Fortunately, Marilla and Matthew had decided to visit Rachel so she was alone, otherwise, they'd be very worried about her mental health.

She'd considered calling either Cole or Diana, but she decided not to, she didn't want to ruin their holidays. She could've called Jerry, but he'd said something about taking his siblings to meet Santa and Anne didn't feel like going out and being miserable in public.

So she was alone and crying to shitty rom-coms. It wasn't even that she was crying for Roy, she was just... lonely. She didn't need a relationship to feel whole, but Roy had taken advantage of her naivety, he'd tricked her into believing he was the one, only to crush every single one of her dreams by cheating on her.

In conclusion, Anne just felt like her first experience had been enough to obliterate all her optimism. Love was a decision. Soulmates were a scam, and she was a twenty-three-year-old destined to be alone forever.

__________________

Anne was moving into her new apartment and slowly building the life she wanted to have forever.

There was a little problem, though. Her soulmate was an asshole.

Now, you're not obliged to marry your soulmate, or to love them romantically. But Anne has always dreamed about her sweet, beautiful wedding, and she'd always dreamed it would be with her soulmate, so she was determined to make it work.

Roy didn't agree. He was a 'free soul', and he wanted to stay that way. Even though Anne loved him like she'd never loved anyone before.

Either way, Roy was her soulmate and -someone knocked on the door, Anne didn't hear it- it was her duty to help him see they were meant to be and—

The knocks became so insistent and loud that the ground vibrated under her feet. She took off her earphones and ran up to the door, thinking that maybe it was the pizza she'd ordered.

"Sorry!" She ran to get her bag. "Coming!"

When she opened the door, however, there was no pizza delivery. Instead, a very grumpy-looking man was glaring at her, and he was holding...

"Rusty!" Anne gasped.

"Your cat jumped on me when I climbing up the stairs!" He exclaimed.

"How do you know it's mine?"

"Well, because you're the new neighbour and this monster wasn't here yesterday," The man frowned. "And you just called it Rusty!"

"He's not a monster, he's playful!"

"Yeah, well, he didn't feel playful when he tried to gauge my eyes out!"

"Oh, you're one of those," Anne scoffed, grabbing her cat and gently placing him on the kitchen counter.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Her new neighbour scowled at her.

"You think cats are heartless beings that only wish to kill humans. As if humans are actually that worthy..."

He gaped and moved his mouth without actually speaking, then he just scoffed and turned around.

"You know what, I don't have time for this. I just came back from a nightshift and I'm tired, just don't let it happen again..."

Anne felt a sting of annoyance, who was he to boss her around?

The man left before she could say anything to him, but to her dismay, he barely walked a few meters before entering the apartment next to hers. That was not ideal.

"A little help here, Anne?" Diana called from the stairs.

The woman helped Diana carry the box, she also told her all about the unfortunate incident with the man living next door, and Diana let out a quiet gasp.

"You annoyed Dr Blythe? No, Anne! I was planning on asking him out!"

"It's not my fault he's an idiot!" She said defensively. "You can ask him out if you want, but I must say you can do better than a grumpy dude..."

"Gilbert's not grumpy! He was so kind to me when I came to see the apartment the first time! You probably had the misfortune to get on his nerves while he was sleep-deprived. He works a lot..."

Anne dropped the box abruptly.

"How did you call him?"

"What? Gilbert?" She repeated. "Well, that's his name."

"Ohohoh!" Anne hurriedly lifted her right sleeve. "No no no no Diana! You can't date him!"

"What?!" Diana got closer and read the thin letters across Anne's wrist. "Oh, c'mon, Anne! Just one date?"

"No! There's a reason I'll hate him, what if the reason is that he'll break your heart?" Anne hid the name and shook her head energetically "You can't date him."

The rules were simple. Two names tattooed on your body. One soulmate, one swore enemy. Roy was her soulmate, she'd loved him for years. This Gilbert was destined to be her personal headache for a long, long time. Which explained why Rusty had been so rude to him, he could probably sense the bad vibes.

"What kind of name is Gilbert, anyway?" Anne scoffed. "Sounds like an idiot..."

"He's not. He really isn't," Diana said, closing the door behind her. "Anne please, just listen to me, he's sweet and smart and he's a doctor!"

"And he's meant to make my life a living hell!" Anne finished.

***

All Gilbert wanted was to have a six-hour nap. Why did God hate him?

The girls moving next door were loud and continued to argue through the day, although he couldn't hear what were they fighting about. Either way, he just wanted to have a quiet evening.

He never got his quiet evening, that night nor the next four. The redheaded nightmare was always causing some kind of mishap, he could hear things falling and breaking, he even heard her scream 'Fire!' once and her roommate's voice going 'ANNE, NOT AGAIN–'

Anne.

He had that name on his wrist.

No no no no no no.

There's no way this girl was his soulmate.

***

It was 7 am on a Saturday and Anne was coming back from yet another sleepless night fighting with Roy. Her eyes felt heavy, and her nose was red from the cold and the crying. She was thankful she'd come home early, Diana was probably either taking a shower or still sleeping, but at least she wouldn't be able to see how messy she looked.

Just as she was reaching the landing of her floor, a figure crashed against her, sending her back down the stairs. Anne yelped and landed weirdly on her wrist. She heard Gilbert swearing loudly and rushing to her side.

"Great," She muttered in anger. "'Course you had to be here..."

"I'm so sorry!" Gilbert kneeled next to her. "Are you injured?"

"Just my pride," She replied bluntly. "Listen, doctor, why don't you leave me alone? I can take care of myself."

"How do you..?" He shook his head. "Nevermind. Please stop acting tough and let me help you, it's my fault you fell... though you should see where you're walking from time to time..."

"You're trying to help me or are you trying to make me hate you more?"

"Hate– Hate me?" He asked in surprise. "Why do you hate me?"

"Because you're my enemy, that's why!"

"What?" He frowned. "You think I'm your–?"

"I don't think, I know," She stood up hastily, refusing his help. "You, Gilbert Blythe, are my swore enemy. And you should know that by now, my name must be on your wrist too, take a look. I'm Anne."

Gilbert just stared at her, she could not tell what that meant, but it wasn't the spiteful glare she was expecting.

"Okay," He said after a moment. "...Yeah, if that makes sense to you..."

"What's that supposed to– argh!"

Gilbert forced her to sit back on the steps as he looked for injuries. When he found his broken wrist, he nodded once and stood up.

"You're coming with me," He said, grabbing her bag and hanging it over his shoulder. "C'mon, we have to fix that hand."

"I'm not going anywhere with you!" Anne exclaimed. "What if this is just a plan to kill me?"

"Oh yes, Anne. I just found out you're my enemy so of course, my first reaction will be to try and murder you," He raised a brow. "I'm taking you to the hospital, don't be dramatic."

Anne swore under her breath, but she didn't refuse his help this time as he gently pulled her up to her feet. Both adults walked quietly side by side until Anne spoke in a sort of childish manner.

"I need a nap..."

"That makes two of us," He huffed. "You are the loudest neighbour ever, I haven't been able to sleep at all whenever you're home."

"I prefer the term feisty," She said. "You could've just knocked on our door and told me to be quiet."

"Yeah? And you surely would've reacted in a gentle fashion, right?"

Anne turned up her nose, ignoring the sarcastic way he'd said it.

"Well of course! I'm not a monster! Even though you insist on calling me and my cat that way..."

"I never called you a monster," He said. "I called you loud. And rude. And–"

"Yeah okay, got it."

Once in the road, Gilbert remained silent, but she could feel him staring out of the corner of his eye. She kept her brows furrowed, not only because of him but because of her fight with Roy. She couldn't even remember what was the fight about, but she just knew it had been awful, and sometimes she just wanted to chuck that big head of his down the–

"We're here!" Gilbert turned to look at her. "C'mon, the faster we heal you the quicker you can walk away from your 'enemy'."

Anne stared at him without knowing whether if he was mocking or not. He seemed amused, but Anne didn't know why.

"Why are you acting like it's a joke? You know we're enemies, I'm on your wrist!"

"Well, yeah, there's an Anne on my wrist," Gilbert raised a brow. "But who says it's you?"

"Because I have you on my wrist! And Gilbert is not a common name these days, is it? I've never heard it until now, honestly–"

The man laughed, his whole face lit up and he looked away, slightly shaking his head.

"What?" She groaned. "What's so funny?"

"You're so upset about this!" He snorted. "You know that whole thing about enemies and soulmates is only relevant if you're like twelve, right?"

Anne had heard enough. Of course her enemy was going to be her complete opposite, of course he was going to be blunt and sceptic, and annoying and so so boring!

***

He knew Anne was his soulmate for the sole fact that the name on his left wrist was a man's. One that he knew already, and he disliked deeply. Although just like he'd said, hating out loud was a very childish thing to do. Or at least, that was his opinion.

However, he could not bring himself to clear things out. She was so determined on hating him it was almost cute, she was really trying. Besides, messing with his soulmate for a bit longer sounded fun, and she would find out the truth eventually, once she met her real nemesis.

He waited until Anne was fixed and ready, he didn't want to start his shift worrying about leaving her alone.

Anne was less pouty and defensive when she walked out, but now she looked overworked. She'd looked exhausted all morning, and he wondered if he was the real reason why she was so angry to start with.

"Let's get you lunch," He told her. When he noticed she was about to argue back, he added, "my treat! I pushed you down the stairs, after all. Consider this your payback, once we're even you can hate me all you want and I can, I don't know, try to poison your cat or something."

Anne stared at him in alarm.

" If something ever happens to my cat I'll kill you, Blythe."

***

Gilbert insisted on taking her home, and she was (regrettably) not as angry at him as before. That could always change though, enemies don't have to hate each other all the time, it'd be tiring.

"Did you mean what you say a while ago?" She questioned. "About soulmates and rivals not being relevant unless you're a kid?"

"Well... a bit," He shrugged. "What I meant to say is that you shouldn't let it consume you. Life is about way more than just the people you're meant to meet. And if you really think about it, it's just two people, you'll meet more throughout the course of your life, and who's to say you won't love or hate them more than the ones that marked you?"

Anne stared at him having nothing to say. It was weird, being rendered speechless. That doesn't happen to her often. Gilbert must've misread this, since he blushed madly and shook his head.

"I'm talking nonsense. Sorry, everyone always tells me that... Apparently, I'm too unrealistic to work in the medical field," He chuckled. "Like that makes me any less good..."

"I think that what you said was beautiful," It was her turn to get flustered. "Er... well, but you should check that narcissistic speech you've got."

"I prefer the term confident," He smiled.

"Sure you do..."

As they reached her doorstep, she stopped and turned, staring at him with a little frown.

"I gotta ask, Blythe. Any normal person would be at least a bit wary around their foe. Even if you are one of those who think 'keep your enemies close' is a wise move."

"You didn't ask anything," He said with a little smile.

"I'm getting to that! Geez," She rolled her eyes. "Why are you so unbothered about this? Do you... Have you not... you know, met your soulmate?"

"Have you?"

"Yeah."

***

He was not expecting that answer. He had to play it cool, though, so he tried his best to hide his disappointment.

"Oh."

Yeah, that'll do it.

Idiot.

Maybe he'd gotten two enemies? That'd be really shitty.

Then again, God really did hate him.

"Listen, Anne," He tried again. "It's a silly belief, you don't have to waste your time hating me if you don't want to. Honestly, I think it'd do us a favour, wouldn't it be better to simply stay away from your nemesis now that you know who he is?"

"I... I guess," She replied, but she didn't sound as certain as before. "So you really haven't met your person?"

Gilbert hesitated, then decided to keep up his lighthearted attitude.

"I mean, I met the other name a while ago, when I was in Highschool," He admitted. "But I'm starting to think that maybe I judged him wrong... although he was an asshole and I can't see myself spending my nights with such an idiot."

Anne let out a soft giggle.

"Maybe you were too harsh on him? Like I was with you?"

"Well, the thing is that I never liked him. From the moment I met him I just knew he was a fool. But wouldn't it be funny if I give him a call and end up falling for him now?" He snorted. "After all the stuff I said about him when I was a kid... Even gave him a nickname: 'Royal piece of shit'. It took me like five seconds. That's his real name. Royal."

"What?"

"I know, right? Who calls his son like that?"

"Royal?" She insisted. "As in Roy?"

"I'm pretty sure it's Roy as in Royal," He tilted his head. "Why?"

"Royal Garner?"

"Yeah! Wait– You know him?"

Anne hurriedly took off her jacket and threw it aside, showing him her wrist.

"I got him too!" Anne exclaimed. "But he's my... Oh my god! I hate him!" She laughed sort of maniacally. "I hate his guts! Oh god, I'm so relieved! I thought I was stuck with a shitty partner! Oh my..." She gazed down in sudden realization. "I've been holding back all my opinions on him because I thought he was my soulmate! I had a crush on him and when we started dating he turned out to be awful! I assumed you were my enemy because, well, I liked him first and I never thought I'd like my enemy! And I just straight-up disliked you the first time we talked!"

Gilbert was having a hard time processing all the information Anne was dropping on him.

"Wait," He said a bit stupidly. "Does that mean we're meant to hate the same person?"

"Yeah!" She said brightly. "I'm going to break up with him right now!"

She turned around and opened the door to her apartment, then stopped again.

"Are you free on Sunday?"

"Wha– Yeah, I guess?" He said, still trying to understand what was happening. "You're dating Roy Garner?"

"Technically yes, but that's about to change!" She was suddenly so giddy it looked like she'd absorbed all his energy. "I'll break up with him and then I'll take you out this Sunday– Consider it a thank you for paying my lunch today– And an apology for being such a shitty soulmate..."

"You're far from being shitty, Anne," He declared. He wasn't sure of what was going on, but it seemed he'd gotten a date with his soulmate, so he wasn't complaining. "See you Sunday, then?"

"See you!" She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek before stepping into her apartment and closing the door.

"Okay," He mumbled, then let out a burst of nervous laughter. "Okay..."

__________________

Gilbert woke up in a wonderful mood. Bash and Mary thought it had to do with the girl he'd met yesterday, but they were wrong.

In Gilbert's mind, there was only room for a certain redhead, one he now knew the name of.

Anne.

However, as the day continued its course, Gilbert lost his spark. He was tired of just dreaming.

It sounded crazy, but he was sure this girl was real, and he'd seen her somewhere in real life, he just knew it...

And now he had a clue in the shape of none other but his Highschool rival. Royal 'Roy' Garner. What harm could come from trying? He'd be careful not to show any signs of craziness around his friends, that was all.

He was going to find her.

__________________

Anne's phone woke her up with a start.

'Gotta call Roy', She thought drowsily. When she realized that thought was stupid she took a moment to go back to reality.

Diana was calling, and she was asking for a night out with her best friend before Christmas.

When she hung up, her finger hovered over the picture she'd been reluctant to delete the day before. She pressed the button without hesitation this time.

"I don't need his pictures to remember, not that the memories were that good, anyway," Anne sentenced. "Just like Gilbert said–"

The young woman stopped mid-sentence.

Who the hell was Gilbert?

He's a doctor.

And... a prince? He certainly looked like one...

She was pretty sure he'd been the same working at a flower shop... and the coffee shop.

He was the guy in her dreams.

"What the fuck," She said with a soft chuckle. "I have a wild mind..."

Surely this was just another of her imaginings, after all, she was pretty good at dreaming things.

"Anne! Breakfast is ready!"

Anne got up, forgetting half of her dream as she got dressed.

"Coming, Marilla!"

Taglist.

@ninizkd @http-itsrebecca @fuckthisshitimoutyall @just-here-to-escape-from-reality​​ @little-boats-on-a-lake @i-am-scared-and-useless-bisexual @Skarlygonzalez

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What if the Animorphs could use magic-like, in addition to the morphing?

All her life, Cassie’s dad has treated raccoons and ferrets, the occasional goose or hawk.  And for as long as she can remember, he’s treated other things too.  There was the pine marten with tiny horns that the long-fingered man with the scars on his face brought from under his coat.  There’s the seahorse that buzzes up to their door on the regular, gossamer fins beating hummingbird-fast at the air as it hovers five feet off the ground.  There are winged foxes and antlered rabbits and animals for which Cassie has no comparison.

Walter never comments on them directly.  Instead he skids the Venetian blinds closed and pulls out his other kit — the one with bone needles and spools of spider silk and not a trace of metal throughout — and gets to work.  Cassie can’t remember how she learned never to comment directly on these night customers.  But she knows.  She does not mention them aloud.  Most of all, she does not thank them or ask for favors.

They never pay in coin, these visitors that step over the back threshold and never come when there is road salt on the ground.  It doesn’t matter.  Every stock share Walter and Michelle buy proves to be lucky; every item they store in the downstairs refrigerator never spoils.  Michelle can heal animals at the Gardens that no one else can save.  Cassie’s parents are careful never to ask for these gifts, or indeed express any opinion on them at all.  Their night visitors bargain exactingly, mercilessly, without quarter.  The only recourse is not to bargain with them at all.

Tobias doesn’t believe he’s a changeling.  Not really.  He’s pretty sure that’s just something his aunt says to excuse how little she cares about him.  That doesn’t stop him from leaving a capful of her Rodda’s clotted cream on his windowsill every night, especially because he wakes every morning to find the cream gone.  Just in case, he tells himself.  Just in case his real family is out there somewhere, keeping an eye on him.

Jake has no thoughts on magic or fae.  If asked he’d shrug and casually disbelieve.  But he listened all the same when his Grandpa G whispered the secret to controlling a golem, to making life of clay.  To destroying that life with a press of the thumb.

Marco learned not to count anything out he hasn’t seen disproven with his own eyes.  Eva lit candles for the Virgin Mother and for the ancestors, for Rihannon and Guabancex and the Holy Ghost.  Marco doesn’t always honor the old rituals, but he also doesn’t cross still waters or take favors from strangers.  He always cleans spilled salt and keeps a tiny iron knife tucked into one pocket.  He wears his underwear inside out and spits on the floor after wishing good luck.  He hedges his bets.

Rachel’s heard of the old gods, of course she has.  They were the fascination of her entire primary school year for a full week, just after unicorns and slightly before everyone became silly amateur witches.

Andalite culture frowns on superstition, and so Ax does as well.  Outwardly, at least.  That means not telling anyone how thoroughly, how casually, Elfangor has always believed in magic.  It means not thinking of the still pool of water, the silver knife, the other scrying tools from eldritch andalite culture… and the way his brother would, just sometimes, know things it was surely impossible for anyone to have seen.

“I put no faith in magic,” Marco says, when Cassie tells them about her dreams.  “I don’t trust it, and neither should you.”

«Fine, then.»  Tobias glares at him.  «Explain how we had the same dream, about the same voice, every single night.  Go ahead.  We’re waiting.»

Andalite magic isn’t like Earth magic, they’ll come to learn.  And sometimes the magic and technology are hard to tell apart at a glance.

It was just a long-distance call, Ax insists when they find him.  He doesn’t know how they talked to a whale.  He can’t explain why Tobias, but not any of the others, would have received that call.  Surely it doesn’t mean anything.  Technology only looks like magic, when viewed from a distance.

Tobias sees the rabbit disappear when it enters the unnaturally round circle of mushrooms.  But he’s hungry, and he’s tired, and the rabbit is fat and white and moving slow.  He doesn’t pull up from the dive in time.  Instead he follows it inside—

And hits the ground on two stubby-toed feet, strong human arms thrown out for balance.  He’s naked, but that seems incidental.  He’s human.  He hasn’t been human for almost six months.

Mostly human.  There are feathers on his arms and along his back.  He sees through hawk eyes and hears with hawk ears, a raptor’s head on top of a human body.  He thinks of ancient Egypt, of that god with the ankh, when he imagines how he must look.

And then he staggers back several steps, all the way to the edge of the suddenly-vast circle of mushrooms, at the sight of the beings who approach.  Their leader is a tall man made even taller by the enormous antlers that sprout from his head.  Behind him walk trees who are also teenage girls, goats upright on two legs, an entire court of half-human half-other beings.

Tobias’s whole body is cold with fear.  He tries to fly, but his wings cannot lift heavy human bones.  Tries to speak, and a hawk’s harsh cry comes out of his mouth.

“Come, little hunter,” the king who is both stag and man says.  “Dance with us.”

«What will you give me if I do?» Tobias asks, finding a different voice.  A stupid and brave thing to say.

The king smiles.  “An answer to one question.”

Tobias doesn’t ask what’ll happen if he refuses.  He’s no fool.  So when they start to dance, he joins the flow of their bodies.

His body moves with grace and speed impossible to him.  There is no music, other than the endless eerie wails of the other dancers.  The dance rages around him, drags him down into dizzy undertow.  He can either keep up, or he can be crushed underfoot.  Those are the only options.  He dances.

It’s been no time at all.  It’s been years.  Exhaustion sets in.  Hunger.  Thirst.

But Tobias is no fool.  He refuses their cordials and fruits, their temptations of hide and bone.  The glistening pomegranates and airy cakes are easy to ignore.  The fresh-killed snake, the blood-warm fox… Those are much harder.

Once, they bring before him a plump, struggling rabbit.  It’s enormous, fat and juicy and still kicking, and he feels himself weaken.  But just before he swings his enormous beak forward to rip at the flesh, he catches a hint of its true reflection in the eyes of the river-maiden who holds it.

It’s not a rabbit.  It has the seeming of a rabbit, but even now he can hear its cries.  Close to rabbit cries, close… but not quite.

Tobias rears back.  He doesn’t see what happens to the not-a-rabbit, because he chooses not to.  And it’s easier after that, so much easier, to refuse the haunches and marrows that they try to pass his way.

Maybe that’s why they throw the net over him.  Darkness and pain cage him in.  His inner hawk panics, screaming and breaking bones against its sides.  But a half-remembered bit of lore surges to the front of his human mind.

He morphs.  Speed is of the essence, and he twists down to the shape of a garter snake he has never acquired.  The net tightens, so he grows large.  Becomes one of the hork-bajir that haunt his nightmares, with blades to slash the net.  So it becomes sticky and dense, and he becomes a spider who can scuttle along its lines.  It grows heavy enough to crush him, so he surges upward and out as a stegosaurus.  It ensnares him with clever knots, and he grows human fingers that he might untie them.  It weights him down, so he goes hawk to fly free.  It becomes fibers that abrade and embed, so he takes on andalite shape to slash the bindings to pieces.

After that, the net falls away.  He stares around the clearing in all four directions at once, seeing them now for what they really are.  His chest is heaving, his tail blade trembling.  He’s desperately tired, but here is no place to sleep.

The woman whose hair drags clear the ground steps forward.  She presses a hand against his cheek, and just like that he’s the human-hawk again.  Only the andalite stalk eyes remain, along with the taloned feet of a hork-bajir.  The world around him remains vicious and savage and beautiful.

“You have entertained us well, little changeling,” she says.  “You may go now.”

«Wait—»  Tobias knows it’s stupid to argue, but he also knows it’s even stupider to leave here with a bargain unresolved.  «My question.»  He takes a breath, filling human lungs nestled between andalite hearts.  «What am I?»

The woman laughs, a tinkling sound that fills the clearing.  “My dear boy, there’s no need to ask us directly, not after we just spent all evening answering you.”

And just like that, Tobias is a hawk.  Or something with the seeming of a hawk.  He sits on the ground just outside an ordinary circle of mushrooms, the rabbit he followed mere inches away.

He watches it leave.  He’s not hungry for rabbit anymore, and suspects he might never be again.

Little changeling, she called him.  And he cannot help but wonder what might’ve become of the boy he replaced, remembering the not-a-rabbit’s helpless cries.

“Fuck it,” Marco says.  Only it comes out like “f-f-f-f-f-fuck i-t-t-t-t” because his teeth are chattering so hard.  They ended up somewhere covered with ice and snow and devoid of life except for polar bears.  No.  Scratch that.  They’re nowhere.  This place might as well be the surface of the fucking moon.

Which is why he’s gone just crazy enough through some combination of hypothermia and desperation to be trying this now.  His fingertips and toes are already grey-white with frostbite at the edges.  Ax is upright for now, but has already collapsed twice.  They’re fucked.  Utterly and completely fucked.

Unless, of course, Marco can coax fire from ice.

The theory behind it is perfectly sound.  Take a beam of sunlight, direct it through a curved lens — in this case a chunk of ice floe that Ax carved with his tail and Marco shaped with what little heat is left in his hands — and that’ll generate heat.  Generate enough heat, and the kindling should ignite.

Only, if you stop to think about it for half a second, that’ll never work in an environment as cold as this one.  If Marco stops to think, he’ll remember that the tiny pile of kindling will burn up in an instant if it even combusts at all.

The kindling is a pile of hair, blond and brown, black and blue.  And a single crumpled feather, striped in brown and gold.  A small, sad pile.  But also: A sacrifice.  An evocation.

It shouldn’t work.  It shouldn’t.

Cassie is murmuring something that Marco elects to ignore.  Because Marco doesn’t believe in astrotheology.  He doesn’t believe in pyromancy.  He just needs to believe in reality.

The sun’s own light casts through the fragment of glacier in his hand.  The concentrated seed of its power rests squarely in that nest of hair.  Don’t move, Marco wills his aching, cold-numb hands.  Don’t move.  Focus.  Breathe.  Don’t move.  Believe.

Smoke curls.  Jake makes a noise, cutting himself off.  Marco imagines his own mind, focusing in a beam just like that weak Arctic sunlight.  Imagines it bending into a pure, strong core with the power of that ice.  The world fades away.  The cold recedes, or maybe that’s just the final stages of hypothermia setting in.

The hair puts up a tiny curl of flame.  The flame gutters and grows.  It races along strand after strand.  The smell is something animal and awful, but the fire is growing.  It’s becoming red at the edge and blue at its core, hotter than the meager fuel should allow.  Marco’s teeth are clenched so hard they cannot chatter, his whole body clenched around where the dying skin of his hands presses with unforgiving power against the ice that kills it.

The flame grows.  It grows.  It’s not possible, and that very fact seems to add strength to its stubbornness.

It’s candle-sized by now.  It could illuminate a lantern.  It’s throwing shadows and glow onto Cassie’s face where she crouches across from him, still chanting.  It’s a fistful of flame.  It’s a campfire.

The hair is gone by now.  Even the ice is melting away, every drop of water that hits the flames becoming like oil in its power.

Marco sits down, hard, on the now-slushy ice.  Jake is leaning forward, laughing, crying, tears frozen to his face.  Rachel thrusts both hands at the flames, fingers starting to unfurl from their painful permanent clench.  Even the frostbite on Cassie’s nose and Ax’s stalk-eyes is visibly healing, another impossibility even with the hearthfire now flowing strong between them.

“This,” Marco whispers, sunning himself in the heat of cannot-be, “is insane.”

Cassie steps out into the daylight beyond the barn, half-startled as always by the shock of its heat.  She isn’t like Marco; she doesn’t need explanations or words.  Her father has always just focused on using whatever works, without trying to apply her mother’s formal empiricism.  Sometimes the creatures bring themselves in for healing, and usually when they do they don’t look like any animal that has ever appeared in one of Michelle’s zoology textbooks.

Sometimes Walter sits out all night with a deer’s head cradled in his lap, a snake wound through both his hands, or one of the beings who is neither mammal nor reptile sheltered by the curve of his body.  He wills, on those nights, and sometimes a broken-legged deer will run free or a fatally ill snake will roll healthy from his palms when he’s done.  Whenever that happens, whenever the will succeeds, he’ll come inside with a few more white hairs, slightly more of a limp in the creeping arthritis of his knee.  That’s the reason Cassie isn���t allowed to join her father on those nights, isn’t allowed to help beyond her mother’s methods: needles full of cortisone, needles trailing twine.

It’s also the reason she doesn’t know how this works.  She suspects that her father doesn’t know either — Walter’s the type to shrug and say they can either explain the molecular structure of water or they can fill this water trough that’s empty now, and only one will ensure the horses remain healthy on a day this warm.  So maybe not knowing isn’t a hindrance, not when it comes to willing wellness to travel from her body into another.

The being she holds in her hands has certainly never appeared in any of Michelle’s books.  Which is part of the reason that Earth’s weak yellow sun, giver of both cancer and trees, can do nothing for her.

Aftran needs kandrona, needs the rich light of her homeworld.  Cassie has no kandrona to give.

“Please,” Cassie whispers.  She holds the fragile little body toward the sky, an offering to Sol.  “Please, just hold on for a little while longer.”

Aftran doesn’t answer.  Aftran cannot hear her, cannot see the brilliant star that warms them both.

Cassie can feel the weakness inside of Aftran, the hunger.  Tonight they’ll take her to the sea.  Tonight they’ll give her whale DNA, and a new chance at life.  She only has to make it that long.

She’s not sure when the trance begins, or how long it lasts.  Later, she’ll have no memory of her knees giving out and her shins hitting the dirt, or of the hours she spends with her hands raised toward the sky in supplication.

It’s Aftran who wakes her.  Aftran who sends a jolt of something through the connection they’ve shared ever since their minds were briefly one.  It jars Cassie and causes her to topple over.

Aftran is strong, scrunching and stretching fins as she basks in the glow of a sun she shouldn’t even be able to see or feel.  Cassie is weak, joint-aching and head-pounding as she fights unconsciousness.  The feeling is so overpowering, so painful and unlike anything she’s experienced before, that it takes Cassie several seconds of lying on her side fighting even to breathe to recognize this as hunger.

Not hunger, famine.  The dangerous kind that leaves her body screaming for sustenance, devouring its own fats and muscles in its desperation to find more fuel for the fire that keeps her alive.  Cassie has grown up secure, with a full refrigerator and loving parents.  This ravening full-body ache brings to mind her great-grandmother’s stories of sharecroppers so desperate as to devour earthworms and hay seeds.

But Cassie has it easy.  She is on her own planet, and she is a child of plenty.  All she needs to do is crawl the ten feet to her parents’ vegetable patch.  To rip the first of the row of carrots from the ground, rolling the dirt off between her palms before she eats it.  Stealing the sun’s sustenance from this plant that has worked so hard to store it.

She is human.  She cannot make her own energy from suns’ light like Aftran.  To be human is to murder and devour just to stay alive.  But to be human is to choose, at times like these, to share the plenty that surrounds her.

Aftran rests on the back of Cassie’s wrist now.  Stronger than she has any right to be.  Cassie rips the life from another carrot, and stops for a moment of gratitude before she begins to devour.

Rachel takes time to gather the supplies.  A mason jar emptied of jam.  Nails and tacks and razor blades, sharp nasty iron and steel to keep evil at bay.  Sea salt and rosemary to purify and protect, layered inside the jar overtop.  And then, last of all, several ounces of her own urine.  To mark it as hers, old-school the way that wolves do.  The lid sealed with wax from a black-tallow candle, wrapped with red ribbon to keep the magic inside.  She buries it at the edge of her yard, whispering invocations to Aphrodite and Ares as she does.

She can’t take it with her, especially not when she morphs, but she can create a bubble the length and width of the property.  She can carve out a space for herself and her mom, Sara and Jordan, that no yeerk can enter.  She has power.

She tests it one time, calling Mr. Chapman to come pick up Melissa at her place.  Smiling, lips pulled tight with glee and anger, she watches him get to the edge of the property line and… stop.  

Watches as his head shakes, his body shifts, and he comes no further.  The spell holds.  The yeerk leaves.

And then comes the day when Melissa herself freezes at the edge of the yard, an expression of confusion on her face.  She leaves, after a while.  Only it’s not really her leaving.  Not anymore.

Rachel doesn’t feel so smug about the spell, after that.

«Please be quiet,» Ax says, after the fourth or fifth time Jake asks Cassie in an undertone how much longer this is going to take.  «I am not confident in this process, and cannot do with distractions.»

They stand at the edge of a waterfall deep in the California woods.  It’s not much, less than ten feet tall, but that’s not what’s important.  What’s important is the place, and the harmony of that place.

What’s important, Ax knows, is the entropy.  Water eroding rocks, breaking down walls.  Trees broken apart by murmurations of termites and fractals of rot.  Nature building and pulling down, creating and destroying, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything out of one beautiful form into another.

Entropy is a release of cosmic energy.  That’s what Elfangor taught him, anyway.  And if he does it right, if he feels this place — water in his hooves, wind in his fur, seeing and feeling and becoming a part of that steady joyous death — he can harness and direct some small fraction of that energy.

The energy flows out of him, and down the bond.  He thinks he can feel it.  His strength becoming Tobias’s, Tobias’s pain becoming his.

“Is it working?”  Jake loses patience again.

«I believe it might be,» Ax says.  He reaches out, all four eyes closed, and takes Jake’s hand in his.  A second human hand, strong and blunt and warm, wraps around his other wrist, as Cassie takes hold.

His shorm is not here.  His only family on this planet is in the yeerks’ hands.  They are hurting Tobias right now.

Rachel and Marco are on a rescue mission.  Jake and Cassie and Ax are here, having walked for hours in the wrong direction, standing by a destructive stream.  Keeping Tobias alive.

Jake sinks to his knees, gasping hard.  Cassie is making a small noise in the back of her throat, one that has no words.  Their strength flows through Ax, and away.  The power in their joints, the sight in their eyes and the succor in their limbs, drains away.  Every heartbeat, every breath, leaves them and does not return.

No one asks if it’s working now.  There are tears running down Jake’s face, his hand trembling in Ax’s as it squeezes hard enough to grind bones.  But they don’t let go, and they don’t end the spell.  They send strength down the bloodline, down the lines more powerful than blood, until one by one they fall into the icy current when they have nothing left to give.

“I don’t believe in magic,” Marco says, but he uses the same tone as when he says “I don’t believe in aliens.”

Cassie asks her father, her grandmother, and her mother’s grandmother more questions.  She pretends it’s idle curiosity, any time her father asks.

Rachel finds that coven she once thought so silly.  They teach her to write names on willow-pulp paper and freeze them underwater, to drag minds away from the forces that might otherwise take hold.  “Melissa,” she whispers, “Melissa Andrea Chapman,” and she prays it will work this time around.

Anyway, they kind of win.

The first person to appear to him is an unfamiliar woman with rough-cropped hair.  No one Jake knows, or no one he remembers, anyway.  But she wasn’t on the dead, drifting hulk of the Rachel a second ago, and now here she stands.  So the ritual must have worked.

“I’m sorry to disturb your rest,” Jake tells the ghost.  “I just…”  He looks down at the drying clay still smeared across his hands, the familiar characters in cascading rows across his arms and across the metal of the deck.  It’s earth, farther from the Earth than any precious quantity of dirt has ever been.  Just like him.

“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t choose it.”  She crouches in front of him, placing an inexplicably warm hand over his.  “I’m Jondrette.  You saved my life at the battle under the garment factory.  You should’ve killed us.  Instead you called off your forces, told us to run.”

“You died anyway,” Jake says sadly.  “You owe me nothing.”

“Not before I returned the favor.”  She smirks, proud of herself.  “Visser Three would’ve killed you in that hospital garage, had we not shot him from behind.  I owe you nothing,” she agrees.  “Because you’re going to die anyway.”

“I’m scared,” he confesses.

The Blade Ship, and the thing it became, are gone.  He rammed it.  Shattered shrapnel floats past through the Rachel’s failing gravity.  He won, and all it cost was everything.

“I don’t think I want to die anymore, but…”  Jake laughs, harsher than expected.  There’s no one to lead here, no one to impress.  “It’s a little late for that now, huh?”

«It’s all right to be scared,» Elfangor says, when he appears.  «You’ve done well.»  He looks andalite and human, standing guard over Jake’s death as Jake once did for him.

Jake nods, and Elfangor returns it as a bow.

«You’ve honored us all, and it was an honor to serve with you, my prince.»

This new ghost causes Jake to surge several inches off the deck in horror before he falls back, lacking the strength to stand even in this reduced gravity.  “Ax,” Jake gasps.  “Ax… No.  You?”

«It’s all right,» Ax says.  «You killed it.  You honored me.  The ritual of mourning is complete.»

“I wanted to save you,” Jake whispers.

«And you did.  Rest, Prince Jake.»

«You were feared by your enemies, beloved by your cousins.  No higher praise can be spoken of any warrior.»  Arbron, when he appears, is the same strange duality as Elfangor: all andalite and all taxxon, all at once.

Jake wonders if it’s a nothlit thing, if Tobias…

No.  Tobias and Marco, Jeanne and Menderash and Santorelli, all made the escape pod in time before the collision.  Jake has to believe that.  He has to.

«Rest,» Ax says again.  «It’s time.»

“He’s right, you know,” a new voice says, and for the first time Jake feels his eyes prick with tears.  “It’s the easiest thing in the world, once you let yourself go.”

A familiar arm slips around him, and Jake lets himself lean against his brother’s shoulder.  “You’ll stay with me?” Jake asks, hating the weakness in his own voice.  “You’ll stay?”  He doesn’t know how long he can keep up the ritual.

“‘Course,” Tom says.  “No getting rid of me now.”

The specter shapes crowd the room by now, crouching close or standing by.  All here, if Jondrette is to be believed, because they chose to be.

It’s harder to breathe, now.  Harder to see, darkness blurring his vision.  Tom is warm against his side, but Jake is bitterly cold.

“I don’t want it to end,” Jake slurs.  Falling asleep never hurt this much, and the dreams that awaited him on the other side were rarely kind.

“It doesn’t.”  She’s already grinning when she appears in front of him, like this is the greatest daredevil stunt ever pulled.  “We go on.”  Rachel gestures around to the crowd on the bridge.  “Aren’t all of us proof of that?  Nothing is ever lost.”

“Go on to where?” Jake can’t help asking.

At that she laughs.  “Like I’d spoil the surprise.  C’mon, I’ll show you.  Let’s do it.”

She grabs his hand and yanks him forward.  Or maybe that’s Tom, shoving him from behind.  Or Ax’s smile, eyes only, pulling him in.

A small strand of space-time goes dark and coils into nothingness.

[waywardnerd67]

TFWB - Chap 22 Life Changing Call

Summary:  Misha receives a phone call from a lawyer in his hometown about his aunt’s family. Characters: MIsha Collins, Molli Sanderson (OFC) Pairing: Misha x Molli (OFC) Warnings: Fluff/AU Word Count: 1869 Squared Filled: Adoption A/N #1: This is for @spnfluffbingo​ card

Check out: The Family We Built Masterlist

Misha waved goodbye to the Crazy Cat Ladies as they left their weekly class. Cleaning up the studio and closing up for the night. Molli would be there soon for their weekly TV catch up. He went to call in their weekly Chinese order when he noticed a voicemail waiting for him.

“Hello, this message is for Mr. Misha Collins. My name is Joe Walters and I’m a lawyer in Boston. I need you to call me back at 617-555-0820 concerning an important matter with your Aunt Abigail’s Will.”

“Hey babe,” Molli called out as he looked up wide eyed at her, “Misha what’s wrong?”

One Week Later

Being back in Boston was unnerving for Misha. Memories of not knowing where his next meal would come from and shelters they had lived in and out of. Molli wanted to go with him but she had finals coming up. He had insisted that she stay in Austin to study. His meeting was not for another hour and he decided to go to his favorite bakery from when he was a kid.

Walking into the law office reminded Misha of Jensen’s office building. Checking in with the receptionist, he was led into a small meeting room. Soon after a tall, balding man entered the room with a large folder.

“Hi Mr. Collins, I’m Joe it’s nice to meet you.”

He shook his hand, “Misha please, it’s nice to meet you as well.”

“Your Aunt Abigail was such a lovely woman and I’m sad she’s gone now.” Misha could see the genuineness of his statement.

“From what I can remember she was. To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m here. I haven’t spoken to any of my family in years. I can’t imagine anything in her Will being for me.”

He watched as Joe opened the folder pulling out several sheets of paper, “Yes, Abigail had told me that when she made this change a few months before she passed. She had followed your success in Austin and volunteer work. She was proud of the work you have done and the man you grew to be.”

“That is quite surprising since I left the family when I was fifteen.” He scoffed leaning back into his chair.

Joe chuckled softly, “She always said you sailed on your own sails. Anyway, your cousin, Amy, fell into a rough crowd of drug users and Abigail was granted guardianship of her daughter, Zalyn. It was your Aunt’s wish for you to take over that guardianship and move Zalyn to Austin.”

He set, in front of Misha, Guardianship papers drawn up a month earlier naming him the new appointed guardian of the thirteen year old girl. On top of those, was a handwritten letter from his Aunt.

Misha,

If you’re reading this then I have passed and Joe has kept his promise of getting you to Boston. I know you left the family because of your mother’s decisions to keep a vagabond lifestyle. You wanted more from the world and the trails you went through as a child formed you into the wonderful man you are today. You followed your heart without fear or hesitation and against the grain of what your family wanted. I admire that about you and only wish I had done the same. Now, I want you to instill that on Zalyn’s young life. I see a lot of you in her and only wish I had the strength to take her to Austin myself for you to meet. She needs someone like you Misha. She needs to get away from Boston and cut the last tie holding her to her mother. You are the only one strong enough to do that for her. Only you can give her a family she needs and one day will appreciate when she is an adult. Please, Misha… not for love of family but for the love of a vulnerable human life. Please help Zalyn the way you helped yourself by getting far, far away from this family.

I’m so proud of you. Please remind Zalyn of how much I love her.

-Abigail Collins

He let out a shaky breath reading over the guardianship papers in front of him, “This says that my cousin gave up her parental rights a week ago.”

“Yes, Zalyn had gone to see Amy in rehab and it did not end well. Amy signed over her rights that day telling Zalyn she never wanted to see her again. Right now, she is staying with a foster family just outside of Boston. She will remain there until she is either adopted or ages out of the system.”

Misha ran his hand through his hair, “This is a lot to take in…”

Joe leaned forward, “I know it is, but time is of the essences. We will have to appear in court tomorrow morning to make this all official. I’m sure you would like to meet Zalyn as well so I arranged for her foster family to bring her after school at three-thirty.”

He looked at his phone seeing Molli’s smiling face, “So I have a few hours to think about a huge life changing decision. No pressure.”

“I know it is more than anyone should have to deal with. I will leave you alone please feel free to stay here until Zalyn comes. If you need anything just let my assistant know.” Joe got up heading to the door stopping before he walked through it, “Abigail, saved me from falling down a dark path. Helped me pay for law school and taught me valuable life lessons I will carry with me forever. I believe, as she did, you will do that for Zalyn.”

With that he walked out closing the door behind him. Misha laid his head down on his arms swallowing deep breaths to keep himself from vomiting. Resentment and rage flowed through him for a long lost family he left behind guilting him into this. As he looked through the file Joe had left he saw a picture of Zalyn. Her dark brown hair matching his own and she even inherited the Collins’ bright blue eyes. He looked to his phone again and knew the call he had to make.

“Hey Molli, well you’ll never believe what this was all about.” Misha started to explain the situation he was being presented.

Of course, Molli had been one hundred percent supportive of him becoming a guardian for the girl, “Misha you have too. I know how you feel about family but this may be her one shot to having a stable life. If you can help change her life for the better then there is no other course to take.”

“This isn’t like adopting a puppy. I would be adopting a thirteen year old girl. I have no idea how to raise a child let alone a teenager.” He was now pacing in the small room trying to reason his way out of this.

“Remember how hard it was for you as a teenager on your own? Do you want her to have that same fate? Plus you wouldn’t be raising her alone. You have all of us here to help you.”

Her logic was maddening and without thinking he said something he never thought he would, “Oh yeah because you’re old enough to raise a teenager. You’re barely ten years older than she is!”

An audible gasp echoed from his phone as he flopped down into his chair, “I didn’t… Molli…”

“You did mean it. You have a lot to think about and I have studying to do. Goodbye Misha.” She ended the call before he could say anything else.

Clutching his cell in his hand he threw it against the wall shattering it to pieces, “Fuck!” he yelled putting his head in his hands.

Misha looked down at the picture of Zalyn once again as Molli’s words echoed in his mind, “Do you want her to have that same fate?” He knew in that moment what he had to do.

The trip from Boston to Austin had been mostly silent. Misha was pulling up to his studio while Zalyn sat in the passenger seat with his earbuds in. He knew she would need space and time to work out what was going on. He only hoped that she would open up to him and they would be able to have some kind of normal relationship. On top of everything else, he had not spoken to Molli since the day he signed the adoption papers for Zalyn. He only hoped she would forgive him because he did not know if he could do this without her.

He carried Zalyn’s bags inside where he found his friends all waiting for him. Zalyn was caught off guard at first but quietly greeted each of the people he considered to be family.

Molli walked up last shaking Zalyn’s hand, “I’m Molli, it’s so nice to meet you. I can’t wait for us to get to know each other.”

Zalyn seemingly perked up seeing someone younger there. Molli placed her arm around her shoulders and led her into the studio to show her around. Watching them walk away, he did not see Rachel coming up beside him and punching his arm.

“Ow! What the…” he yelped holding his throbbing bicep.

“That is for making her cry. Make things right or you’ll get worse.” Rachel gently patted his cheek walking off towards Jared.

When everyone was up in his apartment and settled around the TV, Misha took the opportunity to have a moment alone with Molli in the kitchen. She was popping some popcorn on the stove and he could not help to stand admiring her. His heart ached as the overwhelming emptiness within him took his breath away.

“I’m sorry. I was an asshole and took it out on you. I’m sorry for what I said.” His voice trembled fearing she would accept his apology.

Molli turned around, closing the distance between them, “Don’t you ever belittle me because of my age again.” Her arms were wrapped around him as he buried his head into the crook of her neck.

“Never again beautiful, I promise. I’m truly sorry.”

She pulled away pressing her soft lips against his, “I know you are and we can talk about it more later. Right now, this is about welcoming Zalyn to Austin and showing her how our little family puts the fun in dysfunctional.”

Misha laughed helping to bring more snacks and drinks out. As he sat with Molli by his side and Zalyn sleeping against him, he realized that life would never get better than this.

***

(Y/N) smiled at her favorite photo of Misha, Molli and Zalyn from Molli’s college graduation. The young girl was the missing piece for their little family and everything came into place when she came to Austin. There had been several bumps in the road but looking out her window to see them all now had been worth it. Zalyn was graduating high school this upcoming year and planned to go to UT Austin for college. Following in Misha’s footsteps of being an studying art education to become a teacher.

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[alirhi]

writing sample, I guess?

So, there’s this series of books I’ve been trying (and mostly failing lol) to get done for...gods, going on 20 years, now. fuck, I’m old. Anyway, I still haven’t finished a single book, ever, in my life, but I’ve got a lot of random snippets of widely varying quality lol and I’m bored so I figured... fuck it. I’ll share some stuff and see if anyone likes it. I’m starting with a scene that was scrapped from the second book in the series. sorry if it’s a little confusing, and I’d be happy to provide context if anyone asks. I just don’t have a lot of good stuff that’s not getting kept if I ever actually finish and publish any of this crap lol and I don’t want to start off with something that’s actually being kept, if that makes sense? Anyway, here:

oh first... TRIGGER WARNING! death, blood, violence, mentions some other traumatic things like torture and rape. 

and despite other characters calling her a child, main girl is NOT. she’s in her 20s. just to clarify XD

"Dad!" Choking back sobs, Rachel stumbled just inside the door and skidded the rest of the way on her knees, coming to rest beside the man she'd truly come to think of as her father. "Dad... dad... Daddy!" Tears blurred her vision as she pulled the bleeding and barely-conscious warrior's head into her lap; she tried to blink them away, but only made them roll in steady rivers down her cheeks.

Voice wavering, she stroked his unnaturally pale face and whimpered, "Daddy, please wake up!"

He stirred, ever so slightly, and the one eye that remained in his skull fluttered halfway open. It seemed at first that he couldn't see anything around him, but then that cold blue orb came to rest on the most welcome features he could possibly hope to see in his final moments, beautiful even twisted in grief as they now were.

"Rachel..." Amadeus rasped. With a wince, he swallowed past the dry lump in his throat and tried again: "Little Lady... You cannot be here..." Feebly, he tried to bring one hand up to cup her cheek, but couldn't muster the strength. His arm sort of twitched uselessly by his side and then dropped, limp and weak in the steadily growing pool of blood beneath him. The shattered stumps where his wings had once sat twitched as she pulled him closer, but they, too, would never be of use to him again.

For one desperate, foolish moment, the young queen felt relief wash through her. He was alive! Resolved to keep it that way, she squared her shoulders and gently shushed him. "Let me concentrate. I'll get you healed up and then-"

"No."

Startled, she nearly dropped him. "What?"

Throat still dry and choked, Amadeus had to fight to push every word out. "I'll not... see another dawn. You must... lead our people... home."

"You're my people!" she protested, fresh tears stinging her eyes. "Don't be so dramatic, daddy, I'll get you heal-"

"Rachel." Her mouth snapped shut as he turned his head to press his pasty face into her hand. Blind hope aside, they both knew he could never be healed; severed wings were the one injury no angel could recover from, no matter how much energy she wasted trying. He closed his eye for a moment, and when it opened again, he put all the strength and dignity he could into his gaze; it pierced through his sobbing Queen, and she shivered. With the last of his waning strength, he insisted in a soft growl, "Be my daughter."

The blonde hated that she knew exactly what he meant. Cringing, but unable to look away or deny him the one thing she could actually do for him, she lifted her stolen dagger and took a deep breath.

"I love you, Daddy." Hardening her heart, she closed her eyes and plunged the shining golden blade through his.

As his lungs deflated for the last time, Rachel filled hers and let out the longest, loudest scream she could manage. A surge of power shot out of her at the same time, slamming into the walls hard enough to cause spiderweb cracks in all four sheer rock faces, and causing the glass to explode out of the tiny window near the ceiling. Vibrant sky blue eyes turned a faintly glowing silver as she set Amadeus' body on the floor and stood. Her lap and hands were soaked in his blood, but she paid no attention. Her tears dried and her grief retreated behind blind, ice-cold fury.

The cracks followed her through the halls, and only grew when the stones around her began to shake as she conjured music through their atoms. This was no low-volume hum to entertain herself; this was her war cry, and it reverberated through the dimly lit halls, announcing her approach to every living thing left in the castle. She was hardly even aware of what song she'd conjured until she heard Jonathan Davis' voice tear through the building screaming "ARE YOU READY?!"

Experience during their invasion of her home world had taught her one thing: The Fallen hated her taste in music, and the driving beat that spurred her on well past the point of exhaustion and kept her focused disoriented the enemy. It was perfect.

"I'm sure I don't need to tell you that this is a very stupid idea." The blonde didn't even so much as twitch when Lazereth appeared out of the gloom and fell into step beside her. "You're letting everyone know exactly where you are."

"Do I look like I'm hiding?" she snarled, swirling silver irises flashing.

"Why aren't you on that transport, you foolish girl?"

In any other situation, her normally cool and collected friend's venom would have made Rachel pause, possibly reconsider her actions, but she was too far gone. Nothing penetrated the static that clouded her mind. No thought was given even the tiniest voice except one: Kill them all. Vengeance drove her forward, and as her rage built, the music grew louder and the cracks in the walls wider and deeper.

Lazereth blinked, taking note of the damage for the first time. "You're expending an awful lot of power, little one."

"I don't even feel it."

That was almost more concerning than the fiery hatred that radiated off of her tiny body. "Killian, child-"

"They killed my father." Rachel stopped dead in her tracks, finally turning to face her friend as she drew her borrowed sword with one hand; the other still kept a white-knuckle grip on the knife she'd driven into Amadeus' heart. The final strike had been hers, true, but that was mercy. He'd have died either way.

Lazereth growled, gripping both of the little blonde's shoulders and giving her a violent shake. "And your children need you! Your people need you!" At the young Queen's startled expression, she rolled her eyes. "Oh, don't look at me like that! Of course I know who you are. And now Matthias will, as well!"

"I don't CARE!" She shook the older woman off, not wanting to find out the hard way if her strange nullifying power worked on her. "Imprison me, enslave me, torture me, rape me... Whatever. I'll live. But no one fucks with my family!"

Tears stung the noblewoman's eyes, blurring her vision with an icy gray haze as she whispered, "You still have family, my dear."

"And Emil's taking care of the last members of it still trapped on this rock," Rachel snapped, breaking into a run as the song switched from Korn's Blind to Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song.

She didn't notice, and was too wrapped up in her bloodlust to care, when Lazereth stood where she was, one hand hovering by her throat and tiny pink lips forming one nearly-silent word. "'Emil'?"

It was surprisingly easy to make her way through the palace to the throne room. Rachel met with some resistance, but it was minimal; by the time she reached the closed and barred doors, it finally dawned on her that most of the King's forces were out looking for her in the city. Good. She wanted her next fight to be one-on-one.

"MATTHIAS!" The heavy doors slammed open, the broken timber that had been bracing them shut launched to two separate corners of the room from the force of her rage. Finding her prey there, huge eyes narrowed in feigned anger to cover the very real fear behind them, she smirked. "Let's dance, you ugly fucker."

The room trembled and her ears ached from the volume as the song she conjured changed again and grew louder. Pantera's 5 Minutes Alone brought Matthias's two remaining guards to their knees, clutching their heads in pain. Matthias himself had too much pride to be seen flinching, much less cowering, and that was fine with her. If he shrank and cowered, she could simply lop his head off and walk away. She didn't want that; she wanted him to suffer.

"You wanted the Pallandre Queen," she bellowed over the music as she slowly closed the distance between them. He took an involuntary step back before he caught himself, and her smirk spread into an insidious, almost manic grin. "Well, here I am, Matty. Come and get me."

Never breaking eye contact with her, the newly crowned King called out to his guards. He tried to sound commanding, even a trifle impatient; Rachel only heard the tremor of unease that made his voice waver and crack. She smiled again. "They're busy. Anyway, this fight is all yours, Matt. You invaded my home, you enslaved my people, you killed my father... and now? Now is your moment of fucking reckoning. You're gonna learn today, boy; don't start a fight you don't have the balls to finish!"

Finally she was mere inches from him. It was too close for her sword to be of any use to her, but that was fine; she still had the knife coated in Amadeus's drying blood in her other hand. Staring up at the lanky monstrosity before her, she cut the music at last and grinned as she pulled her glamour back in around her. She delighted in watching those comically large eyes get even bigger with shock as her golden locks and bright sky blue eyes both faded to a deep brown and her pale pink skin turned a beautiful light caramel color. "You should have killed me when you had the chance."

"You!"

The illusion dropped in an instant and she backed up a step, nodding. "Been here all along, baby." Quick as a striking snake, she pressed the flat of the knife blade against his bare arm and then danced back, cackling as he shrank away from her and howled in pain. "Not my fault you were too stupid to see it."

[writingshirbert]

A Royal mistake

Prompt: Gilbert is jealous at Roy. Set after 3x06

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

In the last few months a strange feeling of loneliness clouded his life. It was as if something was missing and the way it made him feel made him think the missing piece must've been crucial. He spent his summer working the farm with Bash, walking the woods with Delphine in his arms, accompanying Matthew Cuthbert in his barn in fixing an old typewriter of his, one that he had promised to give Gilbert afterwards. Sundays and Saturdays he went to Charlottetown to see Winnie, they went to tea or simply just walked around, sometimes dropping by to see doctor Ward, but that was all. He had found their conversations turning to idle chatter and started feeling more and more like they've ran out of topics to talk about. The lesson of tea etiquette she had given him on their first date had come in handy, Gilbert resolving to talking about the weather and decor much more than usual. He was certain Winifred felt this shift in their relationship as well, as she started talking about moving to Europe with her auntie. Perhaps she will find a better beaux there, Gilbert thought to himself. He also couldn't help but notice his decreased lack of interest in her romantically, she had become a good friend, however all the attraction he felt towards her in the beginning had faded away. Mary's words about marrying for love echoed in his head every time he thought about taking the next step in this courtship, making him unable to do it. This can't be what love feels like, right? It is the stuff of tales and novels, wars had been fought over love, so surely it must feel different... Anne Shirley-Cuthbert had accompanied him on the train rides in July, bit distant but still providing pleasant company. He didn't know why she went so frequently, but he had no business to meddle in her life. Marilla had allowed it, that's all he needed to know. In August, she was gone. After Diana Barry went away for finishing school in Paris, Anne had perished from Avonlea. It crossed his mind that she went to spend the last month with her, but he was sure the Cuthberts would never allow Anne to travel such distance. He thought it best he didn't ask, it was enough that the image of Anne flooded his thoughts every night before bed, appeared in his dreams and in the morning, first thing with the crow of the rooster. It was a strange unpleasant feeling, it couldn't be love either, because it hurt, right? He needn't think about her during the day. But he did so anyways. He thought about why she stopped coming by their house, stopped comparing their notes in class, stopped giving him excited glances during the science lessons, stopped teasing him about his grammar, didn't once look in his eyes during the barn dance at the fair and started snapping at him at the meetings of the Avonlea Gazette and much more. She was still there, but she just wasn't there for him anymore. He saw her sometimes when he came home to take a break from the heat, but she talked mainly with Bash and usually perished away quite quickly. When they tied for Queens she didn't come to congratulate him and only replied with a thanks when he did, using none of her usual witty humor. She was quite well in other ways, always being her gay shiny self with others, which hurt even more. He told himself he didn't care and that was that.

"Gilbert Blythe, how lovely to see you this fine afternoon," the voice of Rachel Lynde echoed behind his back. He was waiting in line at the shop, looking to get some cucumber seeds, as August was the time to plant them, when a bulky lady appeared behind him. He liked Rachel just fine, however he wasn't in the mood for her sharp chatter, so he prayed the line would move quickly. At the counter an older gentleman was carefully counting dried dates, an abundance of them in Gilbert's opinion, dropping some on the ground and picking them up very slowly. He sighed loudly.

"How do you do, Mrs Lynde?" He smiled at her.

"Such a nice boy you are... You're turning into a fine young man I can tell ya. And handsome, too," she winked. "I'm quite well, thank you for asking. I'm getting some flour for Marilla Cuthbert, seeing as Anne is staying with Miss Barry for the time being and Matthew and Jerry are busy with farm work, she hasn't anyone to run these errands for her. She doesn't know I went, of course. That woman doesn't like help, such a shame... She is getting older, you know. I went over to tea yesterday and saw she was running low on flour, so I thought I'd do her a favor and pick some up for her."

He had become accustomed to Rachel's rumblings, usually paying them no mind, for his father had always set a good example in such matters. Gossip isn't healthy, and howbeit it's more of a womanly thing, you still can't escape it as a man. However a part of her monologue caught his mind.

"Anne's in Charlottetown?" He heard himself say without thinking.

"Oh yes. Why, you see, she's become quite good friends with that Mackenzie boy Josephine Barry's taken into her care. Plus, she wanted to familiarize herself with the town more, now that she's going to live there while she's at Queens. Her house isn't close to Queens, but Cole rides to his academy in a carriage every morning, so there's no trouble taking her too. She's even started moving her things there! Oh, how I don't understand that Barry woman. Having had ten children of my own, I can't imagine taking more of them into my home at such age. But I suppose she must be all lonely in that big house of hers. Don't be so glum, Anne will be back in Green Gables last week of summer. I do have to admit, I gave that Anne girl hell when she first came to Avonlea, but I too do miss her company dearly. She's a strange one, to say at least, but one can't help but love her, can one?" she laughed.

"I can't imagine how Marilla must miss her... But she's almost a woman now and one must expect her getting on her own feet sooner or later. I heard she's even got a chum there... Poor Marilla, I hadn't had the heart to tell her about it. She still sees her as a little girl," Rachel shook her head disapprovingly...

"And what about you, Gilbert? I know you have a sweetheart of your own..." Rachel grinned.

The line has moved a little bit, so they both took a step forward. "Yes, she's great," he said rather unconvincingly. His mind kept trailing to an image of Anne walking arm in arm with another man and he felt an unfamiliar feeling rise up in his chest.

"And to imagine both you and Anne might marry into such wealthy families, you have a good life ahead of ya... I told you he's wealthy, did I not? Very handsome too, such as yourself... Oh, how wonderful it is to be young and in love... I would do anything to relive my youth with Thomas, but I suppose being an old married couple has it's charms too. It's so strange, after seeing you and Anne dance in school I thought you were sweet on each other. I can see now that I was mistaken, although I don't mind as much, seeing how well everything worked out anyways."

Sweet on each other, he thought... So if other people had noticed, it couldn't have been all in his head. If Rachel Lynde wasn't staring at him, he would probably go bang his head against a wall.

He was relieved when he saw Miss Stacy enter the shop and head towards them. "Oh, Rachel, please do relieve this boy from the reins of your chatter," his former teacher laughed. "Young boys don't care about the problems of us old folk."

Muriel Stacy winked at him. "It's good to see you, Gilbert. I hope you're not working yourself to the bone and have found some time for relaxation this summer. A good book always does good for one's soul."

The walk back home felt longer than usual, uncomfortable thoughts creeping into his mind. He thought about paying Anne a visit tomorrow while he's at Charlottetown, maybe he could even catch up with Cole while he's at it, but then changed his mind. She hasn't mentioned leaving, in fact she didn't even come to say goodbye, even if it was just a three week visit. She obviously doesn't want him getting involved.

The following day he felt especially lost at tea with Winnie, remaining silent for most of it.

"Is something troubling you, dear?" she asked. "I feel like Mr Bones would be a more garrulous company than you today," she cracked a joke, but he didn't laugh.

"I'm sorry, Winnie."

"You needn't apologize, just tell me what I can do to cheer you up."

He looked thoroughly at the woman sitting in front of him. She was smiling at him with her ocean blue eyes, her hair perfectly done as always. She was wearing a very fashionable golden yellow dress and she was undeniably beautiful. And smart. And funny. She was almost perfect. There was one fault however, which was preventing him from loving her fully. She wasn't Anne.

"I don't think we are right for each other, Winifred."

She looked down, a little shocked but not mad, like he thought she would be. After a little while she sighed, nodding. "You know I would be perfectly happy with you. But I have to admit this relationship doesn't give me much thrill, if that's what you're talking about."

"I feel that way too. I hope you're not hurt," he said, taking her arm. "I like you very much, Winnie."

"Oh, I am hurt a little, but I do understand, because I feel it too... We could marry and live a life that would be just fine, but maybe there should be more to it indeed. I like you very much too, Gilbert Blythe. I hope we'll remain friends."

He stayed sitting for a while after Winnie left, the tea was still warm and he had plenty of time before his train left, so he decided to think everything through.

If Anne had really felt something for him back then, it's natural she was hurt when he brought Winifred to the town fair. She did run off and acted rather strangely, but acting strangely isn't unusual for Anne and that's why he didn't put it all together... He smiled at the memory of the judges spitting out Anne's cake. He knows he shouldn't, but oh, that really was rather amusing. Poor Anne, he thought.

Gazing out of the window, he saw Cole MacKenzie on the street talking with a tall dark young man. He stood up abruptly, threw money on the table and left, running after them.

"Cole," he shouted and waved, crossing the street. Cole turned around and smiled, taller and older than Gilbert remembered him.

"Gilbert," he said, shaking his hand. "Long time no see..."

Gilbert nodded, studying the guy he was with. He was rich, that much was obvious from the way that he dressed. Gilbert thought him objectively handsome too, with his dark curly hair and dark complexion, Gilbert could see him being a lady magnet.

"This is my classmate, Royal Gardner," Cole introduced him and Royal shook his head, extending his hand to Gilbert.

"Just call me Roy, please. Cole likes to introduce me by my full name to make people uncomfortable and I can see it's working. My parents are rather funny people, you see..."

"Where's Anne?" He blurted out and earned himself a strange look from Roy, but he didn't care.

"She's in the library, you know how she gets around books," Cole grinned. "We were just on our way to see her, do you want to join us?"

Gilbert thought about it. He did really want to see her, but he thought it might look weird if he just appeared before her. "Oh no, I couldn't, you obviously have other plans, I wouldn't want to intrude."

Cole laughed.

"No, not at all, come... We can catch up on the way."

So Gilbert walked with them. Cole told him about his life at the academy, he was obviously much happier and Gilbert was glad for that. He hadn't seen him in two years, but it was as if they never parted, conversation flowing easily between them. Gilbert didn't have many friends his age, but Cole was much more mature than most boys in Avonlea and very easy to talk to. Roy was a funny lad, Gilbert observed. He too used a lot of big words, kind of like Anne, but it seemed as if he used them less seriously, just for fun and to show off his high class education. When they reached the library, Anne was already standing outside waiting for them. She gave Gilbert a surprised look but she didn't seem bothered by his presence.

"Gilbert, how unexpected..." she said, walking over to him. "How are you? How's everything in Avonlea? Is Matthew and Marilla well?"

He assured her they were well and promised to give them both her regards. He saw Roy leaning into Anne's side, she didn't flinch in the slightest, which showed this was something normal for them. He kissed her hand and she gave him a brief smile, but remained focused on Gilbert. "What are you doing here? Visiting Winnie? You know, I get what you like about her... We met a few days ago and I've discovered a kindred spirit in her."

He smiled at that. Of course she and Anne would get along, they're both amazing women.

"She and I, uh... Parted ways."

Anne's look was unreadable.

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."

He didn't stay long. Roy muttered something about them being late to tea at Miss Barry's and the trio took off, Anne holding Royal's hand as they walked. Looking at her in the arms of another man, a wealthy, tall and good looking man made anger bubble up inside of Gilbert. He realized right in that moment that not admitting his feelings to her back then was truly a Royal mistake on his part.

[7hyuns]

made to be worshipped

preacher!kyungsoo x reader

requested; yes!! thank you bub 

a/n; this took so long?? but it got a lot longer than expected so....(also light disclaimer: this includes religious themes (it’s not extremely focused around religion but it’s mentioned often) so if you’re heavily religious, specifically christian, this might not be for you!!) 

warnings; blasphemy (? probably), sexual acts in a church, religious themes, swearing, sex, lots of talking i’m sorry, biting?? idk, unprotected sex (always use protection!!), light use of a pain kink, bondage, slight dom/sub themes

word count; 14k let’s get this bread

song recs; church - chase atlantic, how - the neighbourhood, tio - zayn, devilish - chase atlantic 

If there was one thing you still found yourself genuinely attracted to about being in church, it was the chance to admire the décor. Everything surrounding you as you kept your eyes focused on the cold stone of the floor was beautiful, you knew that to be true from the years you’d spent attending different religious spaces. All of them kept to the same decorations, so in that respect you supposed it lost its initial awe-inducement after a little while, but that didn’t remove any of its long-term glamour. If you were to let yourself look up from the grey floor, you would see the same stunning sight you’d seen every Sunday at the very least since you could remember. But something stopped you. You assumed, in some obscure way, as much as even being in this building pressed a weight to your chest, the idea of looking at the stain glass windows and crosses closing around you caused an entirely more pressing kind of anxiety to come down upon you.

Breathing in shakily, you tightened your grip around the bible in your hands. It almost felt ridiculous, these jolts of guilt moving throughout you, especially with the knowledge that you could have easily avoided all of this. When you’d left home as soon as you were old enough to, you’d promised yourself that going back into any church was not something you’d find yourself doing. You’d been so convinced when you first got away that your life would be solved without the lessons you’d been taught since you were old enough to comprehend them, that if you could let go of that worry and fear then your life would be full of adventure and levity. In the end, you had to conclude, things don’t always turn out the way you expect them to.

Although, feeling the solid wood surface of the seats you sat on, with devout people you didn’t know surrounding you, there was a shakiness to you: perhaps an annoyance that you hadn’t been strong enough to stay away, or maybe it was the growing guilt in your stomach. With every word you could hear the preacher speak about sin and forgiveness, about temptation and repenting, in his deep and even voice, the more you felt guilt consume you. Releasing the breath you hadn’t noted you’d been holding; you felt a lump appear in your throat. Suddenly you felt like the same childish young girl that had desperately avoided even being on the same street as the church in your hometown after you made-out with a boy in the bathroom at the first ever party you went to. You felt the same shame you had when you had sat in the confession booth with your knees pulled to your chest and school-bag dropped onto the floor by the suffocating door of the box.

Finally glancing upwards and fixing your sight forward on the preacher in order to stabilise your breathing again, you felt your stomach twist. Evidently, he didn’t notice you, his eyes moved around the other people sat among you, meeting their eyes for a small moment as he recited verses and affirmations he probably had entirely memorised. It was a strange experience, the way you immediately found yourself too distracted by him to continue thinking of all that you’d been hiding for so long. He held a sort of assured confidence, his voice and eyes oddly expressionless for a preacher, all the ones you’d been in contact with before had always seemed alight with some kind of passion for the book in front of them. It was almost refreshing to not have verses practically thrown into the echoing space of the church walls at you, to instead be able to focus on a calm and pleasant volume of soft spoken words.

Maybe the service felt as though it was flying past you after that because of the way you seemed unable to concentrate on anything other than the way his lips moved, the way he pronounced words and the movements his hands would make as he spoke. Even from your place, around the middle of the stands, you swore you could almost hear the sharper breaths he took in-between longer verses and more detailed paragraphs. Or maybe that was simply your imagination giving you something other than your own problems to focus on. It didn’t seem to matter when you let yourself stare intently at him, picturing your face to look like that of someone who was utterly starstruck by whatever was in front of them. In a way, you supposed that’s exactly how you were feeling; the preacher ahead of you seemed young, although not young enough to be immediately viewed as anything other than someone established in the church system.

The service seemed to be coming to a close, his voice beginning to rise to a light and airier tone, the smallest of smiles twitching the corners of his lips up just enough for it to be visible. You found yourself wishing for it to drag on longer, for him to stumble upon something else – a verse, a sinful topic, anything that he could think of – to talk about. His eyes swept across the small gathering of people in front of him, eyes full of the same fondness that came with seeing so many faces you recognised, until they landed on you. For a brief second, it felt almost as though he was completely unphased at the sight of you, his eyes skimming over your form without a second thought and heading onto other attendees immediately after. Trading places with an older man to close the ceremony, he stepped away from the higher stand, heading to sit himself with a few other church-related people that you had forgotten the positions of.

From his place at the front, he appeared to be copying his earlier action of glancing around at the no-doubt familiar faces of those in front of him. Although something differed this time, and to you – and maybe to anyone else who was intensely focused in on him throughout this service – it was obvious. His eyes landed on you again, his face remaining stoic and collected as he gave you a painfully slow once over. The way his eyes raked over your form made you feel more flustered than it should have, your body flushing hot and eyes struggling to not drop straight away from his own. Meeting your eyes again, his tongue skimmed out to wet his bottom lip, his eyes remaining caught on you as you tried to make yourself look away.

You could only force yourself to actually drop the eye contact once you saw the people surrounding you begin to stand, collecting their things and shuffling to make conversation with those around them. Quickly following their movements, you grabbed the jacket you’d only just remembered to bring with you, keeping your eyes trained on your feet as you made hasty work of heading towards the doors. At any opportunity you had to glance upwards, you felt your heart tighten within your chest; the sight surrounding you – the very way the people there interacted with one another – reminded you far too closely of what your home had been like. The memory made your legs feel uneasy, like you weren’t going to be able to remain on your feet for too long before they went entirely weak.

Your chest felt tight, even as the distance between yourself and the doors grew smaller with every step you took. You counted how many times your feet moved, trying to distract yourself from the way it seemed the room was closing in on you, you had almost reached ten – and maybe if you could make yourself look further up from the floor you’d see you were that close to the door by now – when someone stepped in front of you. The blocking of your path brought a small wave of anxiety on you, although the soft smile on the face of the woman in front of you helped your heart slow back to its normal beat. She must’ve been a regular here, you concluded, and you partially cursed yourself for forgetting that showing up to a church in the middle of a small-town without pre-planning was something that would undeniably bring attention to yourself.

The woman didn’t stop smiling warmly at you, her eyes remaining fixed on yours as she waited for you to speak. You remained silent, unsure of what you were supposed to say, if you should have been figuring out a way to justify yourself or if you should simply start with an introduction. Understanding that you didn’t know what to do, you kept your mouth tightly shut, willing her to say something so you wouldn’t have to.

An airy chuckle left her lips, as if she noticed the tension building between the two of you at the lack of words. “I’m Rachel,” she said brightly, offering you her hand to shake, which you took gratefully. “Is this your first time with us?” She asked, but you found her question rather redundant, she already knew the answer.

Nodding, you tried to rid the knot of fear between your shoulder blades. The fact that the two of you had paused in the middle of aisle to have a conversation – considering it seemed evident to everyone in the service that you were new there – was appearing to catch more people’s attention, drawing their eyes away from their conversations and towards you. The woman was still looking at you expectantly, but you weren’t sure what it was she wanted from you still. Clearing your throat uncomfortably, your shoulders lifted to tighten again, “I’m ___.”

This seemed to make her back off slightly, as though you’d answered her question, and you then fell into silence, patiently waiting for her to either ask you something else or move to let you pass. She did neither, although her eyes had trailed away from your own – more so your entire figure – and were now focused on something behind you. You felt the hairs on the back of your neck rise, but something within you was insistent you don’t turn around, that you instead kept your eyes facing forward at the woman.

You remained tensed, your body feeling set on edge as you waited for something to happen. The woman was still smiling past you, although as she opened her mouth to speak you concluded that whoever she’d been focused on was close enough to hear her now. “Hello, Father,” she began, and for a moment you felt the same strange detachment from the words that left her lips as you were sure those who didn’t attend church would feel at hearing them. “How have you been?” She asked courteously, although you didn’t have the energy to play at trying to figure out if she was being genuine with her question or not.

Turning your head to the side slightly, just enough to see the man now standing beside you, you attempted to take in as many of his features as you could at your angle. Your eyes fell to his lips as they opened to let him speak, and you found yourself wishing you’d been able to see the more minute details of his face throughout more of the service, knowing it would’ve given you something better to focus on. His hair seemed messier than earlier, however, you noted. It looked as though he’d run his fingers through it a few too many times since he’d delivered the sermons.

The man’s lips pulled up into an almost lazy smile, the sight making his eyes appear softer from your angle, more emotive than they had been earlier. “I’ve been just fine, thank you for asking,” he answered, his voice tightened in formality. You noted that he hadn’t asked her how she was, and found it odd for a preacher to not inquire about that, all the ones you had known back home would have always mirrored the question. Turning to face you better, the man offered you the same tired-looking smile, “This is your first time with us, isn’t it?”

Nodding, you found your voice dried up in your throat, lips unsure of what answer to form. Your demeanour felt almost bashful, your eyebrows almost furrowing together in embarrassment at the realisation. “Is this your first time in church?” He inquired, turning to wave and smile at the woman who’d introduced herself to you a moment earlier as she spoke loudly to a different, younger woman.

You shook your head at him, “No, I, I’ve been going to church since I was young,” you answered, wondering if you should mention the large space of time that you’d been avoiding coming anywhere near a holy building. The preacher nodded at you, his eyes seeming to communicate to you that he knew in some way you weren’t finished speaking. “I,” you paused for a quiet moment, the same shame from earlier building in the pit of your stomach, “I left the church for a little while.”

He nodded softly at you as you searched his face for judgement, as you waited for him to ask why or for him to critique your decision. Instead he simply spoke in the same exact tone from earlier, “Will you be returning to any of our services in the near future?” His voice seemed impossibly formal as he spoke, and in an odd sense it unsettled you more than you wanted it to – he reminded you too closely of the preachers back home.

His eyes remained fixed on yours as he waited for you to respond, “Yes, I think so,” you answered, remembering that you had promised yourself you’d at least attempt at settling here. “Services? As in more than Sunday’s?” You found yourself inquiring, almost sharper than you had intended to be.

If your voice head an ounce of bite, the preacher chose not to react, “Well, it’s more of a social one, I suppose,” he answered, “we have social gatherings on Thursday’s.”

“Would,” you paused to clear your throat slightly, finding yourself choked up on a strange sense of shyness, “would I be, invited? To the gatherings?” The question made you feel like a child, your eyes dropping away from his as you chose to hear his verbal reaction rather than see his features shape at your words.

An airy chuckle left him, one you could only presume was over your flustered state, making your embarrassment elevate even more. “If you intend on being a regular at church again, of course you’d be welcome.”

Daring yourself to steal a glance back at him, you saw his eyes didn’t appear to have left you for even a moment. The sight made you nervous, but you swallowed that down and nodded at him curtly. “Thank you,” you responded, “and um, would one more question be okay?”

Again, he nodded quickly, not missing a beat between your words, “Of course.”

“What’s your name?” You asked, voice almost dropping too quiet for him to hear you.

The preacher smiled at you again, “Kyungsoo.”

///

It hadn’t been a noticeably long period of time since you’d left home, and yet you’d still somehow managed to forget how difficult it was to settle into an entirely new town. Officially settling here hadn’t been something you’d planned, but the security of knowing you’d already attended the church here made you linger. You also knew that people in church communities talked, it was one of their favourite things to do – they talked about the church, the people in the church, their children, other people’s children – but you were completely assured that they talked and communicated frequently. By avoiding going anywhere in the town and by hiding yourself away in your little apartment, you knew you were probably giving the people there something to talk about, and perhaps worse – something to ask about. It made you wonder whether any of the people at the church in this town talked to people from the one back home, as people surrounded by a religion usually did, but you hoped not.

To pass the drawn-out time of the days between the Sunday service you’d found yourself in and the hopeful offering of returning to the church on Thursday, you thought more about settling further into the town. If you were planning on staying relatively long-term, you were going to need to get a job eventually. You should probably start to work on forming some form of social life here, too. But the desire to do either of these things had dropped painfully low, your brain deciding you’d rather hide away from all the devout living in the town, even if it would be impossible for them to know anything about your time within their religion. You wondered sometimes how they’d react, whether it would be positive that you had somehow found your way back into the church or negative that you’d ever even left the church at all. Assuredly, it would differ based on the person.

Which always lead you to thinking about the younger preacher there, Kyungsoo. He gave you no reaction when you told him you’d abandoned your faith shortly before getting here, he didn’t even ask you a single question about it. You thought that was most likely a part of the job description – being understanding and not inquiring too quickly on the levels of a newcomer’s devotion to a religion they’d evidently secured their whole lives to. In the days you’d spent in purposeful isolation, you considered the idea that maybe Kyungsoo wasn’t as intensely devoted to his religion as you automatically assumed he was. Although, you supposed, why would someone go as far as to work and thrive off of the church and its social life if they didn’t fully intend to find themselves surrounded by their religion?

Anyway, it wouldn’t matter for too long, you didn’t realistically have any intention of staying in this town with these people. The memory of your own hometown and upbringing that reminded you so closely of this town stung too much, especially when you would recognise a young girl from the church. Would they struggle to follow the rules put in place for them as you had? Or would they thrive off of the church as others did? You didn’t really think you should find yourself caring as much as you did, whatever worked for people at the end of the day had to be the right thing for them. But that always made you wonder what the right thing for you was. You thought that maybe you were supposed to be a member of the church, attending services and memorising bible passages and so on – but you also thought that you were the type of person who should avoid the church space at all costs.

In the end, you didn’t suppose it mattered, you were going to end up staying in this town to attend the church service on Thursday, no matter what kind of turmoil you were feeling at the idea. Counting down the days to a church activity was something you hadn’t seen yourself ever doing again since you’d left your first church, and it made you feel so childish you vowed to yourself that you’d never admit doing it to anyone. You weren’t even entirely sure what it was you had found yourself so excited about – when you thought enough about it, it didn’t feel as if there was anything to be looking forward to, except maybe getting more human interaction in a single day than you’d had all week. Even as you reminded yourself daily to overanalyse everything you were thinking; you couldn’t seem to fully stop your thoughts from going back to the Sunday service. Or more honestly, back to the preacher you’d met there.  

You were only looking forward to seeing someone who’d been kind to you, that was all. Or was it? You couldn’t be sure, or maybe you could and you didn’t want to be. If you could just think of anything else maybe the idea of seeing him again wouldn’t seem so important or tormenting. But you couldn’t. It was as easy as that. All you found yourself thinking about was the brief conversation you’d shared with him. A conversation that couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes, you tried to keep in mind. But that didn’t seem to matter too much, especially not when you had as much time as you did to think about it.

You thought about the way his eyes seemed to take in your entire figure, even if you’d been sat down, when he’d first glanced over you in the church. You thought about how even and calming his voice had been, whether he’d been giving a sermon at the front or talking to you directly. You thought about how nice the colour of his eyes had looked once he’d gotten closer to you. You thought about what his hands looked like and the shape of his lips when he spoke or when he fell into silence. Even as you thought about him in the privacy of your own space, you were almost convinced that somebody knew, that somebody was watching and shaming you for even beginning to think of him as anything other than what he was – a preacher in a devout church.

And even with your other anxieties, and your growing thoughts surrounding the preacher, Thursday still came. You got ready quicker than you had meant to, sleeping in when you’d forgotten you had an obligation – in the lightest terms, you supposed, no one was actually expecting you except for Kyungsoo – for the day. Still, even dressed in one of your nicest – and longest, because the worry for the conservativeness of the space you were walking into still found a way to bite into you, even after leaving your first church – sundresses and walked down there, it felt surreal. As if you had to of gotten the day wrong. Or maybe the time. But the more you double and triple checked, the more you were becoming aware that the event was unmoving, and definitely happening today.

Even after all of this, all of the twenty plus times you must have reaffirmed yourself that everything was fine and completely normal, arriving at the church building sent your heart lurching in your chest. This is normal. Nothing about this is out of the ordinary. But if that was the true, why were you suddenly so desperate to turn around and go straight back home? The nerves almost made your hands tremble, and you knew if you were sitting down your leg would be bouncing from the adrenaline.

But you couldn’t go home. And you didn’t know anywhere else in the town you could lay low at until you worked up enough courage to at least show your face for a couple minutes. Instead, you let yourself hesitate by the open doors, looking inside to see if you could spot Kyungsoo or even the other woman you’d spoken too on Sunday. You could see the preacher, far enough into the room and at the right angle to see you if you walked in his direction. But that only brought on more nerves. You weren’t sure if you were supposed to walk straight over to him, and even if you did, you didn’t know what you would say to him once you got to him. You’d just start talking, have a normal conversation like he expects you to. But maybe he wasn’t even expecting you to walk right in and over to him and start an entire conversation when all he’d done is invite you.

By the time you’d finished thinking about it, you had decided fairly securely that you were going to give the room a once over and then turn around and go home. If it was going to bring more panic than anything else, what was the point? You glanced over the room, trying to picture yourself being invisible to everyone else in the room so turning and running away didn’t feel so embarrassing. Before you could back out cautiously, you noticed you’d caught the preacher’s attention. The hairs on the back of your neck felt like they were rising when you caught his eyes, staring back because you felt too awkward to look away, even if upholding it still felt more uncomfortable than you had expected it too. He offered you a smile, as if he wanted it to welcome you, to urge you to finally give in and walk the rest of the way into the room.

He smiled at whoever was around him, side-stepping them to head towards the door. The suddenness of his movement made you wonder for a split second if you should turn on your heel and sprint back the way you’d come to get here. You still felt too rooted to the spot to do that, though, so instead you shifted from foot to foot until he reached you.

“You finally showed up,” he announced, and you tried to be subtle in your check of the time. Ten minutes past. A little later than you thought you were, but you didn’t think ten minutes was long enough for him to doubt you showing up entirely. He laughed as you double-checked the clock on the wall of the church, “I’m just kidding.”

You tried to force a laugh, but you could feel the blush heating up your cheek from the light touch of embarrassment. “Right, yeah, well, you know, new town, new people.”

“Ah,” he hummed in understanding, “you’re nervous?” He questioned lightly.

You were nodding before he got the chance to finish speaking, “Yeah, well, a little bit, I guess. There’s just a lot of…stuff, to sort out and...things to do.”

“There always is when you move to a new town,” he smiled again. You found yourself unsure of what to say, choosing instead to just nod at his words. You didn’t know if you were supposed to be soothed by how commonplace he made struggling sound, or if you should be nervous all over again at how much was left to do if you decided to stay.

He cleared his throat, “Do you want me to introduce you to some new people?” You wanted to say yes, to thank him for the offer, but you found yourself not particularly wanting to talk to anyone other than him. He seemed to pick up on your hesitation, offering you a quizzical look as you opened and closed your mouth. Just say you’d prefer not to today, you urged yourself, but stayed silent instead. Plainly saying you didn’t want to felt too confirmed and childish. You needed to meet new people, anyway.

“Don’t want to?” He asked, voice dropping even softer than it had been before.

You shook your head, still hesitant to confirm your answer. “Just…I’m, I’m not really feeling up to it today, sorry. Thank you for the offer, though.”

Kyungsoo shook his head at you, “Don’t be, I understand. I’ll introduce you to people whenever you feel ready,” he affirmed, “if you still need me to.”

“I’m sure I’ll still want you to, by then,” you answered, feeling a smile form naturally onto your features for the first time since you’d been there.

Kyungsoo rose an eyebrow at you, “I didn’t say want,” he corrected.  

“Huh?” You asked in disbelief, feeling the heat crawl up from your neck onto your cheeks. You didn’t even want to picture how bright red the blush would be by now.

He laughed, and you wondered if he was laughing at your embarrassment or at you using the wrong word. Was that intentional? Is it even worse if it was subconscious? You couldn’t guess. Maybe you liked not knowing more. “Did you not understand what I said?” He asked, tilting his head at you.

Blinking at him, feeling almost in disbelief at how confusing the conversation had gotten in the space of a couple sentences. “No, no, I understood.”

“Then why act like you didn’t?” His eyes were digging into your skin as you stuttered, trying to think of a response. “Did I say something out of line?”

Shaking your head, you lost his eyes to glance around the room. You weren’t sure what you were looking for but you hoped whatever it was would give you a valid answer. “No, of course not, I just,” you laughed breathily to try and rid yourself of the embarrassment, “didn’t know how to respond.”

Humming, he nodded at you, “Why?”

“Why…as in why didn’t I know what to say?”

He laughed again, louder and more comfortably this time, “Yeah, why didn’t you know what to say?”

“I…” Again, you glanced around. There had to be some inanimate object somewhere in the enormity of the main hall of this church that could click something in your mind to make an excuse up. “I don’t know?” You offered.

“Did I fluster you?” He asked, quietening his voice to make sure only you could hear.

This time you did audibly stutter. Had churches really changed that much since you’d last been to one? You’d never known any preacher in any church to be so bold, and you’d only ever been to one in your entire life. You didn’t need to. Not to know – or assume, you supposed – that preachers were supposed to have piousness and gentleness as their main personality traits. But he seemed to be opposed to having those tropes be a part of him. Would I prefer if he did? You weren’t sure yet.

He was still looking at you when you finally let yourself catch his eyes again. “I’ll take that as a yes, then?” He prompted, a complacent look overcoming his features.

Swallowing thickly – as subtly as you could complete that action – you shrugged. “A little, I guess,” you spoke, evening your voice out. “Why are you trying to fluster me?”

“How do you know I’m trying? It’s not difficult to do.” He quipped, answer too quick for you to have begun to think of a way to shut down any answer he gave you.

Instead of looking back around the room – or even worse, dropping your eyes down to your feet – you scoffed. “So you speak to every church newcomer like you’re speaking to me?”

“Would that hurt your feelings?”

“Now you’re not answering my questions,” you answered, unsure of what your response would have been if you found yourself being honest. Isn’t lying a sin?

Kyungsoo hummed, “I suppose,” he gave you an insolent shrug, “but if I answer yours, will you answer mine? Or would it fluster you too much?”

“It wouldn’t fluster me,” you defended, embarrassed at the implication. “I’d answer, if I had to.”

“Alright,” he cooled, “I only speak to you, like this,” he mocked your tone. You lapsed back into silence then, finding yourself too anxious to speak all of a sudden. He hummed, “So,” he prompted, raising his eyebrows at you, “if I was speaking to other people like this, would it hurt your feelings?”

“No,” you tried to defend, watching as his features turned into one of mock understanding. “But you don’t,” you bit, “so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Nodding, he spoke again, “I could. If it doesn’t bother you, then it would be okay, wouldn’t it?”

You lost your focus as he spoke, dropping your gaze down to his lips. They were almost perfectly heart-shaped, you noted. And pouty. And a nice colour. He was tilting his head at you again, having to prompt you to respond yet again. What were you supposed to say? You couldn’t think of a non-jealous sounding response to that. You have spoken to this man twice, you tried to rationalise, what does it matter if he flirts with other people? And besides, what was a preacher doing flirting with church goers? You didn’t think that sounded very devout.

“Do you enjoy not answering questions? Is it a hobby of yours?” He pushed, and you found yourself flushing again. You kept reminding yourself to stop doing that every time you did it, but you never seemed to be able to.

You wondered if you should shrug again. Or maybe scoff and quip something back. But what were you supposed to say? It was too soon to ask him to kiss you. Anyway, a church definitely wasn’t the right place to try and kiss a preacher. Other than that, you weren’t sure what else there was for you to say. “Yes,” you said simply, letting him have that as an answer to consider, instead of letting him make another easy response.

He laughed, loud enough to attract the attention of another man from the church to your conversation. You hoped he wouldn’t say anything, hoped he would stay out of yours and Kyungsoo’s conversation. Gratefully, he did, turning back to the people he had been talking to before a second after he’d glanced over. If Kyungsoo had noticed attracting someone else’s attention, he didn’t let it show. His features remained as unbothered as ever, giving you no idea of what he was thinking.

He glanced away from you for another moment, catching sight of someone across the room. The lightness slipped from his features, his face slipping to seem gentle and stoic again. Is that some kind of unspoken rule about preachers? Do they all have to look cold whenever they’re in a church building? The preacher back in your hometown had been gentle, and as devout as you’d first expect, but he’d been a much brighter man than other churches seemed to have. That hadn’t made him any more accepting, especially not when it came to confessions.

The memory made bile rise in your throat. Shame bubbled in your stomach, making you lose any confidence you had left and look away from Kyungsoo. He was busy looking at something else, anyway. You cleared your throat, shifting from foot to foot again, “I really just dropped by to say hello,” you spoke, “and there’s so much stuff I still have to sort out, you know, so uh, I’ll see you on Sunday, right?”

He blanched then, “You’re leaving already?” You should have spoken slower, or at least less…panicked? Flustered? It was too late to think about that, though. Instead, you just nodded.

“Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a lot left to do.” It was more so along the lines of having a lot left to procrastinate, but he didn’t need to know that. Any viable excuse was one you were willing to use, especially if it got you out of having to wait around here while Kyungsoo was unavailable.

He nodded then, looking like he was giving in to something. “Of course,” he answered, his mask going back on. He looked significantly more like a preacher with it, you decided. “Good luck with whatever it is you need to do.”

Unsure of what else to do, you only nodded again. “Are you…here, on Sunday? Preaching, or…something?”

His lips quirked upwards at the corner, but he didn’t laugh this time. “Yes, I’ll be here on Sunday. And surprisingly, as a preacher, I’ll be preaching, too.” You rolled your eyes at him but looked straight back to him when he let out a breathy laugh. “I’ll be here for a bit afterwards, too. If you need anything, you can let me know then?” You didn’t want to go even a couple more days without talking to him. It would just be a couple more days you spent overthinking everything about this conversation. A conversation that had more than basics to it, as well.

Instead of complaining like you wanted to, or suggesting a solution to the problem like you should have, you instead just nodded. “Thank you, for that and for today.” He nodded politely, and you felt the walls of the church surrounding you become more apparent then. You felt your shame twist into anger, or maybe it was self-pity, you couldn’t really tell. The whole situation felt as redundant as it really was as you turned to walk out. Flirting with a preacher you’d spoken to only once before today was never going to get you anywhere. That seemed like something that should have been apparent before you even showed up here today.

///

You had never realised how fast two days could move when you were busy. When you were younger, waiting just forty-eight hours for something you wanted had seemed like a cruel challenge. But now, it felt too short. Too short an amount of days and hours for you to organise yourself effectively before you dived straight back into a stressful situation. Could you really call what happened on Thursday a stressful situation? It did feel like a slight overreaction to think of it like that. You didn’t know what else to call it, though. It hadn’t felt too stressful at the time, not really. Disappointing, yes. Now that you’d had time to think on it more, it felt significantly more anxiety packed than it had been. Maybe that was sign you should have given yourself a chance to think about something else.

You didn’t, though. You thought about Kyungsoo when you went to your job interview, and then you worried about what happened with him instead of worrying about what the outcome of your interview would be. You thought about him when you tried to finally get some proper shopping for your apartment, and ended up missing more items from your list than you had thought possible. Every time he came up in your mind you’d remind yourself to think of something else, that you were being stupid to spend so much time overanalysing the way he spoke to you on Thursday, but it had been strange, right?

You were also fairly certain by now that you were only obsessing over him like this because he was related to the church. If you were still forcing yourself to go regularly, you were probably just trying to find something to keep you calm while you were there. And there was nothing wrong with that. Or at least you didn’t think there was. As long as nothing happened, it seemed completely harmless. Even if you did talk outside of church activities, that was fine, too, wasn’t it? This wasn’t the middle ages, religious people were allowed to have secular aspects to their lives now.

Yet, you still felt exactly the same trepidation showing up to the Sunday service as you had on the Thursday. Maybe even more now, as it mingled with another strange feeling in your stomach. Assuming it was just another ton of shame being dropped on your head as you walked through the door, you went over to a vacant space on a pew. When you were seated and relatively able to calm yourself, you felt the nerves in your stomach settle slightly. It was just another church, if you thought really rationally about it. There are churches everywhere you go, if you know where to look. This is just one of those churches. It was fine for you to be sat in a room in one, because it was just a building.

Seeing Kyungsoo walk up onto the stand brought back the knots in your stomach, though. But those didn’t feel the same as it did when you felt yourself slip back into shame. You weren’t feeling the overwhelming need to run away. No, but you did want to kiss him. It was when your brain brought thoughts like that out of nowhere that you wished you could be two separate people, so you could fully chastise yourself, without having to remember that it was you who was actively thinking these things. You didn’t really need to focus intently on the sermons, though, so it wouldn’t matter if you just admired him intently throughout the service.

You wished that was the truth of the service. But luck seemed to want to avoid you at every cost. Today they were having a few special sinners sermons, read mostly by Kyungsoo, although a few other preachers were going to read a short verse each. You wondered if getting up and leaving at the mention of praying for sinners and repenting would have looked too suspicious, or strange. You assumed it would, especially being new in a town small enough for it to be one of those everyone-knows-everyone-else’s-business type of places. So you made yourself stay rooted to your spot, hoping that your brain would just switch off and decide to stare up at Kyungsoo with cartoon-style heart eyes instead.

Like you were remembering, though, luck was avoiding you still. You instead found yourself so intensely focused on the sermons and prayers and responses of the crowd surrounding you, you were almost able to completely ignore that it was Kyungsoo reading them, and Kyungsoo stood in front of you. Almost, but not quite. It would probably have been worse if it was another preacher doing it, you knew, because at least you could focus on how deep his voice sounded, and you could picture how pretty his eyes were even without being able to see them close up. It didn’t make enough of a difference, though. You could still feel the knots in your stomach you got when looking up at Kyungsoo twist into something different. You felt bile rise up in your throat and heat sting at your cheeks. Almost expectantly, you waited for tears to bite at your eyes or the lump to form in your throat. Neither of those things happened, however, as you instead struggled to keep your breathing even enough to fully focus on anything. At least the sound of them giving sinners sermons didn’t sound so loud anymore.

You thought you should probably get up, walk out of the church and not worry about what other people were thinking of you. But you did care about what they would think, so you stayed still. You could still get up though, you thought, you could disappear off to the bathroom and come back as late into the service as possible. Still, the idea of standing with people being able to see you in full view felt like too much. Especially if one of those people was Kyungsoo. Someone would probably notice you seeming upset, anyway, and they’d follow you and ask you questions you didn’t want to answer, and you didn’t have prepared excuses for them anyway.

Staying rooted to your spot was harder than you had expected it to be. Realistically it couldn’t have been too long of a service, especially not the last two preachers who began speaking. Yet it still seemed to be going on for longer than you could handle.

It wasn’t the first time you’d heard these sermons. You already had memories linked to the prayers and to the responses of the crowd that surrounded you. Shame was twisting your stomach into knots, just the same as it had on days when you’d heard these words in your own hometown. Before, you’d never been able to tell if the feeling was shame or fear, but you understood now that it was a mix of both. Even worse about before, you had never had any idea of where to go when the guilt consumed you. The confession booth back in your first church had never been the secure place of keeping secrets as you’d hoped it would have been for you. You only told the preacher you’d kissed that boy at a party. It wasn’t that big of a deal anyway. But he’d still told your parents. You could place that now as the first time you’d really understood what it was like to be ashamed of yourself.

The service was coming to an end, it looked like, when you finally built enough courage to focus back in on the space around you. People were saying their closing prayers and standing to speak with people before leaving, or before standing around for the next hour or so and talking to their companions. Rising to your feet, you understood that you should probably be doing the same. You wanted to go home now anyway, curl up in your bed and forget any of this day ever happened. It all comes back to luck, though, doesn’t it? And luck was never on your side. Not since you were old enough to know which situations you needed luck to get out of.

Kyungsoo was already approaching you, stopping another man beside him mid-sentence with a polite inclination of his head toward your figure. But you couldn’t read his lips, so you didn’t know what excuse he’d come up with unblock his path. A well-intentioned, pious one, though, you had no doubt. He kept walking quickly toward you, as if letting those beginning to make their way to speak with him that he had something to be doing that made him unavailable. You told yourself that you should turn around, act like you hadn’t seen him and walk out of the building, go straight home and sleep. Of course, though, you stayed rooted to your spot and waited patiently for him to reach you. And he did, but you were more distracted with the way he eyed you as he drew closer. His eyes flitted up and down your figure as if he was looking for something. For the briefest of seconds as he got within hearing distance, one of the corners of his lips seemed to nudge upwards. It made you feel as though he knew something you didn’t know, or maybe it was just something he wasn’t letting you onto just yet. You wondered if you’d ever know.

When he reached you, you weren’t sure if you should say something immediately or wait for him to begin a conversation. Assuming he’d speak first could lead you into standing in front of him in complete silence though, but you didn’t have the mental energy to be worried enough to change that. He cleared his throat after a moment, looking at you expectantly.

“Getting settled in better?” He asked, voice tight with courtesy.

His tone made your stomach turn in higher flips than it had been for the entirety of the service. The regret for making yourself come here was starting to weigh heavily against your shoulders. You made yourself speak, though, even if you just wanted to sit in complete silence and mull over how much shame was building in your chest. It almost felt worse than usual. All you did was…but that didn’t matter at the moment.

Making yourself nod, you swallowed down the hint of a lump in your throat. “Yeah, it’s…getting a lot easier, you know.” You realised that you couldn’t look at him then, your eyes not lifting from the floor for the entire time you mumbled out the sentence.

Kyungsoo hummed before speaking again, “Are you okay?” You nodded before even finding the courage to lift your head back up. Looking at him seemed to make the guilt worse. It’s the preacher outfit. The cross around his neck was helping to set your nerves on edge. He was raising his eyebrows at you, telling you that he didn’t believe your not-proper-answer answer.

If you were sat down, your knee would be bouncing in anxiety. He stepped closer to you, as if feeling that your alarm was rising. “What’s wrong?” He asked, his voice as soft and soothing it always was, but feeling different now.

You swallowed thickly, “Do you have confession times here?” You asked meekly, watching as he pulled back from you slightly.

His eyebrows furrowed, but he was already nodding. “Yes, but not…there won’t be an organised time for it until tomorrow morning.”

“Is that…” you shifted, the anticipation for his answer suddenly becoming too much, “is that with you?”

“No, it’s with someone higher up. Why?”

You weren’t sure how to respond to that. It didn’t need to be him, not really. But you wouldn’t want to say it to anyone else. Even if there wasn’t anyone whoever you confessed to could tell anymore, you still felt too afraid to go and sit in another confession booth. It was years ago, you tried to remind yourself, it didn’t matter anymore.

“I could…I could get a session, if you want?” He suggested, voice lowering to be impossibly soft.

You nodded, and then corrected yourself, “So I could talk to you?”

Offering you that same welcoming smile, he nodded. “When do you want to do it?”

“Can we do it today?” You asked, hating how worried your voice sounded as it met your own ears.

He looked hesitant for a moment, before nodding. “I think so,” he paused, “I’ll need to go and ask, though. Wait here.” If he wanted a response, he wasn’t waiting around for you to think of one. He turned on his heel and walked away from you, heading back up to the raised platform he’d been on to recite the sermons.

It was while watching him speak to an older man there that what would come next hit you. You weren’t even sure what you were supposed to say when you were finally alone with him. Part of you didn’t really want to tell him anything you’d been thinking about, the other part of you realised that there was nothing else you could do. Maybe talking to someone who seemed like they’d understand where you were coming from would help. Maybe you didn’t want to only be talking with him. But was things that made you ashamed to think about that you were supposed to be getting off your chest in a confession booth, wasn’t it? Not giving yourself something else to feel guilt for another couple of years.

The conversation between him and the other man was dwindling, his feet turning in their place so he could walk back to you. You found yourself wishing you’d been able to observe the reactions on his face when he’d been in the thick of the conversation, instead of seeing the blankness of his features as he turned to walk back over to you. Part of you had already immediately assumed the worse, that whoever he had spoken to had said an immediate, ‘no, that’s against our rules. Go and tell her it’s an unchangeable no.’ But that seemed slightly dramatic, so instead you went with assuming he had given him a simple, ‘no, tell her to come back at the normal time for it.’

The crowds around you were beginning to thin out significantly quicker than you had assumed they would. Already the people in the building seemed to have depleted heavily, even more of them sloping towards the now open doors in packs. They were probably going to stand outside to speak, you supposed; the weather was nice enough today for it. Some of the nerves in your stomach settled slightly at the idea of absolutely no one being able to hear you speaking to him, if you got to speak to him.

Kyungsoo reached you again, smiling encouragingly like you would to a child afraid of a doctor’s appointment. “He said it’s fine,” he answered before you had the chance to ask your question, “do you still want to do it now?”

Deciding not to trust your voice, you nodded. He didn’t say anything else, mirroring your nod to confirm that he understood, and then turning to walk towards the further end of the main room. You passed the platform, keeping your eyes trained on the grey concrete ground where you’d usually be enthralled by your surroundings; the odd glamour that came to churches. Daring yourself to look up just once before you were sat inside a blank walled confession booth, you stared longingly at the stained coloured glass of the highest windows ahead of you. You weren’t sure what the longing was, but you knew that the arching ceilings and intricate carvings decorating them wasn’t helping you forget the feeling.

Oddly enough, you were almost grateful when you reached the booth. A sense of relief came with being closed away from the most recognisable features of the church while still being where you had to be. You didn’t have to, though, you didn’t have to do anything. But when you dropped to sit inside the booth and heard the door closing behind you, you supposed you had lost the opportunity to change your mind and run back out onto the street. You felt overly aware of everything around you, down to the sound of the booth door next to you opening and closing as Kyungsoo walked into it and sat down.

Everything about the booth told you it was used regularly. The lack of dust settling onto the surfaces within removed a reminder of the confession booth back in your own church – that had barely ever been used, save for a few regulars who wouldn’t mind the signs of disuse. That was a smaller town, though, you supposed. The other aspects of this church didn’t look too different though, and it had the same kind of preachers, if you were to set Kyungsoo to the side.

He cleared his throat after he’d given you a moment to settle into your surroundings. “Have you been to a confession booth before?” You didn’t want to respond, so you just nodded again, feeling the meekness from earlier rebuild in your stomach. “You know how it works, then?” You nodded again, watching through the opened grate as he mirrored your action. “Take your time,” he finished, slipping into patient silence.

You felt a gladness that he’d said that, realising as you sat in the building silence that you were probably going to take a while before you spoke. If you could find the right words, maybe it wouldn’t take half as long. But you couldn’t. Especially not when you knew he was sat in complete isolation waiting for you to say something.

Coughing to clear your throat, you strung together the words you could find in a panic to actually say something. “The last time I went to a confession booth didn’t…it didn’t go very well, so I’m,” you spared a glance at the decorated grate to see him looking at you with patient eyes, “I’m a little nervous.”

He offered you another one of his courteous smiles, the kind that made him look exactly like what you’d imagine a preacher should be in the most stereotypical way. “There’s nothing to be nervous about,” he assured, “whatever you say won’t go any further than me.”

The preacher back in your town had said that, too, and he hadn’t stuck to that. But Kyungsoo wasn’t that preacher, or the boy at the party, and this wasn’t your hometown. You nodded, chewing down on your bottom lip in exchange for not biting at your nails. “Do I…do I say the prayer now?”

Kyungsoo waited for you to look at him before he spoke, “If you want to. I’m not going to tell you to.”

That struck you as off, but you didn’t make a move to say anything in retort. He was letting you take things at your own pace, you should just be grateful for that, not suspicious. “So, I, this happened a couple years ago,” you started, looking away from him and back at your hands, “but I slept with somebody at a party.”

When you didn’t immediately say something afterwards, you dared to look over at Kyungsoo. He was looking right back at you, but his eyes were lit up with amusement. “Is that all?” He asked, lips quirking up at the corners.

You wondered if you should be offended that he seemed to find it funny, especially when it was something that had been weighing on your chest for so long. Strangely, you weren’t angry at all. You felt a slight buzz of shame at how quickly relief had begun burning through your system. Still, you offered him a wary nod, waiting for him to say something else.

His lips were still turned up when he finally spoke again. “Would you like me to speak honestly?” He asked, watching intently as you nodded. “You almost made me think you were going to say something awful.”

“Would the church not think that was awful?”

“The church might,” he hummed.

You looked away from where your hands had curled around one another in your lap then. “But you don’t,” you finished his lingering sentence, “do you?”

He shrugged, looking almost disinterested, “You slept with someone once a couple years ago?” He asked, looking to you for confirmation. Nodding cautiously, you waited for his nonchalance to blow up in your face. Instead, he only chuckled, “I’m sure god will forgive you.”

Raising your eyebrows at him, you felt your heart thump against your chest. “Why?” He quirked a brow at you and you jumped to correct yourself before you could speak. “Why would he just…forgive it if it’s against what’s in the bible?”

He breathed in sharply, “There’s worse things in the world.”

“Yeah, but, you’re a preacher. Aren’t you supposed to…shame me, tell me it was wrong, or something?”

“No, I’m supposed to guide you to forgiveness.”

“And saying there’s nothing wrong with it is…telling me god forgives me? Aren’t preachers supposed to be the only ones able to…you know, tell you when god’s forgiven you?”

“Yes. God’s forgiven you.”

“That’s it? I don’t need to repent for anything? I don’t need to say some kind of special prayer? God’s just…over it?”

“It was a couple years ago. Once.”

“It was still a sin.”

“And you’ve been shaming yourself for it ever since,” Kyungsoo finished sharply, the courteous tone falling from him, “I’m sure a couple years of hating yourself will be repentance enough for god.”

You blinked at him, wide-eyed. “That’s not,” you paused, wondering if you should speak again.

He interrupted before you could, “Why do you want me to shame you? Haven’t you done enough of that yourself?”

“No,” you stopped him, “that’s not what you should be shaming for.”

This drew him to a pause, “I don’t understand,” he replied simply.

“I’ve done something worse, I think.”

“What have you done?” His tone was more curious than pressing now, but the patience was still gone from his demeanour.

“I’ve been thinking about doing it again,” you mumbled quietly.

“Thinking isn’t a sin.”

“No,” you nodded, “but I don’t think they’ll stay thoughts for very long.”

He stayed quiet for a moment, looking away from the grate and down to his feet. “Who are you thinking of sinning with?”

You breathed in sharply, losing your courage suddenly. “Does it matter? It would still be sinning.”

“I’m starting to think you just want me to shame you.”

You let out a shaky breath, “What if I do?”

His eyes snapped back to look at where you were staring at him intently through the grate. “Who is it?”

“You’re not stupid,” you said instead, “you don’t need me to answer that.”

He considered your words for a minute, “No,” he finalised, “but I want you to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you will, won’t you?”

“No.”

“What if I told you to?”

You didn’t answer. His lips quirked up again, more amusement lighting the dark brown of his eyes up brightly.

“Answer my question.”

“I can’t remember it,” you defended weakly.

“Lying is a sin.”

“So is what you want to do to me.”

The words didn’t even make him blanch, “I think we’re both guilty of that, aren’t we?”

“I never said it was you.”

He scoffed, “If you don’t stop acting like a child then I’ll just read the prayers to you and leave.” The mix of confusion and vague panic on your features made the complacent look you’d seen him wear before come back. “Be a good girl and tell me who it is.”

“You already know, I don’t want to say I,” Your voice failed you again.

��Don’t want to say what? That you want me to fuck you?”

You wondered how he hadn’t blanched a single time since coming into the booth, yet his words made you look to the floor with a blush heating your cheeks. “I…I never said that.”

“You were going to, though, weren’t you? Remember what I said about lying. Be a good girl, okay?”

You swallowed thickly, feeling your leg begin to jitter up and down in anxiety, “Yes.”

He nodded, rising from his seat and opening his door, heading out of the booth. Your nerves moved faster through your body then, not being able to see him anymore as the door closed behind him. You should’ve known, really, confessing that to a preacher was realistically a bad idea from the beginning. You could almost hear speaking from outside the walls, but too smothered out to make out the words.

The door to your booth opened, and you kept your eyes focused on the floor. Kyungsoo crouched down so he’d be in your line of sight, letting the door fall to slam shut behind him. The space around you both was cramped, making him much closer to you than you initially expected he would be so soon.

He stayed looking up at you in silence for a minute, “Do you want to repent?” He asked in a hushed tone.

The question didn’t make sense to you, so you only tilted your head at him to let him know you didn’t understand. He settled his hands onto your knees, starting to push them apart so he could settle closer between your legs. Breathing in sharply, you understood his question then.

“Yes,” you answered, voice growing breathy in anticipation.

It seemed the be the last push he needed to curl his fingers into the waistband of your underwear, tugging them down your legs. When he had them off your ankles, he curled them up, raising them to your lips and looking at you expectantly.

When you made no movement, he rolled his eyes, “You need to be quiet, this’ll help.”

Parting your lips, you let him push the fabric into your open mouth, feeling the weight of them settle in your mouth. He slipped back down to his previous position after he’d them placed there.

You let your head drop back before he’d even touched you, feeling your head knock against the wooden wall behind you. The sound was dull, but felt all too loud in the buzzing silence around you.

Kyungsoo didn’t say anything to the sound, pushing your skirt further up, letting it bunch up around your waist. His hands curled around your thighs, holding you still as he pressed his mouth to your core without another word. You let a moan pass around the fabric of your underwear resting on your tongue, only to earn a sharp glare from Kyungsoo.

As he placed his mouth back onto your core, you opted to tighten your teeth down onto the material instead of making any more noise, the lingering fear that he’d stop if you did sticking to you. You should be more scared of someone catching you two. But you couldn’t think of anything other than Kyungsoo as one of his hands moved from clasping your thigh to join his mouth at your core. His fingers moved quick against you, while his mouth stayed slow, making your head feel like it was spinning. You wished you could make noise, or at the very least say his name like you had wanted to earlier.

Your hips lifted from the bench, only to be pushed straight back down onto the wooden surface. The slight sting that came with it almost drew another noise from the back of your throat, but you chose to tighten your hands into his hair instead. The coil in your stomach was already starting to tighten, much to your embarrassment. You wondered if you should do something to let him know, but when you felt his fingers speed up even more you knew he didn’t need you to tell him.

His hold on your hips tightened even more, keeping them pressed harshly against the wood under you. The mix of the bruising feeling from his arm and the way his mouth and fingers hadn’t stopped moving for even the slightest moment against you brought the pressure in your stomach slamming into you. He let the feeling move through you, his mouth parting from you to bite down softly at the skin of your thighs while his fingers kept moving. When you started whining from the slight overstimulation, he fell away from you.

You took a moment to catch your breath, feeling him tug your underwear out of your mouth. He let himself drop back down to your eye-level again, slipping your underwear onto your ankles and tugging them up for you. He stopped when he reached the tops of your thighs, gripping your hand to pull you to stand and letting you finish redressing yourself.

“Try not to look at anyone out there for too long,” he said as he curled his arms around your waist, “I told them you were crying.”

“I look flushed enough for that to be true, don’t I?” You joked, unsure of what you would be saying if you had to be serious.

He only chuckled lightly in response, “You do,” he parted from you then, turning to face the door before offering you a lingering look, eyes still glazed over in amusement. “Pull your skirt down, angel.”

A blush crept onto your already hot cheeks, hands fumbling to pull your skirt back down into its proper place. Your eyes fell straight to the floor as you left the booth, following closely behind Kyungsoo.

“Feeling better, sweetheart?” You heard a female voice ask, making you glance up to meet her eyes. They were a warm brown, kind and welcoming as she smiled brightly at you.

You nodded, “Yeah, yes, it was very…helpful.”

She smiled, bobbing her head up and down just as you had been doing to back in the booth. “That’s great,” she assured, “get some rest, though, I know you must need it.”

She didn’t know what she was referencing, you knew that, but you still couldn’t say she was wrong. You really were tired. But you didn’t want to sleep yet. If you slept, you would wake up and think this was a dream you had to feel guilty for. You’re going to have to feel guilty about this anyway, you knew. But you didn’t have the energy to do that yet, so you instead just nodded at the woman’s words.

Kyungsoo breathed in to clear the air, letting the woman know that the conversation wouldn’t be going much further. “I’m gonna head out now, too, if that’s still alright.”

“Of course,” the woman smiled warmly at him, “you’ve already stayed later than expected today.”

He returned the smile, and then the formalities as they both said goodbye to one another. You copied his actions, smiling brightly and murmuring, ‘goodbye,’ more than once before you finally got out the doors and outside. The cool air waiting for you both almost seemed to kiss your skin, surrounding you and cooling you off as you stood with Kyungsoo.

He cleared his throat, “Will you still be coming?”

“Coming where?” You asked, your head still feeling light from the heat inside.

“To church.”

“To this church? Sure.”

He tilted his head at you after you responded, but asked nothing else. “Well,” he started, “I’ll see you then.”

You narrowed your eyes at him, “You’re leaving?”

“I have a life outside the church, you know.”

“Yeah, but…”

He rose his eyebrows at you, “But…” he mocked, “what?”

“You’re just gonna leave after that?”

“Was that not enough for you?”

“No,” you scoffed.

“I should’ve known you’d be greedy,” he sighed in mock disappointment. “Well, I can’t fuck you in the church, you’d be too loud.”

You couldn’t defend yourself against that, instead you just offered him an insolent shrug. He almost smiled again, but instead stole a glance back at the church building behind him.

“Walk up that street,” he gestured towards the way you usually came up to the church, “I’ll pick you up at the end of it.”

You nodded, blinking quickly as you turned on your heel, watching as he waved and smiled politely at you. He must have done this before, you thought bitterly, seeing his easy composure and logical thinking. You still walked though, reaching the curb at the end of the street and lingering there for a minute.

His car slowed as it went to drive past, and he waited only as long as it took for you to slip inside and shut the door before he was moving again. The ride was completely silent for the first few moments, before you felt his hand land on your inner thigh.

You glanced over at him, feeling his hand draw closer to your covered heat. “Do you not feel guilty?” You asked quietly, not thinking about preserving the moment.

Kyungsoo shrugged, dragging his knuckles across your heat, “Why should I?”

“You’re a preacher, aren’t you supposed to abide as closely to the bible as humanly possible?”

His eyes didn’t leave the road ahead, “How do you know I’m not?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” you chided, “but I’ve very much been brought up to believe sex before marriage is an awful thing to do.”

Kyungsoo let himself laugh softly at that, “Your church wasn’t much different from this one, was it?” You shook your head, waiting for him to continue. “All churches follow the same book, but sometimes the rules are different.”

“That’s vague.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

“Then just tell me what you mean.”

“I’m saying that people follow their religion in different ways, don’t they? I follow it differently than some preachers, but I still say my prayers and do my job, so it doesn’t matter.”

You couldn’t come up with an argument to that, especially not as he pushed your underwear to the side and pushed a finger into your core. People did follow religion in different ways, you’d known that for a long time. But his answer didn’t feel like enough.

“Kyungsoo,” you mumbled, still feeling a need to be quiet, “this doesn’t feel very…” you trailed off as he added another finger.

He hummed, “Not good enough?” He asked, watching as you immediately jumped to shake your head.

“No, no, I, it doesn’t feel very holy of you to be doing this.”

“Worried you’re corrupting me, angel?”

“More worried about you corrupting me,” you mumbled, feeling the seatbelt dig into your hips as they tried to lift from the seat.

He hummed, but didn’t respond. You tried to talk again, “Should we be doing this?”

“Do you ever stop worrying?” He asked, speeding his fingers up as the coil built in your stomach again. “I’m not going to crash the car, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It’s not,” you whined, wanting him to stop and speed up at the same time, your head spinning again, “you know it’s not.”

He stayed silent for a fleeting moment. “We shouldn’t,” he answered, “but do you really want me to stop?”

You knew you should say yes. You knew you’d probably end up in another town, at another church, in another confession booth crying about this in a few years’ time. But you couldn’t find it in you say anything other than a meek, “It’s not…” the coil in your stomach came to a snap, his fingers continuing to let you ride it through.

“Holy?” He suggested, pulling his fingers out of your underwear, tapping them against your lips. You found yourself opening them before you could say anything else, sucking the fluid off of them as he hummed, “It wasn’t meant to be.”

The car rolled to a stop a few moment later. He pulled his fingers out of your mouth, and drew them into his own, watching as your lips parted as you watched him mirror your actions. You realised then that you hadn’t even payed any attention to your surroundings through the entirety of the drive. You supposed you’d been a little distracted.

He moved round to your side of the car, opening the door for you and curling his arm around your waist as you stepped out. You were grateful for the small action, knowing that if he hadn’t you would’ve stumbled as soon as your feet hit the concrete. He kept his arm around until you reached the front door, his hands reaching into his pocket to grab his keys before letting you walk in ahead of him. You took the few seconds between him shutting the door and beginning to walk you in the direction of his bedroom to glance around at the hallway, looking for any sign of crosses that you should avoid looking at. Oddly enough, you found none, seeing the walls bare and undecorated completely instead.

His arms had curled back around your waist, although this time he stayed with his front pressed to your back. You could tell beyond a doubt that he wasn’t in a patient mood anymore, feeling him keep your speed quick until he reached his open bedroom door. The walls were the same as the hallway in the room, undecorated save for a few a photo-frames that you couldn’t see clearly, even when he switched the light on.

The weight of his arms around you disappeared once you got into the room, and you turned to face him to see what he wanted you to do next. He rose his eyebrows at you, as if expecting you to already know what he wanted from you.

“Get on your knees.”

Your lips parted even further than they had earlier, eyes widening just slightly as you breathed in sharply. The command caught you off-guard, making you hesitate as you stared back at him.

“Weren’t you saying I wasn’t being holy enough?” He taunted, glancing up and down your figure before he spoke again. “If you get on your knees for me, it’ll be a lot holier, won’t it?”

You swallowed thickly, dropping to your knees in front of him as his hands reached to undo his belt. “Put your hands together.” You placed your wrists next to one another and outstretched them to him submissively. He bevelled his head at you, “You know that’s not what I meant.”

Breathing in shakily, you clasped your hands together as you would if you were praying. He tightened the belt around your wrists then, raising his eyebrows at you once he had in a subtle check to make sure they weren’t too tight. When you offered him no complaint, he pushed his jeans and underwear down together.

Something about the energy radiating from him told you not to do anything without being directly told to first. You stayed still, waiting for him to speak again, feeling his hands curl behind your head, gathering your hair into a messy resemblance of a ponytail. “Open your mouth,” he said, voice dropping low enough to almost be inaudible.

You could still hear him well enough, though. Your mouth fell open, his hands pulling you closer to his member until you could feel the weight of it in your mouth. He slowed then, moving at a pace that you assumed must have felt torturing to him until you felt him hit the back of your throat. For a passing moment you felt yourself wanting to pull away and gag, but when you looked back up to catch his eyes focused intently on your features, the ache in your core started up again. He pulled you off of him, tipping your head up for a moment before pulling you back to him, repeating his actions a few times until he stopped suddenly.

“Get up,” he said blankly, grabbing you by the belt fastened around your wrists to pull you to your feet. His hands went to the hem of your shirt, and you noted by how easily he lifted it to rest over your bra that it must have come untucked from your skirt at some point in the day. You couldn’t tell when. He left it resting there, not bothering to go to the effort of taking the belt off your hands to pull it over your head completely.

His hands moved up your skirt again, tugging your underwear back down your legs until they hit the floor. You stepped away from them, feeling his arms grab your waist and turn you in the direction of his bed, pushing you further towards it until the backs of your knees met the mattress. You let yourself fall backwards to rest on the surface, feeling his hands already beginning to slide back up your thighs and slip to dance his fingertips over your core. He undid the buttons on his black shirt, throwing it off his arms once he had, breaking the last one on the fabric in his speed.

He slammed his lips against yours as his fingers pulled away from your core, his tongue skimming over your bottom lip as he kicked his jeans and underwear off his legs in one. Lining himself up with your core, he pulled away from you for a few seconds, pressing small kisses to your throat and collarbones as he slipped inside of you.

You whined, grabbing at his jaw to bring his lips back to your own as he went still for a moment, hearing your whines grow in volume as he did. Pulling back, he let his lips trail back to your jaw, “Ask nicely.”

You moaned again, tightening around him, feeling his lips dig into the skin of your throat in retaliation. “Please,” you mumbled, kissing at the corners of his mouth once he came close enough again.

He hummed, starting to let his lips move, “That’ll do,” he set the pace faster than you imagined he would when he’d just started, “this time,” he warned lowly.

His grip on your hips grew until it felt bruising, a whimper rising from your throat at the feeling. The pace felt almost dizzying, his lips moving back to yours after biting down on the skin of your shoulder hard enough to leave the indent of his teeth there to bruise. His tongue was already back in your mouth, his nails digging into the soft skin of your hips.

A particularly hard slam of his hips against yours made a sharp whimper leave your lips, being smothered out by his lips. He pulled his mouth away from your own, lips trailing as low on your covered chest as they could. “You’re so good for me,” he groaned, his eyes closing as his eyebrows furrowed.

You whined as the pressure in your stomach grew impossibly apparent, “I’m not,” you mumbled in response.

He grunted, “I said for me, not for anyone else.” His lips slammed against your own again, just as harshly as they had before.

You felt cold metal brush against the heat of your chest just as the coil in your stomach started to snap. Opening your eyes for the smallest of moments, you saw the cross hanging from his neck had landed to drift across your skin every time his hips moved against you. The feeling of the pressure moving through your body for the third time in a day brought your attention away from the sight though, eyes fluttering shut again as Kyungsoo pressed his lips back to yours as he hit his own high.

Small bouts of overstimulation were burning up your thighs when he slowed to a stop. His lips fell away from yours, but his forehead stayed pressed to yours for another passing moment. He slipped himself out of you, kissing your forehead gently as you whined. His hands curled around the leather still against your wrist, undoing it before he parted from you completely.

You lay still while you listened to him move around the room, not finding the energy left in your body to rise to your feet again. You weren’t sure how long he’d let you lie there until he tugged you to sit up, handing you a pair of his underwear and a plain white shirt to wear. You smiled, your throat feeling too dry to let you say a thank you as you pulled the clothes to cover yourself. He was wearing almost the exact same as you, you noted, but the shirt he’d thrown onto himself was long-sleeved and black, so you didn’t have to feel the hints of embarrassment you would have if he’d matched your outfits by mistake.

He moved to fall onto the other side of the bed, staying sat up with the duvet off of him until you moved to be at his level. Tugging the duvet up to cover you both, you raised your eyebrows at him, “I’m sleeping here?”

He nodded, “Unless you don’t want to?”

“No,” you interrupted, “that’s fine, I, I just wasn’t sure.” It wasn’t late enough to sleep yet, not really, but you weren’t going to refuse the prospect of closing your eyes for a few hours.

He draped his arm over your shoulder once you’d settled onto his chest. You could feel the chain holding the cross around his neck press to your cheek. “Can I ask you something?” He asked quietly, voice practically a whisper in the silent room.

“Of course,” you responded quickly, knowing you’d asked him enough difficult questions today for him to ask you at least one.

“What happened at your old church?” His hand had begun to trace small circles on your shoulder, as if he knew the question would make you startle.

“I told you,” you mumbled, “I made a confession there.”

“The same one you made to me?”

You nodded, keeping your head pressed to his chest.

“And what happened?”

“The preacher told my parents,” you paused, “they weren’t as easy-going about it as you were.”

He hummed again, “Is that why you left?”

“Yeah, I guess. I wasn’t really happy there anyway.”

“Are you happy here?”

“I’ve barely been here a week.”

He didn’t respond immediately after that. For a minute you thought he might have fallen asleep. “They shouldn’t have overreacted about it,” he said quietly.

“It’s against the religion,” you pointed out, wondering vaguely why you were defending their anger.

“So is this,” he retorted. When you made no move to argue his point, he sighed. “Are you gonna feel guilty about this, too?”

“Shouldn’t you feel guilty about it?”

“No,” he answered plainly.

You pushed yourself up from his chest, “Why not?”

“Because god doesn’t care who you’re fucking. Why would he? It’s not important.”

You sighed, “You’re a bad religious influence for a preacher.”

He shrugged, “We all have opinions.”

“Opinions don’t usually go directly against our jobs,” you mumbled, feeling him chuckle at your response.

“Doesn’t really matter,” he grumbled again, his voice growing thicker with fatigue. You only nodded, dropping your head back against his chest. “You’re gonna stay in town, aren’t you?”

You thought for a moment, and then nodded against his chest, “I’ll see how I go, I guess.”

Humming, he moved the hand that wasn’t tracing soothing patterns on your covered skin down to your shift between your thighs. “I don’t know if you’ve heard,” he started, lazily tugging the pair of his underwear you were wearing down to your knees, “but we have a wonderful church in town.”

You let out a sleepy moan, “I guess I can check that out, too,” you paused again, letting your legs fall further apart, feeling his fingers curl inside you again, “or maybe I can say my prayers in privacy instead. I know someone who knows them pretty well.”

He hummed, pressing his lips back to yours, “That could work, too. Only if you’re good for them, though.”

Groaning softly in response, you nodded against his chest, the chain digging into your cheek again, “I think I could do that.”

[canid-slashclaw]

The Outliers - A Guildwars Love Story

This story is dedicated to my wife.

Chapter 1

So many of my comrades had perished at the paws of those savage beasts! He had mused to himself.   "Father, I'm here.  Are you okay?" The old man looked at his son with a somewhat surprised look then handed him the lantern.   "I'm fine.  It's nothin'.  Just help me get these fence posts back in their notches so we can tie 'em off."   Kaleb swung the lantern around searching for one of the fallen fence railings. Once he had located the post both he and his father worked in unison to get them reset. "Have you checked to see if Gerty decided to make a bolt for it?"  Kaleb asked.   His father laughed. "That ole' girl wouldn't move if she were being attacked by an army of ettins.  She's right where she's always been... face firmly planted in the feeding trough." In spite of the misery of the cold rain, both father and son managed to mend the damaged fence well before sunrise.  After their tasked had been completed, they promptly headed towards the back kitchen door. "Not one step further you two." Shirley Grimwald, or "Mamma" Shirley as her husband liked to call her, raised her hand in a gesture for both men to stop.  She pointed towards the floor as a signal to remind them to take off their wet boots and parkas before entering the house.   "Yes ma'am.  I guess the rain chased me in and I lost my head for a bit," the elder Grimwald chuckled.   "It's okay, dear. The next time, I'll chase you out sans overcoat and muddy boots." She smiled in return.

"Once the two of you are dried - I left some fresh towels at the edge of the table right next to the door - you can have some hot coffee and cakes." Mamma Grimwald was slight in build but strong in her faith.  As a devoted follower of the Six, she piously offered prayers whenever a situation demanded them.  With the serving of food came the traditional supplication to their god, Dwayna, for blessings upon their family.   Kaleb tried his best to dry out the locks of his dark shoulder-length hair.  But even with his judicious efforts, his head still looked like a frazzled soppy wet mess.  The chair he sat on felt small and rickety under the weight of his broad, six-foot, four-inch frame.  Being mindful of the damp towel, he discreetly folded it into a compact square then placed it upon his lap.  

"Thank you, boys, for fixing that fence.  It seems every time there's a puff of wind, that thing keeps getting blown down," Shirley said as she poured both men some coffee.   "Are the girls still asleep?  That thunder makes enough racket to wake the dead." Kaleb looked at his father and said with a laugh.  "C'mon, father.  Katie can sleep through a volcano eruption.  And Rachel is probably hiding under the pillow crying like a newborn with her butt stuck in the air." "Liar!" Came a shout from the other side of the door adjoining the kitchen and hallway.  Rachel leaned out from the door frame just enough so her green eyes and auburn hair was visible.

"And miss snoop gets foiled again.  Yer way too predictable, sis.  Now go to bed!" "Why should I?  I can't even sleep and Katie snores like a cave troll." "If the big bad thunderstorm is too much for you, then you can always sleep in my closet." "Oh, just shut up Kal!   I hope you catch pneumonia and die so then I can have the best room in the house." "Rachel Grimwald!  I will hear no further talk like that from you young lady. Since you can't seem sleep during foul weather or be nice to anyone... I guess you'll just have to sleep in our room... on the floor!" Rachel said nothing as Kaleb gave her a wide-eared grin. "Fine! I'm going back to bed... in my room!" Rachel said as she stomped off making every attempt to make her footsteps as loud as possible. Kaleb then turned to his parents and commented.  "Yanno.  I would sure feel sorry for the unlucky soul who has dubious honor of wanting to marry her."

"She's just going through that phase, son.  Girls eventually get over it and blossom into beautiful women," Daniel said while taking an extra sip of his coffee. "Speaking of marriage.  How are things going between you and Trish?  You haven't talked about her much for awhile."  Mrs. Grimwald asked her son.   Kaleb averted his gaze for a moment before responding.  "She's been really busy trying to earn some brownie points with the nobles and such.  We really don't get to see each other that much anymore." "She would make a fine wife for you, son.  I know her family is well connected.  Shoot, if you ever had to serve on a battlefront, I'm sure her folks would find a way of having you stationed in a place that far from any fighting," his mother said with a smile. "Shirley.  That's not how the Seraph operates.  Only the spoiled rich brats get to serve far from the front lines.  Us common folks, on the other hand, aren't as lucky."   The elder Grimwald then looked at his son and asked, "speaking of the Seraph, when are you supposed to report for duty?" "I'm to report in within three days.  According to my commanding officer, I am to be stationed not too far from Claypool." Father Grimwald poured himself another cup of coffee then began arranging the pieces of silverware in a triangle pattern.  

"So, after your stint in the army, what are your plans then?" Kaleb knew where the conversation was going.  "Honestly, I'm not really sure.  Maybe I'll go to Divinity's Reach and join the carnival.  I heard they are always having openings.  I think part of that comes from the fact that some of the performers wind up getting eaten by the ferocious animals they train." "You're like the pot that keeps callin' the kettle black, son.  You are much worse than your sister as far as that smart mouth of yers goes and if I were a woman I would have smacked ya upside the head, silly," Daniel said tersely.   "Then I guess I'm lucky in that there's no woman who's got a witty mouth quite like mine.  Not that I'm thinking too highly of myself or anything, mind you... just stating the obvious, that's all."

His father stood up from the kitchen table then spoke to Kaleb in a passive-aggressive tone.  "Well, sooner or later you will have to face the facts.  As the elder son of this family, the burden will fall to you when the time comes to take over the business.  If I had my way, I would rather you remain here than be sent off to fight in some godsforsaken far off piece of Tyria." "Hey. I'm not keen on dying either, father.  But since the treaty, Kryta is no longer under threat and even your outfit, the Ebonguard, has had to pull back from charr-held lands.  And who knows?  If I'm lucky, I may even get into the hobby of mounting centaur heads in my trophy room,"  Kaleb said with a half-smile. His mother also rose up from the table to give her son a hug.  "Well, I for one am proud that you are serving in the queen's army.  Your father had a distinguished career as a soldier and I have no doubt that you will as well.  Of course I'll be worried sick about you, but at least you are making yourself part of a noble cause." "Ha! Mamma, there's one skill you've taught me that I can utilize while being a soldier - and that is being an excellent cook.  After all, an army moves on its stomach and whenever I'm around I'll make sure my comrades enjoy feasts that are worthy of norn legends." Daniel shook his head.  "War is nothing to get excited over.  Anyway, do you honestly believe this treaty will even hold?  The ink is not even dry yet and our people are already fighting along side those brutes."   "It doesn't matter.  Besides, the chances of me encountering a charr are about as likely as someone being killed by a ghost," Kaleb quipped as he helped his parents clean off the table.  "Speaking of non-human peoples... I still gotta say my farewells to Ulfgar.  That old norn would never let me hear the end of it if I just up and left without saying goodbye." "Dodging the question again, son?  No matter.  Sooner or later you will have to come to a decision on whether or not you want to take over the family business.  I'm getting too old to be lifting things I shouldn't be lifting and managing things I should no longer be managing; at some point that responsibility will have to fall upon someone else.  Namely, my son." His father angled his reply just as he started heading towards the hallway.  

"Love ya, father.  Try not to let the coffee keep you and ma up too long."

Shirley gave her son another hug before heading out of the kitchen and to her bedroom.  As she passed her husband, his father turned back towards Kaleb and commented.  "No worries, son.  Coffee is more like a sedative to me anymore."

"Oh. And one other thing..." Kaleb looked up waiting for his father to finish his response. "I have seen people killed by ghosts back when I fought in Ascalon."

[sweetsmellosuccess]

Sundance 2020: Preview

Earlier in the month, as I frantically made my selections for the limited public tickets Sundance generously makes available for the press, I was struck by just how much of a crapshoot the whole process was. That’s the thing about this particular festival, virtually no one outside of the filmmakers and Sundance programmers have seen the films yet. It’s a great unknown (and, yes, Cannes is also similar in this way, but whereas Sundance is selecting primarily indie films, the festival on the French Riviera gets to choose anything they damn well please, from big Hollywood studio fare, to auteur International work), which leads to lots of hunch choices, based on gut feeling as much as anything else.

As you might imagine, one’s hit rate on such matters is volatile. I looked back to previous years’ selections, and found, on rough average, choosing solid (or better) films at about a 45% clip. That is to say, of the films I deemed most worthy of my attention, about half of them were less  —  or even far less  —  than I hoped. To be fair, randomly watching regular studio films opening from week to week at home in Philly, I would imagine that percentage would be a good bit lower, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with Sundance’s percentages.

Still, it does speak to the embracing-of-the-unknown ethos that this festival instills in you. We pays our money, we takes our chances, etc. Having said all that  —  and perhaps having chiseled down the enormous boulder of salt with which to read this piece  —  here are our best guesses for what looks like (on paper, at least) some of the more interesting films in this year’s fest. We’ll see how it turns out.

Downhill: The U.S. remake of Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Swedish film about a family on a skiing trip in the Alps, who experience serious disruption when a controlled avalanche terrifies the father of the clan to ditch his family in order to save himself. Normally, I would steer far clear of American remakes, but this indie remains intriguing, even if it is directed by a pair of actors (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash). Casting Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfus together as the parents is also a draw. We can only hope the film retains the razor-sharp acerbity of the original.  

Falling: Viggo Mortensen, best known for all time as Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings triad, has many talents  —  he speaks French fluently, writes poetry, and paints with some apparent aplomb  —  but we’ll see how he handles writing and directing for the first time with this film, in which he plays a gay man living with his family in L.A., whose arch-conservative farmer father (Lance Hendrickson) comes to live with him. The set up sounds on the definite hokey side, but any film that casts David Cronenberg as a proctologist has got something going for it.

Horse Girl: An awkward loner of a woman (played by Allison Brie), with a predilection for crafts, crime shows, and, yes, horses, endures a series of lucid dreams that infiltrate her day-to-day existence. Sounding just so perfectly Sundanecian, Jeff Baena’s film nevertheless holds some attraction, especially because the director (whose previous film was the well-received The Little Hours) has a solid track record. He co-wrote this effort with Brie, a collaboration that might well lead to something more compelling than its initial description.

Kajillionaire: I guess you could call writer/director/actress Miranda July something of an acquired taste. Her previous films, including Me and You and Everyone We Know, and The Future are filled with a kind of creative whimsy, along with intense character insight. Her new film is about a pair of grifter parents (Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins) who throw together a big heist at the last second, convincing a newcomer (Gina Rodriguez) to join them, only for the newbie to disrupt their relationship with their daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), whom they have been training her entire life.

The Last Thing He Wanted: Working from a novel by the resplendent Joan Didion, Dee Rees follows up her 2017 Sundance rave Mudbound with another literary adaptation. Anne Hathaway plays a journalist obsessed with the Contras in Central America, whose father (Willem DaFoe) unexpectedly bestows her with proof of illegal arms deals in the region. Suddenly, a player in a much more complicated game, she connects with a U.S. official (Ben Affleck), in order to make it out alive. It’s a particularly well-heeled cast, which at Sundance doesn’t necessarily mean a good thing, but Rees has proven herself more than up to the challenge.

Lost Girls: At this point, I will literally watch Amy Ryan in anything  —  her exquisite bitchiness absolutely stole last year’s Late Night  —  so Liz Garbus’ film would have already been on my radar, but here, with Ryan playing a Long Island mother whose daughter goes missing, my interest is sorely piqued. Based on a true-crime novel by Robert Kolker, Ryan’s character discovers her daughter was part of an online sex ring, and goes through heaven and earth to draw attention to her plight, taking on the local authorities in the process.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always: Eliza Hittman has a way of adding lustre and temporal beauty to the otherwise roughneck scenes of the teens she depicts. Her latest film is about a pair of young women living in rural Pennsylvania, who find the means to escape their repressive town after one of them becomes unexpectedly pregnant, making their way to New York City. With a storyline eerily reminiscent of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Hittman, as is her want, has cast two relative unknowns (Talia Ryder and Sidney Flanigan) as the leads.

Palm Springs: Lightening things up a smidge, Max Barbakow’s off-beat comedy stars Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg as reluctant wedding guests, who somehow find each other at the same time as some kind of surrealistic episode leads them to recognize that nothing really matters in the first place, allowing them to lay havoc upon the proceedings for their own amusement. Barbakow’s debut feature is stockpiled with strong castmembers, including J.K. Simmons and Peter Gallagher, and it’s always a treat to watch the continuing evolution of Samberg from mop-haired SNL performer to certified big-screen actor.  

Promising Young Woman: The #metoo movement begets this revenge thriller about a once-victimized woman (Carey Mulligan) who works by day as quiet barista, but spends her nights seducing men in order to punish the living hell out of them for trying to take advantage of her. When she runs into a seemingly sweet old classmate (Bo Burnham), it would appear as if salvation is at hand, but apparently it’s not quite that simple. Filmmaker Emerald Fennell, whose outstanding work on the series “Killing Eve,” earned her a pair of Emmy nominations, makes her feature debut with a film that sounds appropriately searing.

Shirley: There were those critics at the 2018 festival who found Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline one of the best films of the year. While I wasn’t among them, there was still much to appreciate with the writer/director’s improvisational visions. Her entry into this year’s Sundance promises to be at least somewhat more grounded, if not still effervescent. It concerns famed author Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), writer of “The Lottery,” whose literary inspiration is stirred after she and her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) take in a young couple to liven up their household.

[bubblyani]

No Apologies Pt. 2

(Billy x Reader)

Part 2 of the Billy Delaney (Me and Mrs. Jones) Two Shot

Rating: Mature (18+)

Author’s Note: We need more Billy content so I’m back with Part 2. Hope you all really enjooooy this. Cause I certainly did imagining it 😍.

Read Part 1 HERE

(One month ago)

You tapped your fingers rhythmically on the pub table, yet it was annoyingly loud enough that the bartender shot you a look of disapproval.

“Sorry...” you muttered. You couldn’t help it, Alfie had finally come back home after his time abroad, and you’ve finally arranged to meet.

Being close friends since childhood, others may have teased the both of you,  claiming you’ll eventually end up falling for each other, like most do. But you knew, Alfie was clearly the brother that you never had. And contrary to the fact he already had sisters, he felt the same about you.

“Lovely people, your boy Alfie’s back!”

That familiar voice made you shriek in joy, turning to see Alfie Jones at the door.

“Oh my goooood ALFIE!” Your shrieks continued as you jumped out of your barstool, running over in a comical fashion, to be swooped up and spun by your old friend.

You noticed another young man stood next to him, who seemed quite cute. Cute enough to certainly get your attention.

But also cute enough that you were suddenly worried of your embarrassing behavior. However, that didn’t matter to you right now, for your friend was back. And that man was merely a stranger that you won’t see again. You were ecstatic enough, you didn’t care. All was normal again.

“How’s my girl??” Alfie asked, as he put you down finally.

“Joyous beyond words now that my friend is back..I just can’t believe you’re back!” You replied with much enthusiasm.

“Oh...before I forget...I brought a friend with me ” Alfie said. And your jaw couldn’t do anything else but drop. For the cute stranger stood next to him with a friendly smile. The cute one who you were sure to forget.

Shit

And there you were, acting like an idiot, free of all worries.

“Y/N...This is Billy. Billy....Y/N”

Looking straight at him, you realized how handsome he was, with eyes that stood out instantly. Embarrassed by your behavior, you had no other choice but to continue on with your bubbly behavior.

“Hi Billy! Very nice to meet you!” You said out loud, extending your hand dramatically. The firm grip and the cool smile that he gave you as he shook your hand, made it even harder for you to get over.

“Anyways, drinks are in order...what do ya both fancy?” 

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

You were glad you volunteered to get drinks, for that was the only way to get away and recover from this feeling of awkwardness your mind has developed.

Surprisingly, Rachel the bartender was busy with other customers you had to wait longer than expected. But you didn’t mind that at all. 

“Alfie changed his mind”

Startled, you found Billy suddenly appearing  right next to you.

“Oh...really?” You asked, “alright then-”

“No...let me” Billy offered, raising his hand politely.

Like a gentleman, Billy ordered drinks for all three of you. And you watched him with surprising admiration.

“Thank you...” you said. He nodded in acknowledgment.

“You’re very welcome” he replied. The drinks seemed to be taking quite longer than it should. And Billy didn’t leave your side either, which was unexpected. Out of the blue, you were suddenly tempted to just, talk.

“I uh...I hope I didn’t scare you earlier. You know...me being all silly and loud seeing Alfie and acting all gahhhh...” you said, chuckling , “I’m sorry about that”

Frankly, you didn’t know why you were trying to defend your actions.

“No I get it” Billy nodded understandingly. You sighed in relief.

“But...” he began, “Why do you feel like you have to apologize?”

You froze. He was right. Why?

“Um...” you murmured, “I don’t know...” You laughed nervously, thankful when  drinks were all ready.

Liar. You knew. You knew at that moment why. Cause you were beginning to fall for Alfie’s friend, Billy. 

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

(Present)

Half an hour went pass, and nothing. Why did you feel this way? Were you expecting something ?

Though the lights were turned off, the city lights still managed to filter through the window. It was beautiful. You loved the way it did. Especially in Mrs. jones’ room.

Replacing with new sheets, you made sure to not make a mess of her room as Alfie generously offered it to you for tonight. Sitting on the bed in just your oversized night tee, your hands kept busy, brushing your hair with the comb.

You felt relaxed every time the teeth of the comb touched your scalp. But not relaxed enough, especially after what happened tonight.

What made Billy do that?

Could it be that he felt the same as you felt about him?

Or was it just spur of the moment?

A quiet knock on the door made you turn with much focus. You wondered if it was Billy. Or maybe it was Alfie. You were sure to go mad with curiosity.

Getting off the bed, you tip toed towards the door, the anticipation growing stronger. Maybe it was Alfie, tired from all the gaming, asking for a completely random favor. Or maybe you were just hearing things. Shaking your head, you took a deep breath, before opening the door slowly.

The breath you took left your lips immediately. For it was Billy.

Wearing a grey t-shirt along with a pair of boxers, his hair was dry and was bed ready. The way he smiled softly, made you smile with him. Moving to the side, you let him enter the room, whilst you slowly closed the door behind you. His gaze remained on your face, and it never left. And you had a hard time looking away.

Looking down, you held on to your fingers shyly, as if you suddenly found yourself occupied with them.

“I’m sorry about earlier...” you said softly. Still looking down. Billy scoffed in subtle disbelief.

“Y/N...” he began, “Would you stop apologizing?”

You nodded in agreement. He was right.  The moments where you’ve apologized to him were endless. Bad habit indeed.

You heard Billy sigh,

“I wish I could kiss your Sorry away”

“Heheh...I wish you could”

You found yourself replying, finally looking up to him as you both broke into chuckles. But that was when you realized. You realized that he actually could. And you would let him in a heartbeat.

Just like that, you felt your heartbeat increase at that very moment. The intensity of his sentence started to sink in your skin. Breathing in sync, he held your hand. Small sparks went  through your body as his thumb ran over your hand.

Hypnotized by those eyes that didn’t need any light to shine, you leaned forward, acting like a magnet as he bent down, grabbing onto your lips with his. The kiss was gentle, akin to flower petals brushing against one another. And you very much felt as if sweetness was being fed to you.

But suddenly that gentleness disappeared, as both of you felt those petals cause friction, creating heat leading to passion. Lips melting into one another, you involuntarily opened yours, easily permitting Billy’s tongue to wrap around your own, deepening this act of affection. 

An unexpectedly loud moan escaped you, forcing Billy to put his fingers on your lips, silencing you. He shook his head, indicating how Alfie might actually hear them. Nodding obediently, you took his hand, leading him over to the bed. 

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

(One week ago)

“Ah...That one...over there. She seems interested”

“Oh?...you think so?”

“Yeah, absolutely ... the way she’s making eyes at you. She means business, Alfie”

Locking his gaze at the pretty young woman across the bar, Alfie slid off from his chair smoothly as per your encourage. It was one of those nights at the bar. Alfie needed some fun, and he needed assistance to get around to that. And you were his ever so dependable wing-woman.

“Just uh...be careful not to spook her off with them...” whistling, you pointed your fingers at his chest. To which Alfie laughed.

“Oh...you know I have very prominent nipples” he said proudly.

“Indeed you do...” you replied, raising your bottle, “...and they do look amazing” “Really?”

“Of course...” you said, “You’ll say anything to make your child happy” you teased.

“Ha-Ha-Ha” Alfie remarked.

Pointing your nose in guilt, you watched him walk over to the girl. Which led you  to the pub table. 

“Any luck?” Billy asked, as he wiped the table.

“So far so good...” you said, sipping on your beer, “You know what I just realized...” getting Billy to look at you with curiosity, “It must be so interesting to work at a bar. I mean...imagine all the crazy things that happen here” you laughed, “Truth be told, most crazy things actually do happen here”

“Well...” Billy said, “It’s never boring” 

“I bet ...” you said, alcohol fueling you up with enthusiasm, “...with all the beautiful ladies coming here...”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh come on Billy!” You said, “surely you must be having your fun here...a handsome bartender like you...who’d resist?”

He merely chuckled, which you were surprised by. “Well then...” he began, leaning forward “Could you kindly spot me a beautiful lady tonight then?”

“Hmmmm...” you said, resting your chin on your hand, “Honestly...” you looked around, “Tonight’s picking is a bit...” you blew a raspberry, forcing both of you to laugh.

“Is that so?” He asked. You kept laughing, covering your mouth.

“I’m sorry...I...” you continued in mid laughter, “I was so rude...all these girls here are all really beautiful...truthfully. I don’t know why I said that”

“There you go ...apologizing again” Billy sighed, shaking your head. You exhaled.

“Do you know wha? If I ever... find a good enough girl for you...” you said, “I’ll pat you on the shoulder...” you continued, as you lightly patted his wide shoulder with a playful vibe , “...and point you to her...without any hesitation. But until then...you’re stuck with me”

Billy smiled, “Doesn’t sound so bad”

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

(Present)

Your hands never left each others as you sat side by side on the bed. Suddenly, all forms of conversation were quieter, and even more intimate. As if this should not be shared by anyone else but the both of you.

“Since...” Billy began, “when did y-“

“The first time...” You replied, alarmingly fast.

Clearing  your throat, “the first time we met...” you said, blushing.

“Oh...”

You heard him reply, his eyes turning warm just like his sudden smile.

“What?” You asked, “What’s wrong?”

“No...just” he paused, “I thought ...I was the only one”

Your eyes widened, “You too?” You asked, “Really?”

“Yes”

“Oh my god” you breathed.

Suddenly you came to the realization that Billy couldn’t stop staring at your lips. Thus bringing heat to your face. Moving back, you felt him tug your hand inviting you to move back on the bed with him.

The moment was yours to savor and there was no Alfie to storm and ruin it. And you certainly surprised Billy by slowly straddling him against the headboard of the bed.

Surprised he may be, but disappointed he was not.

Taking the initiative, you took his hands, gingerly placing them on your waist, which he willfully held on to now with your permission. You felt his fingers settling on you slow, familiarizing themselves, simultaneously relaxing and arousing you.

You felt feathers tickle your fingers when you let them run through his locks. His hair always was tempting to be touched. And tonight you let the temptation take you, and his eyes fluttered with comfort as a response.

Slow. This was slow. Yet it was sweet. And indulging.

Foreheads finally resting on each other, you found balance as your hands moved down to his chest. You relished pleasing Billy with this slow torturous act for it was the only way you could think of to appreciate him. Words were moot when silence needed observing behind closed doors. Feeling the comfortable material of his tee, Yours hands explored his torso, running over his shirt painfully slow. Finally reaching to the end of it, You suddenly dipped your hands inside, fingertips gently making contact with his skin. Billy inhaled and exhaled sharply as you made your presence known over every inch of his torso. And he certainly didn’t hesitate to tighten his grip on your waist as you did.

“Looks like you’re still stuck with me” You whispered, noses brushing against one another. Billy’s lips formed a smile.

“Doesn’t sound so bad”

Joyous, you kissed him with much passion, to which he responded with much desperation, for you had him at the palm of your hand. Pulling his shirt off, you were fueled with impatience. Hands returning to his hair, you couldn’t believe that this was the man you’ve loved from the first sight. And you were more than happy that he was.

You felt yourself involuntarily roll your hips against him once. And you liked how it felt. Repeating the process, you began to roll them continuously, causing  little moans to come out of his lips as well, forcing him to hold on to you even tighter.

Apparently the fuel you bore may have transferred to Billy, for you felt him explore your topography as well. You felt your cheeks heat up the moment his face pressed against your chest over your shirt. Inhaling, he savored in your warmth, and your body began to send you urgent whispers, begging to show him the world existed behind the cotton. He could be learning to be telepathic or eavesdropping, for he hurriedly pulled your t-shirt up, making you chuckle in reply. Without any sense of objection, you assisted him, discreetly pulling it off of you, until it left your skin completely.

It was all so easy, until you finally realized, how naked you were before him.

Cupping your neck, you swiftly allowed your arms to hide your breasts in sudden embarrassment. Suddenly you felt not pretty to show yourself off. Suddenly you were concerned unnecessarily.

“Y/N...” Billy breathed, eyes filled with longing, “...not now...”

Before you could explain yourself with your own eyes, Billy's kisses landed on your elbows, then over to your arms traveling upward. Moving to your neck, you felt him kiss each and every finger, setting them free one by one till his lips were successfully able to reach that sweet spot of your neck. You felt vulnerable, for he was studying you well enough. Hands parting free, you were reminded of your confidence you possessed a while ago, deeply inhaling as you revealed yourself to him finally.

Hands securely gripping on your back, Billy proceeded to show his affection, leaving no inch unattended with his lips as he moved down. Their lightest touch over the soft skin of your breasts, gave life to your nipples. They felt noticed, and instantly begged for a direct connection. Finally, his mouth enclosed on the hardened buds, each given such care, you could only moan in whispers. You felt chills yet you felt heat, and the only way to balance both was to roll your hips against his now very evident erection, which made your eyes flutter. Pulling his face to yours, you kissed him hard, reflecting the intensity of your emotions.

He held you tight, he lifted you with strength, laying you on the bed effortlessly despite his lean frame. His aura exuded Protector, and you felt like a princess. Fresh bed sheets against your bare back, even the air you breathed tickled your body for it felt noticed all over. 

“Are you sure?” Billy whispered.

Yes

You heard yourself say instantly. At least in your head you did. Resting on your elbows, you held his face.

“Billy...” you breathed, “with you ...I always am...”

You said, inching closer as you softly kissed his eyes then his temples.

Under the city lights, Billy looked beautiful as you watched him slowly pull his boxers down. Your hands extended involuntarily the moment you saw his shaft spring out, urging you to gently stroke it. And by the way he exhaled sharply you knew you did well. But it did not distract him from slipping the panties off you.

As you wrapped yourself around him, you realized how your innermost desire certainly became a reality tonight in many ways. Resting his lips on yours lovingly, Billy entered you, hoping to make his declarations of affection in this night of new discoveries and celebration. 

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

You didn’t need any blankets, especially when it was Billy who cradled you in his arms with such softness.

You wished this moment could last longer. But the look he suddenly gave you, proved otherwise.

“I have to go...” he said, his soft Irish accent caressing your heart while his hands caressed your face.

“I know...” Sitting up, you watched him get out of bed and get into his boxers, turning around swiftly, as he was looking for something.

“Ah ...found it” you whispered, leaning over to grab his t-shirt.

Billy suddenly sighed. “What?” You asked, as you walked over to him. “You’re...so beautiful” he breathed. With the city lights washing over you through the darkness, he gazed at your naked frame standing there confusingly.

And that’s when you realized it. Shyly, you bit your lower lip. And that was the only shyness you could have. You didn’t want to hide. Walking closer, you handed him his shirt.

The mere action of him putting it on appeared to look mesmerizing. And as you stood there breathing heavily, you began to grow more infatuated. As if to console, he kissed you. But as he did, it felt far from mere consolation.

Especially when those kisses lit something up in both of you once again.

Holding you by the waist, he surprised you when he suddenly picked you up, your naked skin brushing against his clothed figure. Breaking away, he looked at you with sheer desperation, which you empathized. If you both had another chance, you would have in a heartbeat. But again, the time and place was clearly not right.

Slowly dropping down to the ground from his arms, you hurriedly grabbed your own clothes in order to get decent. Watching you with adoration, Billy quickly held your face.

“Drop me a text when you get home tomorrow...” he said, “In fact...you can send one...any time. You can call me...” his eyes twinkled, “You can come see my flat...just you” he added.

You nodded, sharing his twinkle.

“I hoped you’d say that...” you breathed, smiling, “Thank you...”

He chuckled, “...as long as it’s not another ‘Sorry’ ”

You giggled softly, hitting him on the chest.

“Shut up” ___________________________________________

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[ucflibrary]

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month!

 Asian Pacific American as a topic covers vast oceans of identity and information. By definition, an Asian Pacific American is an American (whether born, naturalized, or other) who was born on or has heritage from anywhere on the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island). These areas cover a wide array of languages, cultures, religions, and ethnicities that have brought countless skills, hopes and dreams to the United States.

 UCF Libraries faculty and staff have (very enthusiastically) suggested 24 books and movies within the library’s collection by or about Asian Pacific Americans. Click the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links. These, and additional titles, are also on the Featured Bookshelf display on the second (main) floor next to the bank of two elevators.

A Concise History of China by J. A. G. Roberts

In this overarching book, J. A. G. Roberts refers to recent archeological finds--the caches of bronze vessels found at Sanxingdui--and to new documentary reevaluations--the reassessment of Manchu documentation. The first half of the book provides an up-to-date interpretation of China's early and imperial history, while the second half concentrates on the modern period and provides an interpretive account of major developments--the impact of Western imperialism, the rise of Chinese Communism, and the record of the People's Republic of China since 1949.

Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese confinement in North America by Greg Robinson

Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States

Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.

Suggested by Rachel Edford, Teaching & Engagement

 Born Confused by Tanuja Desair Hidier

Seventeen-year-old Dimple, whose family is from India, discovers that she is not Indian enough for the Indians and not American enough for the Americans, as she sees her hypnotically beautiful, manipulative best friend taking possession of both her heritage and the boy she likes.

Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Cora Cooks Pancit written by Dorina Lazo Gilmore and illustrated by Kristi Valiant

When all her older siblings are away, Cora's mother finally lets her help make pancit, a Filipino noodle dish. Includes recipe for pancit.

Suggested by Cindy Dancel, Research & Information Services

 Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong

Named one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Science Fiction Books in 2007, Dance Dance Revolution is a genre-bending tour de force told from the perspective of the Guide, a former dissident and tour guide of an imagined desert city.

Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He’s a Fractional Persian—half, his mom’s side—and his first-ever trip to Iran is about to change his life. Darius has never really fit in at home, and he’s sure things are going to be the same in Iran. His clinical depression doesn’t exactly help matters, and trying to explain his medication to his grandparents only makes things harder. Then Darius meets Sohrab, the boy next door, and everything changes. Soon, they’re spending their days together, playing soccer, eating faludeh, and talking for hours on a secret rooftop overlooking the city’s skyline. Sohrab calls him Darioush—the original Persian version of his name—and Darius has never felt more like himself than he does now that he’s Darioush to Sohrab.

Suggested by Peter Spyers-Duran, Cataloging

 Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

Suggested by Rachel Edford, Teaching & Engagement

 Fa Mulan: the story of a woman warrior by Robert D. San Souci

A retelling of the original Chinese poem in which a brave young girl masquerades as a boy and fights the Tartars in the Khan's army.

Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, Connect Libraries

Front Desk by Kelly Yang

Mia Tang has a lot of secrets. Number 1: She lives in a motel, not a big house. Every day, while her immigrant parents clean the rooms, ten-year-old Mia manages the front desk of the Calivista Motel and tends to its guests. Number 2: Her parents hide immigrants. And if the mean motel owner, Mr. Yao, finds out they've been letting them stay in the empty rooms for free, the Tangs will be doomed. Number 3: She wants to be a writer. But how can she when her mom thinks she should stick to math because English is not her first language? It will take all of Mia's courage, kindness, and hard work to get through this year. Will she be able to hold on to her job, help the immigrants and guests, escape Mr. Yao, and go for her dreams?

Suggested by Peter Spyers-Duran, Cataloging

 Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the censored images of Japanese American internment by Dorothea Lange

Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army―the majority of which have never been published―Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps.

Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 John Okada: the life & rediscovered work of the author of No-no boy edited by Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, and Floyd Cheung

No-No Boy, John Okada's only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and is cast out by his divided community. The novel faced a similar rejection until it was rediscovered and reissued in 1976, becoming a classic of American literature. As a result of Okada's untimely death at age forty-seven, the author's life and other works have remained obscure. This collection offers the first full-length examination of Okada's development as an artist, placing recently discovered writing by Okada alongside essays that reassess his legacy. Meticulously researched biographical details, insight from friends and relatives, and a trove of photographs illuminate Okada's life in Seattle, military service, and careers as a public librarian, technical writer, and ad man. This volume is an essential companion to No-No Boy.

Suggested by Missy Murphey, Research & Information Services

 Little Fires Everywhere: a novel by Celeste Ng

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned -- from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren -- an enigmatic artist and single mother -- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town -- and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides.

Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.

Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, Connect Libraries

 Music for Alice by Allen Say

As a girl, Alice loved to dance, but the rhythms of her life offered little opportunity for a foxtrot, let alone a waltz. World War II erupted soon after she was married. Alice and her husband, along with many other Japanese Americans, were forced to leave their homes and report to assembly centers around the country. Undaunted, Alice and her husband learned to make the most of every circumstance, from their stall in the old stockyard in Portland to the decrepit farm in the Oregon desert, with its field of stones. Like a pair of skilled dancers, they sidestepped adversity to land gracefully amid golden opportunity. Together they turned a barren wasteland into a field of endless flowers. Such achievements did not come without effort and sacrifice, though, and Alice often thought her dancing days were long behind her.

Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, Connect Libraries

 No-no Boy by John Okada

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys." Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle. As Ozeki writes, Ichiro’s "obsessive, tormented" voice subverts Japanese postwar "model-minority" stereotypes, showing a fractured community and one man’s "threnody of guilt, rage, and blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world."

Suggested by Missy Murphey, Research & Information Services

 Severance by Ling Ma

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she's had her fill of uncertainty. She's content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won't be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They're traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird. Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.

Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 The Chinese Exclusion Act by directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu

Examine the origin, history and impact of the 1882 law that made it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America and for Chinese nationals already here ever to become U.S. citizens. The first in a long line of acts targeting the Chinese for exclusion, it remained in force for more than 60 years.

Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 The Making of Asian America: a history by Erika Lee

The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured "coolies" who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States.

Suggested by Missy Murphey, Research & Information Services

 The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, moonlighting as a dance-hall girl to help pay off her mother's mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin plunges into a dark adventure: a mirror world of secrets and superstitions. Eleven-year-old Chinese houseboy Ren also has a secret, a promise he must fulfill to his dead master; to find his master's severed finger and bury it with his body. Ren has forty-nine days to do so, or his master's soul will wander the earth forever. Dazzling and propulsive, The Night Tiger is the coming-of-age of a child and a young woman, each searching for their place in a society that would rather they stay invisible.

Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 The Way You Make Me Feel by Maurene Goo

Clara Shin lives for pranks and disruption. When she takes one joke too far, her dad sentences her to a summer working on his food truck, the KoBra, alongside her uptight classmate Rose Carver. Not the carefree summer Clara had imagined. But maybe Rose isn't so bad. Maybe the boy named Hamlet (yes, Hamlet) crushing on her is pretty cute. Maybe Clara actually feels invested in her dad’s business. What if taking this summer seriously means that Clara has to leave her old self behind?

Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Thich Nhat Hanh: essential writings by Thicht Than

Zen master, poet, monk and peace advocate, Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has lived in exile in France for 30 years. Through his writings and retreats he has helped countless people of all religious backgrounds to live mindfully in the present moment, to uproot sources of anger and distrust, and to achieve relationships of love and understanding.

Suggested by Cindy Dancel, Research & Information Services

To the Stars: the autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu by George Takei

This is the autobiography of one of Star Trek's most popular stars, George Takei. It tells of his triumph over adversity and of his huge success, despite an inauspicious start in a wartime US Asian relocation camp. In his lifetime, he has become an actor, a successful businessman, a writer, and a man deeply involved in politics and the democratic process. His story also includes his early days as an actor when he had brushes with greats like Alec Guinness, Burt Lancaster and Bruce Lee, as well as his first meeting with a writer/producer named Gene Roddenberry.

Suggested by Tim Walker, Information Technology & Digital Initiatives