#Sonia is not up by 7 AM without a good reason to be. She is down at the kitchen in a bathrobe by 9 to eat some breakfast.

[deva-arts]

☆ Nathaniel Wilson ☆

I Really Like Nathaniel because the guy embodies Hope and Positivity without forcing it down the gullets of everyone around him.

He looks like he'd be a pleasant individual to actually be around at 7 am. Even before his coffee. [ Sera should be too, she doesn't seem like an unbearable person to be around in La Matinée ( the Morning ) . But still, she is alot grumpier than her other half. ]

With that said. Insert Happy music here. Nujabes or Smth.

Submitted by @mettamorphoses!

Love the way you drew Nate here! such a clean style and serious face :> He's my favorite little quadfocal guy... friendly, polite, and a good conversationalist! You're absolutely right, he's one of the easiest people to get along with. It's almost like he knows exactly what to say to people.

Sera isn't grumpy so much as she is disinterested and dismissive. She heads to work without bothering to make small talk besides a basic "Hello." if she passes you by. Not the worst outcome, really, if silence doesn't bother you.

[imjeralee]

Comfort in Despair: Chapter 7 - Galar’s National Treasure

Leon x F!Reader

Disclaimer: Do not own Pokemon

Summary:

Galar is rich in folklore and tales of the supernatural.

As a Pokemon Researcher who specialises in ghost types, this is a great opportunity for you to investigate and learn more about the paranormal.

Along the way, you meet Leon (in the most awkward way possible) who becomes embroiled in your adventures.

^ Basically this story is about ghosts :/

Rating: General/Teen

Galar’s National Treasure

(aka 'Like A Normal Person')

...

...

[Snippet about Leon from Galar Daily Times: Selfless, humble and kind, Leon has swiftly become Galar’s National Treasure in a short period of time.

He has captured the hearts of all the women of Galar. As one fan states, "It's impossible to look at him without smiling."]

...

...

The ring of your alarm forces you to wake up and you are in a questionable mood following yesterday’s events.

It’s the afternoon and usually you wouldn’t wake up so early but you have to try and visit Leon before the end of the day and so you push yourself off the mattress, groaning loudly.

You perform several mild stretches in bed before you slide off to stand. You’ve woken at an unnatural hour. You are unused to this. You like light but hell, this light is blinding…you can’t help but hiss with distaste under your breath.

And downstairs, you can hear the muffled sounds of the TV.

You get dressed, head to the bathroom to wash up, remembering that you are also supposed to return Leon's snapback if possible.

Visiting hours officially ends at seven pm which you think is generous so when you return to the room, you pack your bag with his hat and some other essentials should you decide to pull another all-nighter in the Wild Area. You highly doubt you will considering how exhausted you are and you head downstairs with bag in tow where you see Magnolia, Sonia, Cutiefly and Polteageist in the lounge watching the news.

Once they hear you come down, they rise from their seats and embrace you. As usual, Cutiefly dives for your hair and Poltea wraps his arms around your head.

“Are you alright, dear?” Magnolia asks, glancing up at you from behind her half-moon specs as your pokemon greet you affectionately.

“Yeah,” you murmur, rubbing your arm, before you notice a cheque on the table. Lifting it up, you see it’s addressed to you and it’s a large amount. Your eyes grow wide and you croak out, “What’s this??”

“Inspector Graves came by this morning and told us everything. That’s your reward for finding the missing gym challengers,” she murmurs as she lets go of you.

“I don’t need this. I didn’t do it for the money.”

“Oooh, can I have it then? I can go shopping with Nessa!” Sonia exclaims as she reaches for it, but Magnolia whacks her hand with the tip of her cane none too gently. “Ow…Gran!”

“Sonia.” Magnolia says sternly, shaking her head. Sonia pouts and cradles her hand to herself. Turning to you, Magnolia says, “I don’t want you to work on such dangerous cases from now on. Just leave it to the police, that’s why they’re here. Your mother wouldn’t want any harm to befall you and I promised to her I would keep you safe.”

“…Understood.”

“Good.”

Sonia glances between you and Magnolia and decides to return to sit on the couch silently, hugging Yamper to herself.

“Anyway, did you sleep well, dear?”

“Yes, professor.”

“We’re having roast today, I do hope you will join us.”

“Yeah, I will,” you reply, and Magnolia pats you on the shoulder; you will be joining them for lunch on this occasion, which is very rare.

She shoves her feet into her slippers and slowly leaves the lounge whilst you join Sonia on the couch with Yamper squashed between you and he scrambles into your lap.

“Gran can be scary, huh?” she whispers.

“She’s just worried,” you mutter, "How's your hand?"

"My hand is fine. How's your hand?"

"Still sore," you murmur as you glance at your bandaged palm, before you look at the cheque again. The money would be good to stock up on some supplies... “Sonnie, if you need anything, just let me know.”

“Hmm, well, I did see a very nice dress in the boutique the other day,” she mutters, “It’s okay, I don’t need it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright."

You avert your attention to the news, using your finger to stroke Cutiefly’s fuzzy body whilst Polteageist pours some tea for you into a cup he fished from the kitchen for you. Chairman Rose is on screen and standing in front of many microphones shoved in his face, providing a speech on the Giant’s Seat incidence. Despite the pressure he should be facing, he seems undisturbed.

“I am deeply saddened by the news and my heart goes out to the families and loved ones of the deceased,” he says, “However, the gym challenge will not be cancelled this year. The Pokemon League has roots dating back to the sixth century and is a beloved tradition of Galar….”

Rose goes mute following those words but his mouth keeps moving, indicating that he is still speaking and the news had decided to blot out his voice for some reason.

The clip abruptly ends and returns to the news reporter who briefly talks about the dead gym challengers being found in an unregistered pokemon den in the mountains of the Giant’s Seat then it shows their mourning family members and friends. Finally, an update on Leon’s status is provided; he is in stable condition and will make a full recovery.

The news then switches to a small group outside Rose Tower carrying posters and picket signs, protesting against the gym challenge. The group consists of middle-aged women and men. Mothers and fathers, you assume.

“We have Evan at the scene right now. Evan, how does it look?” says the reporter, and the screen changes to a skinny tall man holding a microphone in hand standing in front of the crowd.

“Thank you, Sarah, I’m standing in front of Rose Tower and as you can see behind me, there is a massive crowd of frustrated parents who want their voices to be heard. After Rose issued his statement earlier this morning…”

As the reporter drones on and on, Sonia sighs. “This is awful, I’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t think this has ever happened in the history of the Pokemon League.”

The reporter is now walking towards the crowd with the camera focused on him. He goes over to a random protestor and inches the microphone towards her, asking her to share some words.

The woman is livid. “Yeah, I got some words for you, Chairman Rose! You won’t call off the gym challenge? Then I’m gonna pull my son out! You’re not gonna get a single pokedollar from me!” bellows the woman. She is holding a sign that says ‘No to the Gym Challenge!’ and ‘Boycott Macro Cosmos!’. “We want safer measures introduced into the Wild Area! I’m not going to send my child to his death!”

“Oh dear,” Sonia adds as Yamper buries himself into her arms, “I wonder what this means for the future of the gym challenge.”

“Rose is pretty clear that the gym challenge isn’t going to be called off,” you reply. “It’s tradition.”

“Poor Leon, I hope he’s okay,” Sonia replies, hugging Yamper to herself tightly, “I mean, he is the Champion of Galar. He endorses the League more than anyone else.”

This is really negative press for the League, the worst, in fact. Cripes, you feel responsible for this. You hope Leon doesn’t lose his job or lose popularity or anything because of this incident…

“Sonnie, I’m going to visit him later, do you want to come with me?”

“No, it’s fine, I already went this morning. He was asking about you. He was asking me so many questions," she turns to you with a wide smile, "...Is there something going on between you two? He seemed awfully interested in you all of a sudden."

"No," you're quick to quip and Poltea pulls on your wrist, gesturing you to drink the tea he’s made for you which is growing cold.

It's a good way to get out of this conversation but Sonia doesn't look satisfied with your answer. Nevertheless, you lift the cup and down a sip. It’s perfect as expected and you smile at Polteageist, patting him on the head. He lets out a warble of affection and spins around in his teapot, before he lifts the teapot lid off the top of his head and begins dancing in mid-air with it. You and Sonia giggle at his actions.

You had once studied Polteageist, but nothing entirely fruitful really came from the investigation.

He was just...haunted tea.

The news moves onto an unenlightened article and you change to a channel showing a documentary about conspiracy theorists who believe the pokearth is actually flat until Magnolia calls you both for lunch and you leave the lounge to sit at the dining table to enjoy the meal. The three of you chat amiably though you do find your thoughts drifting to Leon often.

Once you finish, you help Magnolia wash up and Sonia scurries upstairs to the bedroom.

You check Rotom for any messages you received when you were asleep; Jace has messaged asking if you were alright and you reply, telling him you are fine and that you will return his belongings to him.

Graves has left a voicemail for you, informing you that he knows you have Froslass and you are to hand her over to the authorities when you have the time. You can feel your head hurting and you look at some other messages you have received. Some of the mothers of the dead gym challengers have also attempted to call and have left messages, thanking you for your work.

Next, you see that you have received a message from Leon and your heart skips a beat when you open it. It says:

Leon: Hi, this is Leon.

“Yes, I know it’s you, Leon,” you say aloud before you can stop yourself. You wonder if he’s going to say this each time he sends a message to you. There are also no smiley faces, no emojis in his messages. This must be Leon’s way of messaging. He must be keeping it professional at all times though you can’t help but think that he texts like an old man.

Leon: Will you be visiting me today?

You inhale the gasp that’s threatening to escape and type a reply.

You: hi leon! i was going to head over right now if ur free!

Wait a second, you sound too enthusiastic. Deciding to keep it neutral, you delete the exclamation marks and tidy the message up.

You: Hi Leon, I was going to head over right now if you are free.

You hit send and you’re stunned to see Leon is typing a reply, the top of the screen indicating that he has immediately gone online the moment you fired the response. However, Leon suddenly stops typing and then a few seconds later, your phone screen changes, indicating Leon is calling you.

"Holy Combee," you utter as you swipe the screen and put it to your ear, "...H-hello?"

"Hi, this is Leon."

"Hi, what's up?"

"Not much, I....I wanted to hear your voice."

"Oh," your face goes ten shades of red and you gulp. "H-how are you feeling?"

"I'm much better now. And yeah, I'm free."

"Great, I'll pop over now."

"Okay," he replies. You can hear him smiling.

"Bye, see you soon."

"Bye."

You both hang up. That was rather tense. Nevertheless, you will go visit Leon right now.

As you grab your bag, your phone goes off once more and you thought it’d be Leon again but it’s your haunted house client. He’s asking if he can speak to you earlier as he’s currently in Wedgehurst and you sigh. You haven’t said no to a client before and therefore you ask if he can come now despite the short notice and he says indeed he can.

You message Leon, telling him you will be at the hospital in an hour and he messages back with a simple ‘okay’.

“Oh my Arceus, are you and Leon text buddies?”

At the sound of Sonia’s voice, you emit a squeak of surprise and turn round to see Sonia standing behind you with a wide smile on her face. “EEP!! Sonnie! What are you doing???”

She giggles, leaning away from your shoulder and twirling her hair in her hands.

“Were you looking over my shoulder the entire time???”

“No. Well, yes, kind of. Sorry, I couldn’t resist! There is something going on between you!"

"No, there isn't..." you wail and as she giggles, your cheeks grow pink and you march away from her. “A-anyway, I don't have time for this; my client’s arriving in five minutes. I need to get ready.”

You hurry up the stairs to get dressed and your client arrives in a few minutes; you escort him to the conservatory where you recount your experience of the haunted house which seems to be such a long time ago, and he seems satisfied with the result.

He’s already paid you the initial consulting fee which was three thousand pokedollars and then you charge an hourly rate of five thousand dollars due to the nature of your work. You investigated for roughly five hours so he owes you a total of twenty five thousand.

When you see him pulling out his beaten-up wallet from his equally beaten-up bag and you see there's a Popplio along with faded, discoloured initials stitched on the cheap leather, you realise you're basically charging a thirteen year old kid a rather extortionate amount, the same price as ten Max Potions.

And so you feel bad for taking all his money when you remember that he had told you no-one believed him and that none of his friends or parents had pooled in for funds to ask for your help so your empathetic nature kicks in and you give him a discount of fifteen per cent.

The look on his face makes you smile as he leaves in high spirits to return to his gym challenger journey.

You also give him a good luck charm and tell him to stay away from abandoned houses from now on. He agrees and waves and you wave back.

It’s time to visit Leon so you leave the house shortly and take a Corviknight taxi to the hospital. During the ride, you read more signs on how to identify if a guy likes you ranging from playful teasing, talking about a future with you, opening up, putting his phone away when you’re around and then there are some that sound bizarre such as his pupils dilating in your presence.

You close the page, unsure what to think about these tips and you’re certainly trying not to overthink yet as the hospital looms into view, you find yourself growing rather anxious.

You enter the hospital and it’s a lot different during daylight. All the Lampents are gone and you hurriedly register your name down on the visitor’s sign-in book before the nurse allows you passage into the ward. You thank her and rush down the corridor, arriving at Leon’s designated room.

You take a deep breath as you stop at his door, adjust your clothing and ensure your hair is neat and tidy, then you nervously rap your knuckles over the surface and hear a jovial “Come in!” from inside.

At the invitation, you push down on the handle, open the door and peer inside.

You wonder if he would look injured or gravely ill but you’re pleasantly surprised to see Leon sitting in bed with the duvet pulled over his lap, grinning widely from ear to ear; he’s dressed in a white hospital gown with his long purple hair cascading freely down his shoulders and over his back and if it’s true, then he’s naked underneath.

…But that’s not something you should concern yourself with so you quickly brush away those thoughts and make your way towards him.

He’s holding a pink box of chocolates in hands and he’s surrounded by a bunch of ‘Get Well Soon’ cards, fruit baskets, metallic balloons and all sorts of other outlandish gifts. Interesting, so this must be how it feels to be popular and well-liked. You gape at the huge amount of boxes and once Leon’s gaze lands on your form, his eyes widen briefly before he hastily puts the box down, smooths his large hand over his untamed hair and turns to you with a somewhat awkward grin.

“H-hey, you’re here.”

He sounds nervous.

“Hi Leon,” you say as you enter the room, trying not to step on anything, “How are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

He nods rigorously to convince you.

You’re not convinced though and as you walk closer to him, it’s then you notice his cheeks are a little pink. You don’t say anything to his demeanor and instead, glance at the stacks of gifts in his room.

“Oh, uh…these are presents from fans,” he replies, and Charizard, who is sitting in one corner of the room immediately rises from his spot and bounds towards you, huffing excitedly.

"Hey Charizard," you greet him happily as the flame Pokemon lunges at you and begins nuzzling your palms and rubbing his snout over you. Charizard buries his head underneath your hand and you have no choice but to pet him, then he begins licking your cheek and you start laughing whilst Leon stares with widened eyes. You've heard of puppy kisses so you guess this is Charizard kisses.

"I heard someone like belly rubs," you say when he stops licking you, before you begin raking your fingers over his yellow tummy. Charizard thumps his tail over the ground energetically and folds his wings properly before he sprawls over the floor, growling loudly as you continue rubbing his stomach. Looking up at Leon, you say, "He's like a big pupper, isn't he?"

"Yeah..." Leon replies, flashing you a smile.

Charizard rolls back upright and you give him an affectionate pat on his head before he nudges you closer to Leon. "Alright, alright..." you mutter as you're finally nudged all the way in front of the Champion and Charizard lets out a wheezy snort of content and returns to the corner, settling down to rest.

You give Leon an awkward smile and as you look around, you realise there are no chairs in the room and you’re not sure why but Leon says, “You can sit on the bed with me.”

“Okay."

With Leon’s permission, you carefully climb onto the bed and sit cross-legged in front of him over the blanket.

"You should've seen him, Leon. He was really worried for you but he was so brave," you say, glancing at Charizard as he curls up on his paws with his tail in the air.

Leon nods, grinning. "He did great."

"He did."

You both turn to each other with a smile and Charizard emits a huffing snort of glee, looking at you two with a toothy, all-knowing grin. Throwing your glance down, you see that Leon has a box of chocolates in hands and he lifts it up to you.

“Try one,” Leon says, and you choose a cute little heart-shaped chocolate before promptly popping it into your mouth. He watches you carefully as you eat. “What do you think?”

“It’s good.”

He grabs a chocolate and munches on it before he beams. Overall, you’re relieved to see that he is well despite the incident. “Have another one.”

With a nod, you pluck another chocolate out of the box and he does the same. You both eat the chocolates at the same time, looking at each other as you chew before you exchange a smile. Leon is sharing food with you…it’s identical to when you were camping with him…

“Let’s see here,” Leon gulps down the confectionary and scoops up the card that came with it, “This is a homemade recipe by… Leigh from Circhester. Thank you, Leigh from Circhester.”

Your grin widens as Leon puts the box down and turns to a pile of unopened letters in another corner. Love letters, most likely.

“I don’t think I have enough time to go through these,” he muses, “There’s so many.”

“Are these from your fangirls?”

His cheeks flush brilliantly. “Y-yeah, I guess….which is…which is really nice of them,” he remarks, stuttering slightly as he throws his gaze to the side.

You’re quite entertained if the reason he is so nervous could possibly be you but you’re not sure. You cannot see his eyes dilating that’s for sure, but he seems to be unable to look at you in the eye.

“Well, here’s my gift,” you say, before you pull out a small wooden carving with a red string looped around it from your bag. It has a weird shape, a bit on the oblong side and it’s carved with a grotesque-looking face but when you give it to Leon, he is fascinated as he balances it in his hands. “I made it myself. It will protect you from being spirited away. I also brought your hat,” you add as you open your bag and pull out his snapback.

“Great, I was wondering where it went,” he thanks you again as he accepts it from you and settles it neatly over the bedside table, “Thanks for the gift and thanks for coming to visit me. I was really hoping for you to come.”

“Of course. I had to see if you were okay.”

His face visibly flushes again and he clears his throat, finally swerving his glance up to you. He holds the gaze and you’re both staring at each other. Your heart thumps harder the moment your eyes meet.

You look away to pick up one of his letters; it’s pink and covered in love hearts. “Not subtle at all," you utter and you can feel his gaze on you but you are too nervous to look up.

“You can read one if you like,” he says.

“Nah, that would be an invasion of privacy,” you reply and you put it back down. You force yourself to look up and indeed, he’s been staring at you the entire time. Your cheeks feel hot now, the heat spreading uncontrollably to your ears and the back of your neck. “I-I guess you’re, uh…used to receiving so many gifts?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make it easier for me to accept them…It’s a bit too much sometimes. If I could send some back, I would.”

“Ohh, don’t be so modest. Everyone loves you, Leon. You’re Galar’s National Treasure.”

Your compliment takes him off guard and his cheeks grow pink again.

An awkward silence settles between you two until he asks, “Do you want to go through these together?”

You want this tense silence to go away so you nod and he picks up the next gift which is wrapped in pink wrapping paper with a matching ribbon and bow.

He brings the box to his ears and shakes it and there is no sound but when he opens it, he sees it is a set consisting of a mini pink hairbrush, a fake pink tiara, giant plastic pink hairclip, fake pink scissors and finally, a matching princess handheld mirror with fake jewels that is also a bright shade of neon pink.

“Ah….interesting,” he mutters, whilst you giggle in response. He pulls the brush out, revealing a little piece of folded paper underneath. Picking it up, he unfolds it and there are messy words written all over the place in pink crayon and he reads aloud, “To Leon, from Princess Natasha, aged five. I brush my dolls with these so you should brush your hair with them too. They’re very special to me so I want you to have them. PS. Please be my Prince.”

“That is so cute!” you can’t help but squeal and he chuckles as he places the box down. “May I?”

“Go ahead.”

You scoop the tiny brush, sit up properly in your spot and lean forwards. It could be the trick of the eye but you swear you see him stiffening slightly when he realizes you’re inching closer to him.

With brush in hand, Leon blinks blankly as you rake the bristles over his thick bangs until they become tame and Leon stares at you wide-eyed as you swipe the brush over the frames of his face and over the back of his head and his face flushes in response.

You finish the look by grabbing the hideous pink clip and brush some of his thick purple hair to the left and slide the clip over, pressing down until you hear it snapping shut. To your utmost surprise, it stays on.

Next, you grab the scissors and pretend you’re trimming his beard, humming cheerfully under your breath, but it does look like he has more stubble than usual. When you realise Leon is staring at you intently, you quickly put the toys back into the box and clear your throat. You got carried away…

You quickly pick up the mirror and show him his reflection. “There. Don’t you look ravishing?”

Leon stares at himself before he chuckles and you join in, laughing lightly until he removes the clip, looks at your direction and as he reaches forwards, you stiffen as he gently brushes fingers against the side of your cheek and over the side of your head, pushing a few strands and tucking them behind your ear.

Your cheeks grow warm as he clips the plastic atrocity in place and grins. “I think it suits you better.”

Your heart beats like crazy but you force yourself to laugh in response though it sounds like you were doing an impression of a honking Ducklett.

“About last night….thanks for saving me,” Leon says, and he’s staring rather intensely. "Chairman Rose knows what you did and he wants to thank you."

“I-it was nothing, but uh…did you watch the news?”

“Yeah, and I’ve to issue a statement in a few days but…” Leon leaves his sentence trailing, sighs and his gaze softens as he gives you a thin smile, “The Wild Area and the League will introduce safer measures. It’s a good thing and it will be a difficult time ahead, but I know we’ll be able to pull through. Even though Chairman Rose is having a tough time right now….and what happened to those gym challengers…As Champion of Galar, I can’t help but feel responsible for this but I want people to continue to believe in the gym challenge and be the best trainer they can possibly be.”

“Leon, it’s not your fault at all.”

He throws his glance to the side however, "I'm sorry, I didn’t mean to go on like that."

"It's okay. Remember I told you before? Whatever it is you're feeling, feel free to get it out of your system. I'm all ears."

Leon pauses, blinking at you in surprise before he utters, "Thanks."

"No problem."

"Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about last night?"

"Not at all, ask away."

"How exactly did you find me?"

"Well, I was doing my research on the case with the missing people from the Giant's Seat."

"I remember you telling me that. We deliberately stayed away."

You don't say anything to that because he still ended up there anyway and so you continue, "I was at the Research lab, looking at all the missing folk and trying to suss out a pattern...and figured it was a Froslass. Went home with Jace to talk about-"

"Who's Jace?"

"Just a friend," you reply and Leon suddenly has a rather undecipherable expression on his face, "Anyway, suddenly Charizard arrived outside my house in Wedgehurst and I got on his back and he flew all the way to the Giant's Seat where he lost you. I used a...um...well," you show him your bandaged palm, "I used an advanced divination technique to find you. You can ask Charizard for further details if you want."

Leon nods, a little perplexed. He's listening though, completely hooked in.

"I followed the trail all the way to this mountain, to this summit, and dropped into a Pokemon den and..." you leave your sentence trailing, inhaling a shaky breath, "....They were there. All the missing people. And then I found you."

A brief silence spawns following your response.

"If you're wondering what the stone is, it's an Odd Keystone."

He nods, hand under his chin, "I read about those."

"My mentor let me borrow it."

"Ezra, right?"

You look at him surprise. "You remembered...?"

"Yeah." Leon replies with a grin.

Your cheeks feel warm. "W-well...Ezra and I have collected about eighty or something spirits over the past few years, so we're almost there," you're wondering why you are sharing so much with Leon but he is such a great listener and he genuinely looks interested. "He taught me how to use it to trap evil spirits. In fact, he's taught me pretty much everything I know."

After your long revelation, Leon offers you a smile when you exhale loudly, seemingly exhausted. "Thanks for telling me."

"Of course. You have a right to know."

"Do you want to go for a walk? I haven’t left the room since lunchtime. It would be nice to get some fresh air.”

“Sure,” you remove the pink clip and you’re quick to stand, immediately knocking over several giftboxes with your leg and causing a domino effect as they topple against other boxes one by one and they collapse over the floor loudly. You turn round to Leon with a wince. “Sorry.”

He laughs as he hops off the bed and grabs his white hoodie from his bedside table which he pulls over his head, slotting his arms in. “It’s alright. Let’s go.” Turning to Charizard, he says, "You wanna come along, bud?"

Charizard shakes his head, possibly because he knows he'll be a third wheel, so you and Leon head to the door and he opens it for you; still a gentleman, no matter what. You thank him, leave the room and he closes the door behind him.

“Let’s go this way.” Leon says, guiding you towards a corridor to your left.

He walks close beside you and your shoulders occasionally nudge together. The corridor’s wide enough and there’s no-one in your way but you both seem to be stepping in line together, gravitating towards each other and staying close.

Eventually, the corridor leads you to a large area where you see a number of patients sitting at tables playing chess, reading the newspaper, watching TV or walking around aimlessly.

As you walk with Leon, everyone greets him and waves.

You can only watch in silence as Leon greets them politely. Even though he’s only been in the hospital for a few hours or so he’s already made friends with everyone…. It’s a skill you wish you had for people usually look at you with disdain the moment they lay eyes on you and avoid you like the plague.

You pass an old man in a nightrobe, seated in a comfy-looking armchair who pipes up, “Hello Leon, is this your girlfriend?”

The two of you abruptly stop in your tracks, your jaws hanging open with shock. Leon’s face grows bright red before he splutters, “N-no, we’re just friends!”

And you don’t know what’s worse: how quick Leon had responded to the assumption or his words. Maybe both.

The old man merely chuckles and winks at him. “That’s what they always say at the beginning! I’ll be keeping my eye on you two, mark my words!”

You cringe like crazy, leaving the ward as quickly as possible and Leon heads towards a door that seems to lead to the exit. It’s a short trip but Leon does not make eye contact with you nor does he say anything until you have left the ward.

Leon has brought you to a large yard with a fountain in the middle. There’s also nobody here.

“Oh wow, this is nice,” you mutter, before you rush over to the fountain and peer over the ledge, gazing into the pool. A few Goldeen and Seaking are inside, swimming around gracefully.

Yep,” he agrees as he joins your side, grinning.

You see some Swanna swimming in a small group so you pull out some snacks from your bag and break it into smaller chunks, throwing tidbits into the water; the pokemon gather round the morsels and gobble them greedily.

Leon watches as you feed the pokemon happily before he rubs the back of his neck. “Hey, uh…I have something to tell you.”

“Yes?”

"Would you like to have dinner?"

Your eyes grow wide as you stop feeding the Swanna to stand up, facing him with your jaw hanging open. "D-dinner?!"

"Yeah. My family would like to meet you.”

"Oh. Right. Gotcha. Family with the dinner. Uh, I mean dinner with family."

"My mum wants to thank you for saving me and Hop really wants to meet you too,” Leon says whilst you mentally kick yourself, “I’m getting discharged first thing in the morning and Chairman Rose has given me a few days off so…it would be great if you could come over to my house for a barbecue tomorrow. It would mean a lot to them… and it would mean a lot to me as well.”

You’re stunned; his words have stolen your breath away but you manage to choke out a meek, “Really?”

“Yeah,” he replies, and as you gawk in silence, Leon’s cheeks grow pink and he slides his gaze to the side. “T-that is, if you’re free.”

You snap yourself out of your stupor and nod, “O-of course! Sure, I’d love to. That sounds great. Thank you, Leon.”

"Have you been to a barbecue before?"

"No."

"You're gonna love it," he replies with a wide smile on his face, causing your heart to thump harder than usual. “I’ll give you the time and send you my address later…I live in Postwick and my house is the biggest one on the right, you can’t miss it.”

You can’t help but giggle and soon it grows silent as you stand together, staring at each other again.

“...You’re really…different," Leon suddenly says.

"Different?"

"Yeah."

"Uh, you mean that in a good way or a bad way?"

"Good way, of course!" he exclaims quickly to shake off any misunderstandings, "I find it relaxing to be around with you."

"Oh, well, I've been told I have an old soul," you reply with a hum under your breath, and you wonder if that had anything to do with what he just said.

"And I saw what you did back in the cave with Froslass," Leon continues, "You’re an amazing person….it’s people like you who really help Galar during times of need. I want everyone to know that you saved my life if…if that’s okay with you.”

Your face grows hot at his compliment. “That’s very kind of you, Leon, but you don’t need to do anything for me and I’m not looking for any kind of reward. I-it’s my work, you know? Well, maybe not just work but…” As you struggle to explain yourself, fighting for words, he chuckles. You add, “Remember I told you that my line of work revolves around dead things?”

“Yeah.”

"People around me get hurt, Leon. And I don’t want you or anyone to get hurt because of me. People don’t understand.”

“I understand.”

“I know I have my blog but what I’m trying to say is – oh,” you pause at once, and he chuckles.

Following that, a nurse steps inside the yard and says, “Excuse me, Mr Champion? You have another visitor.”

You both throw your glance to the nurse as Leon acknowledges her and she departs. "I'll take my leave," you say, a tad reluctantly.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

“Dinner tomorrow?”

You nod.

“Any allergies we should be aware of?”

You shake your head.

He plants his palm on your shoulder, giving you a firm squeeze. “Great! See you then. I’m looking forward to it,” he says, before he gives you a wink and your stomach does a backflip.

When you leave the hospital, you pass the gym leader of Hammerlocke in the corridor and he's with a rather timid-looking girl whom you believe is his girlfriend. You throw a quick glance at them but they don't seem to notice you, and you look at their hands which are entwined tightly together. You hear the girl talking about something or someone called 'Driffie'.

They must be visiting Leon. He knows so many people compared to you. Off the top of your head, you can only count Jace, Graves and Ezra. That's about it. You want some boy advice, but it's not a good idea to ask Graves or Ezra, so you might ask Jace later.

You’re confused and inwardly hating yourself for once again, mistaking Leon’s friendliness for perhaps flirting and hints of romantic feelings, the usual. It dawns to you that you had spent the entire time with Leon as a blushing mess and also, your heart wouldn’t stop thrashing against your ribs.

And when you arrive home, Magnolia’s asleep and Sonia’s lounging upstairs in the bedroom. You immediately rush up the stairs, opening the door wide.

“Sonnie,” you exclaim, and she looks up from her magazine, “I have been invited to a dinner tomorrow. Like a normal person.”

”That’s fantastic! With who?”

“Leon and his family. It's gonna be a barbecue. They want to thank me for finding him,” you reply, and Sonia’s eyes widens abruptly before she sits up. “Wait, no, why am I doing this? I...I shouldn't be associated with Leon. He might get hurt because of me. Oh wait, it's sort of happened already..."

"No, no! You should go. Come on, don't be like that..."

"O-okay, but I’m really nervous about this. Help me.”

“What do you mean? You’ll be fine! Just be yourself.”

“Be myself?” you utter, before your eyes bulge, “That’s the worst possible me I could be.”

Sonia shakes her head wildly. “Don’t be silly! Arceus, this is exciting!” she exclaims as she slides out of bed. “Do you have anything to wear?”

“No…but I do want to wear something nice though.”

She giggles. “Leave it to me! This is like those movies where the girl gets a makeover!”

“You don’t say,” is your reply as she hurries over to you, circling you and checking your hair and nails and your complexion. You add, “I need your help, Sonnie, but I want this to be as painless as possible.”

“Of course,” she utters as she continues to inspect you. Placing a hand under her chin, she snaps her fingers and smiles widely. “I know what to do!”

...

[airlock]

airlock grades the Punchable archetype

so far, a majority of the Fire Emblem villains I’ve covered in this series are the sort who are meant to be liked, forgiven, sympathized with... these here are not those ones. these are the ones whose singular purpose in the narrative is to piss you the hell off. so, which of them played that role to excellence?

(do note: under cut are spoilers for… everything, and also a significant amount of me criticizing or blamming characters that you might- okay, yeah, no, you probably don’t like anybody on this list, but you may still strongly disagree with my opinions of them. you’ve been warned! ha, no way these fools would set about reading the whole post now... what!? impossible!)

a foreword

so, to be very specific, I’m not rating every flatly irritating miniboss here; the definitive aspect here is that the character has to be a recurring one, whose extended screentime never quite ends up giving them a chance to be something other than vile. but more important than the hair-splitting here is giving some consideration to how exactly I’ll be doing the rating; after all, I’m not supposed to like any of these people, but there’s still better and worse ways to be despicable as a character.

I’m running pretty much on two central critteria: is this character entertaining, and is that character satisfying to take down. it’s more important to hit one than to hit both; a character who hits neither is significantly more likely to be a pure waste of bile, however.

without further ado, let’s start gritting those teeth!

fuck this guy

(9/10)

directly enabling the single most badass scene in all of Book II obviously lands you on the upper echelons of this here character type. but that’s just the effect; we should peer into the cause of what makes him work so well!

of the critteria I mentioned, Lang goes for the latter: he’s not only quite satisfying to defeat, it’s also great anytime someone finally talks back to him and puts him in his place. that’s because he’s not the sort of character for whom this sort of thing is a given. a lot of the ones we’ll see ahead of him are incompetent toadies on top of being amoral, but not this guy; he knows exactly what he’s doing, relying on the backing of the most powerful nation in the continent to plunder, raze, and oppress to his heart’s content. the business of doing something about this dipshit gets severely delayed by the dire consequences of crossing him -- until Marth finally decides that enough is enough.

and THEN Jagen tells him to meet him 9 PM at the Grustian denny’s parking lot for an old man brawl-

fuck this chin

(3/10)

I struggle to understand ol’ Kaga’s obssession with jealousy as a villainous character motivation, I really do. it’s one entirely realistic thing to envy someone for having riches, fame, status, influence, the attention of one’s crush, or other such things that are more or less objective and palpable. it’s also entirely a thing to have an inferiority complex and fear or spite people one perceives as being more talented, better looking, stronger, smarter than oneself. but the way these characters are written tends to come across like they’re furious because they’re underwritten gonk and not everyone else is.

... which hey, would be a pretty upsetting thing if it happened to a real person, but I don’t think meta-commentary is the point here, is it? I sincerely hope it isn’t...

fuck this lady

(7/10)

the second leg of Genealogy of the Holy War finds you facing the same sorts of enemies most of the time: half of them are Satanists, and the other half are unfortunate innocents trapped in the crossfire of courtly intrigue. it’s exactly because of this that the arc desperately needs a villain like Hilda.

Hilda is just someone who doesn’t particularly mind if the most effective path up the social ladder involves destroying her relatives, daughter included, or capturing children and forcing them into murder tournaments. how is the imperial machinery of tragedy and death supposed to run without someone like her cranking a couple of the levers? er, I mean, you don’t really crank levers unless you’re doing something weird, but... okay, moving on

amidst all of the battles you might struggle to feel were worth fighting, Hilda here serves as a reminder, as a face of every reason why the Empire is the enemy and must be defeated.

and yes, making Tinny kill her rocks

fuck this guy IN AMERICA

(2.5/10)

not too long ago I would have dropped him a straight zero, but I’ve recently been reading through the Project Exile text dumps for a new Thracia 776 fanslation and what can I say, they put good work into making him tick properly and I essentially have no choice but to keep that sort of thing in consideration when making the ratings, being that all of the other villains are also characters I only have indirect contact with through a translation that may have improved or worsened things.

but the good work is no miracle -- although given much-needed entertainment value, this guy is still who he is: practically a standard-fare asshole miniboss who ends up getting three whole chapters to chirp into. and to make matters worse, you only actually get the payoff to him in one of two possible routes!

I am strong, I am clever, I am handsome, and most importantly, fuck me

(4/10)

I can’t possibly deny that his antics are some of the most hilarious on this list; the ridiculous speeches, the facial expressions from the manga, the fact that he gets demoted on screen... and I mean, they got Kaiji Tang to put voice to his high drama on Heroes, on top of it all!

alas, it just really spoils the fun to a significant extent that his very introduction in Binding Blade sees him macking on a captive prepubescent girl. however entertaining it may be that she snatches his wig on that occasion anyway.

fuck this morph

(5/10)

yeah, some people wish. notably including Brendan Reed-

the thing with Sonia is that she’s a little less believable than most folks in this archetype -- specifically because she’s not, like, working within the structures of power that would let her get away with being as much of a dip as she wants to; she’s earned her influential position by seducing the boss, which is hard to buy when, however attractive she may be, she never has a single positive interaction with anyone and nobody trusts her (barring Ursula on both counts, but she’s not the one who needs to be brought on board anyway). I realize what a phenomenon it is to think with one’s dick, but come on; surely, you don’t let your new friend with benefits tell you how to do your job just because she’s that good in bed or something.

that said, although her overall spot on the plot feels weakly implemented, she still makes for a tremendous bulwark to overcome specifically within Nino’s subplot. what a powerful confrontation against a lifelong abuser she provides in the end!

do not fuck this guy what is wrong with you

(3/10)

Valter is just uncomfortable as a character, which is limbo as far as emotion-inducing goes; it’s not particularly entertaining, and nor is it artfully terrifying in the way that Orson is. furthermore, I normally praise Sacred Stones’s antagonists for averting the way of behaving like a plot device, but this guy is the exception; he seems to primarily show up to cause trouble because trouble needs to be caused.

I feel like he’d have made for a far stronger character concept if his backstory had been handled differently, being more specific in what part of his mind broke when he held the cursed lance, instead of just being “now he does bad things and talks like he’s vaguely horny throughout”.

at least he’s quite a bit entertaining in Heroes where he gets voiced lines and no particular characters or plots to interact with -- but if that’s what it takes to make the character shine, it doesn’t really say good things about him.

fuck beauty

(5.5/10)

so, the truth come out: does this guy is deserve becoming the absolute teacher’s pet he’s been since Radiant Dawn? my verdict on the matter is: not really.

I mean, Path of Radiance actually writes him into a solid niche; for all the big words he emits about being a patron of beauty, he’s ultimately just the same kind of petty, ostentatious garbage that poisons the governance of Begnion, and finally taking him down for good and all makes for an excellent dive after all the work it takes to set the light of justice on him -- not just in Day Breaks (oh gooooooooddd) but over the course of the several chapters it takes.

it’s all downhill from there, though. his appareance in Radiant Dawn is not only unecessary, but also a deviation from the established writing to focus on pallid, ineffective jokes, like someone invented Heroes writing before the thing itself happened. he fights on your side because now he genuinely cares about beauty and art to the point he’ll fight a goddess over it? yeah, that’s not who he was.

and seriously, one strongly gets the impression that, in that appearance onwards, the punchline is just supposed to be that he’s fat, bald, wordy, and has a shitty mustache -- which, besides being blatant fatphobia, is seriously stale; “it’s funny because he’s ugly” is, like, at least two random minibosses per game, usually more.

fuck the senate

(2/10)

although he jabs a lot of the buttons that should make for an entertaining and stalwart hate sink, it ends up not really working.

his narcisism lacks the performatic grandeur of the likes of Narcian; it lands as pastiche at best, and common annoying smugness at worst. and although he’s powerful and influential enough to cause a bunch of problems, he’s introduced at a weird time that fails to make his specfic capabilties relevant to opposing the protagonists, and he ends up not doing a lot more than severely inconveniencing Zelgius (who is on his team) a couple times.

at least, the battle dialogue against him in Part 4 still provides some of the most fierce drags in Radiant Dawn

fuck the valm arc

(0/10)

seriously, fuck it

but ahem, onto the guy in question: he’s an annoying waste of writing space that doesn’t seem to be intended for any reason other than making the rest of Team Bad Guy look good, plain and simple.

you might be thinking, airlock, this is the third Awakening villain you blammed in four posts, are you just biased? the answer is: yes, but even if I were being perfectly fair, let’s be real, antagonists are just not one of that game’s strengths, overall. that just happens sometimes; I can really say the same thing of like Thracia 776, y’know?

fuck playing f- yeah, okay, that’s just low-hanging fruit

(??/10)

honestly, from this distance, none of Fates’s fixed antagonists bar Anankos really give me the impression of not just being despicable pastiche, but I’m guessing he’s supposed to be the one who actually intended to take it as a niche?

so, I’m just going to assume you hated this, but how was it? are you glad it’s over, or do you regret having read it at all? we’re probably not going to be spared from one of these characters on Three Houses, but specifically how much would you like to hate the one that comes along? to be honest, your thoughts aren’t remotely as good as mine, so I wouldn’t bother replying or reblogging to share them, worm. what? you’ll do it anyway!? how dare you! do you know what I’m capable of!?

[dracolizardlars]

my own take on the SDR2 cast 6hrs in

my bf @kingofthesheep and I are playing it, we just got to the first murder (no spoilers for that here tho) finally & he went and made this post about the characters so I couldn't be outdone could I? I'm lazy so these are in a random order with their names as I remember them lmao

Hajime Hinata: Look, Hajime, I get it. This shit is fucked up, it's entirely understandable that you're going through some shit mentally & emotionally. But please, stop Ebony Raven Way-ing it up in your internal monologue. It's so fucking annoying dude you could use like 50% less words and say the same shit. Despite that his personality is actually really likable and I'm already liking his slight character development so 7/10

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu(sp?): I have a little bit of a soft spot for Crippling Insecurity Covered By Absolute Rage characters which prevents me disliking him as much as I probably should for how much of a dick he is. I would really like to know more about his backstory but atm I don't know where I am with him. 5/10

Nekomaru Nidai: a relatively normal (for a sports student anyway), perfectly nice guy. nothing particularly stands out about him except jesus christ he is so TMI shut the fuck up about needing to shit it's not even funny dude (in other words he feels like a comic relief character which is lost on me) 4/10 I just can't feel any affection for him I'm afraid

Teruteru: DEFINITELY a comic relief character and the WORST kind which is the Haha Funny Pervert. he's like the even worse DR equivalent of Mineta and I would personally murder him myself given the opportunity 0/10

Saionji: shut the fuck up you bitch, you fucking bully, I bet you've spent your whole life making other kid's lives miserable and getting away with it because you're cute 1/10 because you're funny sometimes

Akane Owari: wins the prize for being the hottest class member by a mile (not because of her tits tho, I find them distracting and not in a good way) & I do like her unabashed troublemaker, rulebreaker spirit but she surprised me by being unnecessarily mean and self-centred on occasion. 7/10

Mahiru: Not exactly a standout in any way but I like her a lot more than I was expecting, really like her no nonsense personality and straightforwardness. I trust her and I hope we see more of her 8/10

Peko Pekoyama: pretty sword girl gets instant approval and there's nothing to dislike about her, but I'm having trouble connecting with her very serious and reserved personality. If she lives long enough I'll probably warm to her because I do find her interesting, but I currently don't trust her at all. 7/10

Mikan: Listen, I WANT to like her and I keep finding myself going "awww" when she's being really anxious, but when I step back from that? I don't like her, for no good reason, and I certainly don't trust her. I find her entire character slightly... icky, if that makes sense. I may be unfairly influenced by the whole Junko's Sex Slave thing in the DR3 anime... 3/10

Chiaki Nanami: I dunno man she's a really cute sleepy gamer girl so I adore the concept of her but she just hasn't left much of an impression on me yet. 7/10

Twogami: When he's not doing his impressively accurate roleplay of Togami (he isn't the Ultimate Imposter for nothing I guess) he SEEMS to be surprisingly selfless and a really good guy. In theory I like him a lot but I'm not particularly invested and I absolutely don't trust him one bit 6/10 but I wish I could give him a higher score

Souda: he's fun, relatably anxious without being a personality-less pushover like Mikan, definitely seems like he'd never hurt anyone and has a fantastic design. 8/10

Sonia Nevermind: A sweetheart, impressively earnest and definitely doesn't intend it when she comes off as condescending sometimes. Just a really good unproblematic girl and unlike some others in that vein, she has somewhat caught my attention/interest. Would be moderately upset if she died 8/10

Ibuki: cute and fun, the only one who can be relied upon to be chipper in any situation. I've seen a glimmer of a possible "hahaha I'm dying inside but it's fine :)" attitude which catches my interest (I fucking love that character trope) but it remains to be seen whether she's actually that, or just a straight up cheerful character. I find her music obsessiveness a little bit Much at times. 7/10

Gundham Tanaka: I like him WAY less than I expected because in person his Dark Devas Of Destruction edginess is just REALLY ANNOYING. I think I finally sympathise with people who dislike the similarly dramatic Owain/Odin from FE: I love that guy, but with Gundham I find it too much - it's because so far I've seen absolutely no glimpse of his real, sincere personality. Honestly 3/10 I really really wish I liked him more though :(

Nagito Komaeda: 99% of the reason I bothered playing the game in the first place, but that was because I kinda wanted/expected to be proved WRONG in loving him. Instead I'm EXTREMELY surprised to find out he's a perfectly sweet, kind, friendly character who I already feel deeply attached to - he's totally different to the fanon/DR3 anime-derived concept of him that was in my head, but it turns out I love the real deal more than the ideal. I'm fully prepared to get fucked up by that later on and I don't even mind because I love him so freaking much. He manages to be relatively "normal" and very nice without feeling a little shallow and dull like some of the others do. 10/10 actually perfect in every way & I'd die for him

[askthenewhopespeak]

Okay I just found this blog. Get me up to speed. Who's already dead? What are the ships?

//*Cracks knuckles* Welcome. Apologies for the horrendous, outdated state of the pages that should fill you in on this, that’s all my fault, but here goes:

Canon:

-Blog canon is very close to the canon of the series, with some exceptions:

-The last… four or so? chapters of the Killer Killer manga are non-canon. Fujigawa stabbed Asano and left her in a wheelchair.

-The Danganronpa Togami novel is… weird. It’s apparently actually all a dream or the matrix or some shit in the actual book? Either way, the characters from it do exist but most of them are dead now..

-Everything else is pretty much canon. Including the brainwashing. Unfortunately.

Deaths: (Posts in which they died are linked)

-Everyone who died in canon. (They occasionally come back as ghosts, though that hasn’t been happening much lately due to mysterious circumstances.)

Season 1:

-Haiji Towa. When Makoto Naegi first reopened Hope’s Peak, Haiji tried to kill him. Makoto was saved, however Hajime Hinata made good on a promise he made that if anyone tried to restart the tragedy, he would kill them, and we are down one pedophile! Hajime ends up leaving the school immediately after.

-Kanon Nakajima (Leon Kuwata’s cousin if you haven’t read Ultra Despair Hagakure, don’t worry, it won’t matter for much longer) was infected with a lethal disease, along with 7 others, and there was only enough cure for 7 people, so Kanon decided to down a handful of sleeping pills.

-Stephanie Storm. An OC (there are a lot of those on this blog) who was the aunt of the main antagonist of Season 1, Maverick Storm (Another OC). Maverick shot and killed her, and that caused the AI she made, one that looks but does not act like Chiaki, to go haywire, essentially becoming evil and have mysterious motivations, also kickstarting the meta plot where she hijacks posts away from me. Look for either zalgo text or 1′s and 0′s replacing I’s and O’s when that happens. Anyway Stephanie really wasn’t all that important, but her creation is.

-Kazuya Togami: Adopted sibling of Byakuya’s half sister, Shinobu. Kazuya was a rapist. That’s… basically all of his character. Shinobu killed him by stomping his chest in after he kidnapped her, and everyone rejoiced.

And then we hit Season 1′s finale, where a bunch of people died:

-Suzuhiko Ootsuki: Shinobu’s other brother, whose personality was cocky hitman rapist. He was killed by a clone of Nagisa named Nine, who’s literally Izuru Kamakura 2.0

-Maverick Storm: The main antagonist of the previous season got an arrow through his eye courtesy of this season’s main antagonist. It was very much deserved, for a large, large number of reasons.

-Yasuhiro Hagakure: The first major canon character to die, Hiro, Hina, and Mahiru were trapped in a gym with Saki Maruyama (OC), a bloodthirsty mercenary working for Maverick. Maruyama tortured Mahiru, resulting in her being rendered mute, and Hiro sacrificed himself by distracting Saki long enough to let Hina get Mahiru to safety.

-Gundam Tanaka: Gundam was killed by Mutsumi Wakatsuki,  an OC belonging to @shslnerdytrash. Wakatsuki gassed the infirmary, knocking everyone in it out, and killed Gundam.

-Seiko Kimura: While she was dead before the series started, Seiko was brought back as a ghost, and worked as the school’s chemistry teacher up until the Invasion, where Kamiko Hisoka, (@hopeful-blue-wanderer‘s OC) shot Jataro in the chest. Seiko then performed what’s called a “Ghost Sacrifice”, and gave up her existence to save Jataro’s life.

-Junko Enoshima: This is a two-in-one. We got a Junko from an alternate timeline pop in, where she didn’t appear to be despaired, but Fuyuhiko decided he didn’t want to take chances and shot her in the head. (I’m not linking it as it happens in the same post that Gundam dies) Then this universe’s Junko appeared as a ghost, and killed Takemichi Yukimaru (Mondo’s captive in Towa City, and leader of the Crazy Diamonds on this blog since Mondo’s been dead for a few years now). But then the Chaos!Anon (Another contributor to the meta plot) then forced her to save Yukimaru’s life, contributing his own life force to do so.

Alter Ego: AI Chiaki killed him, but he’s back now, with a brand new color scheme!

And I believe that’s everyone from Season 1. I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m mistaken.

Season 2

Makoto Naegi/Future!Mukuro Ikusaba: OK, technically, Naegi is alive, having been stabbed by Tsumugi Shirogane and then saved by the ghost of Mukuro Ikusaba from the future (I’ll get to that). But his current situation is… complicated and not yet fully explained on the blog.

Saki Maruyama: Saki died in a killing game set up by the group Invidia. The contestants of the game were all criminals who had escaped the law in some way, and Saki died to a random guy who was literally just a name and a crime. Out of all the characters I’ve killed off on this blog, Saki is the one I am the most dissatisfied with, in the arc I’ve probably had the least fun writing… minus potentially the Couples Games. But at least the couples games didn’t lead into a months-long hiatus, so…

Kresta Ivanov (OC): A minor villain from Season 1 who didn’t really do much, and got killed along with most of the other minor characters at the end of the killing game, as her mod left the blog.

Couples: 

(I’ve seperated this into 3 categories, 2 canon characters, a canon character and an OC, and 2 OCs)

Canon Character X Canon Character:

Makoto Naegi x Kyoko Kirigiri: Kyoko believes Makoto is dead, and he has not done anything to dissuade that idea, so this couple has technichally broken up.

Toko Fukawa x Komaru Naegi: They’ve been dating for about a year and a half, and are the moms to the Warriors of Hope (Minus Monaca).

Hajime Hinata/Izuru Kamukura x Nagito Komaeda: Hajime and Nagito were dating before Hajime chose to leave Hope’s Peak and hunt down Remnants, and during that time, Izuru’s personality awoke and took over, working with Maverick for a while, until Maverick nearly killed Nagito, during which Izuru decided to save Nagito’s life and bring him to the infirmary, and Izuru’s pretty much been hanging out since (Would you try to kick him out?). They’re technically not dating, but try getting Izuru to do anything useful without Nagito asking him.

Mahiru Koizumi x Hiyoko Saionji: They’ve been dating for… I dunno, a while. I don’t really have a whole lot else to say on that. 

Ryota Mitarai x Imposter-san: Neither of these two have worked up the courage to ask the other out.

Sonia Nevermind x Gundam Tanaka: They were together… but then Gundam died and that ship sank.

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu x Peko Pekoyama: I’m gonna say they got married offscreen.

Akane Owari x Nekomaru Nidai: Married offscreen and Akane is currently about 4 months pregnant.

Masaru Daimon x Kotoko Utsugi: They’re dating.

Shinobu Togami x Yui Samidare: Both are interested in the other but neither has acted on it.

Mekuru Katsuragi x Misaki Asano: Same situation as Shinobu and Yui.

Canon Character x OC:

Takumi Hijirihara x Naomi Kizakura: Married, and Naomi is currently about five months pregnant.

Mikan Tsumiki x Kyoji Nakamura: Dating, and Mikan is currently about eight months pregnant

Misako Kawa x Nagisa Shingetsu: Dating.

Ryouko Otonashi x Sly: Ryouko is a clone of Junko Enoshima, and she and Sly recently ran off to join Invidia, a vigilante group that kills criminals

OC x OC:

Momo Kuzuryuu x Alyssa Storm/Satoru-Kun: A dimension-travelling nine year old has attracted both a psychopath and a ghost (both of whom are also kids). This can only end well.

Sora Hijirihara x Mitsuru Nakamura: Fankids from the future who time travelled here and ended up getting together.

Blog Lore:

The blog is set in 2020, roughly 2 years ahead of the real world’s time.

Alternate Universes: The Multiverse is a thing here, there are a few characters who come from alternate universes (Mainly the V3 kids, and an OC, Momo Kuzuryuu, an alternate universe daughter of Fuyuhiko and Mikan).

Time Travel: Five kids from the future (Sora Hijirihara, Mitsuru Nakamura, Kaede and Shuuichi Naegi, and Akio Hinata) travelled back into the past. Shuuichi came with his “Guardian Angel”, the ghost of Mukuro Ikusaba.

Ghosts and the afterlife: The Afterlife is a small town square, with a cinema to view the current happenings in the living world, and an odd, white building that leads to reincarnation. Current ghosts living at Hope’s Peak Academy are Natsumi Kuzuryuu and Kiyotaka Ishimaru.

Ghost Sacrifices: Ghosts can give up their existence to save the lives of dying humans. So far, this has happened three times, all noted up above.

Clones: In this world, the science to copy a person and recreate them exists. You wanna know the science? Ask @commander-bubbles-the-first. He’s the smart one around here. Current clones that exist are Ryouko Otonashi, a clone of Junko Enoshima, and Nine, a clone of Nagisa imbued with the abilities of Izuru Kamakura.

The Izuru Kamakura Project: Hajime Hinata was the eighth student to undergo the Izuru Kamakura project. Only one of the other eight survived.

Hope’s Peak Academy: Re-opened two years ago, with Makoto as the headmaster, it’s now just a school, no longer for the best of the best (though, it turns out that kids who come tend to have a talent of some kind anyways, go figure). The school finds itself under attack. A lot. Following Makoto’s disappearance, Byakuya Togami took over as headmaster.

Ultimate Despair: This once powerful terrorist group has now been reduced to a mere shell, with the largest ‘cell’, (if you can even call it that) being reduced to 4 people and a monster hiding in Seoul.

Invidia: A vigilante group that surfaced in April of this year, Invidia was responsible for starting a killing game full of kidnapped criminals, which was eventually shut down due to Monaca Towa and Kokichi Ouma working together, as well as Nine invading. They recently resurfaced with a bolstered membership, slaughtering their way through a prison, and are discussing whether or not to let a stoway from said prison join them.

Final note:

A lot of OCs have come and gone on this blog, some only leaving as recently as two arcs ago. It’s very likely that if you go through some older posts you will see them, but for most, their plotlines died when their characters left.

So uh, that’s a sorta kinda recap on this batshit crazy blog. Welcome! I hope I didn’t scare you off with all this.

[doof-doofblog]

"I Want To Report An Assault!"

Monday 11th January 2021

Hello again everyone! Hope you've had a great weekend and doing well! I have seen a few spoilers over the past couple of days and honestly, I'm so excited to blog about it. I believe this episode in particular is a belter! I'm not going to waste any of time and simply jump straight into it!

Ooooh Wow!!! So there's a lot I want to talk about but firstly, I'm going to focus on Sharon. She's still poisoning her new husband, however I do feel like she's kind of struggling to keep it together. Obviously she's having to live with a person who she has grown to despise after learning about his involvement in her son's death. We've already seen her fall off the wagon a couple of times, almost putting little Ollie in danger and also stealing medication from Jean to carry on her plan. She seems more determined than ever to get her revenge and justice for her son. As the days and weeks go by, Ian is visibly getting more and more unwell, I find myself wondering how long it's going to take before he realises that the reason he's unwell is down to his wife. You'd think that if he was taking medicine and taking a lot of rest, and if he hasn't prepared any food or drinks for himself, surely you'd put two and two together? I don't know, who can say for sure?! In this episode, it looks as if Ian is gradually getting worse, as he becomes slightly light-headed and loses his balance, causing him to fall to the floor and knock a considerable amount of glass over. Unfortunately, he does this in front of the whole pub. One of the main people who sees this happen just so happens to be Dotty, the person who warned Sharon about Ian in the first place. Part of me is also questioning, has Sharon actually believed Dotty from the very beginning? I mean, why would she make something like that up? Something is telling me that maybe after what Dotty told her, maybe it played on Sharon's mind and she had to find out for herself whether her claim was true! Personally, I'm looking forward to the moment when Sharon reveals to Ian that she knows about Dennis, it's going to be a powerful woman getting her justice with Ian practically on his knees, begging for forgiveness! Oooo it's going to be great viewing for sure!

Seeing as we've already mentioned Dotty, its been quite a while since she's been in the soap. Tonight she reappears announcing that she's throwing a party whilst Sonia is away! She questions both Ash and Iqra whether they'd like to come, at first they decline the invite, explaining that they're both up early for work the next day. Suddenly, Dotty's phone pings and she's excited to reveal that Peter will be attending her party, surprisingly, as soon as she mentions Peter's name - Ash instantly looks interested and changes her mind, announcing that they will attend Dotty's party after all, much to Iqra's annoyance at the sudden change of mind. Now, why would Ash be interested in Peter? Was there a bit of flirtation going on between them a while back, if I'm not mistaken? If that so happens to be the case then I would really feel for Iqra, especially how her sister warned her of the Panesar family before she left the Square! Could Iqra and Ash's relationship fall apart thanks to Peter? Who knows? What do you think is going on between Ash and Peter? I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions on this one!

The next thing I want to talk about is the Fox/Trueman family. As Denise, Kim and Isaac continue to worry about Patrick, it seems that Sheree does a disappearing act. At first, I think to myself, why on Earth would Sheree flee whilst her husband needs her at such a desperate time in his life! Even when Kim and Denise visit poor Patrick at the hospital, he slowly wakes. It's clear he's very groggy, his speech is still slurred as he asks for his wife. Poor Denise doesn't know what to say and tries to reassure him that she'll be there at his bedside very very soon! Later, both the Fox sisters confront Isaac, questioning where his Mum is, he takes it upon himself to go and search for her. Eventually he finds her drowning her sorrows in Ruby's club, but what she says really shocks me - it's like she's already given up on him. Now, I'm sorry to sound harsh, but if you loved someone, regardless of their health, you'd do everything in your power to support them and be there for them. It may be hard, but you'd find the strength to be there for them. I'm shocked that she stated that she couldn't do it and be there for him - when he is in his hospital bed, desperately asking for her. I don't know, it doesn't sit well in my head. If she states she can't cope, think of poor Patrick, his second major stroke within the space of 7 years (with his first major one happening in July 2014!) Isaac speaks firmly to his Mother, informing her that now he knows for certain that he's his Dad, they need to make more effort with him more than ever and they need to be with him, now, when he needs them the most. I just hope Sheree will come to her senses and realise that her son is right!

The next thing I want to talk about is, Jean! Oooh poor Jean! We saw at Christmas that during the family celebrations, whilst getting changed into a gorgeous new dress, she found a new lump forming. Since then it looks like she's been suffering in silence, not informing her family about her discovery. In this episode, we see her have a check up at the hospital, I do feel for her during this scene. The poor woman breaks down into tears as she checks herself under her hospital gown, it's only when the nurse enters the room that she attempts to put on a brave face. Even though the nurse is trying to be polite and put her at ease, Jean just wants to get straight to the point and questions whether her cancer has returned. I hate to say it but when she stated that she could be "Riddled with it!" - my heart did sink for her, I pray to God that that will not be the case. I absolutely LOVE Jean, she's been one of my favourite characters, Gillian Wright is just a credit to the soap, I know it might be jumping in too deep here, but I pray to God that they don't kill her off. Jean has been through so much during her time on the Square, I think, she more than anyone, deserves a happy ending! I just want to point out that NOTHING has been announced or confirmed regarding Jean's cancer story or whether Gillian Wright will be leaving, I am just voicing my personal thoughts and views. Lets just all hope and pray that our beloved Jean will be okay! Regardless of the sadness of Jean's current story, I want to acknowledge also the comedy between her and Laila Morse - AKA Mo. Can I just comment on the eyebrows - brilliant comedy!

Now the main focus of the soap, the Carter's!! At the beginning of the soap, they are all gathered at Mick and Linda's apartment with Gray. This specific day happens to be the day which Tina is supposed to be attending her court hearing for the attack on Ian! However, we all know full well that Gray has gotten rid of Tina, unbeknown to the Carter family. They all seem to be worrying due to the fact that she hasn't been in touch with any of them, and they all seem to think that this would be the day she'd reach out to them. Shirley seems to be worrying increasingly as she keeps a tight hold of her phone, hoping to hear from her younger sister. But when she proposes trying to contact her instead, Gray panics and instantly informs Shirley that it would look bad on her and also Tina if she did. With Shirley informing Gray that her little sister always gets in touch in the end, Gray takes it upon himself to lie to the Carter family even more by sending a message to Shirley from Tina's phone. Meanwhile, while the Carter's continue to worry about Tina, Katy is at home with Frankie, it has come completely clear to Frankie who and what her Mother is! Katy pleads to Frankie to believe her and forget about Mick, but it's something that she just can't do! She tells her Mother to state who her Father is, if Mick isn't, but Katy can't bring herself to answer. Eventually Frankie leaves the house, leaving Katy worrying and panicking, but it's only when the police turn up at her house, she flees out the back of the house. (Even the police state that they have come for Frankie!). Making a silly and dangerous decision, Katy takes it upon herself to give Mick a visit and returns to the Square, it's there she informs him that Frankie has called the police on her own Mother. Even though Mick wants nothing to do with Katy anymore, after informing her to leave, they eventually enter the Carter's apartment. Katy once again attempts to get inside Mick's head, asking him to keep everything between them a secret, that Frankie shouldn't have to suffer. Only as she's asking Mick these things, unbeknown to them, Shirley has entered the flat is slowly approaching the room they're in, overhearing everything she's saying. Now THIS, THIS is the moment where you realise that Shirley has learned the truth about everything!! She's found out what's been bothering her son for all this time, this is the moment we've all been waiting for! It's when Mick uses the word "Paedophile" to describe Katy which completely grips Shirley! She eventually lets herself be known by slowly walking into the room, both Mick and Katy's faces drop! I think this next moment was absolutely brilliant!!! No speech between them, only Mick pleading for his Mum not to act! Shirley attempts to chase Katy around the kitchen table, but she scarpers down the stairs and out of the front door out onto the Square. Without words and without any hesitation, Shirley follows her like a determined bull chasing it's pray - eyes daggered toward Katy, when she finally catches up to her, she gives her a good ole slap around the face and beats her as she lies in a heap on the floor. I do not condone violence but, YES SHIRLEY!!!!! YES!!!!!! I'm sure every single viewer was applauding her as she was doing this!!! Finally everything that Mick has suffered has come to light and finally Katy can get the comeuppance she deserves! The neighbours on the Square however, witness Shirley's assault on Katy and shout for her to stop. Katy makes her escape as Shirley looks back to her son, as everyone takes themselves inside, Shirley pulls out her phone and decides to report an assault. But who's assault exactly? Hers upon Katy? or Katy's upon Mick?!

Overall a very dramatic episode! A lot of questions which I can't wait to be answered! I'm looking forward to Shirley and Mick having their very important talk now about what he went through whilst in care and what Katy did to him. Plus, how long will it be before they learn the truth about Tina? I'm convinced that Shirley isn't going to let it lie and maybe even start a search for her sister. Will Jean be okay? Will she inform her family about what she's found and could her health be at risk?! I'm looking forward to finding out what happens next! Thank you all so much for reading, it means the absolute world. Please feel free to share any comments or thoughts you may have, I'd love to hear them and I'll always respond! Thank you again folks, I'll be back again very soon! Love you all xXx

[jaskiersbeloved]

2x20 Beside Still Water

Warning: This review contains spoilers

1. JACE

Moly motherfucking God! Boy! Damnit! Note to self - don’t piss off jace Herondale! Or don’t threathen Clary’s life! OMGOMGOMOMG, how I liked him in this episode! Now he was more heroic and less pain in the ass yesssss. Too bad he choose to lie to Alec… And the hell is happening with him? Like… Really… And I must admit I cried when he died… It may be beceuase of Dom’s and Kat’s acting but also beceause of the music… Damn…

2. CLARY

I’m both happy and mad. Happy because I’m really proud of her how she handled almost the whole sitiation. Like literally when she was about get to be killed she simply laid her haid on that tree… She was in fear but also she looked like… Okay with this. And woah girl, your fighting skills upgraded! nice! And she killed Valentine! yaay! But… FOR TO LOVE OF GOD REALLY?! I HATE the trope with that one wish. She could have pleaded Raziel for anything. I know, she loves Jace. But… She could wish for Jace being alive and something else too in one wish. She’s smart she could have sneek two wishes in one!

But okay… i understand that book readers would eat the writers alive if that wouldn’t happen in the show so I’ll give it a pass… 

3. Clace

Nice. Sweet. A bit selfish but okay. I’ll give it a pass. It wasn’t forced at least. You could have seen that they truley do care for each other and that was sweet. I approve this ship :P

4. Valentine

Hail and farewell, motherfucker. May the Edom demons make you suffer for all of this. Dad of the year I swear to God. I mean… What to say after killing your daughter’s bf? ‘ugh, I’m sorry,lol… wanna kill all the downwolders?”… I mean?? WTF?? But well he’s dead everyone’s happy yay. Valentine WILL NOT be missed. Alan will…

5. Luke

yesss. My dad is happy! And carefree! Fina… OLLIE GTFO! It’s so refreshing to see Luke like this. First being extremly worried about Maia, beating Meliorn to get to her, speking up to the Seelie Queen… And then they are awardong him with being all happy and tipsy celebreating! Omg yes please, Luke deserves happiness! And well if Jace doesn’t wanna hug him I will! With a pleasure!

6. Simon

Okay. But. What have you promised to the Queen? Boy, you KNOW that you CAN’t trust her! So why would you do that?! But… Putting that aside… I loved ho he was worried about Maia too. Like literally he would have done everyhing to get her out of this place… And he probabbly done this… God, I’m scared about him… And I’m super happy that he and Clary are both in peace now ^^

7. IZZY

Girl was so good today! 1st Malec shipper I swear to God! She knew EXACTLY what she was doing. Award for best sister goes to her definitley! And best freind! I mean her talk with Clary at the end was so, so sweet <3I love when they show Izzy like that ^^

8. ALEC

I am reapting myself. I’m doing this in EVERY review and I have no idea if i ever stop doing this. he. Is. An. AMAZING. Leader. And the Head of the Institue. He was VERY fast in his actions. And I really appreciate that he didn’t want to drag Magnus into this, even when it was for personal reasons. But ahhh he showed how of a warrior he is! Book Alec who? Never heard of him. Especially that he HAS felt Jace’s death and felt it rather painful... Btw... There’s no better feeling than walk into your parabati, who you supposed was dead, kissing his gf...

P.s. Alec don’t kid yourself you’ve never been able to think staright... :P

9. MAGNUS

Gotta love this Prince of Hell, At first I was slightly annoyed by how he had acted torwards Luke and Simon, but I understand. He got betrayld TWICE in a very short peroid of time. It’s understandable. And then... Holy f... Man he is SO powerful! I’m really happy that they’ve started to show that! And that quote “I’m a High Warlock of Brooklyn” is iconic alongside “Duh...” XD And i love how caring he is. OMG. That strong contarst between Alec’s words (Magnus is not intrested in helping Shadowhunters) and Magnus’ words and actions during the whole episode... *.* (Also, Magnus... i would KILL for this jacket!)

10. MALEC

OMG!!! I KNEEEW IT!!!!!! I knew that they will reunite! And be protectibe over each other even if they mad at each other! I mean look at Alec’s face when he saw magnus falling! Omg he looked so worried! So did Magnus when Alec was in pain! And how Alec reacted when they saw that Valentine summoned Raziel! And that talk outide and in Hunter’s Moon. Alec is SO in love with Magnus and vice versa. They DO love each other so y’all haters who bittched on Malec for 2 weeks can kindly shut up! <3 “I can’t live without you” *.* And Magnus being speachless... That’s love. That’s a real relationship: they have arguments but they still deeply care for each other and love each other so much that they will find their way back together *.* 9Besides this scene were so aestheticly pleasing omg)

11. THE SEELIE QUEEN

Your Highness kill yourself, how dare you. How dare you do all of this things! Omg. I’m so, so mad. What did Valentine promised you/ What have you made to Simon? Damnit. I hate her more and more. I want her to die, honestly... but on the other gand I know that I’m gonna struggle with her and her games for a loooong peroid of time... (Maia is me on this gif...)

12. Maia/Saia

Kind of sad that this time I don’t really have much to tell about her... I enyoed having her on the screen. I love how she had none of Queens bullshit. And I agree with Jace, she and Simon look So cute together. He really cares about her *.* And she looked STUNNING.

11. Sebastian

I knew that he wasn’t deeeeaaad!! it would be too easy!! But... Omg... how in the freaking hell he opened the pit? Like... literally... HOOOOW... But well.... he is... um.. “safe” in... Edom? And now we know that at least his mother cares about him...

12. Ollie

Girl... Why... Would you... Destroy.. Luke’s... Happiness? You could easly wait a few days! But nooo you came to hunter’s Moon and demands answeres... And like... Why... Please don’t piss me off... I swaer, she’s gonna die like soon... Or she’ll get turned into something...

13. Meliorn

I trusted you... But well... on the other hand... i could expect that... Like... I know how annoying he has been in the books... In the show I like him more... Ugh.... Why would you do that...

14. Malachi

Traitor. I’m glad you had die. Like seriously I was rolling my eyes during his passionate speech about how Valntine is right... I’m glad he died...

15. Raziel/Lilith (?)

I really enyoed both of their apperances. Raziel’s voice was amazing. And I’m really glad we haven’t seen his face. It felt... Right. But one thing... I understand that he just calmly watched how father and daughter were fighting to their death? I’m... Okay...

And for Lilith... Yay Caring mother. Bravo Sebastian, someone trurley loves you! And I can’t WAIT to see more of her! I mean we saw only a bits, but I’m SUPER exited for her!!

16. AFTER ALL

Woah that was a REALLY good season’s finale. I know that I’m gonna cry when I re-watch this ep with my friend on Agust 21st. Kat’s the winner of the best acting performance in this episode, really. So let’s sum our cliffhangers.

1. What’s going on with Jace

2. What Simon has promised to the Queen

3. Ollie cofronting Luke

4. Sebastian’s case

A lot to be expected in s3. And I simply can’t wait for it. The waiting is gonna be hell though... Especially adding school... Bet well. For an episode I would give this 5/6. But as a finale I’m gonna give it 6/6. I’m really glad to say that this show begins to spread it’s wings! Catch you guys later! Sonia’s out! ( And yes I love how retro I look on this gif XD)

[sunbrights]

fic: by the claw of dragon (6/7)

fandom: danganronpa characters/pairings: natsumi kuzuryuu, fuyuhiko kuzuryuu, peko pekoyama + 77th class ensemble, et al. kuzupeko. character tags will be updated on AO3 with plot-relevant characters as chapters are posted. rating: m summary: The Kuzuryuu Clan stands on the precipice of the greatest era of its history. Kuzuryuu Natsumi promises to be the strongest leader the clan has ever seen, the Overlord of the South born again. That Hopes’s Peak Academy would select her for it’s 77th class was assumed, not hoped for.

To the younger Kuzuryuu son, everything is as it’s meant to be.

“I’m still fucking pissed at you,” Fuyuhiko says, when they get back to her dorm room. “Don’t forget that.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She sits on the bed, and sets to work twisting her boots off her feet. Her arches are starting to ache. “Like I could ever forget, since you won’t shut up about it.”

She waits for him to snap at her, or shout, or try to stomp out of the room. Natsumi won’t let him leave; they’re settling this here and now, whether he likes it or not. She makes eye contact with Peko on the other side of the room, and she bows her head, message heard.

But Fuyuhiko doesn’t reach for the doorknob. He stays where he is, against the wall with his arms crossed over his middle, and he sighs, bone-deep.

Irritation prickles at her. Where does he get off, acting like he’s the one that’s been so put-upon here? After she’s spent weeks chasing him down, trying to make it right?

He says, “What are you doing, Natsumi?”

“I’m trying to get you to sit down and talk to me,” she answers, “in case you haven’t gotten, I dunno, any of the eight trillion messages I sent you.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

“Of course you’re not,” she mutters, and yanks her other shoe off too hard. It pinches a nerve in her ankle that sends a shot of pain all the way up to her hip.

He ignores her. “I’m talking about whatever the hell that was with Satou back there.”

“What about it?”

Whatever response he was expecting from her, that apparently wasn’t it. She stares at him, steady, while he searches for words. “It was a lot,” he says finally. “Even for you.”

“It was effective,” she corrects. She reaches one arm out towards her desk, where her laptop is sitting. Peko steps forward to pass it to her, and Fuyuhiko tracks her with his eyes. “What? Are you seriously going to side with Satou now?”

“Satou’s a bitch,” he snaps. “Don’t put words in my mouth.” She opens her computer in her lap, and sees him scowl in her periphery. “Hey! What the hell? I’m fucking talking to you.”

“Yeah, talking about stupid shit that doesn’t matter! Let me know when you fall off your high horse, I’m gonna be shopping for a new phone.”

“Dad said he wasn’t buying you a new one.”

“Well, good thing Dad’s not here then, huh?”

“So that’s it then?” She ignores him, and types what she’s looking for into the search bar. She wants something slim and pretty and expensive. “You can do whatever the hell you feel like, but fuck everybody else and what they want?”

She rolls her eyes. “There it is,” she says. She doesn’t look up from her keyboard. “You’re so melodramatic, you know that? I did it as much for you as I did for me.”

“That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard in my life. In what fucking universe would this be what I want?”

“Oh, please. If you had your way, you’d be happy to sit in the background for the rest of your life, letting everybody else take the credit until nobody even remembers your name.”

“Don’t you fucking dare—”

“Would you have told them?” she demands, loud enough to drown him out. She looks at him now, over the edge of her screen. The phone model she’s looking at is jet black, all curved lines and metal edges. “After all that work we did, after all that shit you had to go through, if Mom and Dad had asked, would you have told them about any of it? Would you have told them that all of it would’ve gone under if you hadn’t helped me?”

He doesn’t say anything, and that’s answer enough. She tosses up both hands. “Yeah. So save the speech, okay? I’m sick of hearing it from you.”

“Even if that is true,” he says. “What in the fuck gives you the right to make that decision for me?”

“We were supposed to work together.” He rolls his eyes hard enough that the back of his head bounces against the wall. “I thought you’d at least trust me enough to talk to me before flipping out like this.”

“Trust you? You didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go along with this dumbass plan of yours! How the fuck am I supposed to trust you?”

Her throat sticks. It hurts when she swallows around it.

“I’m sorry,” she says, which is nothing at all like the speech she’d already had planned out in her head. “Okay?”

He looks up at her. His eyes are wary, but at least not angry, which is as much progress as she’s gotten in weeks. She’ll take it.

“I should’ve said something to you,” she says. “But be honest. Would you have said yes if I did?”

He only says, “No.”

“Exactly. You’re not some big man of mystery, you know. You’re just my little brother.” He glares at her, but it’s more what she’s used to. It’s built out of irritation and pettiness, not hatred. “I have to make up for everything I fucked up last year. I have to do all that and do triple as well on my practical exam to shut up any of those fucking judges who don’t think I’m worthwhile. I need your help. I need you here.” She feels the corners of her eyes start to sting. She takes a quick breath, and focuses again on her laptop screen. “I wasn’t bullshitting you when I said we were supposed to work together.”

Peko has been silent this entire time. She’s still silent now, but she’s not staring resolutely at the back wall anymore, determined to be a piece of furniture, oblivious to their shouting match. She watches Fuyuhiko while he thinks.

“Fine,” he says finally.

“Fine, you’ll help?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Natsumi feels something in her chest start to loosen. “But,” he goes on, “if we’re making a decision, we make the decision. Got it? I’m not putting up with this behind-my-back bullshit a second time.”

“I can do that,” she says. It’s an easy enough promise to make. The worst thing she’ll ever have to ask him is already behind them.

He nods, and that's the end of it. "I should get back," he says. "I'll talk to you later, alright?"

Peko looks over at her, but Natsumi shakes her head, just enough. He slips out the door, letting it lock behind him, and her stomach sinks with relief, not disappointment. She goes back to shopping for her phone; she thinks she’s found the one she wants, slim and pretty, with the model in rose gold.

*

She stops going to class.

There’s no point; from the very start it was always just an appeal to Yukizome’s ego. Nothing about a standard curriculum is going to help her advance the clan, and with bridges officially burned with Sonia, there’s no one left in the 77th with anything worth giving her, anymore.

If there’s no benefit, there’s no reason to waste time on it. It’s embarrassing that it took her this long to figure that out.

The rest of the school makes it easy. News spreads like wildfire, even through the main course, and within the week people who were avoiding her gaze before are now stepping completely out of her way in the halls, and people who were unafraid to stare now suddenly have more interesting things to occupy themselves with when she walks by.

She puts her energy into new plans and new deals instead. Enoshima puts them in contact with Hisakawa, and the agreement goes off without a hitch; they give her a reduced interest rate in exchange for a locked-in pipeline. Struggling models, struggling designers, bright-eyed hopefuls: Hisakawa puts all of them on Natsumi’s doorstep first. There’s no deception involved; all of them know what they’re getting into, and where they’re accepting money from. Fuyuhiko knows how to make the numbers work, and Natsumi knows how to get the yes.

It’s less showy than what she was trying to do before, but it’s only the beginning. It’s the step she skipped before, laying the foundation to support future endeavors even when the wind starts to blow sideways. It’s what her father does every day; all Natsumi needs is to do it better.

“Holy shit,” Enoshima says, when she drops into an empty seat at Natsumi and Peko’s lunch table. She’s the only one still brazen enough to sit with them uninvited. “You would not believe what a cluster this day has been.” She tilts her chin up. “What’s shakin’, Peko-senpai?”

Peko doesn’t say anything.

Enoshima slurps on her shake. It’s dark purple today; blackberries, Natsumi thinks. Antioxidants and Vitamin C. “Dark and mysterious. Nice.”

Natsumi tolerates her only because her information is good. The underbelly of the fashion world, it turns out, has a lot of slightly-open doors, all of them waiting for Natsumi to stick her foot into. Enoshima points her to the most profitable ones. She’s never asked for anything for herself, but that only means she knows how to play the game, or thinks she does. Let her think she’ll get a favor out of it later on down the line. Natsumi’s happy to cash in until then.

“Do you have something for me, Enoshima-kun?” she asks.

Enoshima pouts. “You’re awful at foreplay, senpai. You can’t skip right to the main event like that. What about, ‘What’s got you down in the dumps, Enoshima-kun? Exactly what kind of cluster are we talking about, Enoshima-kun? Did you know your skin is glowing today, Enoshima-kun?’”

“Do you or don’t you?”

Her teeth shine when she smiles. “You caught me. My skin looks amazing, right? Not a pore in sight! I’ve been waiting all day for someone to mention it.”

“Then keep waiting,” Natsumi snaps. “Either hand over something worthwhile or get lost.”

Enoshima clucks her tongue. “You’re so serious lately.” She pulls a thin, square envelope from inside her shirt, and slides it to the edge of Natsumi’s tray. “There. You’re welcome. ‘Cause I got a feeling you’re really going to like this one.”

Natsumi reaches to take it, but Enoshima pins it to the table with one bright nail before she can. “But. Before we talk business, I wanna get on the gossip train.” Natsumi jerks the envelope out from under her. Enoshima lets her, grinning. “What’s the news? D’you know which way it’s gonna land yet? I have to know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Natsumi answers, and she doesn’t, so obviously it can’t be important. She splits the top of the envelope with her nail; the note is a letter of introduction for a production facility in Osaka requesting a loan for capital.

Enoshima keeps talking. “Oh, c’mon, you don’t have to be coy about it,” she says. “We’re partners now, right? What happens with you affects me too, you know! I have a right to know if all my good investments are about to go up in a dumpster fire.”

Natsumi is only half-listening, focused more on the gall of someone requesting their own interest rates, but she hears investments and dumpster fire. When she looks up, Enoshima is still smiling at her. “Why would you think that?”

“Well,” Enoshima says. “Fuyuhiko-kun’s not really an A-list gangster, if you know what I mean, but he’s still part of the family, you know? I always heard good things about him. If that turns out to be wrong, I wanna know it’s...” she searches for a word, painted nails against her lips, “handled.”

Natsumi grits her teeth. “What’s handled?”

“Come on! Is Kirigiri giving him the boot or not?” Heads around the dining hall swivel in their direction. Enoshima leans forward, and picks now to lower her voice. “I mean, it takes a special kind of failure to get kicked out of the reserve course, they’re basically just walking bank accounts over there. I didn’t think you were that kind of family.”

They’re not, Natsumi wants to say, but the words aren’t there when she reaches for them. She glares over her shoulder, and the other students who’d been dumb enough to try to eavesdrop abruptly lose interest. Her hands curl into fists on the table, and humiliation burns in her cheeks.

If it’s not true, who would have enough of a death wish to play a prank like that on her?

If it is true, why does Enoshima know about it before she does?

She doesn’t need to say anything; the grin falls off Enoshima’s face all on its own. She actually looks uncertain, for the first time since Natsumi met her. Her eyes slide to the side, but she’s not just looking away, or avoiding Natsumi’s gaze. She’s looking at Peko.

“Oh,” she says. “Family secret?”

When Natsumi looks at Peko, Peko is looking at her. There are lines of confusion in her face, or maybe anxiety, and Natsumi realizes that for the first time in her life, she’s not sure which it is. “Did you know about this?” she demands.

“No,” Peko replies, at once. It should make Natsumi feel better, but instead the coil of frustration in her belly curls tighter. “I spoke to Fuyuhiko-sama last night, but he never mentioned—”

“Because if you knew,” Natsumi says over her, “and you didn’t tell me, we’re going to have a problem. Understand?”

Peko startles, her eyes big behind her glasses. Enoshima is, for once, silent.

“Young mistress,” Peko manages, head low. “My only priorities are your safety, and your needs. I would not hide something of this magnitude from you, even if your brother requested it.”

“Good.” Natsumi focuses again on her food. The sight of it turns her stomach, now. “You’re done, Enoshima-kun.”

“Hey,” Enoshima says. “I meant what I said. If your family can’t keep it together—”

“What are you trying to get at, huh? You’re saying I should do anything before talking to my brother? Because of something you say you heard?” Enoshima only stares at her, her mouth a thin line. “If there’s a problem, it’ll get handled, believe me. You’re done, Enoshima-kun.”

Enoshima stands up, one hand slapped on the table. “Fine, fine. You’re the boss, after all. Let’s just hope you know what you’re doing better than he does, senpai.”

Her shake gurgles as she goes.

*

She’s waiting on the steps of the west building when her brother comes out after school. The reserve course students who’d been loitering there all scattered the moment she sat down, eyes low and heads together.

The wide main doors of the west building creak when they open; there are a few, long seconds of tense silence before they creak back shut again.

“I thought you’d be training with Peko,” Fuyuhiko says behind her.

“I don’t train with Peko,” she answers. She doesn’t look up at him. “I’m not the one swinging a sword around.”

“You know what I mean.”

“This is more important.” She pats the space beside her on the step. He sits, but only after he spends a drawn-out moment staring at the back of her head.

“Can we make it quick?” he says, “I’ve got a lot of homework.” He shrugs the strap of his bag off his shoulder before he sits. Probably he wants her to think that him rubbing his neck is from the weight of the bag, but he should know better by now.

“Sure,” she says, conversational, “if you wanna come clean right now instead of pretending like you’ve ever been any good at lying.”

He sucks in a breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“See? That’s exactly what I mean!” She copies him, a big gasping breath with both hands clapped over her mouth. He glares at her, shoulders drawn back. “It’s like you don’t even try.”

“What the fuck do you want me to say?”

“The truth, for starters. Since when are we all about keeping secrets?”

There’s no point in asking. He looks away, arms crossed over his knees, and she knows the answer.

She wonders what else there is that she still doesn’t know.

“I’m getting expelled,” he says. His voice, his expression: it’s all flat, like he doesn’t even care. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“You’re not getting expelled,” she tells him, because there’s no reason for him to say it like the decision’s already been made. He only raises his eyebrows at her. “What did you do?”

He stretches his legs out on the steps. “Apparently,” he says, “I attacked another student. Hit her to the ground and then threatened her in front of witnesses. Like a real certified moron.” He picks at a loose piling on his knee. He’s never been this calm about anything in his life, except this, apparently. “Sound familiar?”

“Satou’s saying that?”

“The school’s saying that. You should’ve seen Kirigiri’s face, trying to feed me that fucking fairy tale.”

“Bullshit they are. I’ll—”

The look he throws her is so serious she almost doesn’t recognize him. “You’re not doing anything,” he says. “Leave it alone.”

She almost chokes on her own indignation. “Are you kidding me?” she demands. “No, I won’t leave it alone. They don’t have the right to walk all over us like this. If they want to punish me, they can sack up and face me. “

“They’re covering this shit up specifically so that you don’t get punished, dumbass. You really think I’m the one Satou wants gone?” Natsumi opens her mouth, but he doesn’t give her the chance to answer. “No. You shut up and listen. They don’t give a shit about one reserve course kid, all right? They don’t give a shit about a hundred reserve course kids. They want to keep you in the main course, and so do we. So just leave it alone, and you’ve got a clean slate. All you have to do is give this stupid fucking grudge match with Satou a rest already.”

She stares at him. She doesn’t know when he turned into this, someone so ready to roll over and be beaten. Maybe he’s let the reserve course get into his head. Maybe he really just hates it here that much.

Natsumi decides she doesn’t care.

“Satou got what was coming to her,” she says, before he can interrupt her again. “There was a problem and I handled it. What was I supposed to do, let her go around trashing us to anyone who would listen? People need to know that I’m not going to fucking stand for that.”

“Satou’s not shit, and everybody knows it. Is it worth dealing with all this bullshit now, just to shut her up?”

“Yes,” she snaps, “because nothing’s going to happen! I’m not letting them think they can just lead us around by the nose like a couple of fucking dogs. Do you have any idea how that would make us look? How it would make me look?”

“How in the hell is this suddenly all about you? Again?” She can’t help it; she rolls her eyes, and that only makes it worse. He blows up in her face, enough that the birds resting on the steps below them scatter into the bushes. “Dammit, this is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you! For once in your whole fucking life, will you just listen to what I want? For once.”

“The clan comes first,” she snaps back. “It sure as hell comes before your stupid feelings. How is it that I’m the one who has to explain that to you? This isn’t about you or me, it’s about our reputation! What are people, our people, going to think if it gets out that I can’t even handle a bunch of school teachers? That I’m willing to just let my little brother take the fall because I’m too afraid of what they might do to me?”

She finds ice in her chest and holds onto it, lets it seep through her until she can be the same cold steel as her father. “This school doesn’t control me,” she says. “Nobody controls me. Understand?”

Fuyuhiko doesn’t have an answer. He stares at her, jaw clenched.

“Yeah,” he says finally. “We both know I sure as hell don’t.” He pushes himself up to standing. He won’t look at her. “I’m asking you to leave it alone, Natsumi,” he says, shrugging his bag higher on his shoulder. “So do whatever you want. You always do anyway.”

She hugs her knees against her chest and watches him go with her jaw clamped shut. If she doesn’t do that, she’ll shout something after him, and she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. He’s her brother. He’s family. That’s supposed to count for something to them.

In her head, she can see the panicked slide of Enoshima’s gaze, from Natsumi’s face to Peko’s: looking for help, or guidance, or some kind of cue. She’s not stupid. She’s seen it before.

She can’t clamp her jaw down on that. “Did you tell Peko?” she blurts.

He stops, one foot on the lowest step, and twists back toward her. “What?”

“Did you tell Peko?” she says again.

“I heard what you said, dumbass. Why the fuck would I tell Peko if I already decided I wasn’t going to tell you?”

She doesn’t know. It doesn’t stop her from needing the answer. “Did you or didn’t you?”

“No.” He bites the end of the syllable off. “The only one I told is Hinata, and that was only because he was there when Kirigiri called me back. Alright? Fuck.”

She hugs her knees closer to her chest. “Whatever you think,” she tells him, “I’m the one who has to make the decisions. I’m the one everybody’s gonna be looking at when something goes wrong. Me. So I’m doing what I have to do, for us. That’s all I’ve ever been doing.”

He doesn’t answer. He turns his back again, and leaves her there alone on the steps.

*

Peko’s still in the dojo when Natsumi gets back. She’s not going through her forms, she’s practicing on the training dummies, and it isn’t with her shinai, it’s with her katana. When Natsumi slides the door open, she’s split one of the dummies open from hip to shoulder, shards of wood shattering and scattering out onto the floor.

She holds the cut, the far tip of her blade perfectly aligned with her shoulder. There’s a small semicircle of other students watching her; they take one look at Natsumi and slink away with their heads down, either into the locker rooms or out into the hall.

Peko turns toward her, both hands clasped over the hilt of her weapon. She bows deeply at the waist. “Young mistress.”

“I talked to my brother,” Natsumi says. Peko doesn’t straighten. “I believe you when you say he didn’t tell you anything.”

Peko breathes, a long, slow exhale, but all she says is, “Thank you, young mistress.”

“I should’ve trusted you more.” Peko doesn’t react. It’s at the point where it’s annoying, not respectful. “Will you stand up already? I’m trying to apologize.”

“That’s not necessary.” She obeys, though, drawing herself back up to full height. “Fuyuhiko-sama and I are close. It’s not unreasonable to think he might have confided in me. You were well within your rights to confirm what I told you.”

“I know that.” Peko lowers her eyes, deferential. “This isn’t about him. If there’s anybody I can trust in this place, it’s you. Just you. It was dumb of me to forget that.”

Natsumi can read the uncertainty in the way Peko’s fingers curl in at her sides. She wants to look up, but isn’t letting herself. “You can trust me,” she says to the floor. “But I’m sure that Fuyuhiko-sama would always—”

“I said,” Natsumi interrupts, and Peko cuts herself obediently off, “this isn’t about him. The only thing that matters is you and me. I need to be sure you’re on my side. Got it? I need to know you’ll be there, no matter what happens.”

For the first time since Natsumi walked in, Peko looks up of her own volition. Her eyes are bright and her gaze is firm. “Always.”

“Good,” Natsumi says. “Are you done with your training?”

“I am if you need me to be. Have you made a decision on how to address the issue with Fuyuhiko-sama?”

“Yeah. But we don’t have to go anywhere right now.” She picks a spot on one of the empty benches and sits cross-legged. “I’m not in a rush, and it’s important you finish, so.” She waves one hand. Peko nods, and drops into her cooldown forms.

She doesn’t have a partner, but that’s never stopped her before. Her eyes narrow against an imaginary opponent, and she moves through each form with liquid ease. The slim line of her katana makes the whole thing look a hundred times more graceful than her clunky shinai ever did.

Natsumi counts them in her head, the way she has since they were children.

Ippon-me.

Nihon-me.

Sanbon-me.

*

The school’s computer network goes down in the early hours of the morning. It comes back up within twenty minutes, but the database of student records gets corrupted in the process. There are backups to restore from, but restoring that much data for that many people takes time.

(That’s how the senior class’s Ultimate Hacker explains it to her, anyway, face illuminated by the blue glow of her computer screen as lines and lines of data scroll past. Natsumi doesn’t care either way. She doesn’t need to understand it, she just needs it to happen.)

Principal Kirigiri apologizes to the student body in a morning announcement. “Continue on as normal,” he says. “We hope to have everything back in order in the next few days.”

A few days is plenty of time.

*

Hinata is harder to track down than she expects. She realizes that the only pieces of his schedule she knows are the ones where it intersects with her brother’s, which won’t work for her, this time. He doesn’t seem to be in any clubs, play any sports, or have many other friends; it’s something she should have expected from a friend of her brother’s, maybe, but that doesn’t make it any less of a pain.

She manages it, though. Obviously. It only takes her a day to figure out that the place he always vanishes off to after school is a fountain in one of the courtyards between the east building and the west building. She catches him on his way there, walking fast through the courtyard. He sees her, and then he immediately ducks his head to pretend he didn’t.

“Hey!” she shouts, and he stops in his tracks, shoulders drawn up to his ears. “Hinata-kun!”

She has to hand it to him: he’s not stupid enough to try and bolt into the bushes. He resigns himself to being caught and turns towards her, smile strained. “Uh.” He fidgets with the knot of his tie until it’s loose against his collar. “Hi, Kuzuryuu-san. Your brother’s not here.”

“Do I look stupid to you?” He purses his lips, but shakes his head. “No. I know he’s not here, I was looking for you.”

“Me?” His eyes dart from side-to-side, wary. “Uh, I don’t….”

“We got off on the wrong foot before,” she says, before he can finish the thought. “You know? So I think we should start over. A friend of my brother’s is a friend of mine, right?”

He rolls his shoulders back, his expression turning stony. There it is again, Hinata’s slim spine. “You seemed pretty convinced I wasn’t his friend, before,” he says, tone flat.

“That was then,” she says. “This is now. That’s what starting over means, isn’t it?”

“Okay,” he says, but there’s still a sardonic bent to it she doesn’t appreciate. She bites her tongue. She needs this to work on the first try. “Why bother now, then?”

“My brother is— stressed out,” she says. “Recent... events haven’t made things any better. I need your help to help him.” She raises her eyebrows at him. “I mean, if he’s your friend. That’s what friends do, right?”

Hinata manages to keep his face carefully neutral, and he only fidgets a little bit. If she were stupid, it might actually fool her. “Sorry, Kuzuryuu-san,” he says. “I don’t know what you mean. He’s seemed fine to me.”

“You can give up the act,” she tells him. “I already know.”

To his credit, Hinata doesn’t break easily. He looks away, a sort of longing half-glance towards the fountain she’s holding him up from, but he keeps his mouth shut. The most he gives her is an anemic little shrug, and nothing else.

“I know they’re trying to expel him,” she says. She doesn’t have the patience to try and unravel him the old-fashioned way. “Okay? Happy now?”

The put-on neutrality on his face gives way. “Sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck, and she thinks he might actually be. “He didn’t want you to know, and he said that you might—” His brain must catch up with his mouth, because he cuts himself off. “I was just being careful.”

“Maybe next time lie like you actually mean it,” she tells him. “If I didn’t know it would’ve taken me all of, oh, two seconds to figure out something was up.”

“Thanks,” he says, and this time when he looks away it’s to hide the shallow roll of his eyes. She pretends not to notice, for his sake. “Do you actually have a plan or what?”

“Of course I have a plan. Who do you think I am?” She pulls tickets from her blouse pocket, and holds them out to him between two fingers. “Here.”

He looks at her hand like she’s offering him the detonator of a bomb. “What are they?”

“Movie tickets, stupid. My brother’s been waiting months for this dumb explode-y action flick to come out. It’s all he talked about, all freaking summer. So I got premiere tickets.” She waves them under his nose. “Will you just take them?”

He has to stretch his arm all the way out, because apparently he doesn’t want to take a single step closer to her. She makes sure to grin in his face when he makes brief eye contact, right before he plucks the tickets out of her hands.

“My brother loves to wallow,” she says. “If there was a talent for drowning yourself in self-pity, he’d be the top candidate. What he needs is a distraction, so.“ She flicks the tickets with her middle finger, just to see Hinata flinch. It’s worth it. “They’re for Thursday night. You can just go out into the city after school. Tell him you won them in a contest or something, I don’t care.”

Hinata is frowning. He squints up at her. “There’s only two.”

“Yeah, and?”

“You’re not going to come?”

It interrupts her rhythm. She hadn’t expected him to notice or care about that part. “That garbage puts me to sleep,” she says. Hinata doesn’t say anything, so she keeps on talking. “Besides, the whole point is for him to actually relax for once, right? That’s not gonna happen if I’m there. So.”

He hovers, one hand twisting the strap of his bag. The paper tickets make a faint scratching sound when he rubs them thoughtfully together. It grates on her nerves.

“What now?” she demands.

“Nothing. I just—” He chews his bottom lip. When he looks up at her, his eyes are intense. “You know your brother cares about you, right, Kuzuryuu-san?”

The hiccup in her rhythm turns into a pothole. She fumbles her words. “What kind of stupid question is that?” Hinata shrugs, but doesn’t take the question back. Natsumi folds her arms tight over her middle. “Of course I know that. Why do you think I’m doing this?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “You’re right. Sorry.”

She doesn’t think he’s sorry at all, this time.

“So you’ll do it?” she presses anyway. “Thursday, after school.”

“Yeah.” He’s smiling at her when he tucks the tickets into his bag, even if it’s small. “I think you’re right, he could use the distraction. Thanks, Kuzuryuu-san.”

“Great!” He jumps when she claps him on the shoulder. “You’re not so useless after all, Hinata-kun. We might even be a good team.” She turns away from him, and calls back over her shoulder: “Have fun with Nanami-san! I think she likes you.”

She leaves him there, standing dumbfounded in the courtyard with his mouth hanging open. She’s not worried. Hinata’s not bright, but he hasn’t done wrong by her brother so far.

It’ll work.

*

The day of the main event, she goes to afternoon homeroom for the first time in weeks. Not for any particular reason; she’s spent the last three days doing nothing but preparing, and by the end of the school day there’s nothing left to do but wait. She doesn’t feel like spending it in silence in the dojo, not with the way her pulse has been racing since lunch, and by the start of the period she finds herself in the doorway, one hand on the frame.

Yukizome is beside herself. It’s almost embarrassing. “Kuzuryuu-san! Pekoyama-san!” Natsumi jerks her hands back before she can clasp them, but Yukizome only clasps her own together instead. “Welcome back. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

The rest of the class is less enthused. A year ago, the room would have been buzzing with quiet conversation. Today, it’s dead silent.

“Look who finally decided to show her face,” Saionji jeers, when Natsumi puts her bag down. “Not so afraid of us anymore? I’m impressed, since your muscle’s basically brain-dead. That’s gotta take a lot of courage.”

Natsumi stands over her desk. Peko stands behind her. “You tell me, Saionji-san. You’ve got the whole story, right? You know how easy it is for me to crush a bug.”

“Girls,” Yukizome interrupts. Her voice is strained. “Please.”

“Hiyoko-chan,” Koizumi whispers. “Don’t. She’s not worth the energy.”

Saionji stares at her a few seconds more, and then she tosses her head. “Whatever. Like I care how this bitch spends her time. Let’s just get this over with.”

Yukizome tries. Nobody could deny that. She gives her lecture the way she always does, with enthusiasm and drawn diagrams on the blackboard. She tries to get them to contribute, the way she always does, with leading questions and discussion prompts, but no one picks up the cues she lays down.

Natsumi isn’t listening anyway. She’s distracted by the way her own knee is bouncing beneath her desk, and how it won’t stop even when she tries to force it. She doesn’t even notice when her phone lights up with a new message, not right away.

fuyu-chan 14:42 just reminding you: you’re not gonna be able to bribe your way out of this

fuyu-chan 14:42 it’s a start though

She breathes out. Everything’s in place. The rest of the class feels at once like an eternity and an eyeblink, but the bell rings eventually, and that’s when her timer really starts.

No turning back now.

While she’s still gathering her things together, Yukizome sets a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Before you go, Kuzuryuu-san,” she says, smiling, “would you mind helping me clean up today? I could use the extra hands. And I thought maybe we could catch up.“

Natsumi shrugs her off. “Sorry,” she says, already halfway out the door. “Got plans already.”

Yukizome doesn’t try to stop her.

*

Satou dropped photography club after middle school. Natsumi wasn’t speaking to her then, so she never heard exactly why, but she doesn’t think it takes a genius to figure out. No one could ever live up to Koizumi’s impossible standards; not even Satou, who always spent all her time talking them up.

The point is: when she dropped photography, she picked up archery. She’s mediocre, Natsumi’s heard, which doesn’t surprise her in the least. Satou was never an athlete. She was never much of anything. Natsumi doesn’t know why she bothers.

It’s just as well, though. She has Satou’s mediocrity to thank now, for the late hour and the empty hallway and the darkness in this classroom. She waits with Peko in silence until she loses track of minutes and starts measuring out time based on the pounding of her own pulse in her ears instead.

Satou drops her bag when Natsumi opens the door into the hall. Brightly colored arrows rattle against the floor when they spill out from one of the outside pockets, cheerful blues and reds and yellows rolling in all directions.

She stoops to pick them up, but freezes when Natsumi whistles, long and loud. “Wow, Satou-san! You’re here late. Did you have a good workout?”

Satou stands slowly, the few arrows she’d managed to grab clutched close against her chest. She looks back over her shoulder, like it will make a difference; the end of the hallway is swallowed by shadows, untouched by the few after-hours fluorescent bulbs over their heads.

“Don’t worry,” Natsumi says to the back of her head. “It’s just you and me. And Peko-chan, obviously.”

“You can’t intimidate me, Natsumi,” Satou says, twisting back around. She lifts her chin, but it trembles. “I won’t let you.”

“Intimidate?” Natsumi echoes. “Who, me? Come on, now, Satou-san. You’ve got it all wrong. That’s not what I’m here for at all.”

“Kuzuryuu-kun is going to get expelled,” Satou tells her. “You can try to delay it all you want, but it’s going to happen.” She gains confidence the longer she talks, and that was always the problem with her, even back in middle school. She could always convince herself of anything, even when the opposite was staring her right in the face. “I didn’t want it to. He didn’t do anything. But you only have yourself to blame for it.”

“Oh, really?” Natsumi considers the ceiling. “Because I bet I could think of a few other people worth blaming.”

She smiles, but the effect is lost, a little bit. Satou’s eyes keep jumping behind her left shoulder instead of staying on her face.

“Hey,” she snaps. “Don’t look at her. Look at me.”

Satou obeys, with effort. Her knuckles are white where they’re wrapped around the small bundle of arrows.

“Like I was saying.” Natsumi lets her expression melt back into the smile. “I’m not here to intimidate anybody. I mean, that sort of thing takes forever, you know? And I’ve already spent way more time in this dump than I ever wanted to. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be here at all. I’m missing out on a movie night with my brother to be here with you right now, did you know that?”

Satou doesn’t have much of a poker face. The lines around her eyes pinch, confusion and anxiety mixed together.

“But! Business is business,” Natsumi goes on. “And I have responsibilities, you know. It’s a bummer sometimes, but what can you do?” She tilts her head, and Peko steps out around her. Today she only has her katana. “You started this. It’s just professional courtesy for me to finish it.”

And finally, for what feels like the first time ever, finally Satou understands.

“Wait,” she says, and chokes on the syllable. The arrows in her hands clatter to the floor. “You’re not…. You can’t—”

“I can’t what?” Natsumi interrupts. “Defend myself against a shameless attack on my family and my clan? Did you really think I was just going to let this slide? Let you and Kirigiri try to strongarm me into playing by your rules?” Satou is white. Natsumi claps one hand against her own cheek. “Wow, you really don’t know me at all, do you?”

“I— I’ll take back the complaint,” Satou tries. It could almost be funny, how quick that tune changed. “I’ll make sure Principal Kirigiri lets Kuzuryuu-kun stay, just—”

“You still think this is about him?” Natsumi laughs, because she has to. Satou stumbles backwards, and the heel of her shoe sends one of her dropped arrows skidding across the floor. “This isn’t even about you. Are you really just that dumb, Satou-san? I even explained it to you.”

“Then what… what can I….”

Natsumi lets her smile drop. She crosses both arms under her chest. “Nothing,” she says. “What’s done is done. I gave you plenty of warnings. What did I say before?” She waits. Satou seems to have run out of words. “I said, we’re not going to have this conversation again. Peko-chan?”

The draw of Peko’s sword is visceral. Natsumi feels it like another limb, like it’s her blade, her will.

“No,” Satou whispers, a sharp intake of breath. “No, no. Wait, please—”

Natsumi throws out a few fingers. That’s all it takes.

Satou tries to scream, but either her breath is gone or Natsumi’s head is too full to hear it. It doesn’t matter. Peko is faster than her. Peko is faster than all of them. Natsumi only sees a blurred arc of silver in the corner of her eye, and she can’t tell where in it Peko’s braids stop and the curve of her blade begins.

There is a wet, thick sound, and then it’s over.

The spill of Satou’s blood squelches when her body hits the floor. It drips from the end of Peko’s sword, and she flicks off the excess in a messy line at her feet. Natsumi can taste metal in the back of her throat.

When they were twelve, she and Satou and Koizumi had all gone shopping together. Natsumi had bought a pink dress. It’s still in her closet, all the way at the back.

“Young mistress,” Peko says. “I am finished.”

Natsumi forces herself to look down. It’s not the first dead body she’s ever seen, and it’s not even the first time she’s watched Peko kill on her behalf, but it is the first time it’s been on her order. It won’t be the last. She refuses to cower in the face of it.

Satou’s dropped arrows cut abrupt, colorful lines through the dark pool around her. It makes the whole scene look ridiculous, like Satou had slipped and fallen in a child’s finger painting. Her hair is spread out around her in a wide ring, rapidly soaking through with blood. Her arm is bent at an awkward angle; Natsumi thinks that it must be painful, before she remembers.

Satou’s eyes are open. They stare up at her, wide and glassy. Those last moments of fear didn’t get erased by death; they were warped and mangled and frozen there, and Natsumi thinks she won’t be able to imagine any other expression on Satou’s face for the rest of her life.

Natsumi’s stomach heaves. Acid burns the back of her throat, but she doesn’t let it up; she looks at the coagulated clumps of blood in Satou’s hair, and swallows it back down.

Her voice is unsteady when she says, “Peko.”

If Peko notices or cares, she doesn’t make any indication. Her expression is blank when she looks over, but her eyes are clear. The front of her uniform is splattered with blood. There’s a sharp line of it across her cheek.

“Clean this up,” Natsumi says. “I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”

“Yes.”

She leaves through the west building’s front doors. The evening air from the courtyard outside is fresh and cool and clean when it hits her face.

*

There’s more than half the school year left before the practical exams. The identities of the judges are never released this early, but Natsumi knows they’ve already been chosen. Getting their names isn’t hard. The whole school is cowering at her feet now, and that includes the desk jockeys that send out the Academy memos.

The head judge this year is a board member named Amachi Satomi. She was a homeroom teacher for the senior class for forty years before she retired, and is a graduate of the Academy herself. Her talent at the time had been Ultimate Negotiator.

Natsumi leaves a newspaper from the day after on Amachi’s desk, the top headline reading STUDENT MURDERED AT HOPE’S PEAK ACADEMY. There’s an aerial shot of the east building underneath it, the same image that’s used in all of the school’s promotional materials. Natsumi drives her knife through the image of the school’s tall front gates, until the polished wood of Amachi’s desk cracks and splinters.

She writes a second headline beneath the first in permanent marker, to be sure that she and Amachi have an understanding. There’s been an issue with people not getting her the first time, lately.

THE KUZURYUU CLAN ABIDES NO INSULT

[maxwellyjordan]

A “view” from the courtroom: A river runs through it

It’s the last day the justices will take the bench for this term, with just two decisions pending.

When the term ends, the justices will be scattering in short order. Justice Anthony Kennedy is heading to Salzburg, Austria, for his usual teaching stint with the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law. Check-in at the dorms is this Sunday, and a reception with the justice is scheduled for July 6. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be the guest lecturer in Rome for the summer law program of Loyola University Chicago, along with her daughter Jane Ginsburg. Justice Neil Gorsuch is heading to Padua, Italy, where he and his former law clerk Jamil Jaffer will teach two courses in national-security law for the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, the Associated Press reports.

Mark Janus seated between Illinois Governor Rauner, left, and Liberty Justice Center’s John Tillman, waiting for opinion in Janus v. AFSCME

ScotusMap reports that Justice Stephen Breyer will be heading to the Aspen Institute in Colorado for a talk on July 7. Other justices are headed hither and yon.

As we expected, Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois and state worker Mark Janus are once again seated in the courtroom, for the third day in a row. But things are looking pretty good that they will get the opinion in Janus v. American, Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees today.

Meanwhile, one of the lawyers involved in the other pending case, Florida v. Georgia, is here. Greg Garre, a former U.S. solicitor general who represents Florida in this case on the original docket, also takes a seat in the public gallery, not the bar section.

At about 9:55 a.m., Kennedy’s wife, Mary, arrives in the VIP box, accompanied by three young people who seem to be the Kennedys’ grandchildren. At about the same time, in the row of the public gallery closest to the VIP box, the marshal’s office seats a group of spectators including one adult and several smartly dressed children. We don’t know if these are also members of the Kennedy clan, but it seems possible.

There is some stirring in the press section about this. Last year, when there was a similar amount of speculation about a possible retirement by her husband, Mary Kennedy did not attend the last opinion day of the term.

Breyer’s wife, Joanna, is back in the VIP box today, for the third session in a row. There has been virtually zero speculation about a Breyer retirement.

The court takes the bench, and the chief justice quickly announces that Justice Samuel Alito has the opinion in Janus. It does not look like there will be a surprise outcome in that case. Still, Janus the person and Rauner show no reaction that Alito, who has led the effort to overrule 1977’s Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which authorized public-employee unions to collect agency fees from workers who don’t join the union, has the opinion.

Alito can be quite brief with his opinion announcements, but today he delivers a fairly detailed summary of his 49-page opinion concluding that a state’s extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public employees violates the First Amendment, and that Abood erred in concluding otherwise, cannot be supported by stare decisis, and is therefore overruled.

Alito says he will address in detail two of the dissent’s defenses of Abood, the “free rider argument” and the “Pickering argument,” from the court’s 1968 employee free speech decision in Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205, which as it happens, came from Illinois. The court held that a school district violated the First Amendment by firing a teacher who wrote a letter to a newspaper critical of the school administration.

He spends some time on the notion that agency fees keep nonmembers from free-riding on the unions’ collective-bargaining efforts. But he says those like the petitioner in this case “are not trying to get a free ride to a destination they don’t want to go to. They don’t want the free ride at all.”

Alito turns to the Pickering argument and stresses the principle that the job-related speech of public employees does not get much First Amendment protection.

“If an employee says, ‘My boss is an ignoramus,’” that is not going to be protected, Alito says.

He makes the point that union speech in collective bargaining cannot be separated from matters of public debate, pointing to the area of education, and saying speech in this area touches on matters such as merit pay, teacher tenure, and how teacher performance and student progress should be measured.

“Can anyone say these are only matters for teachers and schools?” Alito says. “We don’t think so.”

Alito continues, discussing four factors that he says “weigh heavily” for not giving stare decisis to Abood. By this point, Justice Elena Kagan, who went head-to-head with Alito in the 2014 decision in Harris v. Quinn, is wearing her reading glasses and looking down at papers.

Alito concludes that “for all these reasons, Abood must be overruled.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor has a dissent, he says. Kagan has a dissent, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor.

And then Kagan, who has rarely dissented from the bench, speaks up, saying that she and the others “respectfully dissent from today’s decision overruling Abood v. Detroit.”

“There’s no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” she says. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in both this nation’s law and its economic life.”

Kagan is stern and sometimes angry-sounding as she goes on at some length. Alito, who sits immediately to her left, leans back in his chair and at times seems to be peeking over her shoulder at her statement.

“Today, the court succeeds in its six-year crusade to reverse Abood,” Kagan says, and “today’s decision will have large-scale consequences. Public-employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support.”

She concludes by saying the majority has “chosen the winners” in the policy debate over agency fees “by turning the First Amendment into a sword, and using it against workaday economic and regulatory policy.”

“Speech is everywhere,” she says, and almost all economic or regulatory policy affects speech.

“So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”

When Kagan is finished, Roberts moves quickly to say that Breyer has the opinion “in Number 142 on our original docket, Florida v. Georgia.”

Breyer moves breezily to summarize the ruling in this water dispute that he acknowledges is not a blockbuster.

“This is a technical case,” he says, involving an interstate river basin involving the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers, which begin near Atlanta, and flow south and meet the Apalachicola River in Florida. Five members of the court, he says, have concluded that the special master in the case applied too strict a standard in ruling against Florida.

The court remands the case to the special master for further proceedings, but not before putting a few dimes in the jukebox.

“If you wish to learn something of the beauty and the emotional appeal of this southeastern river basin, I could recommend songs, say, by Alan Jackson, who has one entitled ‘Chattahoochee.’ Even Bing Crosby and Bob Hope had one called ‘Apalachicola F.L.A.’”

“But if you wish to learn about water rights, equitable apportionment of river water among states, and other related legal and factual circumstances” about the basin, Breyer says, read the opinions, “which we hope, despite their length, hold legal interest.”

Breyer says that Justice Clarence Thomas has filed a “thorough” dissenting opinion, joined by Alito, Kagan and Gorsuch.

With that, the chief justice says he is “authorized to announce that the court has acted upon all cases submitted the court for decision this term.” He discusses the order list that will be released on Thursday morning, and thanks Supreme Court employees and members of the Supreme Court bar.

“Before we rise for the summer, I would like to note the retirement of three court employees,” Roberts continues. This is a tradition, and it does not typically include justices. Nor will it today.

The chief justice recognizes Corporal John Gilliam of the Supreme Court police department, who will retire at the end of the month after 20 years of service, and Cristi Cherry, a paralegal specialist and secretary to the court’s legal counsel, retiring this month after 23 years of Supreme Court service.

“Finally, my administrative assistant, Diane Nelson, has announced she is retiring July 12, with 12 years of Supreme Court service,” Roberts says. “I am personally grateful to Diane for her dedication, hard work, and friendship.”

Roberts wishes all three well in their retirement. Kennedy has taken this all in without betraying any hint of what is to come this afternoon.

Marshal Pamela Talkin bangs her gavel to close out the session, and the justices make their way through the red velvet curtains, one for the last time.

The post A “view” from the courtroom: A river runs through it appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/a-view-from-the-courtroom-a-river-runs-through-it/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[st3physimone-blog]

part one .

once upon a tIme there was a gIrl named Stacy . She lIved In upstate New York -- Poughkeepsie to be specIfIc. She suffered from what today Is a very very common problem-- AddIctIon . SpecIfIcally opIate / heroIn and crack addIcton. No matter what ones opInIon Is about addIctIon ( nor do I care whether or not If you agree ) It's a dIsease . -  A terrIble dIsease . One that wIll take you to places that you never , ever want to vIsIt . The deepest darkest places . I guess I wIll start at the begInIng - So here goes nothIng

part one : before It all started Born In November 1993 , Stacy grew up wIth both her parents , not a lot of money but enough to get by nIcely. She hd the thIngs that she wanted . She was an only chIld up untIl 2002 when she was 8 about to be 9. Then her beautIful lIttle brother entered the world. Sure she was a lIttle jealous - all chIldren whom had been an only chIld there whole lIfe but she was happy and she loved her lIttle brother. After her mom had her brother she had ,  what I guess you could call a " mental breakdown" . She was In and out of PsycrIatrIc hospItals - Stacy practIcally helped her dad raIse her lIttle brother because her mother was absent. ( I know that sounds kInd of harsh but I don't know what other woed to use) . When she was younger she hated her mother for It - she saId some very hurtful thIngs to her mother on a couple occasIons . Now her mom dIdn't really have all that many frIends- she dIdn't have frIends at all really for that matter . There was thIs one woman - Leanne . Stacy fuckIng hated Leanne - wIth a passIon- before the nIght I am about to tell you about when she was about thIrteen - Stacy's father hated Leanne more then she dId. So Stacy's mom hung out wIth Leanne from tIme to tIme - and from my understandIng every so often they would snIff coke together (they as In Leanne and Stacy's mom)  and that was somethIng that her father had saId "had to fuckIng stop, or there was goIng to be a problem" -- So one nIght Stacy's father was out , and she was home wIth her mother and her brother and then Leanne and her son JustIn came over - ( JustIn was a bad bad chIld - vIolent and what not- but takIng Into account who hIs mther was I understand why ) -- So Stacy, her brother, and JustIn were raIsIng hell around the house whIle Leanne and her mom were locked In her parents room for some reason. Stacy's father came home and asked Stacy " Where Is your fuckIgn mother?" whIch she obvIously replIed " Her and Leanne are In your room." -- Her father went to the room, seen the door was locked and started freakIng the fuck out - then he got Into the room and world war three started . There was yellIng and screamIng , slammIng and bangIng -- and before Stacy knew It her mom was gettIng her thIngs together and gettIng rady to leave -- her father saId to her mother " If you leave rIght now , you're leavIng your fuckIng famIly for good " -- for some reason - unknown to Stacy at the tIme -- her mother grabbed her car keys and left , rIght behInd Leanne. A couple hours later Stacey's father asked her and her brother If they wanted to take a rIde to the dInner and get a late nIght snack- whIch Stacy and her brother were excIted about - even though they were upset from all the fIghtIng and mom leavIng ( TImmy - her brother -- was too young to really understand what was goIng on - even Stacy was confused about all the detaIls but she dId know that her      an alterIor motIve behInd why he wanted to go out - he wanted to go see for hImself If her mom really went to Leanne's house - whIch she dId. The next mornIng she woke up and her mom stIll wasnt home- they had to go to PoughkeepsIe for some reason so her dad locked up the whole house (thInkIng her mother dIdn't have a key) and left. WhIle they were drIvIng , not too far from they house they passed her mom, her dad swerved toward her - not tryIng to run her off the road just tyIng to get her attentIon -- but her mom thought he was tryIng to run her off the road-- so her father , brother and her kept on theIr way and her mom kept on heer way home . When they got to PoughkeepsIe her father got a call from her aunt sayIng that she just called 911 and we had to get home ImmedItly -- Her mom took every pIll she could fInd In the house and luckIly she called her sIster In South CarolIna to say goodbye ... whom called her aunt In New York --- They sped home and got to theIr house -- a normally 20 mInute drIve -- they made It there In 7 mInutes.-- on the way home she overheard her father make a phone call to , who she assumed was Leanne -- " If anythIng happens to my wIfe, I have a bullet wIth your fuckIng name on It" made It to the house just as they were brIngIng her mother out  -- her and her brother sat In the car for a short whIle untIl the state troppers and what left -- when they fInally went InsIde she looked on the stove ( whIch Is where the famIly left notes for one another ocassIonally ) -- on the stove there was a note on the stove that read .. " Stacy -- I want you to know thaat I love you and your brother very much and I m sorry but you are better off wIthout me. I love you -- mom " --- later she talked to her father about It and found out that Leanne had graduated from snIffIng coke wIth her mom to smokIng crack wIth her mom ... she was crushed . -- So her mom had an "extenended stay" in a mental ward at the hospital for t he attempted suicide . She didn't partically like school - for some reason her parents were extremly strict -- ( I think partly because her dad was a tad bit crazy ) she never went to a sleep over besides maybe once - she never  had a friend sleep over her house -- she never went to the schoool dances -- never went on a date in high school -- outside of school she didn't really have s social life --- nor did she really have any friends -- she was a "four-eyed , over weight , outcast" --- back then she cared so much about what people thought about her - like her freshmen year she started smoking cigarettes because the couple kids she hung with smoked-- ever morning she would go into her parents car and "steal" a pack of her dad's Marlboro Red shorts because he would buy like four at a time so for a whole he wouldn't notice and then he eventualy did notice and stated to lock them in the glove box because for a long while her parents absolutly didn't approve of her smking ( a tad bit hypocritical if you ask me though on accont of her father smoking like a fucking chimney)  - and  that's partly why I think she got caught up in all the shit that she did - but that's just my opinion .. so when she went to school she used that time to socialize with the couple friends that she did have -- which led to her constsnly getting suspended --- she would either get suspended for skipping class or cursing her teacher out when she did go to classs . -- at her "home school district" ( the school she was supposed to be in -- i'll explian why she stopped going to that high school in a minute ) had somethiing call In School Suspension -- for short ISS -- so they would try and put kids in ISS and if that didn't work they would give you Out of School Suspension or OSS -- she would always walk out of ISS because she had a problem with the teacher that supervised the ISS room most of the day -- Mr . DuBois -- one day he had said to her - " you're just going to grow up yo be nothing but a drug addict prostitue" -- and she threatened to chokee him with his tie and of course SHE got into trouble ( and they didn't take any disiplinary action towards him which I really don't find fair - how is it oky for a teacher to say that to a student -"  It was bad enough she got picked on by her peers , she had to take shit from the fucking teachers to. GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, I wouldn't want to go to school either if I was her. She was at her "home school" until the middle of her sophmore year and she got kicked out ( No surprise her disiplinary file was a big as two phone books ) -- she got sent to an "alternative high school" -- a school for "bad kids"  -- she went to that school from the middle of her sophmore year until about a quarter of the way through her "senior" year in january third 2010 she ended up loosing her virginity to this kid Chris -- a guy she had considered her "boyfriend" her freshman year -- but she was prude back then -- she wouldnt even kiss him then but she snuck out of her house late one night and Chris had his dad pick her up -- she stayed the night and ended up having sex with him -- then she never spoke to him again after that night -- she regreted that for a while -- every girl wants prince charming to take her virginity but realistically it doesn't usually happen like that -- ecspecially because there are guys like Chris who go around "collecting girls V-Cards -- ( aka their virginity ) -- she let that bother her for a long time but she eventually got over it ---- but we will get to that later . it was when she was going to alt ed that she started running away from home-- she ended up in Ellenvillle with her friend Sonia -- there she met this kid NIck -- she was hanging out with this kid for the week she was there -- this was in March 2010 -- one night Stacy was hanging out with Sonia Nick, Sonia's mom and step dad and drinking and she ended up going home with Nick-- she was flirting yes so Nick assumed that she wanted to have sex -- she kissed him and what not but when he tried to take her pants off she told him to stop and he didn't and he endded up having sex with her no matter how much she said "no" and "stop" .... that was the first time she got raped --- she blamed herself -- thought it was her fault .... she crawled up in a ball in the bed and couldn't wait to go home - but she had no way to - so she had to settle for Sonia's house -- she didn't tell any one what happened . eventually the state troopers showed up at Sonia's house to take Stacy home -- the day that happened she could not be more relieved.. she had never been so happy to walk into her parents house . she was in her fourth year of high school but in at most sophmore classes and most of them weren't even sophmore they were still freshman -- not becausde she wasn't smort but because she just didn't go to class ever or apply herself . ( when she did she did good - like she had her english teacher Mr Jordan -- she was the only one to get an A in his class out of all his students - not that there was all that many , the school only had about 200 kids .. but still --- that was her first A since elementary school ) -- but she ended up being at the Alt. Ed. high school until a quarter of the way thru her "senior year" then she ended up back at her "home school disrect" -- but t didn't matter she was 16 or 17 when she dropped out ... the summer the year she dropped out she ended up running away from home and goi ng to Kingston with her friend Kate to meet this guy Miguel that Stacy had met on Facebook -- Miguel lived in this "rooming house" called Elizebeth Manor --- him and his friend CJ -- at first they would sneak us into Elizebeth manor but then Miguel got kicked out and Kate Stacy Miguel and his friend KillahKye were started sleeping on fucking picnic tables in parks and then they found this guy Shep -- she had an apartment on North Front Street in Kingston-- and Stacy's childhood friend Simone lived there -- so that was how Stacy got to stay there .. Stacy stayed there for a while -- even after Kate and Miguel had to leave -- Mainly because Kate was nothing but fucking DRAMA -- she was a pathological liar and an attention whore so it was a lot better without her there-- so Stacy and KillahKye were allowed to stay -- and then Killah Kye left and it was just Shep Simone and Stacy staying there .. Stacy was bi-sexual and Simone was the first girl she was intimate with -- they were in a relationship for a little while but they eventually realized that they were better off as friends. Then Stacy started talking to the kid that lived in the first floor apartment in the building she stayed in -- Jason .. she hadn't had sex since the incident that happened in Ellenville -- but she ended up having sex with Jason -- the first two times she bled a little -- the first time i think he popped her cherry and then there was the third time --- they had been drinking and they ended up in the abbandoned second floor apartmeent in their building == where they would go to hook up because he lived with his mom and she 1000% did not approve of their "relationship" and there was not privacy in Sheps apartment --- so they were drunk -- he "slipped out of her " and kind of "jammed himself " back into her and all of a sudden she felt a loy of warm liquid --- and she asked Jason " what is that ? " his response was " did you cum ? " -- she said in a wise as tone " don't you think I would know if I fucking came ? " . There was no electric in the apartment -- which means no lights so Jason grabbed his cell phone and shined the light on the floor and beneth her was a puddle of blood- she didn't feel any pain until she seen the blood and then the pain hit her. She was bleeding so bad -- she walked over to the stairs , a trail of blood behind her -- she yelled up the stairs to Simone -- " I need a little help here " -- Simone came t her and started freaking the fuck out " what the fuck happened Stacy ? " .. Stacy then explained what happened and Simone told her she had to go to the hospital and she refused -- she said she was going to be fine. She went upstairs with Simone and put i towel between her legs to catch the blood - it hurt to sit - it hurt to stand she didnt know what to do -- at one point she stood up , walked maybe 6 feet and then passed out banging her head on the door frame -- she was out for a few minutes and when she came to Simone insisted she go to the hospital . She called an ambulance to the store on the cornor ( she couldnt call it to the house because she was on probtion and she couldn't attract attention to the house) -- she helped Stacy to the cornor store by the house and they waited for the ambulance -- when it got there and Stacy stood up there was a huge puddle of blood where she was sitting on the step. She then went to the hospital-- she was so embarassed and in so much pain.They tried to examine her but she wouldn't let them touch her because she was in so much pain. Her dad showed up and she couldn't bring herself to explain to him what happened -- all she told him was that she had not been raped -- which is what everyone automatically assumed that is what had happened -- she ended up having reconstructive surgery and nine internal stitches .She ended up going baak to her parents house after that happened and she stayed there for a while -- she still snuck out here and there and , I guess you can say, did what she wanted .. but for the time being she was home ---- at least until she started hanging out with Kate again. And then that 's where it all began .