#Regalia Penthouse

[natalievoncatte]

“Today?” Kara said, “really?”

There was a silence in the house, as a pall had fallen over it. Everyone was gathered for the festivities and the turkey in the oven was filling the house with a delightful scent that made Lena’s mouth water. Thanksgiving was supposed to be the one day that Lena could forget about her waistline and just indulge herself. She’d been “helping” Eliza along with Alex and Kelly and Nia while the boys and Kara were out back tossing a football and pretending that she and J’onn didn’t have an outrageous advantage over Brainy and James.

Now Kara was standing in the living room as the news broke in over the football game and announced that a rampaging alien was tearing apart Rio de Janiero.

“Guys,” Kara said solemnly, “I have to go.”

Lena’s heart sank. She knew better than to protest. Kara had already glumly removed her glasses and was about to go grab her suit. Lena reached out and curled a hand around her bicep.

“Please be careful, darling.”

Lena could feel eyes on her back, Eliza and Alex and Nia all watching, silently urging one of them to just finally make a damned move. Lena *lived with her*, for God’s sake, and had since she sold her penthouse. They shared breakfasts and Kara gave her foot rubs and still they were stuck in this maddening limbo without defining what and who they were and it seemed neither dared to ask.

Lena knew what she wanted the answer to be, and how it ached inside her.

Kara glumly trudged down the stairs in full Supergirl regalia, regal and imposing as ever and just as beautiful. Since she’d revealed her identity to the world she’d been freed from the constraints of having to disguise herself, and a few months ago had buzzed the left side of her head, having trimmed the rest to shoulder length, and Lena longed to run her fingers over the fuzz.

She’d also altered her suit again. It no longer had sleeves. Every time Lena saw her, it felt like her soul was going to escape her body.

Kara came over and put her hands on Lena’s arms.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

Lena gulped down her anxiety.

“I can hear your heart, you know.”

“Just be careful. Please.”

Kara started to turn. Maybe it was the audience, maybe she was just tired of being mired in this thick tension between them. Maybe it was the wine. She grabbed Kara’s arm again and sprang forward to brush her lips against Kara’s cheek, dangerously close to Kara’s mouth.

“For luck.”

Kara’s eyes flew open wide and she gaped at Lena.

“I’ll be b-back,” she said, and swept out the door, cape billowing majestically.

God how Lena hated that cape, sometimes. It blocked the view.

What had been a festive gathering grew quiet. Everyone gathered around the television to see what was going on, save Eliza who politely excused herself to the kitchen, hiding tears that everyone politely ignored.

Lena joined her. She was making the gravy.

“A life of fighting isn’t what I wanted for her,” she said.

“Me either.”

They were alone in the kitchen and Eliza was whisking a roux as she waited for the raw flour smell to cook off.

“Lena, do you have feelings for my daughter?”

Lena swallowed hard, grabbing a knife to chop carrots for glazing so that she’d have something to occupy your hands.

Eliza’s voice was soft, something wistful in her eyes. “You must know how she feels about you.”

Lena had to stop to avoid slicing open her finger, almost feeling the touch of the blade. She cleared her throat.

“I do,” she admitted. “I very much do. If I’m going to be honest with myself, I’ve been in love with her for years.”

Eliza nodded, utterly unsurprised. “Kara is very hesitant about delicate things. When she first started living with us, she used to rip doorknobs off and break things at random while she learned to control her powers. She’s probably told you about Streaky.”

“She has.”

Eliza began pouring stock into the pot, her whisk making soft scraping sounds.

“She’s still that way about everything. Afraid if she pushes too hard, she’ll break something.”

Lena nodded. It was at that moment that Alex stormed into the kitchen. “She’s back.”

Immediately, Lena rushed out into the living room. Kara trudged through the door, and sighed.

“He got a few good hits in but he’s contained.”

Lena could only stare. Her suit was covered in scorch marks and even worse, Kara was bruised, her knuckles especially battered. She smiled weakly.

“I just need a minute to clean up.”

With a deep sigh, Kara turned and headed upstairs.

Lena could feel the eyes on her before she glanced back. Eliza motioned a silent “Go”, and Lena went.

She knocked at the bathroom door.

“Lena?” said Kara.

She always knew. Super-senses.

“It’s me. Can I come in?”

Brief hesitation, then, “yes.”

Lena stepped inside and closed the door. Kara was washing her hands, the injuries already vanishing. Lena didn’t care. She took Kara’s hands anyway, gently washing them under warm water.

She then fumbled at the clasps and unhooked Kara’s cape, and folded it. It was surprisingly heavy, made of a dense material from her long lost home. Setting it aside, she rested her hand against Kara’s deliciously broad back, silently waiting for permission.

“Go ahead,” Kara said in a shaky voice.

Lena freed the tab of the hidden zipper and pulled, baring Kara’s expansive muscular back, and peeled the suit away from her shoulders. Kara had nothing but a sports bra and boxer briefs on beneath. She finished shimmying out of the suit on her own.

Lena has seen Kara in bathing suits, or caught flashes of her changing, but this was different, somehow more intimate. There was a vulnerability, not just in the woman disrobing but in the goddess showing Lena her bruises. Lena gently touched a black and purple mark on Kara’s flank.

“This one hurt, didn’t it.”

“It always hurts. I can feel it, I just pretend I don’t.”

Lena looked up at her and met her gaze.

“Kara, may I kiss you?”

Kara blinked and Lena could actually feel her tremble.

“Yes,” she breathed.

Lena rose on her tiptoes and pressed their lips together very softly, with a deliberate slowness. When Kara kissed her back and pulled her into a delicate embrace, hands bracketed low on her hips, Lena felt like she could fly.

Kara was looking at her in wonder.

“Was that for more luck?”

Lena felt bold. She had seize the moment now, before she lost her nerve and they fell back into tense limbo.

“Kara Danvers, if you want to, you can get very lucky tonight.”

Her eyes were wide and Lena grinned.

“I umm, I…”

Lena trailed a finger down the center of Kara’s muscular chest.

“Dinner is almost ready, darling. Take your shower. Just remember to save room for dessert.”

Kara favored her with a delighted smile as Lena stepped out of the bathroom and padded down the stairs.

When she reached the ground floor, everyone was pointedly focused elsewhere, either on the football game or cooking, and Kelly and Nia were playing cards at the dining room table.

Alexa, though, handed her a beer. Lena took it with a shaking hand.

“Fucking finally,” Alex whispered. “Just don’t get too loud tonight, okay? Go down to the beach if you can’t control yourself.”

Lena’s eyes narrowed.

“I hate you.”

“Love ya too, sis-in-law,” said Alex.

“We’re not married yet.”

Alex tipped back her brew. “Six months, tops.”

Lena took a long pull on her beer and scowled.

(It ended up being four months)

[nana-glass-chillhop-radio-hour]

Happy Halloween to Janelle Monae and that time she dressed up in full Grinch regalia and did a glamorous photoshoot of her lounging in a beautiful penthouse as the Grinch and posted it on Insta. For Halloween.

[literarynecromancy]

🍒 AND ALSO 🔥FOR THE ASK GAME!

I'm on a roll for Reaper so I might as well continue for her!~

🍒 What kind of things do they expect from their relationships? Does this differ between platonic relationships and romantic ones? Is your OC “demanding” or a door mat? What kinds of things do people expect from them in a relationship?

Reaper does not expect to ever be in a romantic relationship: full stop. It is something that simply hurts too much and she has no wish to bend towards anyone's preconceived notions of what Death should be like. Therefore, she just removes it from the equation.

🔥 Give us a list of general likes and dislikes, such as colours, textures, music, weather and other stuff!

Reaper likes deep reds - almost bordering on black. The same as her eyecolor when not wearing the specially-ordered contacts. She's also a big fan of velvet and has a chaise lounger in her penthouse that's made of exactly that, and in her favorite color. She likes very indie singer/songwriter things that can be heard at bars or clubs during live performance nights as well as slower jazz pieces. (She's also a big fan of musicals as a whole.)

Her favorite weather is rainy weather. Not because of going out in it, but more for the fact that she can stay indoors without full regalia and just sit, listen to music, and read.

[comphetkoncass]

notes:

this is NOT a 'no capes au' because i dont like those. but this IS an au where bats very very very rarely venture outside of gotham so instead of being robin of young justice fame, tim almost never teamed up with yj. only once, maybe twice, when there was a gotham specific issue that yj had its hand in so batman sent tim as a 'how do you do fellow teens' representative -- meaning tim and kon dont really know each other in this au

OR maybe i scrap all that and tim just never revealed his identity or face. hes been no-face-mcgee all through young justice. tim drake who? also 'alvin draper' was not 'willingly' revealed. batman and tim set up a fake reveal or something (i miss the exorbitant lengths theyd go to re: secret identity keeping. wheres the pizzaz u know? i miss weirdo cryptid tim)

anyways. either way kon is now a celebrity hero in his 20s. supernova. tim is now cardinal or something because i like that name best for him (: (listen. i know everyone else likes rook. i dont. personal opinion.)

the actual plot is about kon having a stalker who's getting too close to finding out his secret identity or whatever. so he goes to gotham (a city close to his own but not the actual city because hes That Paranoid now of this stalker) and checks a detective agency to please please start looking into his stalker problem. or whatever. he goes as kon-el not as supernoval in full regalia.

tim takes the case because of course he does. also tim is weirder in this au. he didnt have yj to mellow him out so hes just an odd duck. a drake if you will.

kon's celebrity stardom continued or whatever. i know tim didnt actually affect the trajectory of his life (moving to kansas) but lets say in this au he never really got the name conner kent. maybe it was offered but he just didnt take the kents up on it. who knows. he mostly lives at the titans tower now (better security) but when hes not being stalked by supervillains or fans of creepy intent, he usually has a little penthouse apartment in metropolis.

??????

profit

i just started watching You for the first time and

im this close to writing a ficlet about celebrity hero kon hiring private investigator tim drake, definitely no association to red robin of batman inc fame no way, to fix his stalker problem

[blueiscoool]

The Stunning $25 Million Miami Triplex Penthouse  

Set atop the Regalia, the 15,000-square-foot penthouse also comes with a rooftop pool, sky bar and views for days.

Stepping into the private glass elevator inside the spectacular Regalia Penthouse overlooking Miami’s Sunny Isles Beach is a little like being inside one of those bank teller pneumatic tubes. Press the button and whoosh, you are up and away.

Here, the air-powered glass cylinder can elevate you between the three floors of this sprawling 15,000-plus-square-foot mansion in the sky, taking you up to the home’s 45th-floor private pool and sky bar.

“There’s definitely a ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ feeling to the elevator. It’s a real rush,” Jeff Miller, listing broker with One Sotheby’s International Realty.

For the past six months, Miller has held the listing for the penthouse, looking for a buyer with $25.5 million to spare. But with the owner now eager to sell before the end of the year, it has been handed over to Concierge Auctions. It goes under the virtual hammer on Thursday December 16, in a one-day no reserve sale.

“This really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for someone to own what is the most exclusive, never-lived-in penthouse in the whole of Miami,” says Miller, who has the distinction of having sold the famous Faena Penthouse on South Beach for $60 million back in 2015—still Florida’s priciest condo sale ever.

Alas, when the Regalia Penthouse goes across the block, it will be without one of its most sparkling features: a rare pink diamond claimed to be worth $500,000. That was the closing gift the developer planned to offer when the penthouse was first announced back in 2014. Taking the gem off the table is what happens when the price tumbles from $40 million to $25.5 million.

But there’s no shortage of other gem-like features included with this impressive property. A choice of three elevators whisks you up to the 43rd floor and the main penthouse living level. The elevator lobby opens into a double-height great room, with towering 20-foot-high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows.

A spectacular feature of this space is the intricate glass chandelier with its 225-plus glass pendants, designed to emulate rain during the day and constellations at night. It sits next to a showcase cantilevered, glass-sided limestone staircase.

On this level there’s also a sprawling state-of-the-art kitchen with sleek Poliform Italian cabinetry and Wolf and Sub-Zero appliances, plus a corner dining room close by. There’s also a games room with designer billiards table, a 650-bottle wine wall, a stunning cocktail bar featuring Israeli onyx counter tops and a movie theater with leather-lined walls. sits next to a showcase cantilevered, glass-sided limestone staircase.

Take the staircase, or pneumatic elevator, up to the 44th floor to find five of the six bedrooms (the staff quarters are on the floor below). The master bedroom features floor-to-ceiling windows with million-dollar views of the sunrise in the east, the rolling Atlantic below and beaches all the way to Fort Lauderdale to the north. “In the bedroom you’re on the 44th floor, so it feels like you’re flying. On a clear day you can see all the way to the Bahamas,” says Miller.

The master bathroom feels like a million dollars, too, as that’s reportedly how much it cost to build. The 1,500-square-foot space takes up most of the north side of the home and has walls and floors lined with over 100 book-matched slabs of imported Calcutta gold-veined marble. Add to that huge his-and-hers closets, his-and-hers bathrooms and a lavish spa with an oversize steam room, sauna, hydrotherapy Jacuzzi tub and massage area.

Finally, one last floor up is the private rooftop deck, with its lap pool and terrace both enclosed by sliding glass and topped by a retractable sun awning for shade.

The complete interior is the work of acclaimed designer Charles Allem, of Miami-based C.A.D International. And all the furniture and art is included in the auction.

The penthouse itself sits on top of the six-year-old Regalia condo tower, with its sinewy, wave-like exterior and 37 one-residence-per-floor layout. Building amenities include a Champagne bar, wine cellar, gourmet chef’s kitchen, fitness center, huge pool deck with six different pools and a full-service oceanfront spa and beach club.

“Absolutely no luxury was spared in creating this one-of-a-kind penthouse in what is the most luxurious building in the whole of Miami. It’s a terrific opportunity,” adds Miller.

By Howard Walker.

[chaotic-super]

Secretly Trusting

Supercorptober Day 18 - Secret

Lena has a secret.

Lena has a secret that is directly related to Kara’s secret, that Kara thinks is still a secret, but Lena secretly knows Kara’s secret.

Lena’s secret is that she pretends to be oblivious to Kara’s secret identity and actively helps her hide the fact from herself because Kara would very easily give herself away without a little help.

Some people might believe that it’s counter-intuitive to help Kara keep a non-secret from her, but she has a reason; they have been dating for a few months now and she needs Kara to come clean about being Supergirl for their relationship to work out in the long run, Kara needs to show that she trusts her, and she can’t let Kara take the easy way out on this one.

She is going to come clean right along with Kara when Kara eventually tells her the truth, but she has to wait this one out, and also help her girlfriend out with keeping her own damn secret because she’s so bad at it.

Just a few days ago, Kara walked in wearing her super suit and so Lena had to pretend not to notice and instead asked her to go grab her lipstick for her from by the mirror in the bathroom, so she had the chance to notice and do a speed change before coming back in more appropriate attire for lunch.

How Kara thinks that she is sneaky, Lena will never understand.

Now Lena is pottering around her penthouse, enjoying a rare day off to herself but wishing that she had the company of her favourite person.

Since it is a weekend and there’s nothing on the news about anything to do with Supergirl, she decides to send Kara a text asking if she’s got time to come over, maybe watch a bit of TV or maybe go check the mattress springs are in working order.

In typical Kara fashion she gets a response right away, the whole thing completely littered with emoji after emoji, mostly hearts. Lena doesn’t totally get what a lot of them mean but she does get the message that Kara is on her way and will be here soon.

She decides to pour them a drink each, a couple of sodas since it’s still early and Kara gets worried if she does any day drinking, even if it’s completely innocent.

 Her plan is to wait on the couch for Kara to arrive, maybe use the time to pick something good to put on the TV and ignore in favour of reacquainting herself with her immensely hot girlfriend.

Lena definitely isn’t expecting the familiar sound of feet thudding onto her balcony as a certain caped superhero lands. She can help Kara out with her lies to some extent, but this is too much for even her genius brain to plan around.

She swivels her head slowly, praying that it’s in her head and Kara didn’t just land on the balcony in full superhero regalia, and…yep. Yes, she’s just done exactly that.

Kara stands there, beaming smile plastered across her face and a lovely bouquet of flowers in hand, waving at her jovially with her free hand, completely unaware of her mistake. A frown slowly replaces the smile when she sees Lena’s horrified expression, crinkle taking its spot on her forehead.

It’s only as she’s dragging the balcony door open that she comes to the realization of what she’s done, the mistake that she’s made.

Neither of them speak, both unsure of whether or not they should directly address it, or maybe they’re just afraid to.

Silently, Kara slips through the balcony door and closes it behind her, her shoulders slumped in defeat. Lena’s just happy that she hasn’t flown away, it wouldn’t be the first time Kara has panicked and made a run for it or rather, made a fly for it.

“Hi.” Kara mumbles.

“Hello.”

They keep staring, waiting for the other to speak first, praying that they don’t have to be the one to break, but eventually someone has to, and that person has to be Kara.

“I’m sorry, I really was going to tell you.” Kara drops the flowers onto the nearest surface, a little side table, and moves around to perch on the edge of the couch next to Lena.

“When?” Lena questions. She wanted Kara to tell her, not fuck up and give herself away. There’s no trust in this kind of fuck up.

Kara pauses, looking down at her feet. The gravity of the situation is all too clear, and she has to tell Lena everything, there’s no way to sugar coat any of it now and that means that she can only tell the complete truth and hope that Lena can forgive her. “I’ve been trying to summon the courage to tell you for a couple of months but every time I planned to do it, I would back out at the last second like a coward.”

Lena drops her head to her own fidgeting hands, so now neither of them are looking at the other, completely lost at how to make this conversation productive and not say anything based on pure emotion rather than having an honest open discussion.

Eventually Lena sees that Kara is waiting for her to speak, to guide the conversation and she also knows Kara enough to know that it isn’t because she doesn’t have anything to say, it’s because she is giving Lena the chance to process and guide the conversation within her comfort zone.

“I already knew, Kara. I was waiting for you to tell me…I was waiting for you to trust me.” Lena whimpers the last part out, tears now streaming freely down her cheeks but lacking the energy to wipe them away, knowing that even if she did, they’d just get replaced right way anyhow.

Kara’s breathing picks up audibly, worrying Lena slightly but Kara talks before she can ask if she’s alright. Kara may have hurt her but she’s still her girlfriend for better or for worse, and she still loves her.

“I’m not going to ask how you knew because I know that you’re a genius who figures everything out and I’ve been getting sloppy at hiding it, I guess that was also my way of testing the waters a bit, trying to figure out how you’d react, but that wasn’t fair of me, so I’m sorry for that too.”

“Kara –“

“Wait, let me finish, please.” Kara cuts her off gently. “I do trust you though, with every fibre of my being. You are my emergency contact in everything, even with the DEO. You are named on my life insurance. You are my power of attorney. I love you and I would have never let our relationship get this far if I didn’t. I really have been trying to tell you, I just got scared, it’s always been drilled into me to never tell anyone, so it was eating away at me when I shouldn’t have let it.”

Lena is taken aback. Power of attorney? Life insurance? Holy cow. “You’d really let me make medical decisions for you if you couldn’t?”

“You’re the only person that I trust to make decisions that would actually be in my best interest, no offence to Alex, and if we were in a situation where I couldn’t make a decision like that then I would be in a bad way, and you would be stressed and in desperate need of some kind of control so it would be good for you.”

Lena hesitantly places her hand over Kara’s. “You’ve really thought about this.”

“I have, because you’re the person I trust most, and love most.” Kara turns her hand over to grip at Lena’s, intertwining their fingers.

Lena nods once, “Alright then. I guess I just have to trust you on that, but that’s not too hard because I love you too.”

[goodlucktai]

(I feel like I should finish your prompt first but. These ones are so good....feel free to ignore if you have too many asks but 29 or 33 with chocobros...?

PROMPTS LIST

33. “Are you SURE I can’t punch him in the face?” “Yes.” “What if I just break his nose a little?”

ik i just did this one for natsuyuu but...........chocobros

x

They're somewhere in Duscae, near enough to the coast that each breeze carries a hint of the sea, on another errand for another stranger to scrape together enough gil to eat tonight.

They've stopped at the last little roadside cluster of shops before the countryside stretches far and wide and wild, stocking up on what meager supplies they can afford.

Noctis has never lived this way before. He's never gone to bed hungry before. Neither has Gladio or Ignis, for all their world-weariness and the general practical knowledge and common sense they walk around with that far surpasses Noctis' own.

Ignis can budget with the best of them, and Gladio is willing to eat literally anything at any time, but Prompto is the one who gets it.

He chats at length about all the times he's had to get creative with pasta or rice because it was all that was left in his pantry. Back in high school, when he could only work part-time. When someone should have been taking care of him, and instead he was left to figure out how to stretch a tiny budget much farther than made sense.

"Come on, Iggy," he said once when they were out shopping, half-laughing. Like he thought Ignis was joking. "Fresh produce? We've got like a hundred gil between the four of us and we're totally out of restoratives."

And Ignis paused, and glanced sidelong at him. He put back the crisp, flowery vegetables and pulled out his little notebook and asked for suggestions instead. It took Prompto a few minutes to convince himsef that Ignis was taking him seriously, but now they like, bond over canned fruit.

"I'm gonna kill this catoblepas with my bare hands," Gladio says with feeling, leaning against the car. "I'm so godsdamned sick of pasta. Don't tell Iggy I said that."

Noctis rolls an energy drink between his hands absently, brow furrowed. It's tricky business, and he's not very good at it just yet, but home-made elixirs save them a ton of gil. He feels guilty when they have to spend their money on something he should be able to do himself.

"I'm telling him," he says without missing a beat. "He'll never forget, and he'll give you shit every single time you make cup noodles from now on, forever."

"I can't stand you," Gladio tells him seriously.

The bell above the door of the convenience store rings brightly, and Noctis glances up to see Ignis and Prompto walking out looking a lot more cheerful than they did going in.

Gladio's face does something very subtle and specific when he sees them, there and gone in a second, before Noctis can pin it down and figure it out.

"What are you two chucklefucks up to?" he calls over. Ignis immediately narrows a disapproving stare at him, but Prompto beams.

"I got a commission, sort of!" he says.

"A commission?" Noctis parrots, sending the energy drink back to the Armiger.

"Sort of?" Gladio adds.

"While we were checking out, the store-owner saw my camera, and seemed really into it," Prompto says. "Since, you know. It's unique."

Noctis does know. The digital camera hanging at Prompto's side has been with him since Noctis first bought it for him three years ago. He would rebuild it every so often, bowed over a collection of impossibly tiny parts spread out carefully across a dish towel at the kitchen table in Noctis' apartment. To call it unique is a bit of an understatement.

Gladio frowns, sensing where this is going a split-second before Noctis does. "And?"

"And he offered me money for it! Like, more than it's worth probably. A lot more."

"I don't see how that could be possible," Ignis says smoothly, leaning through the open window of the Regalia to put the shopping bag in the backseat. "Since your camera is clearly priceless. Which is what I explained to the man."

Noctis relaxes, glad that Ignis and Prompto have bonded over shopping to the point that neither of them want to do it unless they can go together-- because if Prompto had been in there by himself, he 100% would have sold his camera. He would have hated to do it, but he would have done it. It's like he thinks he owes his friends something just for letting him exist.

"Good looking out, Specs," Gladio says gruffly. Prompto waffles a bit, looking torn between pleased and embarrassed. Noctis decides to rescue him.

"What commission, though?" he asks.

"Oh, right. Well, he was kind of bummed about the camera, but he asked if he could see some of my photos, and Ignis said we had time-- "

If it were literally anyone else, Noctis thinks, up to and including and especially the Actual Crown Prince, Ignis would have said they were in a hurry and not to show off.

"--and he seemed really impressed! With the photos! I told him we were going to take down a catoblepas, and he asked why, and I said for some cash, I mean, clearly," Prompto adds, gesturing at the four of them and their general road grime. "So he, ah-- well he's never seen a catoblepas up close before, and he said if I could get some good pictures of it, he'd pay me for them. He gave me a figure, and it's, like, better than some of the jobs I've done for Vyv."

He's delighted, clearly. He likes feeling like he's pulling his own weight. Noctis is always so relieved when Vyv calls, not because of the inherent payday, but more because it puts this light in Prompto's eyes that Noctis would easily climb a hundred volcanic mountains for.

"Damn, Prompto, at this rate you'll have funded our whole trip," Gladio says. He doesn't ruffle his hair anymore, because Prompto actually hates that, just sort of scrunches his fingers through it instead. Prompto doesn't hate that at all. It's adorable.

Sometimes in the early morning, when he and Noctis are the last to drag themselves out of the tiny camper, they'll do their affirmations together:

"Gotta be our best today," Noctis will say, and Prompto will put on this absurdly determined expression, bed hair hanging into his eyes and cheek still creased pink from the pillow.

"Gotta get those hair scrunches," he'll reply gravely.

"What else did he say, Prompto?" Ignis says in a pleasant tone of voice that Noctis hasn't trusted since he was seven years old.

"Um! Nothing. Nothing worth repeating, anyway, you know." He is looking completely away from them now, an avoidance tactic if Noctis has ever seen one. "Woah, is that really the time? We better get going if we wanna catch that cow before it gets dark!"

He turns toward the car and runs into Gladio's arm instead.

"He suggested that Prompto's talents would be put to better use in different company," Ignis says, his voice carrying clearly over Prompto's whine of 'nooo, Iggy, let it go.' "He said that if Prompto ever got tired of our lifestyle, his door would be open."

Ah, Noctis thinks, followed by, ouch?

"Oh, fuck that guy," Gladio blurts. "Let me go talk to him."

"No!" Prompto clings to his arm, throwing all his weight into keeping Gladio in place. The Shield, who could bench Prom's entire body weight in one hand, lets himself be detained anyway and pretends to be annoyed about it. "Ignis, why are you causing trouble right now?" Prompto says frantically.

"Transparency is important in a relationship," Ignis replies.

"There's transparency and then there's causing trouble. Noct, tell them."

"I think Gladio should go talk to him," Noctis says immediately. But then Prompto looks betrayed, and it makes Noctis feel awful. "Ugh, okay. Okay. We're leaving. Ignis, Gladio, that's an executive order."

"Are you sure I can't punch him in the face?" Gladio grumbles.

"Am I-- yes, dude!" Prompto half-laughs nervously. "Very sure!"

"What if I just broke his nose a little?"

"Then that would be treason, I guess, cause Noct just said no."

It's with the standard amount of bickering and noise that they climb into the car, the top rolling up over their heads as it starts to drizzle. Ignis pulls smoothly back onto the cracked asphalt road and reaches over to turn the radio on; a peace offering. From the backseat, Noctis can see the corner of Prompto's smile, framed by a flyaway piece of yellow hair.

They live this way now, but they didn't always. Noctis used to have the run of the whole Citadel, had his own penthouse apartment, grew up dodging banquets and lavish dinners. It's not like he likes sleeping on the ground and having nothing to eat. It's not like he chose to lose his home.

But it could be worse. It's not a bad way to live, just Noctis and the people he loves best and these countless hours together. There's a lot of hard work and sometimes he goes to bed hungry but he knows he'll remember these days forever. He knows he'll miss them.

"Hey," he says, over the quiet sound of rain on the windows and the catchy synth-pop crooning out of the speakers. "Don't ever sell your camera, okay?"

Prompto says, "I mean, I wouldn't ever want to."

"Seriously," Noctis presses. He doesn't want to let it go. It feels important. "Your pictures are-- they mean the world to me, Prom. I can't even tell you."

His friend looks bewildered. He's half-turned in his seat, and his eyes stray to Gladio, then jump to Ignis, then settle back on Noctis. Whatever he's looking for, he seems to find it, because he smiles.

"Okay, weirdo," he says, "one fully-documented roadtrip, coming up. I won't leave anything out."

Noctis is counting on it.

[abookishdreamer]

Character Intro: Philyra (Kingdom of Ichor)

Nicknames- Lyra by the others

Age- 18 (immortal)

Location- Shimmering Tail Island, Olympius

Personality- She loves & embraces all things related to traditional femininity. She has a taste for the finer things in life & can be a bit of a snob and uptight. She's also incredibly creative, passionate, sensual, and a true romantic at heart. She's currently dating.

As the goddess of paper, perfume, writing, & beauty, she has many abilities. These abilities include lexiconicy, papyrokinesis (to control/manipulate paper), melanokinesis (to control/manipulate ink), perfume manipulation (can use perfume for various effects- like healing), & being able to control/summon various writing tools like pens, pencils, quills, and brushes.

A notable physical feature is the white gold diamond encrusted nose ring she wears.

She's currently dating a merman named Nico. They first met at the Olympic Derby.

Lyra's main address is a mansion estate in the Queenstown district of New Olympus. She has an equally stunning backyard complete with a pool, her own personal waterfall, and various fountains which sprout up different perfumes. She also owns a beach house on Shimmering Tail Island as well as a penthouse in the Chant du Cygne neighborhood. She owns a single pet- a teacup shih tzu named Florence.

Lyra is known for hosting her fabulous yearly slumber parties.

She always starts off her mornings with yoga and a rose water bath.

Her go-to drink is a pink champagne margarita. She also likes cosmopolitans, medium caramel lattes from The Roasted Bean, & a strawberry lassi.

Her favorite breakfast dishes she loves ordering are the eggs benedict with strawberry filled red velvet crepês, and coconut & cardamom pancakes. She also likes a bagel sandwich with eggs, turkey bacon, and mozzarella cheese from The Bread Box.

Lyra's businesses include the largest printing press in the country, a company which produces & manufactures paper and various writing implements. She has a chain of stationary stores called Charti & Melani. Her most well known business is a multi-realm retail store of personal care & beauty products- featuring well over 300 brands (including the brands of goddesses like Glory's Crown, Museology, Graces' Glam, Pure Muse, Studio Bloom, & Hot Intoxication) along with her own cosmetics label (which is also the store's namesake), Olmorfia. Olmorfia offers beauty products including cosmetics, skincare, body fragrance, nail color, beauty tools, body lotion, & hair care.

She also writes for Glamgerous, Modern Olympus, Kythereia, and Regalia.

Lyra's also a popular author of novels (her go-to genres being romantic tragedies, historical romance, and literary fiction.

Some of her favorite beauty & hair products to use include the Luxuria shimmering body oil, the sulfate-free rose water shampoo and the argan oil gloss spray from Glory's Crown, & her very own (Olmorfia) Think Pink makeup palette.

She loves smelling like different scents everyday. Some of the perfume goddess' popular perfumes & fragrance sprays include Dolce, Lavender Daydreams, Pretty in Pink, & Morning Dew.

Lyra even has her own collectible glamour dolls!

She has a collection of luxurious writing implements, but she likes writing with a quill feather and ink.

In the pantheon, Lyra's really good friends with Hera (goddess of women & marriage), Iris (goddess of the rainbow), Phaenna (goddess of jewels), Naeus (Hymenaeus) (god of weddings), Pothos (god of longing & yearning), Nerissa (goddess of jellyfish), The Graces, Pandaisia (goddess of banquets), Aeolus (god of wind), Chloris (goddess of flowers), Antheia (goddess of swamps, vegetation, & floral wreaths), The Muses (especially Calliope, Melpomene, Erato, & Clio), Móda (goddess of fashion), Aoide (goddess of voice & song), Eos (Titaness of dawn), Panacea (goddess of universal remedy), Peitho (goddess of persuasion & sensuality), and Eupraxia (goddess of well-being & success).

There's a "frenemy" relationship between her & Aphrodite (goddess of love & beauty).

She greatly admires Theia (Titaness of sight & heavenly light).

Lyra thinks that The Hesperides are a bunch of floozy gossips.

Lyra used to have crushes on Astraeus (Titan god of dusk), Nomos (god of laws), and Helios (Titan god of the sun).

As for romantic relationships, Lyra once drunkenly made out with Poseidon (god of the sea & earthquakes). She used to be in love Naeus (god of weddings), but would always get too nervous to tell him how she really felt about him. Her feelings & thoughts often became poems and short stories. One night when Naeus came over to hang out, she was about to admit her feelings when he started lamenting about his secret feelings for Hera.

She's an avid lover of romantic dramas & comedies!

In her free time, she loves working on her fragrances & cosmetics, doing ballet, reading, writing, surfing, sunbathing, dining out, shopping, getting her nails done, working on her art (in particular her ink paintings!), and going to the spa.

Lyra's favorite meals include chapati with spiced curry, pakora, moussaka, and inji rasam.

"Beauty needs to be cultivated and cared for."

[mimik-u]

Flower Child, Ch. 18 (”Abyss”)

LINK

i.

The door that led into Room 11812 was already partially cracked when Blue Diamond arrived in front of it the next morning. Lost, hesitant, adrift, perpetually undone, she simply stared at it for a long while, sized it up, reified it into yet another monolith she would have to confront.

For she was surrounded by monoliths.

All the time.

They towered over her.

Mocked her.

Grief and ghosts and all those other inlaid, ingrained fears, carved deep into the marrow of her bones, muscle memory now. She was scared of everything, really: the continuance of life, the permanence of death, the human capacity for endurance, the inhuman throes of her nightmares. And how these nightmares were sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, waking dreams nowadays, stalking her far beyond the confines of a bed that was much too big for her. She was afraid of forgetting Pink Diamond and replacing her, caring for Steven Universe and losing him. Telling Yellow Diamond that she loved her. Showing it. Proving that she did. Never doing it in the end precisely because she was so afraid. (Of what? She scarcely could articulate in the labyrinthine abyss of her mind, where everything was guttural and murky and raw.) Consigning their marriage to the same grave where their daughter laid, the memory of their once great love dressed in funeral shrouds…. She was afraid of empty halls and empty penthouse suites and empty rooms where dust laid thickly on furniture that would never be touched again. Ratty hoodies, diamond quilts, pink sticky notes reminding dead twenty-one year olds to study for upcoming tests. She was afraid of living and afraid of dying, afraid of happiness and afraid of pain. She feared mornings, and she feared nights. Doorbells, sleeping pills, good days, bad days, her very shadow, her own wasted reflection. (Because fundamentally, Blue Diamond was afraid of herself most of all.)

She wasn’t particularly afraid of doors—because most of the time, a door was just a door after all—but she was afraid of this particular door on the sixth floor of a hospital. More simply, she was afraid of what was behind it. Simpler still, she was afraid of who laid in that hospital bed. Afraid of all the unspoken things that had simmered quietly in the space between them for years upon distant, aching years...

So, she simply stood there.

Lost.

Hesitant.

Adrift.

Perpetually undone.

She made a monolith out of a door.

Voices seeped from behind the narrow gap, rising and falling together in a conversation that didn’t quite make sense, try though she did to piece the snippets into a context that she could understand. Blue braced both of her hands upon the head of her cane as she leaned forward to listen, a long strand of her silvery hair falling listlessly between her eyes, curling just over her nose. 

How terribly her heart beat.

How loud.

Her fingers shivered; they simply ached.

“... ouch, dammit! Don’t poke me so hard,” Yellow Diamond snapped, her abrasive voice loud, clear, unmistakable, ringing.

(She was always so pleasant to be around in the morning.)

“Then you should quit squirming around so much, Mrs. Diamond,” a voice that she recognized as belonging to Dr. Reed replied, as amused as her patient was irate. “It’s just a needle.”

“Yes, well—it’s too early in the morning for me to be especially happy about being prodded like a cow.”

“Mm,” the doctor made a noncommittal noise at the back of her throat as she continued to work, noisily shifting invisible materials around.

“So, when will I get these results back?” Yellow asked, affecting a tone that was passably casual to anyone who didn’t know her, who was unaware that she clipped her consonants more shortly than usual when she was tense, scared, strained.

“A couple of hours if I had to wager. The lab’ll want to be thorough.”

“Naturally.”

“And once we get those results back—if they say what I think they will, of course—then we’ll have to run through the whole gamut of other procedures: urological assessments, medical histories, blood pressure tests, cancer screenings, chest x-rays, EKGs... it’ll be a long process.”

“Sounds like it,” Yellow returned in that same punctuated voice, and then the two women lapsed into silence as the ground revolted beneath Blue’s feet, simply eroded.

And she was suddenly falling at the same time that she was perfectly upright, a swaying pillar tethered only to the facticity of her cane. She clung to it all the more tightly, fingers whitening from the beds of her nails downwards; it was the only bulwark she had against total collapse.

Annihilation.

Ruin.

All these tests?

What were they for?

She furrowed her silvery brow and desperately thought back to her conversation with Dr. Reed just yesterday; nothing about it had suggested that something was seriously wrong with Yellow, except a few fractures and lacerations that would clear up with time and rest... so what reasonable line of logic led from a minor car accident to cancer screenings and chest x-rays? What had happened in the unaccounted for hours when Blue had been away? 

She closed her eyes as nausea suddenly rushed up the cylinder of her throat, sickness invading all her delicate senses.

The answer seemed to loom darkly ahead—only a door push away.

“Alright, Mrs. Diamond,” the doctor sighed, “I’m going to get these to the lab. I’ll draw up your discharge papers soon, too...”

Yellow must have made some sort of nonverbal reply because Blue didn’t have time to recover her face as the cracked door suddenly flung open, breaking the final divide between everything she thought she understood and all the awful things that she apparently didn’t.

“Mrs. Diamond, oh, hello! Good mornin’!”

Her wiry eyebrows hoisted high above her thin glasses, Dr. Reed looked equally surprised to see Blue Diamond standing just outside the door. The medical tray she bore in her arms jumped a little as she did, shaking a few test tubes that were filled with dark crimson.

But Blue was impatient, eager, scared most of all. (She was always scared.) Her hooded eyes involuntarily slid from the harried doctor to the test tubes to the impressively cut figure just beyond Dr. Reed’s shoulder.

For Yellow Diamond, wearing her favorite pair of silken pajamas like royal regalia, sat upon the edge of her hospital bed, simply staring at Blue from widened eyes, her cracked lips parted slightly, every line etched across her face a livid, pulsing scar.

It was an expression of contradictions, of paradoxes, of dichotomies: tender at the same time that it was strained, vulnerable and equally forbidding.

Yellow averted her gaze first, a dull flush suffusing her sharply hewn cheeks. When she turned away, the sunlight pouring in from the window eclipsed her features behind the curtain of its flaxen reach.

“Good morning, Dr. Reed,” Blue murmured, painfully wrenching her attention back to the more immediate woman. “I see you have been… busy.”

She glanced questioningly at the tray of test tubes again, but just as the doctor opened her mouth to respond, Yellow got there first, cutting across her with cold precision.

“She was just leaving,” she said pointedly, still not looking their way. She brought her left arm up—the one enmeshed in a brace—to absentmindedly skim the right where her sleeve was meticulously rolled up at the elbow, where a long piece of gauze had been nearly wrapped around the joint. “Right, Doctor?”

It was a clear dismissal, blunt and unsubtle, a maneuver of clear avoidance, of keeping those strange, private words in the dark. Blue imagined it was a tactic that would have worked exceptionally well on Poppy or Livia or one of their various other employees besides whom Yellow had already intimidated into submission, but Dr. Reed didn’t seem to be especially frazzled by Yellow Diamond at all—unbothered by her elevated status, impervious to the harsh way with which spoke, as though every word was a finely calibrated weapon. She only resigned herself with a meaningful sigh that Blue couldn’t quite miss, her wire-rimmed glasses slipping incrementally upon the bridge of her nose.

“I suppose I was,” she smiled grimly, adjusting her tray more securely in her arms.  Blue counted the scarlet tubes. There were four in all. “Be sure to eat that. cookie, Mrs. Diamond”—she called over her shoulder, as calculatingly sweet as Yellow was acerbic—“and it was nice to see you again, Mrs. Diamond.”

Blue stepped to the aside to allow the doctor passage. They exchanged a final nod, charged with unspoken significance, and then, just like that, Dr. Reed was gone.

And finally, they were alone.

Blue and Yellow Diamond.

Once upon a time, this had been one of their most treasured sensations in the world.

To be alone.

With one another.

In the confines of a room.

Oh, how Blue’s slender hands had once known Yellow as intimately as they had known her own body. The curvature of her sharp jawbone. The tender column of her pulsing neckline. The feeling of their hands together, gently intertwined. Spiny knuckles. Soft palms. Brushing thumbs.

And now, eight feet stood between them.

Seven once Blue timidly dared to step into the doorway.

Merely six once she made an awkward movement to close the door behind her.

And neither of them especially knew how to breach the space between them.

The distance.

The gulf. 

Yellow seemed to have finally noticed that she was massaging the place where the doctor had drawn her blood because she suddenly stopped, self-conscious, wrenching her left hand away from the spot. But the gauze was still there, wrapped around her bony elbow tightly, advertising its unspoken secret like a flag at half-mast.

“You’re having tests done,” Blue stated.

It was as bold as it was quiet.

The loudest accusation in an otherwise silent room.

“They’re nothing,” Yellow replied immediately, trying for a nonchalance that didn’t quite land. “It’s nothing. Just routine stuff.”

The lie landed between them, too, with an odd, dull plunk, and Blue felt the beginnings of something other than fear coil in the pit of her stomach for the first time all morning. A burning sensation—stinging, raw.

She squeezed her cane again tightly and absently thought that it wouldn’t surprise her if her fingers came away with indents from where she gripped the metal.

“You were drunk… you were in an accident, Yellow,” she whispered, her words acquiring an icy edge. They lashed. They lunged. They hurt. They were intended to hurt. “Are you sure there’s something you’re not telling me?”

On the ropes, cornered—she hated being cornered—Yellow’s features suddenly hardened, her nose upturning, mouth calcifying into its trademark sneer. If Blue Diamond’s cane was her defense, then Yellow Diamond’s snarl was her weapon, sharp as any saber or sword. 

“You’re being paranoid, Blue—even more so than usual,” she scoffed, fingertips digging into the sheets beneath her hands. “It wasn’t as though I caused the accident. I wasn’t even driving!”

“Then why has Dr. Reed ordered such an extensive battery of tests for you? Can you answer me that at least?” She insisted, now shrill, now angry, now hoarse, now unknotted, soon to be undone—her throat wrenched with its own rage. Tears burned the corners of her eyes, gathering like rushing rivers down the skeletal curves of her cheeks. “I’m your wife, Yellow Diamond, and you—”

“And I should what exactly?” Yellow interrupted, laughing so mirthlessly that the sound was feral, almost inhuman. “Give you yet another reason to fall apart for four years? You barely survived the last time. I barely survived watching you, Blue. I—“

But she stopped short.

She realized that she had said too much.

And six feet became six hundred feet as the two women stared at each other across the empty tiles, as the words that Yellow had growled registered to them both. 

Neither of them had barely survived Blue’s total dissolution.

Both of them.

Together.

Alone.

They were both so utterly alone.

“I’m sorry,” Yellow exhaled, the fight in her voice punctured. Leaking. Drained. “I… I’m—“

But what exactly she was, even she didn’t seem to know. Prodigious marshal of words that she was, she was clearly at a loss for words, her mouth quavering with its own forced silence. Yellow abruptly looked away again, and the sunlight threw the stitches across her cheek in sharp relief, the redness of them, the rawness. 

Painful to even look at.

How much more painful were they then to bear?

How many other wounds besides had her wife collected in all these awful, unspooling years? Not even simply the visible ones, but all the other sundry hurts, too. The lines beneath her hawklike eyes. Her perpetual coldness, wrapped like impenetrable armor around her skin. The very way that she spoke these days, as though each word was a marionette jerked by some strict taskmaster’s violent strings. 

In the night, when she was alone in that master bed that had never been intended for just one, Blue didn’t have to look at these things, didn’t have to acknowledge that there was a reason that the door to the study was perpetually cracked open, didn’t have to wonder about how her utter contempt for life reflected on others because fundamentally, there was no one other than herself; it was her and her alone.

During the day, she didn’t have to care.

Time stretched ad infinitum all around her, slipping, always slipping away.

And she remained in the mire of her own head.

Stuck.

Broken.

Sinking.

Sunken.

Gone.

“So, please, Blue Diamond… please don’t look away, Steven Universe had whispered, indicting her, condemning her entire modus operandi with seven simple words as he laid in that hospital bed, dying for everyone to see.

She had looked away from Pink Diamond, and now Pink Diamond was dead.

She had almost looked away from Steven Universe.

Even still, even after all that they had ever been through together—and they had been through quite a lot—Blue Diamond was looking away from her wife even now.

Fool, masochist, coward.

She was, she was, she was—all of these things and very likely more.

Drowning.

Save me.

Spiraling.

Always.

Sinking, sunken, gone.

But the corrective, Steven Universe implied with every word and kind deed, wasn’t in the recognition of her problem; it wasn’t even in the actual acknowledgment that there needed to be a change.

It was in action and reaction.

It was in change itself.

A sickly boy could extend a flower to her in the cemetery, but she had to be the one to accept its grace.

She had to be the one to not look away.

Six feet, not six hundred feet.

Please, Blue Diamond… please don’t look away.

Swallowing thickly, Blue forced herself to gain perspective in that tiny hospital room, narrowing the world to just the two of them and the few strips of tile which stood between them.

Six feet.

So close and yet so far.

(Their daughter was six feet under the ground.)

“We apologize to each other all the time,” Blue murmured, her voice lilting softly in her accent, “and yet… not at all. How many times have we hurt each other, Yellow? How many times have we had to repent before doing it all over again?”

“So many times,” Yellow returned automatically, and her voice was quiet, laced only with the fading dregs of bitterness. Her knuckles were white where she continued to clench the sheets balled in her fists. “Because I am sorry—every damn time, Blue. I don’t mean to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. Hell, but I—”

As her voice rose, it was just as quickly stifled.

Choked.

A single tear glanced down the consummate businesswoman’s sharply angled face, and perhaps it was the most visible sign of her defeat that she didn’t immediately make a move to scrub it away, to pretend as though it had never existed.

And perhaps it was this gesture, or lack of a gesture, that finally did it for Blue Diamond above all.

That taught her what she needed to do.

She moved forward, one halting footstep over another, the hem of her long dress sweeping across the clinically white ground.

Clank.

Five feet.

Clank.

Four feet.

Clank.

Alerted by the telltale clangor of the cane, Yellow Diamond abruptly jerked her chin upwards, her lined eyes wide with horror and disbelief, with fear, with apprehension, with confusion, and something else, too—something almost indefinable because it had been a long time since Blue had recognized the expression in her wife’s chiseled face.

Had seen it.

Had noticed it.

Named it and reciprocated it.

Yearning, that irresistible rush of longing.

It shone painfully in her eyes, a drowning man’s golden flare shot into the dark.

Clank.

Three feet.

Clank.

Two.

“Blue, what are you—”

Clank.

One.

Scarcely twelve inches stood between them now, the air quiet, unnervingly, unnaturally still.

For everything was on a tightrope, the line just ready to snap.

Between them, individually, over twenty years of history were stored in the shared memories of their bodies, and for a moment, if only for a fleeting second, Blue felt as though if she could only reach out and touch Yellow in just the right place, that the world would just as suddenly right itself on its tilted axis, and everything would make sense once again and forevermore.  They would be reconciled, reunited, restored, all of their damages undone, and they would know each other intimately, just by touch alone. They would be able to pick up where they last stopped, somewhere in the darkness, on a road that went by the wayside so long ago. Maybe, at long last, they would even join hands.

But, no.

That was simply naïveté.

Childlike belief.

A dream.

Touching Yellow Diamond would not change the fact that their daughter was dead and that four years of grief had nearly destroyed the both of them; touching Yellow Diamond was not an apology; it wouldn’t even be an adequate excuse. The touch, if such a thing were to exist, would only be a gesture, a microscopic movement towards what had heretofore been the impossible.

The beginnings of a bridge.

And one goddamn awful gulf.

But it was a start.

And that was what mattered, right?

Yes, Blue Diamond thought to herself.

Please.

Closing her eyes against the sudden vertigo—the fear, the terror, the rush—she slowly leaned over into the darkness and gently pressed her lips against Yellow Diamond’s forehead, exhaling softly as the stalwart general tensed beneath the touch, deathly still.

“I’m sorry, Blue.”

Her voice shook, a pillar cut off at its foundation, sunken to its knees.

Blue gingerly brought her hands up so that they were encircling her wife’s head, her tousled hair, the tips of her ears, her temples…

“I’m so sorry,” Yellow repeated simply; her voice cleaved itself in two; she was insisting on an apology, as though it was absolutely necessary for them to proceed.

And it was.

But so, too, was this.

“I know,” Blue whispered as Yellow’s shoulders began to silently shake. In response, in return, because she wanted to, because she desperately needed to, she began to absently skim her thumb through the woman’s hair.

 “I’m sorry, too.”

Three words still hung—unspoken—in the sterile air.

Suspended.

On the tips of fearful tongues.

ii.

Priyanka brought them all back to the slaughterhouse again because there was nowhere else left to go. There were five of them in total, so they couldn’t very well have their daily harrowing conversation out in the hallway. They were adults, and Steven was a child, Steven was fourteen, so they couldn’t baldly discuss his mortality in his hospital room, where he laid in a bed, hooked up to so many whirring machines. Her office was cramped, and the chapel was somber. The cafeteria was too noisy, the hospital’s atrium just the same. 

And so, that left only one option.

The conference room on the fourth floor.

The slaughterhouse.

They all took seats at that long, long table and did their best not to look at each other, at the griefs laid bare in all of their tired faces.

“I’m sorry,” Priyanka said abruptly, “for yesterday. I got your hopes up. I got my own up, and I... I should have been more circumspect.”

She stared at her lined hands, at how they were templed neatly upon the smooth surface of the table. Even sidled up next to each other, brushing, her palms felt bitingly cold.

“I knew better, and that—irrefutably—is on me.”

“Aw, come off it, Doc,” Amethyst shrugged dully from the other side of Greg. “You couldn’t have known.”

“You told us best yourself, Priyanka,” Pearl agreed, her voice an almost passable imitation of prim. She was sitting in the chair opposite to Amethyst, delicately massaging her temples with the tips of her long fingers. “That damage wouldn’t have shown up on the scans... we don’t fault you for that.”

“We won’t,” Garnet added pointedly, never moving her bicolored gaze away from the empty air just above Greg’s shoulder.

“We would never,” Greg finished kindly, and when Priyanka dared to look up at him—he was sitting to her immediate left—she was appalled to see a weak smile quivering on his bearded mouth. Of all the things she didn’t deserve, a smile was high on that list which seemed to grow longer with every passing day that Steven Universe was in her care.

“You’re all being far too nice to me,” she insisted in that same blunt tone, though she knew it was a losing battle, four against one, the weapons of their affection all drawn. “I made that child—I made all of you—a promise. And doctors don’t make promises.”

Take care of my baby for me... please.

You have my word.

“Not unless they’re arrogant,��� she concluded coldly, glancing away. “Foolish.”

And she was a fool—assuredly. A jester in a white lab coat. All she needed was the hat. In the slaughterhouse, she half-demanded that the people around her admitted to it, that the victims of her fault had their chance to cleave her apart on the altar, too.

But because they were kind and good and everything that was compassionate in the world, not a single one of them did.

Garnet even reached over and briefly placed a warm hand on Priyanka’s arm.

“It’s a good thing you’re neither then.”

And of course, here was yet another thing she didn’t deserve—a consolatory touch—but the doctor did not have the heart to shake it off, not now—not when there were dark circles beneath Garnet’s eyes that spoke to yet another sleepless night in a long row of likely many.

“Yes, well, at any rate”—she hurried away from the subject, desperate to escape their kindness, goodness, their sympathetic gazes—“I’ve called you here to give a progress report… we potentially have another donor candidate… a live donor this time.”

Priyanka enunciated each word as though she was announcing the presence of a ticking time bomb, and it registered as much in the faces of her captive audience. Garnet withdrew her hand quickly, as though stung, and they all stared at the nephrologist, each and every one of them, with a naked disbelief that was a far cry from the unadulterated joy of yesterday’s declaration. They had been briefly happy, and then they’d been so quickly, so mercilessly burnt; it was no wonder then that they were skeptical.

It was painfully obvious that they were still licking their damn wounds.

“A patient at this very hospital,” she continued haltingly, precise in every word. She had to be careful here not to let something slip up, not to betray a word that would drive the blades sticking into these people’s chests in just one inch more. She wanted to be fastidious this time; she intended to be sure. “Their blood type is likely a match for Steven’s, but we’re checking again just to make sure… and even if that’s a certainty, there are so many other tests besides that we’ll have to do just to make sure their body is healthy enough to undergo a transplant… it could take weeks…”

She spoke into thick silence, excruciating to the last as each word was wrenched free from her teeth in some poor facsimile of her usual brusque fashion.

Pearl and Garnet exchanged a pregnant look across the table, but it was Amethyst who spoke the meaning aloud; she was always the one who seemed to be the best at translating what everyone was secretly thinking into words, what they were all too fearful to say.

“So we shouldn’t get our hopes up yet, huh?” She asked candidly. “That’s what you’re saying… isn’t it?”

“Something to that effect, yes,” Priyanka returned with a slow nod of her head. “I just don’t want to… I would rather not…”

But she struggled to find the right words, to strangle all her emotions into sentences that didn’t complicate the professionalism to which she was called.

Because she couldn’t break down.

She couldn’t flinch.

She was the doctor in the room for goodness’s sake, and that meant something.

But again, Amethyst stepped in so she didn’t have to—blunt, plain, merciful.

“… hurt him again,” she mumbled, her lavender hair forming a curtain around her lowered head. The young woman swiped her arm roughly across her face in a gesture that was lost on precisely no one. “Yeah, I guess that’s for the best…”

The ensuing silence was somehow worse than the last. 

It seemed to chafe at them all, rubbing their skins raw.

Greg Universe shifted in his chair.

He looked less man than mountain, carved ruggedly against a bleak, gray sky—hunched in on himself, avalanched, collapsing all over. 

(When she’d first met the man some fifteen years ago, he’d still had all of his hair.)

(A kid having a kid.)

“He hasn’t said more than a few words today, Dr. M,” the mountain whispered, his voice eroding in all the right places, crumbling. “He barely even looks at us.”

Priyanka didn’t know what to say.

She wasn’t naturally warm like Maisie Reed.

Wasn’t soft.

Wasn’t encouraging.

Being a doctor didn’t require any of those epithets, even though she knew cerebrally, intimately, that being a human did.

“It’s hard being sick,” she finally said.

It was the easiest way to utter an even harder truth.

(Sometimes, her patients found it unbearable.)

iii.

“And Archimicarus preened his feathers haughtily, all the while keeping one amber eye on Captain Bonham, whose apparent warmth wasn’t enough to stop the falcon from being wary of the witch’s eccentricities: the dual pistols she wore in the holsters on either side of her waist, the long knife handle jutting just above the ribs of her corset, and most ominously of all, the necklace she wore around her neck—a leather cord threaded through the skull of a baby bird,” Connie read aloud, adopting her most suspenseful voice for one of the most tense chapters in the book—Lisa and Archimicarus meeting Valentine Bonham, famed pirate witch of the jewel-bright seas, and her serpentine familiar Scyllane. 

Of course, Valentine would prove to be one of Lisa’s most beloved companions by the end of the book, a swashbuckling mentor with a semi-tragic backstory, a kind of mother figure who had a penchant for committing petty theft and tax fraud against the despotic king.

But Steven didn’t know that yet.

“Skyllane,” Connie continued, “her silvery scales glimmering beneath the midday sun, hissed her amusement at Archimicarus’s obvious discomfort as she coiled herself sinuously around Valentine’s neck. Show off, the falcon thought savagely…”

Her mouth twitched into a reflexive smile at this part, nostalgic at Archimicarus’s occasional petty asides, and she looked up automatically, hoping to see the same amusement reflected in the face of her one-person audience… but Steven… Steven obviously wasn’t feeling it.

He didn’t seem like he was feeling much of anything, really.

When she’d come in with her mother that morning, he had tried to hide it, insisting that she open The Unfamiliar Familiar again, that they could pick up where they had last left off like everything was fine and good and normal and dandy.

But it wasn’t.

And perhaps pretending was only adding insult to injury, salt to an already agonizing wound.

Her mother’s famously steady hands had been shaking all day. They shook around around the leather of her steering wheel; they shook around the circumference of her coffee tumbler; they shook as she fumbled with her keys to lock the sedan’s door. She dropped them. Connie picked them up and didn’t comment on the incident, just as her mother didn’t comment on the event except to proffer a perfunctory thank you. And still, her mother’s hands continued to shake as she ushered Connie through the double doors that led into the Truman Ward, where only the nephrologist’s most dire patients were hospitalized. 

On the ride to the hospital that morning, she had laid out the bare bones as best and well as she could to her daughter—Steven had been going to get kidneys, and then he just as suddenly wasn’t. 

Steven’s life had miraculously stretched before him, and then the ribbon was abruptly, cruelly cut.

And his heart is tired, Connie, her mom had whispered—very quietly, with evident strain. As though she was scarcely able to comprehend it herself. So tired. And his lungs are doing their best to keep up…

Connie did not think it was necessary to ask what happened to tired hearts.

Staring at Steven, who wasn’t staring at her but rather at a fixed point upon the ceiling, she instinctively understood that there was only one thing tired hearts could do.

And that was shatter.

Break.

“Hey… Steven?” She asked tentatively, replacing the straw wrapper bookmark in the place where she had last left off. (She didn’t quite close the book—not yet. There was a finality in that action, mundane though it was, that suddenly scared her.) “Are you… okay?”

Seconds dripped before anything happened. Surrounded by a nest of tangled wires and tubes, Steven was deathly still in their embrace, less subject than object, less object than tangible ghost. From her vantage point—the chair next to his bed—she couldn’t see his face, the expression in it, perhaps even the lack of one. But she observed the way that his right hand laid feebly on top of his stomach, fingers lightly curled into a ball. And she saw the feeble rise and fall of his chest, how it stuttered every so often with each arrhythmic movement that found its companion in a staccato beat on his heart monitor.

And here was yet another thing that scared the twelve-year old.

She surmised that all these signs and symbols had something to do with finality, too.

Endings.

She hated those.

Sometimes, when she was reading a really good book, she would stop just before the last chapter to steel herself for what was to come.

“Yes,” came a mechanical reply. “Just tired…”

“I can imagine,” Connie said. (She couldn’t imagine it all. She could barely reconcile that this was the same boy she had laughed and laughed with only so many days ago on the first floor of this very hospital. He had smiled at her so kindly, eyes shining with their own paradoxical aliveness. And she’d thought to herself, even then, how miraculous he surely was, how extraordinary.) “We can stop right here for now if you want to take a nap or something…?”

“I don’t like naps,” Steven immediately said in that same colorless tone, and yet, there was a slight edge to his voice that wasn’t exactly anger, but rather defiance, argumentative, defensive, self-directed—as though it was aimed towards himself. His chubby fingers tensed on his stomach, crumpling the paisley-studded fabric there.

Connie did not think it was necessary to ask why he didn’t like naps.

Or, maybe, it was entirely necessary.

Maybe it was one of those very human statements that required an equally human reply: comfort, consolation, concern.

But she lapsed into silence rather than pursue it, the weight of her book pressing heavily upon her knees, the weight of the moment overwhelming her in all of her twelve-year-oldish-ness. She glanced emptily at the page where the spine was cracked open and realized that they hadn’t even reached the halfway point yet.

There were still so many pages to go.

Hundreds.

“… how does it end?”

But now, very suddenly, with all the air of a startled cat, she glanced up, and saw that Steven had painstakingly tilted his head in her direction. And he was simply watching her, the expression in his dark eyes impenetrable and distant, even though he was so close, quite close enough to reach out and actually touch.

Her literary mind worked ahead of her.

There was a metaphor in there somewhere.

“The chapter?” Connie asked, wondering if he was implicitly asking her to keep reading. 

“No.” The line of Steven’s pale mouth barely moved. “The book.”

It registered with her immediately—he was asking for an entirely different thing besides.

Cold collapsed down her spine, settling somewhere in her stomach.

Icy.

Hard.

“Don’t be silly,” she returned numbly, as though it was just a game they were still playing. It was not in fact a game. It wasn’t even close to one. “You’ll have to wait for me to read the rest of the book to find out. We haven’t even reached Chapter Eight yet.”

There were twenty-one chapters total.

Epilogue included.

Steven was silent for a long time, but never entirely; the various machines invading him did all of the talking in his place: whirring, beeping, stuttering on.

“I guess we better keep going then.”

“Yeah…”

Connie removed her straw wrapper bookmark again and began to read.

She read very quickly now, as though something depended upon it.

iv.

A little before noon, Dr. Maheswaran briefly came in to disconnect Steven from the portable dialysis machine and send Connie downstairs to be picked up by her father for tennis practice. Garnet watched him as he seemingly watched nothing. He looked away when the nephrologist gently disconnected the machine’s tubing from the central line grafted into his neck. He closed his dark eyes when she replaced the oxygen mask over his mouth for one of those quick albuterol treatments. (Ever since his episode last night, his breathing had been a little too stilted for the doctor’s liking, a little too short.) He barely opened them again when Connie said her tentative goodbye, placing a hand on Steven’s arm as Dr. Maheswaran placed a consoling arm around her daughter’s shoulder. 

Through his mask, he couldn’t say anything, so he only blinked slowly, the shadows turning beneath his eyes starkly pronounced. He coughed once. The feeble sound rattled across his chest. 

It shivered his whole body.

It shivered the entire room.

When Connie withdrew her hand, fear flashed across her face.

(For she was shivering, too.)

The Maheswarans left, and Garnet and Steven were left alone in that tiny hospital room that was filled with golden sunlight. It leaned through the window with a light, mocking smile, teasing a warmth that the gym trainer couldn’t feel as she continued to watch Steven.

Vigilantly.

With no little obsession.

Afraid to miss something.

(Maybe even more afraid to stay.)

Hunched over in the uncomfortable chair next to his bed, she curled the fingers of her right hand over her clenched left fist, gingerly rubbing her knuckles, and she stared plainly at the punctuated rise and fall of his chest as albuterol vapor leaked beneath his mask, spiraling into the air like fading smoke. The machine hissed pneumatically, nearly overwhelming the sound of Steven’s beating heart, which was measured out in shrill noise, clangorous noise.

Beep…

Beep...

Beep…

Garnet hated this sound and she was simultaneously desperate to keep hearing it.

A nurse came in some ten minutes later to remove the mask and readjust the oxygenated cannulas in their former place, gently threading the tubes around Steven’s ears, maneuvering the tiny nubs into his nose. He kept his eyes closed, but Garnet was almost positive that he wasn’t sleeping. 

It was subtle, but she knew the signs, having studied them night after night for almost nine months now—all those times she had curled up beside him in bed, resting her chin on top of his curly, black hair, keeping a vigilant eye out for all the demons she couldn’t exactly see. 

The shadows that lurked around and about them never quite materialized into foes she could punch, kick, or destroy, so she memorized all the telltale signs of his aliveness instead, committing each trait to memory as though her own sanity depended on it.

The slight furrow in his dark brow.

The twitch in his nose.

The grim press of his lips.

(When he was truly asleep, he had the tendency to snore, mouth lazily lolled open in unguarded torpor.)

But the nurse didn’t know him, so they only said poor kiddo before leaving too, and the room suddenly felt so much more vacant without the hiss of the albuterol to fill all the empty crevices—the silence, the all-consuming nothingness, the barefaced, omnipresent pain.

Beep…

Beep…

Beep…

Steven slowly opened his eyes as the nurse’s footsteps died away from the room.

And Garnet watched him as he seemingly watched nothing, as he stared, very quietly, at the ceiling, without so much as moving a limb. She drank every micro-gesture in, as though every micro-gesture meant something in the wide cosmos of the universe. Every breath became consequential in this barebones theology, a butterfly’s wings rippling through space and time to matter in ways both big and small.

It mattered—fundamentally—that Steven continued to breathe.

Beep…

Beep…

Beep…

“Garnet?” He asked quietly. His voice was small, weak—the mewling rasp of an injured animal. She thought fleetingly of Cat Steven, of how they had found that tiny, defenseless kitten shivering in the pouring rain. If only Garnet could scoop his namesake into her strong arms just the same and keep him safe, holding him very quietly, very gently, against her chest.

“… yes, Steven?”

“Was my mom… was she ever scared, too?”

The question was simple enough, and it simply unmoored her.

Skewered her through.

Because they didn’t really talk about Rose.

Not really.

They referenced her obliquely, in passing mention, if they absolutely had to; her portrait loomed above the door leading into the beach house; every year, on her birthday, they laid flowers upon her grave and tried not to think about young she would have been had she never died.

And yet, here Steven was, trespassing that unspoken rule and doubling down upon it.

As little as they ever discussed Rose Quartz, they touched upon her illness even less.

So many memories.

Too painful.

Too raw.

Never healed, buried deep within their skins, buried six feet under the ground.

“…I think she might have been,” Garnet answered slowly, “but I can’t say for sure. She was good at pushing down her feelings for us… for our sakes.”

Which in turn made her an excellent leader.

(And an inscrutable friend.)

Steven seemed to silently grapple with this for a few moments, his expression complex, as though there were cloud shadows roaming across his eyes and mouth, threatening rain but never delivering.

“I dreamt of her last night,” Steven said, an explanatory note in his voice. Justificatory. He wasn’t bringing up his mother for just any random reason. “My mom.”

Garnet’s heart shriveled somewhere inside her throat.

“Mm.” She attempted to be calm anyway. “Tell me about it.”

“We… we were in a pink room full of swirling clouds,” the child whispered. “We played football together. And video games. And she told me that she was proud of me… that she loved me…”

What Steven knew of Rose came from stories and anecdotes, from picture albums and yellowed newspaper clippings, from the few videotapes she had left behind—from the one video she had explicitly recorded for Steven scarcely a month before she had delivered him.

It wasn’t a lot, but still, maybe it was just enough.

Because that sounded like Rose.

Her kindness.

Her warmth.

Her fun.

For she had loved, more than anything, to play.

“And then what happened?” She asked, her voice almost even.

“… I woke up.”

And Garnet watched, helpless, as a single tear wriggled itself loose from the corner of Steven’s eye, slipping gracelessly down his cheek and away.

He was silent after that.

She was almost positive, though, that he wasn’t asleep.

v.

“C’mon, Ste-man,” Amethyst wheedled, wafting the milkshake temptingly just below his nose. She’d walked nearly a block away from the hospital just to get the damn thing—a specialty of Stacey’s, the little retro milkshake bar on the corner of Pin Avenue and 32nd. The staff dressed up like they were from The Jetsons and everything. When Steven hadn’t been… when things hadn’t been so bad… they’d sometimes shlepped over there after his dialysis treatments to slam burgers and milkshakes as the jukebox played the Heaven Beetles’ greatest hits. One time, all five of them went together and sung shitty karaoke ’til Pearl was laughing so hard that strawberry milkshake shot out of her nose. “It’s got Reece’s Pieces in it—your faaaavorite…”

“I’m not thirsty, Amethyst,” he returned dully, turning his face away from her. “Sorry.”

His pale neck exposed to her in the gesture, Amethyst could now clearly see the livid bruises that crept vine-like out of the collar of his hospital gown, blooming blue and purple near the place where his central line was inserted just next to his collarbone.

If she could have, if it would have made sense, Amethyst would have crushed that stupid styrofoam cup between her fingers right then and there and enjoyed the feeling of milkshake pouring all over her shaking fingers.

She would have reveled in the destruction of the act.

The cathartic release.

Very probably, she would have begun to cry.

But Steven didn’t need that.

He didn’t need to see her lose her shit.

So, she only collapsed backwards on her feet and into the chair pulled up next to Steven’s bed. She was ginger, notably careful, as she placed the milkshake on the nearby tray, where it’d melt into itself between the hours and the blazing sun.

For the sun burned today, like golden fire, through the square window.

It scorched.

“You… you haven’t eaten in, like, days, my dude,” Amethyst stated plainly, as if he didn’t know that better than anyone else who cared to know. “Dr. M’s worried ‘bout you. If ya don’t get enough nutrients…”

But Steven cut across her bluntly then, still not looking at her. “… then they’ll have to put a feeding tube in me… I know. I heard Dr. Maheswaran and Pearl talking about it the other day.”

She supposed it should have surprised her that he already knew; maybe if she’d been Pearl, she would have jumped to try to sugarcoat the blow with something soft, something comforting, something consolatory. 

But the truth of the matter was that there was nothing soft nor comforting nor consolatory about the ugly reality that reared its head above them, ten feet tall and ready to fucking strike.

He was fourteen, not ten.

He’d long stopped believing in magic.

“Doesn’t that scare you?” She asked him, frustration edging the rims of her scratchy voice, and she knew, even as she spoke, that she was being hella unfair. The poor kid couldn’t help the fact that he was puking his guts up left and right, but he was just laying there, lifeless, like he’d already accepted the inevitability of the stars that had spelled out his fate. 

And it maddened Amethyst.

Sickened her.

She really want to pummel that goddamn milkshake cup into smithereens; she clenched her fists tightly on top of her knees to try and stop them from shaking.

She reminded herself—painfully—that it was only yesterday that happiness had been given to the kid before it was so brutally ripped away.

She told herself that even grown ass adults had trouble with that.

The volatility, the utter unpredictability of life.

“Of course it scares me, Amethyst,” Steven replied, his broken voice barely a whisper as he finally turned to look at her, his brown eyes drowning in the black bags which encased them. Grooved them. Hollowed them.  “I don’t wanna have another surgery… but what do I… how can I do anything? I… I don’t know if I… I can’t stop this. I can’t.”

He seemed to struggle for the words, each one wrenched from him with a punishing drag of air.

And it struck Amethyst then and precisely there, with all the sharpness of a knife, that she took it for granted.

How easy it was for her to simply breathe.

“Catch your breath,” she implored him wildly, leaning forward in her chair. “Shh, shh, it’s okay, Steven.”

“B-but it’s not okay,” he insisted fiercely, sniffing. A single tear slanted out of the corners of one of his eyes and down the hollow of his face, slipping beneath the oxygenated cannulas, following the gentle curve of his beaten, world-weary face. “Don’t say that it’s okay. Please. I can’t take that anymore.”

“Okay, fine!” The awful words exploded out from her, tumbled and rushed and spilled from her mouth headlong on their hands and knees. Amethyst would say anything to make him calm down, and because she had no filter, because she’d never known how to mince the truth, she would mean every damn syllable. “Everything isn’t okay. Everything isn’t fine. Is that better? Are you happy now?”

But to her utter horror, to her staggering discontent, the answer was apparently—

“Yeah,” Steven sighed, closing his eyes in visible relief. “Yes.”

He laid there quietly for a handful of seconds to take in deep gulps of air.

It looked painful.

Excruciating.

“… I just wanna be on the same page,” he eventually finished, his voice a barely distinguishable mumble, distant and muffled.

Amethyst’s entire chest seized with fear unlike that she’d ever felt in a lifetime full of fear; it gripped her, and it wrestled with her.

Put its hands ‘round her throat and squeezed.

“And what page would that be, buddy?” She tried to keep her voice even anyway, though. Steven had yet to reopen his eyes. “Enlighten me.”

But there was no forthcoming reply.

His outburst had exhausted him, and sleep was merciless.

It stole him away.

vi.

They worked together in tentative silence, Greg and Pearl, taking damp washcloths and running them along the parts of Steven’s body that they could reach beneath all the medical apparatus: the column of his neck, his pale face, his arms, his leaden legs. He was too weak to take a shower in the bathroom attached to his hospital room, and they wouldn’t have been able to get a few of his lines wet anyway for the fear of clogging them up.

So a nurse provided them with a basin of soapy water, and they each picked up a rag, gliding the rough fabric as gently as possible across his skin as he laid beneath them like a doll, limp and lifeless.

Staring up at them from dark, button eyes.

Greg pulled his own cloth around Steven’s left ear, now rubbing the tip of it, now gently scraping behind, and tried not to think about how he’d done the very same when the kid was just a baby, so tiny in his arms, so helpless. He’d been afraid then, desperately so, to make just one wrong move. What if he accidentally hurt the little tyke? Rubbed his head a little too hard? Accidentally got soap in his eyes? What if he fucked up? (He was so good at fucking up.)

He’d miss Rose the most then, in those far too common moments, when he was at his lowest.

He’d miss the way she used to wrap her warm arms around his shoulders and show him, without so much as saying a word, what he looked like in her eyes.

Like he was someone worth loving in spite of everything.

In the face of it all.

Fourteen-years later, Steven was tiny beneath his arms.

Helpless.

And Greg missed Rose.

(He would always miss Rose.)

Pearl’s hands trembled as she gingerly lifted Steven’s left arm, weaving her cloth through the gaps between each of his fingers, swiping its breadth across his sweat-stickied palm. Greg followed his hooded gaze to where it settled somewhere on Pearl’s face, where there were faint circles cradling the spaces beneath her eyes, where there was a recent gauntness in the pointed architecture of her cheeks.

She must have noticed, too, because she blinked quickly, self-consciously, pausing her ministrations.

“Are you okay, Steven? I-I’m not hurting you, am I?”

Because that was the most important thing after all—neither of them wanted to hurt him anymore than he was already irrevocably damaged.

Couldn’t bear to even leave so much as a bruise.

“No,” came his simple reply.

It was the monosyllabism that was somehow the most dreadful above all.

Pearl also caught onto this, swiftly folding her slender fingers over Steven’s knuckles, her rag dangling like a white-sheeted ghost from her fingertips.

“Are you sure? You… you haven’t been yourself all day.”

He was silent at this, and Greg was pretty sure it was because the answer was obvious, painfully so.

(He hadn’t been himself in eight months now.)

The man swallowed thickly and turned away, dipping his rag in the basin on the nearby tray; the lukewarm water slushed around his wrists. He made a meal out of squeezing the cloth out, hoping that when he faced Steven and Pearl again, the moment would have passed, the unspoken things remaining unspoken.

But it was the very absence of a reply that seemed to gall Pearl, spiral her, and Greg could see, when he turned back to them, that she was utterly ruined.

She couldn’t hide it; it shone in the over-bright lights of her eyes.

“A-a kidney is bound to turn up,” she said, speaking in that rapid way she always did when she was upset (and trying not to let people see). “Dr. Maheswaran is looking for one even now, and… and… she thinks she might be able to secure a live donor kidney this time because, y-you know, the numbers and everything. Your numbers. Not that they’re abysmal. I mean, they’re bad, but—”

Greg tried to step in, tried to rescue her, before she got in too deep.

“I know it’s hard, Shtu-ball… but chin up,” he said gently as he maneuvered his washcloth beneath the kid’s neck. He skated around the bruises when he could. (There were so many new bruises, erupting like angry supernovas all across his tender skin.)

“Pearl’s right”—she shot him a grateful glance—“Dr. M’s not gonna give up, and neither are we.”

The silence stretched again.

It absolutely groaned.

And Steven finally moved his gaze away from Pearl and back to the bare ceiling.

Apparently, he’d been staring at the ceiling a lot today, divining something in it that no one else could see.

“Were you guys this scared… when Mom… when she was…”

But before he had ever gotten the words out, before he could finish another word let alone the whole sentence, Pearl abruptly extricated herself from Steven, gently setting his hand back on the bed, gently throwing her white cloth of a flag down.

“Excuse me,” she muttered feverishly. “I’ve got to… I can’t—restroom.”

But rather than flee into the door that led to the ensuite bathroom, she swung through the adjacent door, the one that led out into the hall, and Steven watched the place where her lithe form disappeared with cavernous eyes.

Sunken eyes.

Dull.

His mouth still partially open where he was still forming the words.

“I… I was so scared, buddy,” Greg said quietly, his throat constricting with all the surging memories. Her big, brown eyes. The tubes running through her skin. How he held her hand at the end, when Dr. Howard unplugged the machines, so she didn’t have to be alone.

Pearl, of course, held the other.

And there they were, the three of them.

And then, just the two of them.

Alone.

Steven’s eyes, so much like his mother’s own, turned to capture him now, penetrating his father somewhere deep in the muck and mire of his soul.

“… are you scared now?”

He choked back a sob.

“Yeah, buddy. I am.”

vii.

They sat together on Yellow’s hospital bed for a long time, not exactly talking, but communicating in other ways—in the brush of their nearly touching shoulders, in the painful glances they would occasionally shift each other from the corners of their eyes, in the way that Yellow’s pinky finger rested on top of Blue’s wrist where their hands were placed on top of the sheets in the microscopic space between them.

Now once more armored in a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks, Yellow Diamond almost looked herself—brilliant and impressive, striking to the last.

And then she would look to the side again, revealing the raw cuts now laced into her sculpted cheeks.

And Blue would fantasize about gently touching one, running her fingers across one of those tentatively scabbed lines, capturing the measure of her wife’s face, relearning it all over again.

But in the end, she didn’t dare.

Because for right now, this was simply enough.

To be sitting next to Yellow Diamond.

To simply be.

Together.

For once, not entirely alone, even though so many unvoiced things still remained.

Three words.

Mountains of griefs.

And something else now, too.

I don’t want to commit to claiming anything about these tests, Yellow had explained earlier, her usually gruff voice working itself into something gentle, a little more kind. Not until I know something for sure…

You don’t believe I can take it? Blue’s tone was as gentle as it was accusatory in that devastatingly contradictory way of hers.

Frankly, her wife returned quietly, no.

And somehow, it was the truthfulness in the other’s expression which made Blue stop short of pressing for more, for she could see, in the lines beneath Yellow Diamond’s golden eyes, just what these past four years had done to her.

You barely survived the last time. I barely survived watching you, Blue.

It was a miracle that they were even sitting here.

Barely touching, barely talking, but still… it was a start.

It was something simply to be breathing the same air.

Around three, Dr. Reed finally dropped by with Yellow’s discharge papers and another doctor whose name Blue didn’t quite catch; she was a tired-looking lady, though, with a fiercely drawn face. Salt-and-pepper hair. Hands shoved in the pockets of her lab coat. They asked if Yellow would come with them. It’d maybe take an hour or so.

The businesswoman made to get up, but Blue stopped her with a withered hand on her arm.

“Wait,” she murmured. “Your collar is crooked.”

She reached upwards to adjust the crumpled white band, straightening the crease between her delicate fingers. 

And Yellow stared at her silently—with open tenderness and rawness and aching disbelief.

And when she swallowed, Blue could see every cord convulse in the smooth column of her throat.

“Would you wait for me, Blue?”

But she must have realized how vulnerable that sounded because she quickly tried to amend herself, always aware of her audience, that there were people watching. She stood up abruptly and a little awkwardly; it was clear that one of her legs was killing her.

“In the town car, I mean?”

“Yes,” Blue returned softly. “Of course.”

Yes.

A complicated expression quivered across Yellow Diamond’s plump lips then; it was hesitant and rich, stiff and almost unbearably visceral in its reluctant vulnerability.

It wasn’t necessarily a smile, but it was something.

It was a start.

viii.

Pearl would have done something, anything, to escape her own body, but it clung to her stubbornly as she half-ran through the hospital’s halls—down Truman Ward and down the glass-encased skywalk, down the elevator, down some forsaken hallway and then another, the turns she took arbitrary and varied.

Anywhere but Room 11037.

Horror clawed its way up her throat—shame and awfulness and terrible, maddening grief—until she could hardly breathe for its presence in her mouth. The nausea was overwhelming. The memories she usually kept carefully tucked away surged forth, frothing like foam on the waves that skimmed the shore near their home.

Just the mention of Rose.

That alone was enough to undo her on any regular day.

But context mattered, too.

Steven had brought up his mother so readily, as though they and their situations were one in the same.

Like they were both—

But she couldn’t complete the thought, even to herself, because fundamentally, Pearl couldn’t accept the inevitable—not when Rose Quartz had once taught her what it was to touch the stars. 

Blindly, haphazardly, unintentionally, she found herself in one of the larger hallways in the hospital, and she immediately knew, from experience, that she had made her way down to the first floor. This particular corridor emptied out into the larger atrium and housed many of the administrative offices and various waiting rooms. 

It was fairly empty. A few people in olive colored scrubs walked by and paid the woman no attention, her total disintegration invisible to them.

Unseen.

And somehow, the fact of this was soothing to Pearl.

Comforting.

So she swiped a delicate hand across her face and moved forward until a sight towards the end of the hall stopped her short, like a blow to the stomach without being half as neat—so uncomplicated and yet so devastatingly simple.

A silver-haired woman wearing a dark blue dress.

Hands poised on a metallic cane.

Staring inscrutably at a pair of nondescript double doors.

Her heavy braid fell thickly across her shoulder.

ix.

Blue Diamond had been on her way out to the car when she noticed a half-open door in a dyad of two on the first floor of the hospital. Golden light spilled from the room upon the bare, white tiles, submerging them in a brightness, a warmth.

The brass label on the adjacent wall gleamed at her invitingly.

The chapel.

Because naturally, hospitals possessed chapels—sanctified spaces where people could pray to their gods and hope they would intercede on the behalves of their loved ones. There was something psychologically comforting in the gesture, she supposed—to do something in a situation where it felt like nothing else could be done, to speak to the Divine and take comfort in the fact that they were not alone because the Divine was omnipresent, and the Divine was all-encompassing, and the Divine loved them powerfully.

She stood in front of those doors for what seemed like an eternity and remembered painfully when she had once loved God.

She’d grown up with a Rosary woven between her fingers, singing Alleluia every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday at Mass until her daughter was murdered, and every theological comfort she had ever held dear scattered to the floor like beads.

She supposed it was only nostalgia then, which drove her to lightly press on that already half-opened door.

But as to what made her go in, the former headmistress could hardly articulate.

Her fingers wrapped themselves tightly around the head of her cane.

Clank, she proceeded forward.

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

x.

Above all, Pearl didn’t know what made her do it—it was almost as though a sense of daring reckless gripped her and propelled her forward, step over unthinking step. She approached the spot where Blue Diamond had only recently disappeared, her pale eyes flicking upwards to the label which named the room for what it was, and then back to the double doors again, which hadn’t been completely shuttered to a close since the entrance of its last visitor.

It was a small chapel from what Pearl could tell at a cursory glance, only offering the essential trifecta of artifacts—a couple of pews, a tiny altar, and what appeared to be the portrait of a dove, spreading its elegant wings across the back wall. 

And there, sitting in the middle of the front row, was Blue Diamond, her head defiantly lifted.

As though determinedly not in prayer.

Her concentrated gaze seemed to be trained upwards, directed at the beautifully painted mural, upon which the gentle lighting threw its warm, amber glow, casting the bird in molten gold.

That same feeling of daring propitiated her again, and it was with her arms tucked neatly over her chest that Pearl impulsively drew closer, stepping across the boundary of the threshold with tender steps, ballerina movements. Her footfalls were light by nature, and in the thin carpet, they were hushed to the point that the older woman didn’t seem to be aware that she had company at all. 

Her cane stood, temporarily abandoned, on the side of the row.

Though her head was high, her shoulders were hunched in on themselves.

Caved.

When Pearl reached the pew directly behind her, she skimmed her knuckles against the grains of the wooden armrest, producing a low, plaintive note as a means of attracting her attention without entirely startling her.

And it was with painful slowness, a certain gracefulness, too, that Blue Diamond finally turned her head to look Pearl’s way, her shadowed eyes wide with surprise and melancholy, with curiosity and well-practiced temperance.

Pearl’s thin brow furrowed.

She bit her lower lip.

xi.

“May I sit?” The Crystal Gem asked, and there was a brusqueness in her otherwise smooth voice that reminded Blue Diamond of yet another encounter with one of Steven’s motley guardians—the one who had stood in front of the door, the muscled woman with bicolored eyes. 

She had warned her against hurting Steven.

She, too, had looked at Blue with quiet disdain.

Perhaps loathing was the more fitting word.

“Be my guest…?” Blue returned, allowing a pause by which the woman could introduce herself. 

“Pearl,” she curtly supplied as she lowered herself to the end of the pew and sat rather primly, with one ankle crossed daintily over the other. 

“Pearl,” Blue echoed gently, trying the name on her tongue. It was a lyrical number, assonant and delicate, much like the person to which it belonged. 

For she was slight—as willowy as the other Crystal Gem had been powerfully built. Simply put, she looked as though one puff of wind would blow her over, bending her back like the breeze did stalks of long reeds, rending her, bifurcating her, snapping her in two. And just as Yellow and Blue’s physiognomies told the stories of their griefs, so, too, did the lines beneath Pearl’s eyes announce her own.

There was a boy in the hospital bed.

There was a wasting disease.

“May I assume,” she continued tentatively, “by the expression in your face, that you already know who I am?”

“Yes,” Pearl replied certainly, but then just as immediately said, “No. I don’t know.”

She closed her pale eyes against some inner turmoil as the ambient lighting gently kissed her beaten face, caressing her cheeks in honeyed gold.

“I know your name, and I know what your family’s company has done,” she continued, “but I suppose that isn’t the same thing as knowing you, is it? Understanding why my… why he… why Steven loves you.”

There was it again—that same oblique indictment that the other Crystal Gem had leveled at Diamond Electric, silently condemning her for all sorts of untold flaws, and Blue Diamond frowned, sucking a little on her lip as the charge did what it was intended to do—level a finger directly at her chest, pressing neatly upon her sternum.

Perhaps these activists were not as inconsequential as she had wanted them to be after all.

Perhaps they had something important to say.

Perhaps here was yet another instant in which Blue had looked away, painstakingly ignoring all of the uncouth things in order to more capably realize the vision of her perfect, invulnerable, tableau of an ugly, imperfect, sheltered life.

She accused Yellow of shoving Pink Diamond in a drawer, but perhaps Blue had always made sure to be in another room when all the shoving was being done.

“Because he loves you,” Pearl finished quietly, “and I’m trying to… I can’t quite figure it out.”

She turned to Blue directly then, appealing to her simply with her over-bright eyes and her slightly parted mouth, with the shadows all over her face.

So many premature lines.

And Blue Diamond returned the gaze as steadily as she could.

Perhaps she even mirrored it.

Lines and shadows and lines.

xii.

“I don’t think… I don’t imagine that I’ve been good at love in a very long time,” Blue began, each word slow and precise, maneuvered carefully on her lilting tongue like a hand-rolled cigarette wheeled between expert fingertips. “Giving, receiving it… showing it… even with my daughter… even before she—”

But the woman could not complete the sentence.

And Pearl found that she didn’t want her to.

The unspoken conclusion sat in the space between them—a little girl Pearl imagined her to be, arranged in a pretty pink dress, dangling her Mary-Jane enclosed feet from the crimson pew.

“But Steven Universe,” she continued, and even at his very name, the mere mention of him, the older woman’s expression seemed to subtly transform, the heaviness in it unfurling.

Incrementally lightening.

Surely.

“He extended a flower and smile to me that day in the cemetery. He noticed that I was sad. And that taught me a lesson I had never thought to learn in all of these many staggering years…”

Pearl couldn’t help herself then; a breathless question fell impatiently from her lips.

“And what would that be?”

Blue Diamond arched a dark brow at her that would have been haughty were it not for the tears glistening in her eyes, threatening to exceed their sunken edges.

“That there is such kindness, such… such love, in your troubles being seen, identified, and acted upon. He saw my sadness, and he named it. He gave me that tiny hibiscus and showed me, wordlessly, that I was not alone.” 

She glided a skeletal hand across the side of her face, her palm capturing the beginnings of those now falling tears.

“I was being seen, Pearl, for the first time in I cannot tell you when… and it made me realize that this is what I wanted most of all, that perhaps, this is what all humans really want in the end.”

“To be seen,” Pearl repeated, her voice constricted, so many emotions thick.

“Yes,” Blue Diamond whispered with a gracious nod of her head, disturbing the heaviness of her silvery braid, “and to be loved by another.”

“Is that what he wants?” She pressed insistently, but deep down, the answer was already known to her, spelled out to her in the rush of so many memories. How many times alone in the past couple of days had he told them as much, both with words and without them? How many times had he asked them all not to look away? Amethyst opened a window for him so he could hear the words they’d all been too cowardly to utter in his presence. In a hospital room, in the dead of night, he told her to rip the bandaid off, to confirm that which everyone already knew and tiptoed around instead of saying.

You’re very sick, sweetheart.

I know.

And even still, even after all these horrible and unsubtle signs, she’d already done the damn thing and run away from him again anyway.

He asked if she’d been scared when Rose had been in the same place, laying in a hospital bed.

Sick.

Dying.

And yes, the answer so clearly, so blatantly was.

“Yes,” Blue Diamond murmured, her quiet voice tender.

And almost, if not entirely, kind.

“I think that is what he has desired all along.”

Pearl had no other recourse then, no semblance of a facade left by which to cling to, to desperately hold onto in a chapel where two entirely different women sat side by side, utterly undone by the same boy.

She brought both of her hands up to her mouth then and began to weep.

xiii.

Blue allowed the woman her moment of private grief, turning her head away from the sight, even though the sounds weren’t as easily escapable.

The sobs.

The keening.

The primality of it all.

Tears gathered in her own eyes, but she refused to let them fall, she swept them all away—because she understood intimately, viscerally, somehow without really knowing it—that this wasn’t her moment, her child, her bone deep, unbearable, unlivable grief.

Though it had once had been.

And it still was.

But not for this child.

Not for Steven Universe.

She’d lost a child; she wasn’t currently losing one.

And there was a fundamental difference in the fact.

There was primacy.

Five minutes passed, maybe ten, and Pearl gathered herself, collected all her tiny, fragmented pieces into a frame that wasn’t entirely shaking with its own reckoning anymore. And Blue finally looked over to see that the woman was leaned forward on the edge of her pew, the heels of her hands pressed against her eyes.

“He’s not doing well,” she said faintly.

If Blue hadn’t been staring at the movement of her thin mouth, she wouldn’t have known where the words had come from.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have even believed them.

They struck cleanly, like a slap to the face.

“Yesterday’s… disappointment”—disappointment was not the correct word—“hurt him badly, and he’s shutting down. Closing off.”

Each word was painful, razor sharp in clarity, dragged from Pearl’s teeth against her will. She dragged her fingers in lines down her wet face, now reaching the point of her chin, now cupping them into fists on either side of her jaw.

“We can’t get through to him,” she finished quietly. “We’ve all tried.”

And tried and tried and tried—Blue could see every failed attempt scrawled in the lines all over the woman’s tired face. The devastation bruised her black and blue.

“I’m sorry,” she offered simply. “I’m so… sorry.”

But Pearl, with all suddenness, with an aspect of barely repressible contempt, leveled her an incredulous look as though to say, What good will sorry do?

She had an excellent point.

“You should talk to him sometime,” she went on to say, turning away from Blue now. A series of conflicted emotions seemed to be playing out in real time across her pale, sky-colored eyes—disdain warring with grief warring with loathing warring with grudging respect.

It wasn’t quite endearment, though.

And Blue Diamond had a sneaking suspicion that it never would be.

“Maybe not today… he’s tired… hurt… but some day… you should visit him. He would like that.”

It was Blue’s turn to stare at the other woman incredulously now, her mouth slightly open as she awaited a punchline that never quite came. Pearl obstinately refused to meet her gaze, fingertips templed just next to her trembling lips.

“I… I have nothing to offer him,” she whispered, a trembling note in her voice as she tried to convey exactly just how serious she was being. “I’m hardly… I mean, he was the one who saved me. I don’t know what I could ever give him in equal return.”

But somehow, without really knowing why, how, or all the sundry explanatory variables in-between, she knew that this was perfectly untrue.

And Pearl seemed to know it, too, for the corner of her lip slightly lifted in the sliver of a sardonic smile.

“Start with a flower and a smile, perhaps.”

[rk1kheadcanons]

hiii here is a prompt if u haven’t done it already, markus tries teaching connor how to paint (and Connor isn’t very good at it)

Listen, Connor's stick figures just hit different to Markus. 😤👌🏽

Sure, Connor is advanced and as such he can copy a scene down to the last detail. Of course, Markus is going to want Connor to be more authentic and offers to teach him how to by himself without falling back on subroutines.

Markus gets... Very cute, very detailed stick figures. He's trying not to coo at Connor's work because he knows that Connor will fall back on protocols, all blank-faced and stoic staring until Markus gets his act together and properly apologizes.

It's really cute though and Markus says as such. Connor LED spins a lovely little confused yellow trying to figure out what Markus doesn't say but accepts the compliment nonetheless.

Markus doesn't stop there, though. He helps Connor explore several forms of artist styles, including pottery, sculpting, and glasswork.

He had done this with musical instruments as well. Connor played a mean Cello and guitar, which surprised no one because of how articulated his hand motions were.

Just like with music, Connor found his calling finally with art. He excelled in watercolor paintings...and jewelry making.

Connor was very excited to paint a scenario for Markus in his new medium.

With the same grace and poise as Markus, he produces sprawling scenes from his mind's eye. It's breathtaking, far removed from his whimsical stick figure Markus and circle body Sumo.

Connor has painted a picture of Markus in his full regalia, back turned from the viewer, holding his Revolution insignia flag high amid a sea of whites and blues and other hints of pastels.

In awe, as that one completes, another canvas is placed on the easel, and Connor, with the same positive encouragement, gets his love to produce a painting of Connor, himself, and Sumo in the fallen leaves of an August day: reds, golds, and greens, and brown hues of the leaves are present.

They are good. They are gallery good as Connor delves into more subjects of his mind such as pre-deviation, the Zen Garden, and Amanda herself.

Markus places them up along with his own and with Carl's. Connor finds that there is a market for them, that humans want to purchase his paintings, much like with Markus'. He does it as a hobby, never serious and only as requested pictures.

Markus keeps the stick figure painting and the two first original one's, the first place over his desk in New Jericho, the other hung in there penthouse that the money Carl life to Markus afforded them.

[wlw5eva]

She’s The Best

Kara Danvers x Lena Luthor

Request: I have a request if you take them? A Supercorp fic with Kara doing a fundraise/auction off a date with Supergirl kinda thing so of course all the rich people are there and Lena is just silently fuming bc she has to deal with all of these jerks everyday and no way in heck is she letting Supergirl near them even if it's for charity so she outbids them and ends up taking Kara on a date as supergirl where it's just awkward and cute idk that's if you do requests and if they're open 🤷‍♀️

Words: ~ 1,256

Summary: Kara decides (while fighting against the blush that she knows is painted on her cheeks) in that moment, that she would visit Lena everyday with lunch for as long as the brunette wanted her to if it meant she would get to see her gush and smile like that. | Lena bids the highest and wins a date with Supergirl.

Warnings:

A/N: Ahhhh it’s been forever since I last posted! This took me forever to write and I am so sorry!! Writers block really hit me hard. Nevertheless, here it is, dedicated to the one and only @cool-beans-scully​ 

  A date with Supergirl was the last thing Lena thought she would be going home with. 

When she heard that Supergirl agreed to go on a date with who ever bid the highest for the fundraiser she was holding - whoever got Supergirl to agree to the idea, Lena has no clue - for the Luthor Family Children's Hospital, she saw the exact moment her colleagues started squirming in their seats, ready to bid their money for a date with Supergirl.  

Lena was watching Supergirl up on the stage beside the auctioneer, her eyes trained on the Kryptonian. She didn't need super-hearing to hear the sexist comments her fellow ‘coworkers’ were making.  

There was no way she was letting any of those intolerable men anywhere near the woman who had saved her life numerous times. It was bad enough that she had to deal with them on a daily basis, she wouldn't want anyone to go through that too. Not if she had any say in it.  

Before she could even think, her mouth opens and she outbids every person in the room. 

All eyes are on her when the auctioneer announces that she's the highest bidder and wins the date with Supergirl.

- 

It doesn't sink for Kara either until well after she gets home from the fundraiser that she has a date with Lena. 

-

They agree to meet at Lena's penthouse to have lunch together. Lena didn’t want to risk either of them being out in the public because who knows what would happen to their date when the both of them are there for every news source and paparazzi to see. 

Everyone was already shocked that she had bid so much money at the fundraiser, she certainly didn't want to add more fuel to the fire.  

The rich and their thirst for gossip could be exceptionally intrusive and brutal, especially if you were the subject of the latest scandal. 

She texts Kara beforehand, telling her that she doesn't have a plan for the date and that she doesn't know what to do when Supergirl finally gets there. Her doorbell goes off before she even has a chance to check for a reply from her friend.

And so, when Lena opens her door to Supergirl holding a bouquet of peach coloured roses, she's at a loss for words. 

"For you," Supergirl greets, blue eyes meeting green as she holds out the flowers to Lena. She feels her cheeks flush as she takes the flowers into her hands. She smiles as she looks at the flowers, vaguely remembering that peach roses symbolized appreciation and sincerity. 

"Thank you." Is all she can say before welcoming the blonde inside.  

-

Apparently, Lena has absolutely no clue what to say to the heroine in front of her. 

After all, what do you say to the woman who's saved your life more times than you can count? 'Hey, thanks for saving all those times I've nearly died, let's get this date started!' Yeah, no. The last thing Lena wanted to bring up was all the times her life was at stake.  

- 

Likewise, Kara doesn't know what to say to Lena either. 

-

So, Lena talks about the only thing her and Supergirl share in common. 

Kara.

And Lena talks about her while they eat lunch. A lot.

It turns out that Lena's favorite subject to talk about was all things related to Kara Danvers. Who could blame her too? The bond between them was undeniable, ever since their first meeting. 

It just so happened to be in her favor that Supergirl seemed to be friends with the reporter too.  

Normally, when you go on a date, the last thing you would want is for your date to talk about another person. Lena was about to apologise for talking about her best friend so much, but the smile on the blonde's face told her that she could talk about Kara all she wanted to. 

- 

Maybe it was because Kara loves hearing Lena talk about her. Maybe.

-

"She brought me food from Big Belly Burger one time. I swear, it's like she can read my mind sometimes." Lena would absolutely deny it if anyone dared call her out on it, but she smiles brighter than any star in the universe when she talked about the reporter. 

She can see Supergirl beaming back at her with a smile that Lena could only describe as bashful with every praise she gives Kara. She's about to question the blush that she swears is appearing on the other woman's cheeks but Supergirl beats her to the chase, asking her another question about the reporter when she realises Lena’s deep gaze. 

-

Kara decides in that moment, that she would visit Lena everyday with lunch for as long as the brunette wanted her to if it meant she would get to see her gush and smile like that.  

-

Their 'date' ends sooner than they expected it to, but when Supergirl gets called for duty, it's not something either of them can ignore. Bad guys don't take days off, and consequently, neither does Supergirl. Lena gathers from the blonde's reaction to the call that whatever threat just came up was pretty serious.  

The expression on the Supergirl's face when she turns to face Lena shows genuine guilt for having to leave. "I'm so sorry, but I have to go."

"Don't be," She smiles. "I had fun." 

It’s true. Lena only bid so much money at the fundraiser so none of her misogynistic colleagues would get anywhere near the woman in front of her. They could barely contain their sexist comments around Lena, let alone around Supergirl. Still, she didn't expect to have such a good time with her. Even if all they talked about was certain reporter. After all, the two of them only ever interacted when danger was around. 

Returning her smile with one of her own, the blonde nodded in agreement. "So did I."

They walk together towards her balcony. Lena, ready to say goodbye is interrupted when Supergirl calls out her name. 

"Oh, and Lena?"

Lena noticed the way she paused for a moment, like she wasn't sure if she should say what was on her mind. Tilting her head slightly to the side, she waited for the superhero (more confident and bubbly than she was currently) to speak up. 

"Miss Danvers- I mean, Kara. She's ah... She's a good one." She said after a beat. 

Without another word, the taller woman bids her goodbye with her signature sunny smile. She watches the blonde walk onto her balcony, flashing her one last smile before taking off to the sky, off to stop whatever or whoever was out there attempting something wicked on their city. 

Pulling her phone out from her purse, she opens up the texts shared between Kara and herself and smiles at the unseen message sent to her. 

12:05    Kara: Good luck on your date! You'll be great, just be your awesome self!

Looking up at the direction she last saw the Kryptonian, she nodded to herself. 

"She's the best."

-

15:26    Lena: Date with Supergirl was a success :)  

Kara, still in full Supergirl regalia, didn't even make any attempt to stop the grin from appearing after reading Lena's text. Because technically, she just went on a date with Lena and the whole time the only thing Lena could manage to talk about was, well, her. It really was a success.  

15: 39    Kara: I bet it was! Good to know you had fun with her.

[princess-of-france]

And multiples of 4 for Edmund - just so we've got our boys covered! :) Thank you!

Hey, angel! I’m sorry you had to wait an eternity for this one, but it was a total delight from top to bottom. Thank you for the ask. :)

[Obligatory disclaimer about how I’ll be writing about Edmund as he exists in L.E.A.R., because that’s the version of him I know best.]

Tagging our amazing Lear squad: @suits-of-woe @witty-fool @lizbennett2013 @cordelialear​ @edmundthebastard

4. Best places to kiss on their body

I think I’ll let the sisters answer this one:

GONERIL: On the mouth, obviously. Where else would you kiss someone? It’s romantic, straightforward...plus there’s the added benefit of stifling noise, so we’re less likely to be overheard by James.

REGAN: Just give him a blowjob and be done with it. Self-evident, much?

CORDELIA: Who the fuck told you I wanted to kiss that bastard?

If Edmund himself were to answer this question honestly—which, let’s face it, he never would—he’d probably say that he doesn’t care where someone kisses him, as long as that someone has long dark hair and smells like violets.

8. Bad memories/experiences

Too many to count. In 27 years of life, Edmund has endured more prejudice and spite, more snubs and microagressions, more contempt and more hostility than men three times his age. It’s not easy growing up as the illegitimate, biracial son of the richest lawyer in Manhattan and the ex-stripper mistress he keeps stowed away in an Uptown penthouse, like some princess in a tower, especially when everyone—from Edmund’s peers to his teachers to the paparazzi—are constantly comparing him to his golden older brother, Edgar. 

Counterintuitively, one of Edmund’s worst memories is the death of Marianne Gloucester when he was 14. Even though Marianne had loathed him with every fiber of her being, and never missed an opportunity to exclude, disparage, or belittle him (particularly in front of his brother), her passing crystallized the public’s hatred for Caleb’s “Family of Shame” tenfold. All over New York, people from Goneril to Edgar’s sophomore friends to strangers on the street suddenly began acting as though they’d been given divine license to treat Edmund (and Kessa, for that matter) like a war criminal. The weeks following the car accident saw him get beaten up twice, his bike was stolen, his locker was graffitied, and three different mothers spat on him as he walked home from school. Caleb barely registered any of what was happening to his youngest son, he was so wrapped up in his own guilt-laced grief. And Edgar, typically Edmund’s one defender, was even less of a comfort.

The next time Edmund would feel so completely alone in the world came six long years later, when he made the one mistake he promised his mother he never would and lost the sovereignty of his heart to someone else. Cutting himself loose from her required telling a lie that scalded his throat and fractured his soul beyond repair. Before Cordelia, Edmund had always taken pride in being too far gone for saving. Losing her made him realize that he still wanted to be.

12. Grudges and vendettas

I don’t know. The world? Society at large? The iron fist of monogamy? White privilege? Fucking “family values”? Fiddler on the Roof-level Tradition???

Edmund hates the status quo, because it always leaves him at the bottom of the wheel. But I think the only person he truly wishes he could obliterate—just wipe off the face of the earth—is the girl who can make him forget that the wheel even exists.

As Kessa likes to say, “Distraction breeds disadvantage.”

16. Dark secrets/‘skeletons in the closet’

From the age of 12, he’s been conniving with his mother to disempower his father, disinherit his brother, and usurp control of Lear’s legal team. If that doesn’t qualify as a “skeleton,” I don’t know what could.

20. What-ifs/Alternate Timelines

I mean, if we’re talking about Shakespeare’s masterpiece, there are as many alternate universes as there are productions of the play. (Shoutout to John Macmillan for leaning into Edmund’s sociopathic subtlety, all while dressed in complete military regalia.)

In L.E.A.R., I think the biggest what-if moment that happens before the action of the play is Edmund’s choice to make Cordelia hate him in order to send her running for Paris. Obviously, that only worked for four years, but it did work. It not only got her out of the cloud of his cigarette smoke, it also gave her the space and pain and clarity to become the fierce warrior queen we all know and love. If Edmund hadn’t sold her that story, she absolutely would’ve gone to Columbia and probably majored in Political Science, rather than International Relations. Anything to make her his equal. And she probably would have a very different relationship to her trust fund, because she would know how much he craved it. 

17 years old is just too young to have perspective, especially on the first real relationship of her life. I think if Edmund hadn’t done what he did—which was as much about saving her as it was about refocusing himself—then the violet sister would’ve turned into a creature much more like her sisters. Loving the bastard would’ve supplanted everything, even the moral compass to which she always clung as a child & adolescent.

If we’re talking about events inside L.E.A.R., then I think the biggest what-if to ask would be: What if Kessa didn’t kill herself? Because she does that for one reason and one reason only: to remind Edmund of his endgame. It’s her death that prompts Edmund to break with Cordelia by going after the two women he swore to her he would never seduce: her sisters. The domino effect of that decision leads to the fatal end of the play. If Kessa had lived...oh god, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. I don’t know that it would’ve been “better.” But it would’ve changed everything. The events of Shakespeare’s play might never have happened at all. *incoherent pterodactyl noises*

[wingedfabray]

make ash and leave the dust behind

Tagging: Quinn Fabray & Family, plus various UMC officials When: Saturday, May 2th Where: The UMC, and elsewhere What: Quinn gets called into Russell’s office at a(n) (im)perfect moment. Warnings: Politics?

There was a buzz in the hallways Quinn hadn’t seen since her father’s last election. The energy, however, couldn’t be more different. Where once there were glasses of champagne and jovial smiles as numbers ticked, the ebbing and flowing of conversation and the occasional clunk of Russell’s scotch landing on his desk, instead the conversation held to a low but steady murmur. It flowed around her in whispers. There was no champagne, but Russell’s hands wrapped tight around his scotch, bringing it to his lips at an almost alarming rate.

Quinn tried to catch the conversation, wrap her fingers around scattered sentences, but it always seemed to flow around her, never through her. The hallway beyond Russell’s office door was both deadly quiet and chaotic. She could things were happening in the clack of harried footsteps, but could never quite catch on what those things could be. There were too many people for a routine day at the office, but not the right ones. She’d caught glimpses of various Heads, but the assembly floors were empty. There was no one there to direct.

Quinn stood halfway through her father’s office doorway, her stomach still turning from the abrupt summons. People moved through the hallway behind her like a river, and the office in front of her was a stone-still eddy. Her father stood behind the desk downing two fingers of scotch like it was kool-aid, one hand shaking atop his desk. His hands never shook. Poised, perfect. There wasn’t a thing they couldn’t accomplish with the right words to the right audience said with confidence. Sit up straight, Quinn, smile. Never let them see you falter.

He met her eyes over the rim of his glass, then set it down with a clunk. His lips pulled up in what could be a smile, in any other context. It was something dark and oddly satisfied. He held her gaze and Quinn felt a stone settle in her stomach.

“Hi, Daddy.” She offered around it, squashing it away. “You called?”

“I did,” He finally broke eye contact, looking down and waving her in. She shut the door with a soft click behind her, the hurried clack of footsteps falling silent. Without the bright lights of the hallway, the office was dark. Her father’s face was carved in deep shadows, and suddenly he looked old. “The rest of the family should be here shortly, but I needed you first.”

The way he said it sounded almost like he was assuring himself. He said it to his hands, to where they rested on the desk next to the empty glass of scotch. He said it with his brows angled in and his lips in a firm line.

“Okay.” She said quietly into the stillness that followed. “What do you need from me?”

As though pleased, a softer grin spread across his face. And God, if warmth didn’t spread across her chest. If her shoulders didn’t come up, if her back didn’t straighten. If that wasn’t a look she’d fought for over the course of too many years. She returned the smile.

“Quinn. My Quinn.” He moved around the desk, and placed his hands on her shoulders. She almost felt tall, for a moment. But she barely reached his shoulders, and a bitter taste was creeping up the back of her throat. “You’ve been doing well in school, yeah?”

A nod, she swallowed.

“Good. You’re active in student government, you’ve followed me through two UMC campaigns, and you’ve put a lot into representing the Fabrays at NYADA. It doesn’t go unnoticed.” He dropped his hands from her shoulders, and turned to grab his suit jacket and grey flat cap from his coat rack. His voice held some bitterness when he continued, there and gone in an instant. “Your sister is making her own waves in politics, your mother has been a solid support at my side for years. I know for a fact Harper is fond of you. It’s time you really got involved, Quinn.”

He smiled as he opened the door to the near-chaotic hallway, disappearing into the current. Quinn’s feet followed of their own accord, like a string tugged at her navel, her father the fisherman spinning the reel. She was struck again by the odd silence, even while bodies moved and buzzed around her. Her father’s flat cap bobbed steadily ahead of her, a rock in the rapids. Everyone was going the opposite direction. “Daddy?”

She could see his shoulders rise and fall, but he didn’t turn around, he didn’t slow down. He angled his way through the stream, ducking and weaving before diving down a hallway less familiar to Quinn, and far less busy. She followed with little difficulty, like the crowds knew Russell Fabray had a tag-along, like they knew it was Quinn Fabray.

The new hallway was quiet, only a few others contributing to the echo of their footsteps against marble white walls. Russell moved like he knew it, his steps easy and familiar, but Quinn wasn’t sure she’d ever been there before. It was a small tributary, unassuming but important all the same. Quinn could see it in the way Russell held his chin up, in the ornate doorways and golden panels that declared the offices of Parliament, of the Bureau, and Conferences A through F. This was where important things happened, and Quinn wondered if her father knew she was still there, still following. Maybe he’d wanted her to go straight, or to fall into the stream and let it take her.

Russell stopped in front of a red wood door, six panels, the long handle gold and clean. He gripped the door jam and Quinn felt her feet stutter sideways beneath her. That stone in her stomach shifted and she wondered if she was going to be sick. It was only a moment, though. Russell grabbed the door handle and pushed it open, and sound rushed out all at once. There was the din of voices Quinn had been expecting, all at once, each trying to be louder than the last. Russell disappeared into the entrance, and Quinn followed a moment after.

“Our priority must be the Manhattan magical districts.” Said one.

“Just how many families are we honestly going to fit into bunkers? We’ve talked about this, the upper Bloodline families come first...” Says another.

We’ve talked about this? Quinn’s head spins. Something tickles at the back of her mind. Something important. But it slips away, and her stomach rolls again. The din seems to hush in the wake of it, and Quinn wonders for a moment if it isn’t just her before the voices pick up once more.

“Ah, Russell! I see you’ve brought your daughter, what of the rest of your family? The portals will be opening soon.” Quinn recognizes this man. She’s seen him in her father’s office, his bushy mustache falls over his mouth, and striking green eyes sit deeply sunken beneath heavy brows. He works in the commission, and Quinn can’t place his name to save her life.

There’s no need to save lives, is there?

“Portals to where?”

“Hush, Quinn. I brought you here to listen. To learn. To take it in, so you know exactly what to say, when you return to NYADA.” He puts a hand on her shoulder, and turns to Mustache. Is it Bertrand? Bernard? “They’ll be arriving at my office soon enough. I wanted to stop in, ensure that there’s still a plan in place.”

“Yes, we’re working on that...”

“Hold on. What am I saying, when I return to NYADA?” For the first time, Quinn finds her voice. Her father looks at her; Mustache looks at her. The former’s brow furrows, and his mouth twists into that smile, again. The dark one, the one that edges at satisfaction.

“That the UMC tried. You’ll tell them you were in this room, and we reacted. We put families first, we began evacuating as soon as we could.” Quinn stumbles sideways again, her stomach drops, and this time she knows it’s not just her. Someone talks about the security at NYADA being notified, the voices are getting faster. “You’ll say the Fae gunned for the end of the world, and the best of us put our heads together to stop it.”

It doesn’t look like anyone is stopping anything. God, it looks like everyone important has gathered in one room to say evacuate Manhattan’s magical districts, and portal away. Quinn opens a Rolodex in her mind, and ticks through the various families she knows own penthouse suites in Manhattan; families whose income never drops below seven figures. She sees clocktowers and suit-clad drivers waiting patiently beside blackout car windows.

Her father smiles, there’s a portrait of Magister-Secretariat Bob Harris on the wall behind him that’s crooked. If so many important people are in that room, where is Bob Harris? The bitter taste gets stronger; Quinn feels sick. “You’ve been doing so well, Quinn. You’re a Fabray, you’re in this room. When you get back to NYADA, when this is all said and done...I trust you’ll know what to say.”

Wasn’t the world ending soon?

Her stomach drops, there’s the slide of chairs against marble, and Quinn finally gets it. She thought it would be different. More like getting everything she’d always hoped for, and less like the ground was falling away, and there was nothing beneath her but a hole that never ended. It should taste sweet, not acrid. She was a stone in the river, and all she could feel was the current battering against her.

The portrait clattered to the floor, and as one the most important people the UMC had to offer stood and began to make their way out of the room. Various Witches clad in full Cardine regalia moved ahead, speaking quickly into Comm Crystals. The lights flickered and died, and magic circles danced light around them. Quinn barely had time to think as her father led her back to his office.

Inside, a portal danced brightly in front of the desk, and her family stood waiting. Francine looked tired, Judy looked bored. Harper met her eyes and there was a sad twist to her mouth that Quinn hadn’t seen in a long time. They held gazes across the room for a long moment before her father interrupted.

“Well, best get on with it.” Quinn closed her eyes, somewhere in the distance something was breaking, and she didn’t know if it was real or imagined. She pictured a needle driving itself into the Earth, a thread of something trailing behind it. She stepped through the portal, opened her eyes, and found herself in a hotel room in Meeru Resort.

She pivoted on her heel, but the portal was gone, Russell’s hand firm in the fabric of her cardigan.

The Maldives. Really?

[ladyleoart]

First Time For Everything

Fandom: Marvel - Avengers {MCU} AU:  Domestic Avengers - Let’s pretend they’re in a time bubble, I just want them to be HAPPY okay! Pairing: Steve/Tony {Stony} Rating: This is a solid fucking G, basically? Sex implied Warning(s): None <3 Prompt: "Stony goes through a haunted house, Steve does bobbing for apples for the first time, Tony takes Steve trick or treating" 

For: Eric @fiction-is-my-diction also viewable on ao3!

(Note: Bucky’s halloween costume is actually inspired by this post from @dorkcoffee !! Amazing artist <3)

--

Captain America is a symbol of hope. He’s an American icon, but his reach extends beyond its shores and touches the heart of every dreamer, the fiery soul of every broken and beaten outcast, the spot buried deep in anyone who looks into the face of inequality and inhumane treatment and yearns to kick and scratch bloody stripes into their skin. He’s a hero, a role model, a mythical figure in his own right.

And he’s terrified of robot babies.

Tony can’t believe it, but it’s true - Captain America has fears, and not something so grand and vague as fascism, war, or another metaphoric big bad. His fear is the goddamn animatronic baby in the haunted house crib.

“Steve, it’s not real.”

“I know that!” He groans, fingers digging into Tony’s arm so hard it hurts.

“We can’t leave until we walk past it.”

“I know that too!” His feet seem to be glued to the spot, and the baby’s scripted routine of jerking upright and wailing resets, causing Steve to jerk and yank Tony’s arm nearly out of the socket.

“Steve,” he hisses involuntarily, and the star-spangled crybaby relents slightly, allowing Tony to roll his sore shoulder and grab his wrist instead. “Alright, come on, I’ve got you.”

A soft whimper and at first Steve’s dragging his feet through the small “nursery”, but once the baby lays back down Tony is able to pull him out the draped doorway and into a hall of mirrors.

As they wander through, Steve seems to calm down; he’s almost back to normal by the time they make it to the exit - but Tony can still feel him flinch when a short little vampire pops out for one last jumpscare. The kid must be about sixteen, but Steve glares him down like he’s Red Skull all over again; Tony can’t help but slide him a twenty to make up for what are most likely stained pants as he drags his surly boyfriend across the lawn of the haunted house.

Steve is dead silent - pun intended - and Tony shoulder checks him gently. “They do say it’s the scariest haunted house on the east coast.”

“I am never doing this ever again,” Steve snaps, but the pout says he’s more embarrassed than angry.

“Hey, at least that kid has a story to tell about the time he almost made Captain America cry.”

“Oh shut up.”

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

They show up to the Halloween party fashionably late - a quick pit stop to change into their costumes turned into Tony’s suggestive “Trick or Treat” implications which turned into a quick tumble in the sheets. Eventually, Steve manages to get into his cowboy costume without Tony prying pieces of it back off, even if it means he has to yank Tony’s grim reaper hood down over his entire face.

There’s music playing and lights pulsing when they finally make it into the party, which is conveniently located three floors under their penthouse apartment in Stark Tower.

“The party’s at your house and you show up late?” Rhodey greets them with a grin, an arched brow, and two glasses of scotch, one of which he hands off to Tony while initiating their routine banter. He’s making the most of his robotic leg braces and has committed to being a cyborg for the party, complete with glowing red eye-piece.

“Oh, you know traffic always sucks.”

“You know,” Natasha interrupts, appearing from seemingly nowhere to stand directly beside them. “This is the boring business equivalent of a Dad Joke.”

Tony looks horrified. “You take that back, I am funny.”

“Maybe the first time, if I’m being generous.”

“Hey, Nat,” Steve interjects, casually sliding between them to steer her away from a sputtering Tony and laughing Rhodey. “Where are Sam and Bucky?”

“Just arrived to the party and you’re already heading to the time out corner?”

“The what?”

She grins. “That’s what I call the corner where they’re inevitably snarling and glaring at each other.”

He snorts. “Guess I better go make sure they don’t start another brawl.”

“Nice costume by the way,” she gives him a once-over. Natasha herself is wearing what can only be called a combat ballerina costume. Grey tights and steel-toed black boots, a fluffy pink tutu and bedazzled bodice, hair in a tight bun and war paint streaked on her cheeks.

He can’t help but laugh. “You too.”

She salutes him with her glass of vodka and a dangerous smirk.

He finds his two best friends right where Nat suggested - staring each other down in a little corner lounge space. The armchairs are plush and they’re sprawled in relaxed poses, but the tension in the air does nothing to suggest comfort - in fact, the chairs seem to have been yanked out of place so they can stare unblinking over their bottles of beer. Sam is decked out in what he calls “modern warlock regalia” which is really just a fancy, fitted charcoal gray suit and a velvet magenta duster, both dripping with chains and jewels. Bucky, true to form, has gone the lazy route with his costume. He’s wearing a blousey black shirt with loose sleeves that has a laced front undone to mid-torso, tucked into tight black pants and tall boots with several belts and a red sash.

“Are you a prince, or a pirate?” Steve interrupts their staredown brightly.

“Pirate,” Bucky spits, wiggling his many-ringed fingers and taking a long swig of Sam Adams’ Octoberfest without breaking eye contact.

“Alright, that’s enough,” Steve frowns sternly. “This is a party and we are here to have fun. No more pissing contest, ya hear me!”

“Aw, fine.” Sam is the first to break and cave to societal convention. “I know what to do!”

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

Bucky is scowling and Sam is grinning and Steve is wary, but Thor enthusiastically grabs them all in a big bear hug as they approach the bucket of water.

“Bobbing for apples?” Bucky’s brow is arched sharply as he squirms away from the embrace, but his relaxed stance betrays his interest.

“On Asgard we call it epli grípa,” Thor explains. “And it is a great game of sport.”

“I saw Thor carrying in the bucket,” Sam explains excitedly. “My cousins and I used to love bobbing for apples as kids.”

“Y’know,” Steve muses aloud, “I don’t think I ever did bob for apples.”

“Wait what?” Bucky frowns. “I did.”

Steve smiles wryly. “I think too many dunks in the school toilet turned me off the concept.”

Sam spins to look at him, incredulous. “You got swirlies?”

“There’s a name for those?”

“Oh yeah,” Tony grins, sliding up behind them and wrapping an arm around Steve’s waist. “I had my fair share, being the misunderstood rich genius that I was.”

Rhodey snorts. “You were a smart-ass punk and everyone could see it.”

“Same thing,” he waves a hand dismissively. “All geniuses are inherently misunderstood.”

“Now!” Thor grins. “Will the Captain be the first to…bob?”

He pauses, and Tony nudges him. “Go on then, Cowboy. Reclaim your honor.”

“Reclaim his honor?” Bucky frowns.

“Don’t you dare!” Steve snaps.

Tony smirks. “If you can catch the apple within three tries, I take the secret……to the grave.”

Natasha, passing by with Pepper and Darcy and a plate of snacks, groans. “Oh, reaper puns? Now it’s getting worse.”

“You shut up, you,” Tony points at her sternly, shaking his scythe, and she sticks out her tongue.

“Fine,” Steve declares, pulling attention back to himself. “I’ll accept your challenge.”

“When have you not accepted a challenge?” Bucky mutters.

Thor claps firmly, grinning broadly. “Yes!”

“I kinda wanna hear the story,” Sam wonders aloud, and Tony winks.

Steve is focused on the tub of water like it hold the secrets of the universe, eyebrows furrowed with concentration.

It’s like watching a blind dog try to find its water dish in the dark. He’s flailing and pecking at the water like a chicken, and Tony Is trying so hard not to pee himself laughing. In the end he goes past three attempts with no success, a fact which seems to drive him further out of spite. Steve is nearly submerging his entire head at this point, and eventually Bucky and Tony have to pull him back by the arms - with an apple clutched firmly in his teeth.

“Good job babe,” Tony smiles, pulling the apple free and taking a bite. “I’m still telling the story though.”

Steve groans, proud grin falling into a resigned expression. “I knoooow….”

So Tony gets the treat in the end.

[kw95design]

Iconic Small Duplex House Design in Bhubaneswar | KW Design Studio

Duplexes have taken the market by storm. The constant shifting preferences of people are currently enamored by the grandeur of duplex houses. Narrowing the niche, people have veered their attention toward small duplex house design in Bhubaneswar, a city that sees hundreds of concomitant establishments emerging every day. While duplexes have become quite common in Indian real estate, people often are in a dilemma when compared to two-story homes or apartment duplexes. Being one of the leading architecture and interior design firms in Bhubaneswar, we have decided to focus this blog on small duplexes and how they are different, and suitable to your needs. 

 Small duplex house design in Bhubaneswar layouts are usually constructed as single-family homes that encompass two floors with a villa vibe with flexible interior plans and subsequently less carpet space than normal duplex houses but you also get more height and additional storage space that could resemble the appearance of augmented space. Small duplexes are specifically intended for residential purposes typically having single dining and single kitchen space. There may be separate entry points for both floors and staircases. They also have large gardens, yards and garages that give you a spacious feeling. A major proportion of small duplexes designed in Bhubaneswar prefer a kitchen, hall, and bedrooms on the lower floor while the upper floor houses the master bedroom. 

Owning a duplex can be a great investment for landlords and homeowners. Duplexes can provide healthy rental returns because the owner’s family can always rent out one section of their property to tenants. Hence many people who have the means prefer Duplex houses, and they are also a great investment opportunity. It is noteworthy that the final construction cost depends on the client's specific requirements and the firm's manner of contriving the requirements. 

 Luxury homes have always been appealing to people. People own them in the form of villas, penthouses, and duplexes. Duplexes are surely luxury homes, but the surprising thing is that they are not that expensive. Most of them are available at affordable prices in any neighborhood. Small duplexes have enough space to increase the privacy of the residents. Being available at affordable rates in urban and suburban areas, duplexes will be a perfect choice to design your dream home. 

 Bringing creativity, innovation, and our client's ideas together, KW Design Studio excels in providing the best small duplex house design in Bhubaneswar. We have established ourselves as one of the most renowned interior and architecture firms offering undocked designing solutions, committed to delivering perfection from commencement to completion. Our services extend beyond just designing and constructing. We take care of your garden, lounge and leisure space, wardrobe, furniture, and whichever feature you wish to add to your enclave. We keep our customers in the loop throughout the process, prioritizing their ideas and suggestions. We are the design experts bringing you personalized interiors and architecture for your lifestyle to suit every budget without compromising on quality. 

We hope this blog has provided some insights regarding small duplex house design in Bhubaneswar. If you wish to design a small duplex, KW Design Studio is your best partner. You can get great beauty and luxury together to make your small duplex regalia of your lifestyle, and reflect your personality judiciously. Contact us today to get affordable small suplex designs!  You can visit our website www.kwdesign.in/

to see our designs and projects as well hear from some of our satisfied customers. You can call us on +919966253166, +919983874554 or mail us at shanika.kwdesignstudio@gmail.com for enquiries and appointments. Follow us on our social media channels to learn about our projects. Stay tuned to our blog page for more postings and updates!