#To sum up a work (hospital IT) meeting:

[alatariel-galadriel]

*through increasingly gritted teeth* not my clowns not my circus not my clowns not my circus

Except it is my circus unfortunately and termites are eating through the tent poles

[darsynia]

New (Nomad Steve/Nurse!Reader)

MCU MASTERLIST | STEVE ROGERS MASTERLIST | Ro Roll

Summary: As soon as two weeks ago he’d have said that keeping to himself was the easiest part of his life right now… but that was before he met you.

Word Count/Warnings: 2,400 | None

As 1/7 of my Birthday fics for @ronearoundblindly, NEw is a first kiss hurt/comfort fic about writing your own happy endings. It's a hugely busy week for you and there's no pressure to respond right now, they'll all be here when you have time!

Excerpt:

Lately it feels like exhaustion is your religion. Stay up way too late, stumble home confused and euphoric and try to will yourself to sleep, then wake up and perform miracles to get yourself back to the hospital for your shift. You’ve always been a night owl, but your shift supervisor practically considers you the ward’s brand ambassador, and to keep the peace, you agreed to stay on the day shift. You’d gotten the schedule down to a science, right up until a tall, gorgeous complication started to jog at the track after hours.

The name he’d given feels fake, but nothing else about him does, and you know all about needing to distance yourself from the horrible things you’ve seen at work. You suspect he was a soldier until he got out, and after that probably a firefighter, but you’ve never asked. Mostly, you just try to keep up with him. The sum total of the words you’ve spoken to each other probably wouldn’t make for a single meet-cute in a romance novel, but they feel consequential enough to you.

NEW

It takes Steve a painful amount of time to adjust to hiding.

It isn’t just that he’s recognizable, it’s that he’s always stood out, always. As a small baby he’d been gasped over by strangers, as a sickly child he’d see concern and aversion in their eyes, and once he’d grown into a scrawny adult, those reactions had just intensified. 

Some accused him of making himself sick to avoid the war, as though he could have secretly known it was coming and starved himself into stunted growth just in case. For some, it didn’t matter what he looked like-- any man who wasn’t at war was fair game for ridicule. Even those who didn’t care either way found his presence unnerving simply because men his age were scarce. He reminded them of the people they missed, the people who didn’t have the ‘protection’ of being physically unable to join up. 

If his life was a narrative, he’d be the best protagonist he could be.

Even so, there was a special kind of hell in wanting so desperately to fight for justice and be told how lucky you were to be disallowed. Back then, it had been important to him not to hide. There were certainly others in the same boat as he was, men who needed groceries, to watch the news in the theater, to have a walk in the fresh air. So he went out anyway. He was the example, the target, the archetype.

Once he had the serum, hiding meant all the hard work by Doctor Erskine and Howard Stark would be for nothing, so he didn’t. Even in tights.

The symbolism was even stronger when he came out of the ice. Now, people look to him as a lodestar meant to bring them all back to decency and safety, and he wants to, but with action, not iconography, no matter how potent. 

That hadn’t been enough, and now they’re here.

“You’ve been tying your shoes for five minutes, man. You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Sam.” Steve finishes up quickly and straightens. “Daydreaming, I guess.”

Sam leans over and looks out through the thin rectangle of night sky visible through the thick curtains. “At this point I think you can just call it dreaming. Stay safe out there.”

Steve watches Sam head off into the kitchen before he slips out of the apartment door and locks it behind him. He and Sam keep nocturnal schedules, but Natasha’s expert-level camouflage skills have netted her a day job that keeps them all afloat. Their plan of moving from community to community taking seasonal jobs has worked well so far. 

This is the most ‘domestic’ of their locations to date; they’re spending the lead-up to Christmas in a small city in the midwest full of people who know how to keep their heads down and get things done. No one’s expecting a trio of superheroes to settle in a satellite town whose main attraction is a vintage bowling alley, but there are other calculations to consider. People make eye contact here. They bring their real selves to the conversation, and Steve’s been struggling with some real guilt about that. 

As soon as two weeks ago he’d have said that keeping to himself was the easiest part of his life right now… but that was before he’d met you.

Lately it feels like exhaustion is your religion. Stay up way too late, stumble home confused and euphoric and try to will yourself to sleep, then wake up and perform miracles to get yourself back to the hospital for your shift. You’ve always been a night owl, but your shift supervisor practically considers you the ward’s brand ambassador, and to keep the peace, you agreed to stay on the day shift. You’d gotten the schedule down to a science, right up until a tall, gorgeous complication started to jog at the track after hours.

The name he’d given feels fake, but nothing else about him does, and you know all about needing to distance yourself from the horrible things you’ve seen at work. You suspect he was a soldier until he got out, and after that probably a firefighter, but you’ve never asked. Mostly, you just try to keep up with him. The sum total of the words you’ve spoken to each other probably wouldn’t make for a single meet-cute in a romance novel, but they feel consequential enough to you.

As it has for the past week, your heart starts racing when you get close to the track. The problem is, you were run ragged today, and you feel just like the mermaid from the original fairy tale. Every single step is like knives stabbing the balls of your feet, and your arches are singing ‘fuck you’ so loudly you expect Ursula to show up any minute.

You stop on the bench right inside the gate to let the burning pain subside a bit. The last thing you want is for your burly new crush to think you’re a lightweight, not now that the months of forcing yourself to run after work have paid off so nicely with… well, him.  

Besides Frank, the school’s night security officer and all-around nicest tough-guy in town, there isn’t anyone else visible on the brightly-lit track. You take the opportunity to cross your ankle over your knee and reach for your shoe in preparation to swap it with the sneakers in your bag. These are a new pair, and you’d planned on wearing them every few days to break them in. As soon as you get your heel off you understand just how much you screwed up by not bringing  the others in to swap into once you realized how go-go-go your day would be. The swelling is bad, and the beginnings of blisters sting in various places. There’s no way in hell you can jog today, and walking home is going to be excruciating. It’s a god-damned miracle you have the day off tomorrow.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” you mutter under your breath. The John F. Kennedy High School campus is the same distance from the bus stop as your apartment is, but in the opposite direction. Your feet had already been screaming, why hadn’t you gone home instead?”

“Thought you weren’t coming!”

Your crush’s voice cuts through the late November chill, warming your heart. You look up and see him crossing from under the bleachers, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie. He’s far enough away that you let yourself sigh, half in addlepated pleasure in seeing him, half in utter frustration at yourself. He’s the reason you came, of course. You’d walk across fire to spend time with this guy, and by the time you head home, that’s definitely what it’ll feel like.

“Sorry, long day,” you tell him once he’s close enough. 

Hurrying, you yank off your second shoe and nearly swallow your tongue from the pain. Tears stand in your eyes, exacerbated by the surprise when you look up and your new friend is right there, almost like he'd teleported over. He’s crouched in front of you, and there’s nowhere to hide from his concerned scrutiny.

He confirms your assessment of ex-military by the professional once-over he’s doing, even more so when he takes your shoe out of your weary hand and tests the bend of its sole with a practiced hand.

“Don’t say it--”

“These are not very good shoes,” he pronounces. With a move as graceful as a ballet dancer, he shifts onto the bench beside you, still examining the shoe. You snag it from his hand and tuck it into your backpack with its mate, pulling out your tennis shoes before zipping back up.

There’s no chance you’ll be able to put them on, but, one thing at a time.

“You’re right. I didn’t expect to be the runner on the ward today, but we were shorthanded.” You wince at your feet, both of which are looking decidedly puffy. Shit, will either pair of shoes fit, at this point? “There’s a ‘best foot forward’ joke I could be making about hoping you’d be here running tonight, but honestly, I’m too wiped out to make it.” You look over as you finish speaking and catch his pleased reaction. It’s understated, but it’s there, enough to make you brave. “I have the day off tomorrow, maybe I can give you a twelve hour rain check? I bet you’re even more handsome in sunlight.”

To your dismay, his face falls and he looks down. You turn your head away, unwilling to see the evidence of just how badly you’d gauged this. He’s very clearly not interested.

“Or not! ‘Not’ is also okay, sorry about that, I--”

The words dissolve on your tongue at the gentle touch of his knuckle on your chin, turning your face back toward his in the time-honored tradition of romantic male leads.

“Please don’t-- Running with you has been-- Believe me, during the day-- I would like to, I just can’t.” Disappointment is etched across his handsome features, but more than that, you can see the way his mind is racing just like yours had just seconds ago. The man looks like he’s desperate to rewind to a moment that doesn’t feel like this.

There’s a remedy to that, and after a day of doing your best to fix everything and everyone around you, it feels like the most natural thing in the world to surge up and touch your lips to his. 

You meant to pull back right away, mirroring that thing where a couple knows each other so well that gentle brush is all that’s needed-- but your midnight warrior is still in the middle of the book. His large hand shifts to cup your cheek, holding you still for his head tip where he deepens the kiss and scrambles your brain. It’s impulsive, desperate, and honest. You grab at his clothing, needing to believe this is real, even as the two of you follow kisses with more kisses like you’re saying goodbye in an airport.

“Doesn’t look much like you’re runnin’!” the security guard calls out, his words so distant they almost don’t register at first.

That ends things abruptly, but the two of you don’t move much farther apart than a few inches, his hand still on your face, yours with a handful of his sweatshirt, right over his heart.

“Textbook,” you whisper, flattening your hand out to smooth over his chest. It’s solid muscle under there.

“Oh?” he asks, pulling his hand away swiftly like he’d forgotten how to be a gentleman in his eagerness to touch you. It’s charming as hell.

“This whole operation, it’s right out of the romance novel guidebook,” you praise. “I ought to look for cameras.” A shadow crosses his face, and you suddenly put the pieces together. “Shit, you’re hiding from something, aren’t you? That’s why you freaked out about coming here in the daytime.”

He’s already standing, but instead of stalking away from you, he’s looking around the track, turning in a circle of deep concentration. He’s looking for cameras, but not in a joking way, not as part of a bit.

“The school district would rather spend the money on Frank than cameras, if that’s what you’re looking for,” you murmur, pushing your voice into steadiness out of sheer determination. “The city contributes. It’s been so much safer when everyone who wants a night walk comes here, but there are fewer of us out in the winter months.” The fall chill is actually helping with the pain in your feet, so that's something.

Your mysterious crush is facing you again, apparently satisfied that the two of you aren't being watched by anything more permanent than good old Frank. “I’m sorry,” he says. The words have a horrid finality to them, but you’re focused on his eyebrows. They’re not on board with the rest of his body language. They’re beseeching, rather than resolute, hopeful rather than harsh.

You have one chance to get this right.

“There are some things I love about my coworkers, and let’s be real, a lot of things I don’t-- but do you want to know the thing I like least about working in a hospital?”

Your whole body is practically vibrating with adrenaline, and you realize this is your opportunity to shove on your shoes. As you do that, you refuse to look up at him. The goal is to bring his critical thinking skills back from ‘fight or flight’ mode. Then maybe you can get the two of you on the same page again.

It takes over a minute, but he lets out a long breath and sits down beside you. “Tell me."

“They’re terrible gossips,” you say, looking right at him. He’s not allowed to make the obvious (ruinous, new-relationship-wrecking) conclusion about what you’re saying, not without having to look you in the eye while he does it. “I can’t stand that shit. That’s why they send me on the errands. I’ve got everyone trained to stop talking when I walk by, at this point.”

His relief is visible. “I can respect that.”

“Good.” You set both feet on the ground and decide to test things out by standing. If you’re wobbly, you feel certain he’ll reach out and catch you. “Tomorrow night?”

“Wait,” he says, the picture of confusion. “You’re not-- You think I’m hiding from something and you’re not going to ask about it?” Even in the dim glow of the nearby track light, you can see the clench and release of his jaw.

“For all I know, you’re hiding from your last girlfriend. I know I’d find it hard to give you up, and I’ve known you for what? Two weeks?” Your feet are screaming at you about as loudly as the critical voice in your head, but happiness has made both just distant enough to achieve your goals. 

He shoves his hands into his pockets, which you take to be a good sign. “Would that still be ‘textbook?’ This is all new to me.”

All of the cheeky, sarcastic, and cheesy thoughts that cross your mind would ruin the moment, so you go off script. It’s not the best, but it’s not awful, either.

“New is terrible for work shoes, but it’s lovely when it’s you. See you tomorrow night!”

Stay tuned for more stories in the Ro Roll! Would you like more of these two? Let me know 💚

[dilemmaontwolegs]

Already Gone {8} || MV1

Pairing: Max Verstappen x spy!fem!reader Summary: After a record smashing 2023 season it seems to be about to repeat as 2024 begins. Warnings: 18+ only, violence, reader injury WC: 2.3k One || Two || Three || Four || Five || Six || Seven || Eight

The season had ended on a high with Max rightfully where he belonged. You had accompanied him to the FIA awards and cheered proudly as he accepted the winners trophy before jetting off to the Swiss Alps for a much needed break. Unfortunately work was never far away and all too soon it was time to make your grand entrance at the annual end of year Board of Directors meeting at the Scuderia Ferrari Headquarters.

The memory of the shocked faces when you walked into the meeting room and took the last chair around the table never ceased to make you smile. The brooch pinned to your Chanel suit jacket had recorded the moment of silence before chaos erupted while you reclined back in the chair to watch the men scramble for an answer.

Now it was time for the new season to begin.

Melbourne, Australia

It should have been a safe place. You had walked the perimeter three times just to check for any signs someone would be trying to get into the event. You hadn’t found any. Leaving the security team to their job, you returned to Max and accepted the cocktail he had ordered.

Australia was always a lively place for Red Bull as they gathered a range of their athletes across a dozen extreme sports and created some promo videos for the year. This year was no different with a party to kick off the week long trip down under and it was more than just the Red Bull family in attendance.

“What’s wrong, liefje?”

You shook away the lingering feeling that something was amiss and draped your arms around Max. “Nothing, baby, I’m just a little on edge.”

“I thought things were going well with the Board?”

You scanned the room for the current Ferrari drivers, and the future one, spotting them all in separate areas and deep in conversation. “They are, I haven’t been able to find anything planned yet but it doesn’t mean they won’t try something.”

“Relax,” he soothed as he kissed his way across your collar and up to your lips. “You can have the night off worrying. I want my girlfriend not my bodyguard.”

“Maybe if you stop winning all the time I will be able to relax,” you teased. “You’re just too damn fast, baby.”

Max’s eyes sparkled with mischief as he dipped his head to your ear. “I went slow last night, didn’t I? I think I got in trouble for that too the way you begged me to go faster.”

The witty retort you had to torture him with was lost as two men stumbled over their feet and knocked into Max. Unsure of their intentions you shoved them back and stepped in front of him protectively but all they could sum up were a few drunken expletives at your lack of hospitality. It was only going to get worse when you signalled for security to escort them off of the premises.

“It’s fine, liefje, I’m safe, we’re safe,” Max soothed as he rubbed your tense shoulders. “Have another drink with me.”

You turned to the bar and reached over the counter for two shot glasses and a bottle of vodka. “I don’t know how many more 1-2 finishes I can survive,” you admitted as you tapped his glass and downed your shot. You could feel the desperation growing with each Ferrari board meeting but it was the meetings that were happening in the shadows that concerned you more. The only reprieve was that Mercedes had started the season off poorly so it was one less team for them to worry about competing with. “I think we should hire more personal security for you and maybe Checo too now.”

“Do you know what I think? I think you worry too much.” Max laughed at the roll of your eyes in response.

“One of us has to be the responsible one.”

Max took your shot glass and the bottle of vodka, placing them on the bar top before taking your hand and giving it a small tug.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m being the responsible one and taking you back to the hotel,” he said with a grin. “A bottle of wine in the jacuzzi with you is much safer.”

There were plenty of drivers parked outside the venue for when guests wanted to leave and the valet waved one forward. Plastic barriers kept fans back, photographers snapped shots for the newspapers and police lined the entrance for anyone that grew too bold. You scanned both sides of the tiled floor for anything out of place and shifted as you saw a flash catch the glint of metal.

When the gunshot rang out, your first thought was of Max. He had only been a few feet behind you, but with the crowd that had gathered in the hopes to get an autograph you had lost sight of him. Had he been hit? Had he ducked along with everyone else? You dared a glance over your shoulder and found he had been quickly covered by the policemen while the man you had spotted tried to make his escape. 

Max’s leather jacket billowed at your sides as you sprinted after the shooter and you heard his voice over the screams of panic, he was calling you back, but there was no way you were letting the man get away. You made it two blocks before he dove into the back seat of a black sedan and fired off a few wild shots as it shot away from the curb.

Grabbing your phone from your pocket you dialled Max’s head of security and it picked up on the first ring. “1NF 2DU, Toyota Caldina,” you panted as you leaned against a building and watched the car disappear around the corner. “Male, early 30’s, brown hair, and fucking short. 9mm Beretta Nano.”

“Got it,” Harry noted before the phone was jostled. “Schatje, where are you? Are you alright?”

You looked down at the tear in his jacket and pulled it aside to see blood soaking your blouse beneath. You closed your eyes as the burning spread to your lungs and your panting grew more laboured. “I’m fine, baby, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, they won’t let me leave,” he growled the last part at Harry who was holding him back from chasing after you.

“Good…that’s good…you’re good,” you sighed in relief and slid down the brick wall. “I love you, Max.”

You heard what could only be described as a roar of pain before the line died and you were left looking at the background image on your phone. You had never been happier than that moment of waking up in Max’s arms on a lazy Sunday before the season began, your head on his bare chest and Achilles curled up on your feet with Jimmy and Sassy. The daily stresses of life hadn’t begun to claw itself to the forefront of your mind and nothing existed outside of those four walls.

 As a teenager you lived life a day at a time, not caring if it was the last one because you had never had something to look forward to. Now, the longer you stared at that photo, determination grew stronger than the pain in your chest and you cut your palms on the brick as you pulled yourself to your feet. 

“Liefje! Y/N!” Max’s voice carried above the sound of sirens and you tried to call back to him but only a hacking cough sawed through your lungs and your vision dimmed. “Where’s the fucking ambulance?”

Your steps faltered as you followed his voice and when your legs collapsed beneath you his strong arms were there to catch you.

Max thought about just going to the car but there was a young boy holding out a cap and he couldn’t leave the little guy disappointed. He looked up to tell you he would just be a moment when he saw you shift suddenly, then the gunshot rang out. Everything moved so quickly as bodies surrounded him and the crowds screamed in the chaos, and he lost sight of you making chase down the street. 

“Max, stay down, we’ll get you out of here,” Harry stated calmly as he pulled Max away from the policemen. 

“I’m not going anywhere without Y/N.”

“These are her orders, shh,” Harry growled as he saw your contact calling and answered in an instant, listening intently. “Got it.”

Max snatched the phone from Harry before he could hang up. “Schatje, where are you? Are you alright?”

The pause was long enough for him to hear his heartbeat in his ears and when you finally answered your voice didn’t sound quite right, “I’m fine, baby, are you okay?”

Max looked at Harry who was using his muscle mass to build a wall between him and the street you had run down. “I’m fine, they won’t let me leave.”

“Good…that’s good…you’re good.” Your voice was growing quieter as he grew more agitated. “I love you, Max.”

Max looked at the floor where he had last seen you and noticed the darkened spot of blood stains that led away from him. Strength he had never known flooded through him and not even Harry’s arms that were as thick as Max’s thighs could hold him back. His trousers threatened to rip from the long strides and the quick pace of Max’s sprint and he screamed for you, praying for an answer as he followed the blood drops down the street.

Max knew there were people following him as he ran to the silhouette he innately knew was you. “Where’s the fucking ambulance?”

“On its way.”

The street lights illuminated the pain etched in your face when you tried to walk to him but your legs collapsed. “I’ve got you, liefje, I’ve got you,” Max promised as he felt his hands grow slick with the blood leaking out of your side. “I’m not letting you go.”

Max could count on his hand the number of times he had felt true fear. He remembered the way his mother cried when she had him down to tell him she was leaving and how she wished she could take him too. He could remember the sound Achilles made when the neighbours dog escaped their property and chased him. He would always remember the look in your eyes before they closed.

For three days Max sat at your side, only moving from the room when you were wheeled away for scans and tests. Christian stopped by each night for an update that hadn’t changed and flowers arrived from the Board but Max dumped them straight in the bin, but other than that the room was empty and quiet. 

Max knew he wasn’t liked by a lot of people but he never really believed that his life had become a target. You loved that he was still naive to the dark side of the sport and you happily became the shield that protected him from the innocence that had long been stolen from yourself. It was why you put yourself into the trajectory of the bullet meant for him. 

Max could still see the footage that Harry had found from the lobby cameras. He had nearly thrown the laptop across the room where he waited for you to come out of surgery. That minute shift, the smallest of movements, had saved him - but at what cost?

“I found a little house,” Max said quietly as he held your hand. “It has an orchard and plenty of space for our babies, and no city around for miles. It needs some things fixed up before we could live there, but it sounds like a good place to retire.” He closed his eyes and lay back in the uncomfortable chair, your hand still resting in his so he could feel for any sign of life.

“I didn’t die just for you to retire now,” you rasped, your throat dry and voice hoarse.

Max was on his feet in an instant, capturing your face delicately as he kissed you with a sound that was some cross between a sigh of relief and a joyous laugh. “You didn’t die, liefje, I couldn’t have survived that.”

“I’m pretty sure I met the devil,” you groaned as you tried to sit up, “he spoke Italian.”

“That’s just Benedetto,” Max said with a flat laugh, placing a hand on your shoulder to stop you moving while the other pressed the call button. “You need to keep still.”

You weren’t impressed by the intrusion of the doctors and nurses who came flooding in and after answering dozens of pointless questions, because yes you were in pain after being shot, they finally left again. 

“They’re just doing their job,” Max murmured as he found space on the bed to sidle in with you. He carefully shifted you so that he could lay his arm out before tucking you in to rest your head on his shoulder. “Let them prod and poke you until they are satisfied you are completely healthy again.”

“I just want to go home-hey! Why aren’t you at the track?”

“Did you seriously think I would leave you?” Max shook his head at the idea and kissed your forehead. “You risked your life to save mine, I know exactly where I want to be.”

The stitched in your side stretched as you craned your head back so he could reach your lips. You had thought there would never be another kiss so you were going to savour the feeling that came with it. “I love you, Max.”

“Ik hou van jou.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The health industry’s invisible hand is a fist

On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

The US has the rich world's most expensive health care system, and that system delivers the worst health outcomes of any country in the rich world. Also, the US is unique in relying on market forces as the primary regulator of its health care system. All of these facts are related!

Capitalism's most dogmatic zealots have a mystical belief in the power of markets to "efficiently allocate" goods and services. For them, the process by which goods and services are offered and purchased performs a kind of vast, distributed computation that "discovers the price" of everything. Our decisions to accept or refuse prices are the data that feeds this distributed computer, and the signals these decisions send about our desires triggers investment decisions by sellers, which guides the whole system to "equilibrium" in which we are all better off.

There's some truth to this: when demand for something exceeds the supply, prices tend to go up. These higher prices tempt new sellers into the market, until demand is met and prices fall and production is stabilized at the level that meets demand.

But this elegant, self-regulating system rarely survives contact with reality. It's the kind of simplified model that works when we're hypothesizing about perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface, but ceases to be useful when it encounters a messy world of imperfect rationality, imperfect information, monopolization, regulatory capture, and other unavoidable properties of reality.

For members of the "efficient market" cult, reality's stubborn refusal to behave the way it does in their thought experiments is a personal affront. Panged by cognitive dissonance, the cult members insist that any market failures in the real world are illusions caused by not doing capitalism hard enough. When deregulation and markets fail, the answer is always more deregulation and more markets.

That's the story of the American health industry in a nutshell. Rather than accepting that people won't shop for the best emergency room while unconscious in an ambulance, or that the "clearing price" of "not dying of cancer" is "infinity," the cult insists that America's worst-in-class, most expensive health system just needs more capitalism to turn it into a world leader.

In the 1980s, Reagan's court sorcerers decreed that they could fix health care with something called "Prospective Payment Systems," which would pay hospitals a lump sum for treating conditions, rather than reimbursing them for each procedure, using competition and profit motives to drive "efficiency." The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient and someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this kind of abuse was predictable from the outset, especially since Health and Human Services is starved of budget for auditors and can only hand out "slaps on the wrist" when they catch a hospital ripping off the system:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-13-fantasyland-general/

Upcoding isn't limited to Medicare fraud, either. Hospitals and insurers are locked in a death-battle over payments, and hospitals' favorite scam is sending everyone to the ER, even when they don't have emergencies (some hospitals literally lock all the doors except for the ER entrance). That way, a normal, uncomplicated childbirth can be transformed into a "Level 5" emergency treatment (the highest severity of emergency) and generate a surprise bill of over $2,700:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

The US health industry is bad enough to generate a constant degree of political will for change, but the industry (and its captured politicians and regulators) is also canny enough to dream up an endless procession of useless gimmicks designed to temporarily bleed off the pressure for change. In 2018, HHS passed a rule requiring hospitals to publish their prices.

Hospitals responded to this with a shrewd gambit: they simply ignored the rule. So in 2021, HHS made another rule, creating penalties for ignoring the first rule:

https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-price-transparency/hospitals

The theory here was that publishing prices would create "market discipline." Again, this isn't wholly nonsensical. To the extent that patients have nonurgent conditions and the free time to shop around, being able to access prices will help them. Indeed, if the prices are in a standards-defined, machine-readable form, patients and their advocates could automatically import them, create price-comparison sites, leaderboards, etc. None of this addresses the core problem that health-care is a) a human right and b) not a discretionary expense, but it could help at the margins.

But there's another wrinkle here. The same people who claim that prices can solve all of our problems also insist that monopolies are impossible. They've presided over a decades-long assault on antitrust law that has seen hospitals, pharma companies, insurers, and a menagerie of obscure middlemen merge into gigantic companies that are too big to fail and too big to jail. When a single hospital system is responsible for the majority of care in a city or even a county, how much punishment can regulators realistically subject it to?

Not much, as it turns out. Kuttner describes how Mass Gen Brigham cornered the market on health-care in Boston, allowing it to flout the rules on pricing. In addition to standard tricks – like charging self-pay patients vastly more than insured payments (because individuals don't have the bargaining power of insurers), Mass Gen Brigham's price data is a sick joke.

See for yourself! The portal will send you giant, unstructured, ZIPped text files filled with cryptic garbage like:

ADJUSTABLE C TAPER NECK PLUS|1|UNITED HEALTHCARE [1016]|HB CH UNITED HMO / PPO / INDEMNITY [34]|UNITED HEALTHCARE HMO [101604]|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|52.02|Inpatient PAF; 69.36% Billed|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|56.87|Outpatient PAF; 75.83% Billed

https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/patient-care/patient-visitor-information/billing/cms-required-hospital-charge-data

These files have tens of thousands of rows. As a patient, you are meant to parse through these in order to decide whether you're getting ripped off on that HIP STEM 16X203MM SIZE 4 FEMORAL PRESS FIT NEUTRAL REVISION TITANIUM you're in the market for (as it happens, I have two of these in my body).

Kuttner describes the surreal lengths he had to go through to prevent his mother from getting ripped off by Mass Gen through an upcoding hustle. By coding her as "admitted for observation," Mass Gen was able to turn her into an outpatient, with a 20% co-pay (this is down to a GW Bush policy that punishes hospitals that charge Medicare for inpatient care when they could be treated as outpatients – hospitals reflexively game the system to make every patient an outpatient, even if they have overnight hospital stays).

Kuttner's an expert on this: he was national policy correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine and covers the health beat for the Prospect. Even so, it took him ten hours of phone calls to two doctors' offices and Blue Cross to resolve the discrepancy. The average person is not qualified to do this – indeed, the average person won't even know they've been upcoded.

Needless to say that people in other countries – countries where health care is cheaper and the outcomes are better – are baffled by this. Canadians, Britons, Australians, Germans, Finns, etc do not have to price-shop for their care. They don't have to hawkishly monitor their admission paperwork for sneaky upcodes. They don't have to spend ten hours on the phone arguing about esoteric billing practices.

In a rational world, we'd compare the American system to the rest of the world and say, "Well, they've figured it out, we should do what they're doing." But in good old U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!, the answer to this is more prices, more commercialization, more market forces. Just rub some capitalism on it!

That's where companies like Multiplan come in: this is a middleman that serves other middlemen. Multiplan negotiates prices on behalf of insurers, and splits the difference between the list price and the negotiated price with them:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/us/health-insurance-medical-bills.html

But – as the Arm and a Leg podcast points out – this provides the perverse incentive for Multiplan to drive list prices up. If the list price quintuples, and then Multiplan drives it back down to, say, double the old price, they collect more money. Meanwhile, your insurer sticks you with the bill, over and above your deductible and co-pay:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/multiplan/

The Multiplan layer doesn't just allow insurers to rip you off (though boy does it allow insurers to rip you off), it also makes it literally impossible to know what the price is going to be before you get your procedure. As with any proposition bet, the added complexity is there to make it impossible for you to calculate the odds and figure out if you're getting robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/04/house-always-wins/#are-you-on-drugs

Multiplan is the purest expression of market dynamics brainworms I've yet encountered: solving the inefficiencies created by the complexity of a system with too many middlemen by adding another middle-man who is even more complex.

No matter what the problem is with America's health industry, the answer is always the same: more markets! Are older voters getting pissed off at politicians for slashing Medicare? No problem: just create Medicare Advantage, where old people can surrender their right to government care and place themselves in the loving hands of a giant corporation that makes more money by denying them care.

The US health industry is a perfect parable about the dangers of trusting shareholder accountable markets to do the work of democratically accountable governments. Shareholders love monopolies, so they drove monopolization throughout the health supply chain. As David Dayen writes in his 2020 book Monopolized the pharma industry monopolized first, and put the screws to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Hospitals formed regional monopolies to counter the seller power of consolidated Big Pharma. That's Mass Gen's story: tapping the capital markets to buy other hospitals in the region until it became too big to fail and too big to jail (and too big to care). Consolidated hospitals, in turn, put the screws to insurers, so they also consolidated, fighting Big Hospital's pricing power.

Monopoly at any point in a supply chain leads to monopoly throughout the supply chain. But patients can't consolidate (that's what governments are for – representing the diffuse interests of people). Neither can health workers (that's what unions are for). So the system screwed everyone: patients paid more for worse care. Health workers put in longer hours under worse conditions and got paid less.

Kuttner describes how his eye doctor races from patient to patient "as if he was on roller skates." When Kuttner wrote him a letter questioning the quality of care, the eye doctor answered that he understood that he was giving his patients short shrift, but explained that he had to, because his pay was half what he needed, relegating him to a small apartment and an old car. The hospital – which skims the payments he gets for care – sets his caseload, and he can't turn down patients.

The answers to this are obvious: get markets out of health care. Unionize health workers. Give regulators the budgets and power to hold health corporations to account.

But for market cultists, all of that can't work. Instead, we have to create more esoteric middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" and Multiplan. We need more prices to shovel into the market computer's data-hopper. If we just capitalism hard enough, surely the system will finally work…someday.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

[irisintheafterglow]

Hello, I have a request. So I have these lyrics brain rotting me and I just know you, with amazing writer skills, will be able to bring it to life. So, from The Prophecy, "Don't want money, just someone who wants my company" and like reader being lonely for a long time before meeting katsuki. I see reader as a very important part of the society, like not a hero, but more as a spy that can also fight (the Hero version of a fantasy assassin) And she is paired with Katsuki for a mission and he sees her in her true colours. Maybe a series? It's up to you, or course, but thank you for writing and being so talented and considering this request <33 Hope you have a great day!!

lowkey this request broke me in all the right ways omg...i love the prophecy so so so much it's so heartbreaking and definitely one of my favorites off ttpd <3 ty for your ask and all the love, hope you like this :)) so sorry that it took so long to get to and ty for your patience, i haven't had much time to write lately

cw: explicit language, implied fem!reader but no she/her pronouns (reader does wear heels), angst/fluff with happy ending, angry forced coworkers to lovers, bkg being lowkey mean but he's just psychoanalyzing you

you liked the sparkle, to a certain extent.

it was nice to pad around in designer satin, your name embroidered in gold thread on the back tag. you could appreciate the crushed velvet sofas in the living room of your high-rise penthouse, the walls covered in abstract art gifted to you by painters whose names you don't remember. your closet was larger than your university dorm and lined with enough expensive fabrics to start a hospital. everything about your lifestyle screamed luxury, yet even a marble bathtub couldn't provide much comfort when you came home at two in the morning to a cold, lifeless apartment. tragic.

bound by contract, you weren't allowed to live with civilian roommates, and pro heroes looking for places to rent were as scarce as dust left behind by your cleaning crew. you figured it was better that way, not needing to explain to your roommate why you're gone for weeks at a time on assignments and coming back with several broken ribs and a staggering sum of money. instead of friends, you had your job, however dangerous it became sometimes. you were good at playing a character (it's why you had your current job in the first place) and made it look like you weren't lonely, but you'd be lying if there weren't times you were just begging the sky to send you...who? who do you even want? love was a foreign word, a privilege reserved for those not in your profession. so you withstand whatever life throws at you like a statue made to wait, constantly on the brink of crumbling.

it's mid-january when you receive the call informing you that you'd be working with a partner on your next assignment. you wrack your brain for the few people trustworthy enough to join you, only for the words to catch in your throat when your agent says they're assigning someone for you.

if you were bad at working with others, bakugo was unapologetically worse.

"could you walk any louder?" you hiss into his ear as you stroll through the lobby of the most luxurious hotel in the city. his bicep flexes under your fingers, something you can only perceive as him stiffening in annoyance. "your big-ass feet are gonna get us compromised before we even make it past the perimeter."

"i'm not trained for stealth, genius," he argues, adjusting his suit jacket with free arm for the fifth time in twelve seconds. "i usually go in, blast the shit out of people, and call it a day."

"well, your thundering steps are doing the opposite of helping us blend in," you reply bluntly with a pretty smile toward the concierge desk. "we're doing recon, not infil." you take an abrupt step to the right, simultaneously bumping bakugo in the hip and making him stumble. with the way you start to sway and lean into him, your perfume makes his brain go fuzzy and his ears pinker.

"what the fuck are you doing?"

"you are literally the funniest person i've ever met. i can't believe i fell in love with you, sweetie," you drawl, fluttering your eyelashes.

"what the hell is wrong with you?" he cringes away as you beam at him with a lovesick smile, one hand keeping him flush against your body while the other brushes the pant leg of a passing security guard.

"just play along, darling," you seethe through a fake smile. without taking your eyes off your partner's face, your prize finds itself between your fingers and you unbutton the keycard without blinking, bringing it to his chest and smoothly slipping it into bakugo's jacket pocket with the guard none the wiser. once you catch the guard round a corner behind you via the reflection of a gilded mirror, you drop your act and detach yourself from a very flushed bakugo. "yikes, you're worse at this than i thought you'd be," you deadpan.

"you-you just used me to get that guy's card," he sputters in pure disbelief while you continue to walk down the side hall in the direction of the bar and banquet room. "the hell is wrong with you?"

"i work alone, bakugo," you say boredly. your heels click against the glistening marble and you roll your eyes as his loud steps catch up to you.

"yeah, that much is obvious," he glowers. "we're supposed to be working together on this shit-"

"you are not my partner in this job. you are a tool." you have half the mind to think that your coldness was too harsh, but remember that working alone is what you're best at, for better or for worse. "look, i'll get the job done; you just sit there and watch so our agencies can get off our asses about this being done through 'official means.' got it?"

"you think you're good at being alone, but it's actually killing you," he states in a tone that barely echoes off the sparkling walls. "you think you're good at being alone, but what you think is the farthest thing from reality." if you weren't running four minutes behind schedule, you'd whirl on him and slap his pretty face. you settle for stamping his foot with your heel and he lets you, an ungratifying fuck you all you get as a reward.

"i should have told my agent that i'd quit if she made me work with someone else," you snap with your arms crossed as he fishes out the keycard from his jacket pocket. he gives you a look that enrages you further, something between loathing and sympathy.

"take my arm, for fuck's sake. let's get this over with so i don't have to deal with you and your self pity ever again," he snarls and, for the first time, he catches you off guard. you obey without a word, eyeing him warily while he swipes the keycard and guides you into the crime boss' exclusive campaign gala.

"you know nothing about me, so don't try to analyze me since i know it's not your strong suit," you mutter under the sound of blaring jazz trumpets, sidling past investor after investor as they chatter excitedly about the your target's recently announced run for mayor. "i've seen the leaks about you heroes' IQ scores."

"yeah, they were faked by some extra in the todoroki agency that wanted to undermine him. wanted to imply that he was a nepo baby or some shit like that," bakugo replies without missing a beat and you're barely able to detect any malice in his answer. it confuses you. shouldn't he be pissed that you just insulted his intelligence? "icy-hot's one of the smartest guys i've met, so don't you fucking dare discredit him for one second." he's angry that you insulted...a different hero?

"that doesn't change the fact that you don't know shit about what i do," you dodge, spotting your target at a table near the banner-flanked main stage. he's surrounded by a dozen women who fawn on him like moths to a fire, caressing whatever body part they can get their hands on. it's exactly the scenario you need to bypass his defenses. "there, 3 o'clock. he's got his harem with him."

"so what's your play, lone wolf?"

"dance me toward him and then get out of my way," you order, dragging him onto the dance floor while the jazz band in the corner eases into a mellower tune. "what, got two left feet?"

"no, i'm just trying to figure out why you are the way you are," he questions, slipping one arm around your waist while his hand intertwines with yours.

"don't go hurting that handsome head of yours," you reply coldly without thinking, suddenly feeling your ears go hot when he smirks. "what?"

"nothing. 's just funny when you actually act human rather than the killing machine you were made to be," he admits and your jaw clenches.

"again, you know absolutely nothing about me." you subtly try to move your dancing bodies toward the crime boss' table, but meet bakugo's eyes with a glare when he actively spins you in the opposite direction. "we should be going that way, idiot."

"what if i wanna keep dancing with you, idiot," he retorts. "now," he takes a deep inhale, "i'm gonna tell you exactly what i think you are so maybe your next partner doesn't have to dig into your ass and get your head out of it."

"you are putting this whole operation in jeopardy--"

"don't care, especially if i'm being told by a self-pitying, pathetic excuse for a public servant who hides themselves away because they're too scared to make human connections," he rants, looking you directly in the eyes so you could see just how molten they were.

"stop," you warn, looking for any excuse to go in on your target so you could get out of the spotlight that bakugo was putting on you. he doesn't let you, though, effortlessly dipping you in a way that outsiders could consider flirtatious. it's an unfamiliar sensation, your spine curved under his steady hands, but all you can register is the intensity of his expression inches away from yours.

"you hide behind your callousness and say you don't need anyone fucking else because you've never had anyone else. and then, one day, when someone comes along who actually wants to know you for you, you're gonna be too much of a little bitch to realize that there are people who care about you. even if you are the most irritating being to call themselves human." he abruptly stands you both up and steps back, both of you burning and withstanding each other's wrath. your voice is smaller than you want it to be when you finally manage to speak.

"how would you know any of that?"

"because i was that." his attention flicks to behind you, toward the boss' table. "now would be your best chance. i'll sit at the bar and you finish the job, alone."

"...alone?"

"that's what you want, isn't it?"

no. i don't want it.

you don't catch him in time, some shackle like pride chaining you to the floor. it doesn't feel like relief, you realize when he turns to leave and disappears into the crowd. it feels like a punishment, an unbreakable curse that you'd put on yourself. you were a fool in a fable and it was sinking in, even as you worm the information you need out of your target and slip out of a back window, alone.

always alone.

---

it's not until ten months after your initial mission with bakugo that you finally work up the courage to tell off your agent.

"you have no place to be making such demands!" you lean away unbothered while your agent screams, her anger distorted by your phone speaker. "you have no idea how to--"

"don't care. i'm done working alone in the shadows," you interrupt with the callousness that once benefited you in your job. now, you realize, it was only impeding you and making it harder to find people who saw you as a human, not a tool. "put me in the infil mission or i'm quitting. for good."

"you don't know anything about infil. they'll eat you for breakfast if you join the op now," she hisses. "you need me."

"you made me think i needed you. you and the sparkle, and the fancy pajamas, and the smelly bath salts. you made me think that, to keep all the nice shit, i needed to be alone. but now i know i don't need to be."

"how would you know anything--"

"i know that you've purposefully delayed the infil operation so that you can cover up your ties to the boss' campaign, and that you sent me in with bakugo that night thinking i'd take the fall for your corruption. too bad he caught on and helped me investigate the todoroki IQ files you gave me and said they were official leaks."

"you're making a big mistake."

"and you should have learned sooner that i don't want the money. i never did."

"bullshit. money is all we have in this hero-run society, the only way we can be equal to them. what else would you want?"

"company." your agent falls silent at the same moment you hear a faint knocking on her line. "speaking of, looks like you have some." the tell-tale beep beep beep! of the call being ended echoes off the walls of the apartment and you sink further into the plush couch cushions, counting down leisurely on your fingers.

five,

four,

three,

two,

one.

"got her, babe!" you hear from down the hall. "and we got her good," katsuki says as he appears from your shared bedroom and grins at you. he leans against the door frame, waiting patiently as you delete your ex-agent's number from your contact list and show him the phone. "i ever tell you you're a natural at getting confessions out of people?" you giggle and let him pad over to you on the couch, sliding down so that he could lie his entire body on top of yours. even after all the time he'd been with you, the skin to skin contact still made your stomach burst into uncontrollable butterflies.

"i guess it comes with being a spy for so long," you suppose with a shrug. "but i'm not one anymore." your fingers absentmindedly trace the creases of back muscle through his shirt and he hums like a cat purring contentedly.

"yep, and now you're stuck with me until one of us dies in combat." you click your tongue with a tsk and lightly pinch his side, feeling him snort in triumph against your sternum.

"why can't you just say you love me like a normal person?"

"because neither of us are normal, genius," he explains, his eyes shut against your chest. "how normal is it to be so lonely that when you're around another lonely person, your shit cancels out?"

"i guess not that normal," you concede. "but still...what do i do now?"

"as much as i wanna say it, i don't think 'me' is the correct answer," katsuki proposes and you burst out laughing. "but really? anything you wanna do, baby. your hand's off the throttle, so now you're just cruising."

"since when did you use so many metaphors?" you ask with a teasing smile. "last week you said 'lightning in a bottle' and 'cursed like eve.'"

"since i met your dramatic ass."

"you know you love me."

"mmm, now you're finally starting to get it."

if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee on my ko-fi! commissions and nsfw requests can be sent through my fiverr! you can also check out my full masterlist here :)

[massiveharmonytiger]

So some people were very confused by this post, which would not exist were it not for the very specific form of Hannibal brainrot I'm afflicted with that can be summed up with the following sentence: Everything is about my blorbos. So I thought I should make a series of posts, because of reasons. Yes, I am very hinged and normal, thank you for asking.

First up, Zootopia.

A prey-coded character with lots of empathy, a passion for solving crime and big blue eyes tries to become a cop.

They get told that they don't have what it takes to be a cop for very similar reasons.

Their boss is a big, burly, slightly grumpy character.

He keeps assigning them cases that they're a bit reluctant to take on, but they do their job nonetheless. After all, they're professionals. They're here to save lives.

Their work leads to them meeting a sassy gay couple.

And a handsome, suave, honey-tongued predator-coded character who wears a tie everywhere.

He has an appreciation for fresh produce:

And has worn a muzzle at some point because the people around him feared getting eaten:

They team up and solve crimes together for a while.

There's a significant part of the plot takes place in a psychiatric hospital.

At one point the main character's very rich friend gets pregnant. They agree to become a parental type figure in the child's life.

The prey-coded character betrays the predator-coded character. The betrayal involves them denying the savagery inside them.

This betrayal is only fixed when the prey-coded character realizes they are not immune to going savage.

The prey-coded character leaves their family and returns to the predator, who means a lot to them.

They celebrate by sacrificing a lamb.

Bonus bunny cannibal joke:

[flowerandblood]

Just this one time (Oneshot)

[modern! • Aemond x sexworker! • female ]

[warnings: sex content, smut, sexwork, anxiety, fluff]

[description: The girl is forced by her life situation to set up a profile on a portal, that is used by sex workers to attract clients. One of them, a young, enigmatic man, wants more than her pictures (Anon Request). Complexes, smut, anxiety, fluff.]

This story has a continuation in another Oneshot (Just one more time), but it can be read as a standalone story.

* English is not my first language. Please, do not repost. Enjoy! *

_____

She had never been so distraught in her life as that evening, when her mother called her to say that their father was in the hospital. Like every week, he went out to drink with friends and play cards. On his way home he didn't look at the road and was hit by a car. He had to undergo surgery which he fortunately survived, his prognosis was good.

The nightmare began when the hospital realized what neither she nor her mother knew - that her father had been unemployed for several months and was not covered by health insurance. Her mother called her crying, saying that such a gigantic sum was beyond her financial means. She worked as a school teacher and tutored. She asked her if she had any savings.

She worked part-time in a bookstore and while she was studying, paying for her room and food, she had little money. She had just gotten paid and had given her mother everything she had. Not only was it not enough, but she had no idea how she was going to make it through her paycheck and pay all the bills. She cried all night that day and didn't sleep a wink.

The next day she spent all her classes thinking hard about what to do. She called her boss, but he told her that even if he wanted to, he couldn't suddenly hire her full-time. He could have paid her a week's wages sooner, but it wouldn't have changed much. She needed a large cash injection quickly. During one of the lectures she suddenly glanced at one of the girls in her year and froze.

She once heard her talk about a website where she sold her photos and videos. She dated rich men on cams, sent them her clothes and panties, and even arranged for them to have sex in her apartment.

She said it wasn't so bad at all, she had a lot of money quickly and she didn't worry about anything. She cared about her anonymity and carefully selected her clients.

She covered her face with her hands, terrified of what she was thinking. She had had sex with her previous boyfriends, but it was always in a relationship, never with a complete stranger, and never for money. When it came to pay that meant she had to satisfy someone, be someone's product to be happy with. She dismissed the thought, knowing she couldn't do it.

When she got home she involuntarily looked at the portal that the girl was talking about. She couldn't see anything without registering.

She sighed heavily, squeezing her eyes shut, not believing what she was doing. A large window opened for her. She was surprised at how many questions she had to answer.

Is she an adult? What nickname does she want? How old is she? What interests her? What is her hobby - sweet photos, videos, maybe meetings or video chat? What kind of men or women, and in what age range, did she want to meet on the portal? What prices for what services?

Once in a while she'd get up from her laptop, pacing the room with her hands on her cheeks, wondering if it was safe, and what if anyone found out. She'd probably die of embarrassment, but each time she sat back down and went back to writing.

No videos. No webcams. No meetings. Just pictures, sweet, innocent, maybe in a light negligee. Men aged 20-35. She didn't want any old, disgusting guys looking at her.

She clicked "register" and her account appeared in front of her on the portal. She could now add more details about herself, what she does, what she likes and dislikes.

She wrote down a few things, including her interests. All that's left to do was post the photos. She sighed softly, went on Pinterest and started looking for aesthetic inspiration. She wasn't going to make pornography out of herself.

She saw plenty of girls with shirts unbuttoned that were too big or in huge sweaters that uncovered their shoulders, in long socks to the middle of the thighs or in delicate, subtle underwear.

It wasn't too bad, she decided, because there was a charm to it and she could crop out the photo, so her face wouldn't be visible. Her whole apartment was decorated by her in a vintage style that she loved and the decor was perfect for the scenery for such photos.

She sighed heavily and looked into her closet. She put on her warm, light wool socks to the middle of her thighs, a soft cream sweater that reached her buttocks, and delicate panties. She wasn't wearing a bra underneath, so her breasts were slightly visible.

She thought she looked cute. She let down her long, slightly wavy hair and sat on the floor in front of her large mirror. Behind her was her beautiful bed and a lovely white chest of drawers, a soft white rug underneath.

She made herself comfortable, leaning back against the bed, her legs bent at the knees in front of her covering what was between her thighs. She held the phone up so that it covered her face and took a picture.

She cropped it, added a filter to increase the saturation and make the whole thing a little more pastel, and it was ready. She looked again to see if there were any photos or other objects in the photo that might have identified her, but she couldn't find anything. She took a few more photos in similar outfits, uploaded them to her laptop and added them with a heavy heart, setting one of them as her profile picture.

She also fixed the price for taking pictures on request. She pointed out that there is no nudity or strange positions involved. She thought she was so demanding and restrictive that no one would want anything from her anyway. Tired and discouraged by what she had done, she simply went to sleep.

She woke up in the morning, rubbed her eyes and got up to drink water. She sat down with her glass and opened her laptop, wanting to see if anything had happened to her account. She almost choked when she saw that she had thirty new notifications. She was terrified and for a moment afraid to click on it. She finally did and started reading.

Several men paid her fixed sum for similar photos she posted. They wrote that she is gorgeous, that they would like a photo of her lying down and wearing different clothes, but leave it to her how she will solve it. She swallowed loudly as she saw several messages suggesting meeting up for sex, sending someone her socks or underwear. She paused on the last message and for a moment thought she had imagined it.

Someone had sent her more than she agreed for a single photo. He was the only one who wrote nothing. She clicked on his account out of curiosity. His profile picture was a black square. All it said was 25 years old, male. In the place where you could insert your short description it said: "Don't write to me."

She blinked, wondering what that was supposed to mean, and whether it meant that the women he orders from wouldn't write to him. She wanted to do it to tell him that he had transferred too much money to her, but she assumed that if he wrote that, then maybe he did it intentionally.

As soon as she got home after class she began to think about how to dress for the new photos. For the men who sent her the amount she asked for she wore a long T-shirt, also without a bra, the same long socks and underwear. This time she lay down on the carpet, lifted her calves slightly while lying on her stomach. She covered her face with her phone again as she took the picture.

She thought that she would come up with something special for the man who paid her more. She took her thin, translucent white robe and tied it around her waist, so that her shoulders were bare. Her legs were bare too.

She took the flowers she had bought that day in one hand, so that they covered her breasts. When she checked herself in the camera, she thought that she looked like some sensual, baroque painting. She took a photo, applied the same filters as before, and sent him the photo first.

Then she changed into normal clothes and started writing one of the essays. She felt terrible, but at the same time felt some kind of relief when she saw that the money had actually flowed into her account. She figured a few weeks and she'd be able to get the rest of the money she needed.

She saw that a dot had appeared on the app card, indicating that there was a new notification. She clicked there curiously, unfolded the list, and froze.

The man who paid more for her picture ordered another one, paying three times as much as before. Again, he didn't write anything to her. No additional requirements.

She pursed her lips as she felt her heart pounding. She thought he must be a very rich, bored young man. Or one that has no success with women. She had to appreciate that he wasn't asking her to do any perverted things.

She decided that since he was paying her so much, she had to make an effort. She might not have to take pictures for anyone else, and his assignments alone would do the trick. She pondered for half an hour what to do. She grabbed the fabric of the same bathrobe, putting it on similarly.

Now she held a beautiful ornate fan in her hand, beads of sweat adorned her bare arms becasue it was hot outside. She thought she'd zoom in on them, capturing her bare arms, the slightly exposed portion of her breast, her hand with the fan, and the portion of her mouth with her dark hair falling behind her.

After applying filters, she thought that there is sensuality, lightness and promise in this photo. If she were a man, she would like to receive such photos from her woman herself. She uploaded the photo to her laptop and sent it to him. She was very curious to see if he would like it.

She jumped in seat when she saw a message from him fifteen minutes later.

Abyss: "You surprise me."

She blinked at the screen in disbelief. She thought he never texted anyone. Apparently, that didn't work when he was talking to someone himself. For a moment she didn't know what to do. He fell from the sky and she couldn't lose him.

Ophelia: "I hope that's a compliment."

She replied briefly. No cute emoticons, no subtext, no familiarity. He didn't reply for a moment, and she wondered if she should add anything. She shuddered, when she suddenly got a notification that she had received a reply from him.

Abyss: "Why are you doing this? Pictures, I mean."

His question chilled her. She swallowed hard, feeling her heart pounding. What was she supposed to write to him? Even if she told him the truth, would he believe her?

There must have been plenty of girls who wrote, that they needed money because of an emergency, not because that was how they made a living. However, she decided that his money was saving her skin and he deserved her to tell him the truth.

Ophelia: "My father had no insurance at the time he had the accident. Neither my mother nor I knew he had lost his job. I work part-time, but it's not enough. And here I am."

She read her answer a few more times and, with a trembling hand, clicked "send". She felt like she was using him. As if they objectified each other. She pursed her lips at the thought. She drew in a quick breath when he texted back after a few minutes.

Abyss: Will he make it?

For some reason, she smiled at the screen. She knew she couldn't allow anyone to talk too privately and imagine who knows what, but she found his concern and manner to be matter-of-fact and kind. She appreciated it, and she tought that she kind of needed it right now.

Ophelia: Yes, thank you, it's very kind of you to ask.

Just a few minutes later, another message arrived.

Abyss: How far are you from the full sum?

She swallowed hard, feeling the cold sweat on her body. For some reason she felt insecure and trapped. She finally wrote him the exact number without adding anything else.

Abyss: I'll pay the full amount if you agree to go to bed with me. On your terms.

She looked at his message and after a while she started to cry. She covered her face with her hands and shook her head, wondering what she was doing.

She felt it was all wrong, terrible, that she didn't want to do it. On the other hand, she told herself that just this once would be enough, that it would be over and she wouldn't have to do anything else.

Just this one time.

She sobbed loudly, texting him back that she agreed.

She wanted him to come to her right away the next day. She couldn't mentally take it any longer, she wanted it to be over. She thought that no matter what he looked like she would be nice to him and just give him what he wanted.

She put on a dress with tiny yellow flowers that fastened at the front, so that it was easy to take off. She wasn't wearing a bra or panties underneath.

She didn't see the point in it.

She hid a condom in one of the pockets - she wasn't going to catch anything from him. She was taking birth control pills, but preferred extra protection.

She hasn't eaten anything since morning. She was sick and pale. She took a shower, sprayed on her perfume, dried and combed her long hair. She hid in her apartment all the photos and objects that could reveal her name, as well as those of her family and friends.

She heard a soft knock on her door two minutes before the appointed time. She tried to control the shaking of her body and the fear she felt. She walked over to the door, rested her forehead against it, and exhaled softly, opening the lock. She opened it and froze.

This was not how she imagined him.

He was smoking a cigarette in the stairwell, measuring her up and down. He was wearing a black T-shirt, black pants and a black leather jacket. His blond hair was partly tied back, and he looked like a pirate with an eyepatch. She saw a long scar running down his left cheek. She wondered if the lack of an eye was the reason he preferred this way of getting close to women.

Despite the scars, she thought he was a very handsome, athletic man. He raised an eyebrow, and she remembered who she was and what she was supposed to do. She stepped aside quickly, opening the door with a crack, inviting him inside. He walked in unhurriedly, as if entering a friend's apartment.

He took off his shoes while continuing to smoke. He went deeper into the apartment, as if to check that there were no third parties, and that nothing suspicious was going on. He stubbed out his cigarette in her sink.

He glanced at her finally, his face stony, his gaze intense. She swallowed hard, feeling her heart pounding wildly, her legs trembling slightly. They stared at each other in silence for a moment.

"Will you drink something?" She asked softly, her voice trembling. His gaze softened at the sound of her voice.

"Water, thank you." He spoke calmly, his voice low and sonorous, almost purring. She felt shivers go through her.

She nodded and, without looking at him, walked into the kitchen, grabbed a clean glass and poured water into it. She handed it to him, then took a few sips from her own glass, feeling her throat go dry.

He put down his half-empty glass with a loud clatter, and looked at her meaningfully, leaning against the doorframe. She swallowed hard and set her cup down as well. She smiled warmly at him and walked past him, glancing at him, nodding for him to follow her.

They went into the room where her bed stood. The man looked around, his attention drawn to the books on her shelf. He took out some of them, looked through them, and put them back. She looked at him and wondered if she should start a conversation with him. He didn't seem like the kind of person who liked to talk about nothing, she decided.

"Here?" He asked dispassionately, and she shivered. She felt herself blush with embarrassment. She was terrified.

"Yes." She said softly, lowering her lashes. He looked at her over his shoulder.

"Is this your first time?" He asked uncertainly.

She swallowed hard and shook her head.

"Good." He said calmly and took off his leather jacket, placing it gently on the bed.

He finally sat on it, leaning forward slightly, his elbows on his thighs. He looked at her intensely, his gaze roaming her body from top to bottom. She lowered her lashes, feeling his gaze burn her.

"I won't hurt you. Don't be afraid. Do it as you see fit." He said low, looking at her calmly, his gaze black. She felt subcutaneously that he wanted her and was surprised to find, that it did not repulse her.

Maybe it was because he hadn't groped her since he walked in and let her decide what it would look like.

She approached him slowly, her legs as soft as gummies. She pursed her lips, swallowing softly.

"Can I sit on your lap?" She asked quietly, her voice trembling slightly, her face red with shame.

He grunted in acknowledgment and removed his hands, straightening up a bit as he looked at her searchingly. She straddled him, her whole body trembling. He placed his large hand on her back and stroked it steadily, their faces inches apart.

"Easy. Take your time." He spoke softly. She nodded and smiled gratefully at him. She saw his mouth part slightly at the sight, and he swallowed hard himself. She placed her hands on his chest to steady herself. She raised a hand tentatively, her fingertips close to his scarred cheek.

"Can I touch you here?" She asked softly, almost in a whisper. He just nodded his head, looking away.

Her fingers traced lightly over his skin, exploring the slight indentations where there must once have been deep wounds. She wondered if those scars were the reason for his complexes and hiding on this portal. Looking at him closely, she thought that he had an incredibly beautiful, interesting face.

He closed his eye, feeling her touch. The tips of her fingers traced further, touching his chin, cheek, mouth. She felt a shiver run through him at her touch. He finally pressed his cheek against the inside of her hand, kissing her skin gently. There was something touching about the gesture, some acknowledgment that he wanted to show her respect.

She finally took his face in both her hands and leaned over him. Her lips brushed his invitingly, gently, teasing him slightly. She heard him exhale softly, his hand tightening on the fabric of her dress. His lips parted invitingly.

She caressed his lips with hers, sucking them gently, running her wet, fleshy skin over them. He moaned softly, and she shivered at the sound. Startled, she found herself getting wetter between her thighs, her nipples hardened and showing through the fabric of her dress.

He smelled of cigarettes and strong perfume, his scent made her head spin. She shivered as she felt him return her kisses timidly, his other hand grabbing her cheek gently, pulling her closer. They began to caress and suck each other's lips, tilting their heads alternately with the wet, sticky sound of their saliva, panting into each other's mouths.

Her hand slid into his soft hair, massaging his neck, and he grunted in delight. He continued to kiss her, his lips pressing greedily against hers, demanding more. She involuntarily moved closer to him. They both moaned into each other's mouths as she brushed against his hard manhood, throbbing in his pants.

"Fuck." He whispered into her mouth, his hand from her back slid down to her buttocks. He looked at her in shock when he realized she wasn't wearing any panties underneath. They both moaned helplessly as his large hand squeezed her firm skin, forcing her to speed up.

She didn't know what was happening to her, but she was full of lust and arousal. She thought with surprise that she wanted this. She leaned over him, pressing his face to hers, her tongue timidly passing over his lips.

He sighed loudly in surprise, his tongue coming out to meet hers. They were both panting, teasing the tips of their tongues and licking like two kittens. His hips pressed against the space between her thighs, making her moan softly.

Her hands went to the buttons of her dress. She began to undo them slowly from the top, their tongues dancing with each other with a wet, sticky sound. He gave her a blurry look as he saw her slip her dress off her shoulders, exposing her breasts to him.

He stared at her chest with awe and wonder. He pressed his face to the space between her breasts, kissing her top to bottom. His caresses made her feel her insides clench around nothing, her wetness running in thin rivulets down her thighs, her hips rubbing against him. She could feel him completely hard now, throbbing intensely beneath her.

A loud, unexpected moan escaped her lips as he took one of her breasts in his hand and began sucking on her nipple. She pressed his face to her chest, his hand tightening on her buttock, forcing her to speed up. They were both panting loudly, his tongue teasing and licking each of her nipples in turn.

"Feels good?" He asked in delight, his voice trembling slightly. She swallowed hard at his question.

"Y-yes, God, it feels so good" She mumbled, her hands fisted in his hair, pressing him against her breasts.

She quickly slid them down to his pants and began undoing his belt. He moved away from her and leaned back, giving her better access, helping her by undoing his button and fly. She started to reach into her pocket for a condom, but he pulled out his own, putting it on quickly and nimbly.

She rose quickly, panting softly, and pressed her forehead against his, lowering herself slightly. When she felt his tip inside her, they both moaned loudly into each other's mouths. She began to tease him by falling lightly on top of him and rising again, not pushing him inside. He writhed beneath her, thirsty and desperate.

They both leaned back and were speechless as they felt him enter her. He was so big that he barely fit in. She began to slowly ride him, panting loudly, pushing him deeper and deeper into herself. He leaned back slightly, holding her ass with one hand, staring at her helplessly, panting with her, his thighs responding to her every move with a thrust.

"You're so big." She sobbed in pleasure, pushing him all the way in, and he moaned loudly as he felt it. She leaned against his shoulders and sped up, rubbing against him where she felt the greatest pleasure, her walls pressing greedily against his cock, making him barely able to breathe.

"Fuck, you're so tight" He gasped, moving faster and more aggressively inside her, and she moaned loudly at his every move.

He finally grabbed her buttocks and turned her suddenly on her back, spreading her thighs in front of him and began to fuck her quickly and brutally, his thighs slapping again and again with a wet, sticky sound against her buttocks.

She moaned loudly, leaning back, she had never had sex with someone this intense before, beads of sweat streaming down her body, her hips responding to his every thrust. She sobbed helplessly as she felt his thumb on her clit, massaging it in a circular, intense motion, making the tension inside her unbearable.

"So wet for me. Do you like it when I touch you like that? Shall I stop?" He purred in delight, his voice trembling slightly, she felt that they were both on the verge of orgasm.

Her hands clenched the sheets around her head, her hips responding greedily to his loud, wet thrusts, filling her to the brim, rubbing where she needed it.

"No, please, touch me, touch me there" She sobbed helplessly, spreading her thighs wider for him, her nipples sticking out, hard with desire.

He moaned low hearing her words. His thumb began to caress her more intensely, pumping his cock hard into her with the wet sounds of their shared fluids trickling down their thighs. She leaned back heavily, her lips parted in pleasure.

"Oh God, I'm gonna come, please, please, please!" She sputtered, moaning loudly. She bent back suddenly, her body went through a wave of hot pleasure, moaned loudly and helplessly, she had never experienced such an orgasm before.

She felt his body begin to tremble, her insides pressing against him in waves, wanting to hold him in, he began to moan loudly along with her.

"Fuck, God, yes" He gasped, coming hard inside her, thrusting into her all the time, unable to stop.

They writhed under each other, breathing heavily, their bodies refusing to let go, clenching on each other. He stared at her half-consciously, beads of his sweat running down his shirt, his hair stuck to his face, his mouth parted. They both looked at each other as if they couldn't believe that this really happened between them.

He swallowed hard and slid out of her as if suddenly remembering who he was. She clenched her thighs, feeling suddenly empty, covering herself with her dress, trembling all over. He slid off the condom, tied it, and laid it on the floor, not knowing what to do with it.

He zipped up his pants as he got out of bed, still breathing fast. He cleared his throat without looking at her, fumbled for something in his trouser pocket. He took out a wad of bills and placed them on her nightstand.

"That's the amount we agreed on." He said lightly, his voice breaking as he said the words.

She shivered all over, feeling the cold fast on her body. She covered her mouth with her hand as she felt tears welling up in her eyes. She finally hid her face from him and nodded.

"T-thank you." She said in a shaky voice and drew in a quick breath as she felt her body convulse. She thought he'd just leave, but she heard he didn't move.

"Did I hurt you?" He asked quietly. She looked at him shocked and shook her head, continuing to cry as she buttoned her dress. She felt lonely, dirty, worn out, unowned.

"Don't mind me, forgive me for my behavior." She said quickly, not looking at him, trying to calm her trembling breath. She wiped her wet nose from crying. He was silent for a moment.

"Do you want me to leave?" He asked quietly.

She was silent for a moment. Desperately, she shook her head. She heard him swallow hard.

"What do you need?" He asked gently.

She opened her mouth, not believing she meant to say it.

"For you to hug me." She whispered, clenching herself, trembling all over.

She drew in another sharp breath as she heard him return to her bed. She felt his weight against her, saw his black T-shirt and pants, smelled his scent again.

He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tightly. She snuggled into him like a teddy bear, burying her head into his chest. His hand tangled in her hair, the other caressing her back. She felt his heart pounding. She slowly began to calm down.

She closed her eyes as she felt him kiss her hair tenderly. She thought that she could fall asleep in the arms of this man, that she didn't even know. She cleared her throat quietly.

"T-thank you, I'm better now. I won't hold you back any longer." She whispered, but he only grunted at her words and kissed her hair again.

"Hold me for as long as you want."

_____

Oneshot written as Anon Request. I had a lot of fun writing this and I really like the end result. Let me know what you think. 💖

Aemond Taglist:

(bold means I couldn't tag you)

@its-actually-minicika @notnormalthings-blog @avgdusterfan @nikstrange @zenka69 @bellaisasleep @k-y-r-a-1 @random-ocity @g-cf2020 @melsunshine @opheliaas-stuff @chainsawsangel @iiamthehybrid @tinykryptonitewerewolf @namoreno

[doctor-hopper]

I'm really tempted to comb through his lines about luck and write meta on it, because even off the top of my head, looking only at DR2/Dangan Island content, it's like

His FTEs frame bad luck as being part of good luck: bad thing leads into something good enough to compensate

But he has at least one Dangan Island line where he anticipates something bad after experiencing something good

And interestingly considers nothing much happening to him to be bad luck in Dangan Island's ending, even though he had a good time, which warrants some unpacking (my current hypothesis is it's because his impending death is making him desperate to make his life meaningful, not 'waste' his remaining time)

Not all of his examples fall neatly into his luck cycle model, especially not the FTE version where the events are connected. The diagnosis and HPA admission were separate-ass events, in DI's ending he expected his convo with Hinata to go well because of the aforementioned general '''bad''' luck too, the events of chapter 5 are hard to sort into the model, some DI interactions make it sound like he just has extreme outcomes sometimes (eg. he'd win capture the flag first try every single time), etc etc.

I have a feeling at least some of the way he talks about his luck is copium, especially in his FTEs since he really had to focus on the idea of bad -> good in the killing game. But as you say, he could have been intentionally oversimplifying... and if he actually thought the cycle worked both ways, saying he lives in fear of bad things every time something good randomly happens might've veered too close to genuine vulnerability. Which he avoided (by his standards anyway- I think he lacked awareness of how bad the kidnapping + plane stories were) until the final FTE.

Either way, I definitely need to scrutinise his lines more :'D

A ton of good points! Komaeda’s luck is fascinating and nowhere near as clear-cut as he originally makes it sound. Fics where he tries to “game the system” and finally gain some sort of control over his luck are interesting—but honestly, I feel like he’s already been trying to do that for as long as he’s lived. And he exercises an impressive amount of power under those restraints! But…also.

As for anticipating something bad after experiencing something good, I do think the way Komaeda portrays the order of events is just what he tells himself and/or Hinata. In reality, good and bad luck are two sides of the same coin to him—the real important part isn’t the order, it’s that nothing good can happen without something bad happening too. Everything has a price. Luck is a zero-sum game.

(He touches on this again in 2.5 when he says there’s “a fixed amount of luck in the world” and so he’s content to suffer the bad luck for everyone else’s benefit. In the dream-world sim, the luck he experiences is apparently “ideal”, but it still has to exist. There still has to be an Omelas child of sorts. Komaeda would just rather it be himself.)

As for good being caused by bad vs. just following it, it definitely happens both ways and he’s definitely contradicted himself. Beyond that, even, there are cases in the game where it’s not totally clear what sort of cycle is involved in the luck he experiences. In 2-1, he draws the short straw simply because he wanted to. Was the bad…offscreen? Was it the killing game itself? Would “being forced to clean” actually count as bad luck even if he wanted it? Was it then followed by the good luck of finding the secret passage? People hypothesize that his luck works differently in the simulation according to his own belief, which would complicate things even more, but I’m sort of back-and-forth on that theory. There are arguably examples of luck working the way Komaeda claims it does in DR2, also—such as getting the Despair Disease the worst out of anyone thanks to his compromised immune system, but being able to discover in the hospital that Tsumiki was the culprit. ending up in the hospital but meeting a lovey-dovey nurse GONE WRONG

I’ve always read the Island Mode ending as copium myself. I do definitely think he was hoping for a chance to die meaningfully on the island, and I guess in his mind that could be bad luck, but it doesn’t really fit his model. The way he tries to nudge Hinata into agreeing it’s bad luck, the scene reads to me like he just needs to believe it’s bad luck so he can solemnly ask Hinata to be his friend. (And I think it’s notable that in the word he uses for friend here is 友達 tomodachi, which in this context could be understood as more of a personal friend—everywhere else, he’s used the word 仲間 nakama, comrades, to refer to the whole class as a unit.) And remember, being loved by someone is another way that Komaeda’s death could have meaning—so even if he didn’t end up in the climactic situation he was expecting, perhaps he’s realized there’s another way to get what he wants. :’)

But, yeah, what decides if something is good or bad luck for Komaeda though? I think even that’s not always clear to him.

I’ve heard the view that it “gives him what he immediately wants while taking away what is subconsciously valuable to him” (from TheAmityElf, I think) which is interesting, especially to play with as a writing tool, but not ultimately convincing. Some events could be loosely mapped to that pattern, but others contradict it a bit—you can’t tell me he just wanted money, and he did actively try to turn down his invitation to Hope’s Peak.

Which is now also making me think: Since the diagnoses and the invitation weren’t directly related, do you think he even connected them in his mind at first? What if he didn’t, and so he was afraid that by going to Hope’s Peak he would be invoking even more bad luck yet to come?

One more interesting dimension of his luck to think about is whether it hurts others vs. himself. In 2.5 it only hurts Komaeda, but that’s not quite the direct opposite of his real luck, because his real luck gave him cancer and dementia! However, it also does seem to be proactive in protecting him from actual death in both 2.5 and the rest of canon.

I’ll conclude this reply with this…relevant blackout poetry (blackout infographic?) I made years ago and which you suddenly reminded me of, lmao.

Silly coda: This is why Komaeda’s favorite word is eucatastrophe.

(…How lucky, then, that people say “Komaeda, eucatastrophe!” to him all the time!)

[r3leee]

i have zero idea if u write for josh but if u do i would be like VERY happy <3

in the trenches rn (pun intended) so i need me sum angst WITH COMFORT

nd if u dunno what to do then u can base it off tear in my heart, the craving or formidable

- lisey 🐈

nails in skin

PLSSSSS hon you know i deliver 🙏🏻🙏🏻

pairing: josh dun x gn!bandmate!reader

summary: you've been stressed lately; deadlines not being met in the band and family issues have been eating away at you, and it's not until blood is drawn you realize you need to calm down.

warnings: RPF!! don’t like, don’t read, established relationship, angstttt (as promised!!), cursing, hurt/comfort, mentions of death and sickness (no actual death tho!!!), injury

word count: 1,847, should take about 14 minutes to read

listen to: tired by beabadoobee

WHEN YOU WERE younger, you always thought the concept of a mid-life crisis was stupid. you thought you'd have your life under control. but, right now, that clearly wasn't the case.

ever since covid came, things had been harder. that's clearly not a shocker. for starters, there was the obvious flaw of not being able to go out and do things. being cooped up in the house was nice for a day or two, but eventually, being stuck inside made it harder to work on stuff.

before this had even started, you, your fiancée, josh, and your best friend, tyler, had begun work on a new album. but, now that you couldn't meet in your studio, things had been harder. a lot harder.

and finally, to top it all off, your grandma was in the hospital. it wasn't for having the virus, thank god, but rather a hip injury. however, you were scared to death she'd somehow contract it and she'd get worse than she already was.

all of this together, and what do you get? you'd figured a mid-life crisis.

all through this, josh was just trying to help. when this all first started, at the start of the pandemic, he was relatively good at fighting the fire that was you and calming things down. for example, there was a time just when covid started.

you were lying in bed, scrolling through your phone alongside josh. you were resting your head on his shoulder, completely content. his hand was rubbing your back as you sleepily scrolled through your instagram feed. until you got an email.

your eyebrows furrowed as you saw it came from mark. you clicked on it and the words you read stunned you.

"hey,

we can't work in the studio tomorrow or the rest of the week. covid protocols. sorry."

it was so short, yet so concerning. well, what were you gonna do? you turned and looked up at josh. "you get this email?" he shook his head as you showed him. "we can't just not record."

"it'll pass. it's okay," he tried to reassure you. "we'll probably get cleared to work there by the end of the week." you looked up at him meekly.

"you sure?"

"almost certain." he smiled and kissed the top of your head. "you always get so worried."

turns out, you were getting worried for good reason. at the end of the week, you contacted mark, asking if you were able to record in the studio. he said no and to wait another week.

that week turned into two, which turned into three, then finally a month before anything happened. a month of sitting around stressed you out like nothing.

constantly, you were caught bouncing your leg or pacing around the house for no particular reason. but, every time josh caught you doing that, he would calm you down. put a hand over your shaking leg, offer you guys to go on a walk. it was all you could really do with your current situation, but it worked.

but, when you got news of your grandma being admitted to the hospital, all hell broke loose in your mind. you had fond memories of her as a kid: baking pumpkin pie together during thanksgiving, coloring together, swinging in the tire swing in her backyard that was up just for you and your siblings. you refused to believe it might be possible that woman would be gone.

the second your mother told you, you immediately drove out to the hospital. josh was out getting groceries, but your mind was in such a frantic state, you didn't even think to call.

the drive there was a blur for you. eventually, you arrived at the hospital. after a check-in with your parents to confirm nothing bad was happening yet, you calmed down a bit. but, you still worried, as you weren't allowed to be in the room for too long.

you were the for a few hours before you decided to leave. as you checked your phone, there were at least four missed calls from josh. shit.

when you got home, you thought you'd calmed yourself down. but, when josh confronted you asking what happened, it was clear you didn't.

you walked into the door, the sound of your keys jingling as you pulled them out of the lock. you threw your purse onto a table in the mudroom and leaned against the wall for a second. "baby?" you heard a voice call out from further inside the house, followed by the sound of footsteps and paws coming towards you.

you looked up and saw your fiancee and your dog, jim, heading towards you. jim's face was so happy to see you as he ran through the hall that you almost forgot of your burdens for a second.

you crouched down to pet jim. "hi, sweet boy," you cooed as you petted him. he started to jump on you before josh stopped him. "jim, down!" he whined, but followed the order. he was a relatively well-trained dog, but he just was happy to see you.

you sighed as you started to stand back up. "where were you? are you okay?" josh rapid fired as you stood your ground.

and suddenly, the dam broke. “ya, i…i’m fine. it’s just-” you couldn’t bring yourself to say it. the words physically couldn’t escape your throat. tears started to well and your eyes.

“hey, hey, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay.” josh immediately ran to your side, engulfing you in a tight hug. you shakily inhaled and hugged him back. “you don’t gotta tell me if you don’t wanna.” his arms are warm as you stayed in that position for at least a couple minutes.

suddenly, jim started to jump at you both. you laughed as you both pulled away to look at him. “damn dog.”

you thought you’d get over it. in theory, it was easy, as your mom was constantly in the hospital, sending updates. and honestly, your grandma was doing just fine.

still though, there was something eating away at you; the thought she was in a prime spot to contract the virus.

you just didn’t want her gone.

also, deadlines for the band weren’t being met. again, it was reasonable; you guys couldn’t meet up in person, so almost all of this had to be on call. that was a major shift for the three of you, compared to meeting in studios, so it was no wonder not much work was getting done.

but, it was stressing you out like nothing. you had no schedule, no plan, no work, nothing to ground you.

about a month after your grandma was admitted was when it started to get bad.

you started losing yourself in a way. you found yourself checking your phone every few seconds for something to reassure or stimulate you, tugging at your hair, laying on the floor and just staring at the ceiling.

but, most importantly, you were ignoring your fiancée, josh.

he tried to reach out immediately when this started, being the kind person he is. but, you denied him, saying you were fine and it would pass.

clearly, it didn’t. as it got worse, he kept on trying to get you to calm down, but still, you shut him down.

you didn’t accept his help until that day.

you woke up in a bad mood that day. scratch that, horrible. you woke up with a pit in your stomach leading to god knows where and it felt like the size of jupiter.

immediately, when you went to get your morning coffee, you could feel it growing worse. josh was doing laundry in the basement, so he couldn't see how you were doing. jim, however, was upstairs, and when he heard you walk down, he scurried to you. even having his warm fur brush against you, you felt worried. his touch made you feel almost overstimulated.

before josh came up, you decided to go to the store then make breakfast to try and distract yourself.

the drive there and grabbing everything made you even more worn out. the bright lights of the store bugged your eyes, and for whatever reason, your ears couldn't stop ringing.

but, you pushed through until you got home, trying to ignore the feeling in you that you should rest. josh, at this point, was in the living room. when he saw you come home, he almost immediately knew something was wrong. but, you shrugged him off.

as you laid out the ingredients on the counter, josh snaked up behind you. "i can make you breakfast," he insisted.

"it's fine," you replied. sharp. insistent.

"are you sure? you seem...jittery."

"i'm sure." your tone was firm. you pulled out a cutting board to start chopping fruit. as you started to cut, josh couldn't help but notice the slight wobble in your hands.

"darling, seriously, i don't really trust you with a knife right now." you ignored him, continuing to cut. "you need to tell me if something's going on." no response. only the sound of the knife against the cutting board.

"i'll be fine," you snapped, setting the knife down. you stayed looking away from josh.

"i know you. you're not fine. you need to tell me what's happening." you started to walk to the cabinet, grabbing a bowl.

"nothing's happen-" you started to yell, when all of a sudden, you lost grip on the bowl, causing it to fall on the counter. you froze. "shit." you mumbled over and over again. "shit, shit, shit..." without you thinking, you tried to grab a shard when it cut your hand. you winced and pulled your hand away.

"woah, baby, hey, it's okay." josh quickly held you from behind. "let's get you to the bathroom, okay?" he rambled. "come on, let's go, let's go, it's okay, you're fine."

you didn't know why, but suddenly, you felt stiff. like a bomb about to set off. josh set you up on the counter of the sink in the guest bathroom as he grabbed a first aid kit. he was gentle as he cleaned your cut, knowing it would hurt. and it did. the sting honestly brought you back.

as he bandaged your cut, you felt tears coming out. "fuck, i'm so sorry." you wiped your eyes.

"it's okay."

"no, it's not. i acted like a bitch all of today and now i'm here hurt and you're patching me up. that shouldn't be how it is." as he stuck the final bit of the bandage down, he looked up at you.

"hey. look at me." you looked in his eyes. "it's okay. i'm not mad at you. you had a reason for feeling that way. i'm not dismissing that. all i ask is next time, you just tell me, okay? cause i don't want you getting hurt cause you didn't tell me about something."

you sniffled and nodded. "thank you." he smiled and grabbed your chin, pulling your face in to kiss you.

"of course. come on, i'll make you breakfast."

[tommykinard6]

I love your headcanons!

Why do you think Tommy has a difficult relationship with sex and how does that show?

Also do you have any more ideas about the emergency contact one? Like the first time they get a call from the hospital...

Yessss thank you so much for asking about those headcanons! I’ve been wanting to talk about these.

I actually just got another ask about the emergency contact and I’m going to go super in depth for that, so stay tuned!

But why do I think Tommy has a difficult relationship with sex? I’m so, so glad you asked. This is one of my biggest headcanons.

However! Please read with caution. TW: for a form of self h*rm involving sex, self hatred, and internalized homophobia.

Tommy was extremely closeted for most of his life. When he was at the 118, he couldn’t even accept himself. But at some point, he stopped being able to ignore it. For me, this might be when he realized he liked Sal (see my other post).

Now for some people, exploring your sexuality includes a *ahem* wild phase. To me, Tommy had two parts of this phase. The first one was…not great.

Tommy was a self loathing closeted man. He hated himself for being gay. He wanted to be “normal”. So when he stopped being able to ignore it, he thought he could “get it out of his system”. So he went to bars outside of LA (he wasn’t risking bumping into anyone he knew) and hooked up with any man who showed interest. He wasn’t picky. He was just more focused on getting out of this “phase”.

So he hooked up with a lot of men. And he didn’t care about himself at all. In fact, he out right hated himself every time. So it devolved. If something didn’t feel good, Tommy leaned into it because he saw it as punishment. He used sex to punish himself and to hurt himself.

I’m not quite sure about how he pulled himself out of it, but we’ll go with this. My idea is that he had a sexual partner who caught onto what was going on, that Tommy secretly hated something happening but refused to stop on his own. The partner shut down the event and when he called out, gently, Tommy on what was happening, Tommy broke down. The partner held him and listened to his garbled story and talked him through it. Instead of the hookup, they spent that night just talking, with the partner trying to get Tommy to see what was happening and get him out of the slump.

And it didn’t fix it. Tommy continued this pattern for a couple more hookups, but he started to get discontented and uncomfortable. Around this time maybe, the 118 got Bobby Nash and the dynamic started changing. Sal was gone and working with Hen, an openly queer firefighter, started to shift how he looked at himself.

So Tommy stopped the hookups and started working on himself. He couldn’t quite face himself still, but he worked on liking himself outside of his sexuality. He started laying down boundaries when he hooked up. And then he left the 118 and started therapy. He was ready to start over. He was tired of the pain and the self hate and the cycle he’d been stuck in for so long. He wanted what he’d seen others have. He saw Hen with her wife and he wanted a bond like that and he knew it could never be with a woman.

Skip forward all this time and he’s learned to be gentle with himself. He finally loves himself. He has embraced his sexuality. Maybe he’s still friendly with that past partner or maybe they never spoke again, idk. He’s had some relationships but nothing’s really stuck. Then he meets Evan Buckley.

He meets Evan Buckley and he feels the sun for the first time. And Evan is still figuring himself out and Tommy not only really likes him, but also wants to make sure Evan doesn’t make the same mistakes he did.

Does that answer the question? Let me sum it up.

Tommy used sex to punish himself and those were his first real experiences with guys. So even now, in healthier relationships and with better mindsets, he doesn’t do the hookup game anymore and is very shy of having sex too soon. He doesn’t have sex without knowing and trusting the person.

Y’all I have no idea if this made sense, but this is literally the premise of a story in my brain.

[gogodollie]

Sister Imperator and Papa Nihil Romance Masterpost

Saw someone the other day claim that Sister Imperator was a bitch for leading Nihil on and although I blocked them instantly, it haunts me because genuinely what are you smoking to EVER get that vibe.

These two are old people and they’re crazy. Nihil is just really into the chase and Sister still thinks that playing hard to get is sexy. Once again, they’re old.

Chapter Media

Chapter One: New Blood

Sister Imperator: “Not here… not now- not like this.”

At this point I don’t think there’s much from the prequelle livestream that would confirm the two in a current sexual/romantic relationship so that means that is the first instance where there’s an insinuation that there is in fact something sexual going on between them. Sister redirects Nihil rather than shutting him down entirely just makes it clear that this is a mutual thing and not just Nihil being a horndog. Also, the fact that this was a direct result of the sexual charisma spiel and involves a lot of heavy breathing (and several glances downward from Imperator.)

Chapter Five: The Call

Papa Nihil: “You have always had excellent critiquing of films, Sister.”

Sister Imperator: “Papa… Tell me, are you alone?” “And what are you wearing?”

Sister Imperator: “I’m just trying to- forget it.”

This is one of my favorite scenes ever but the secondhand embarrassment it gives me is so bad (my poor girl Imperator has been in that hospital for WEEKS I can’t even blame her for attempting it). Anyways, another clear example of Sister being receptive to Nihil’s flirting and even going on to (very poorly) attempt to reciprocate. She wants to get fucked sooooooo bad it makes her look stupid. If Nihil was a little smarter this could have worked but unfortunately Sister has no game and Nihil was on the toilet.

Chapter Eight: Kiss The Go-Goat

Papa Nihil: “Why can’t I have another chance?”

Sister Imperator: “Do I have to remind you what happened last time?”

This part gets quoted a lot in reference to Sister rejecting Nihil and her lack of forgiveness towards the cheating incident. However, all things given, I don’t think those lines directly are about their relationship given the context that they’re said in (but they can definitely be taken that way when considering the KTGG sequence and ending). This reads more as Imperator reminding Nihil of his failed attempt to lead the band after he criticizes Copia

Chapter Nine: Tomb It May Concern

Sister Imperator: “Ugh it’s perverse: Papa.”

Sister Imperator: “I…had his balls.”

This is the first instance that Sister brings up a sexual connotation with the title “Papa” which she clarifies in Chapter Ten: Home Coming & Special Guests when Copia asks if she won’t call him Papa because of “the old guy.” Then obviously she just straight up says she had Nihil’s balls in a metaphorical and literal sense much to Copia’s horror.

Non-Chapter Media

Prequelle Promo Sermon

Papa Nihil: “Well Sister you’ve never made a mistake in my eyes.”

Sister Imperator: “Isn’t he sweet? Very generous man, he always was.”

Dance Macabre Music Video

I take this mv with a grain of salt because nothing about it aligns with the 60s and to me it feels more like a retelling of their meeting from Copia’s memories, rumors he may have heard, and whatever misinformation Sister and Nihil had spread about the event themselves. That being said, I do know there are a lot of people that accept that this was the actual first meeting and wedding of Imperator and Papa which actually is insanely romantic. They’re like if Romeo and Juliet were cult leaders and also in their mid-twenties. Love at first sight! Also the first insight into a past relationship between the two.

SIOSP Promo Live

Papa Nihil: “Oh Sister, I wish you were here- I wish Sister was here. She’d be so proud of me.”

Just a guy missing his girlfriend nothing to see here folks.

Ghost on Ghost

Literally just look at them. The context of the scene they’re recreating is enough to sum everything up, the video being posted on Valentine’s day, those old people were getting NASTY.

Mary on a Cross Music Video

There’s a lot of things about this music video that make me crazy and I would like to begin with the confirmation that the two did in fact live together in a non-abbey setting (PLEASE peep the two empty glasses and wine bottle on their porch table). Aside from the violent aftermath of Nihil’s little on stage scandal, the two obviously were seriously together in some sort of way that would both warrant this reaction from Sister and also would involve them living together (mind you it’s still the 60s and this sort of arrangement between an unmarried couple would be uncommon but also they’re fucking satanists so. whatever). A little peak into Sister being the one to initiate intimacy even after the cheating and what their messy future will look like together (but this time around she doesn’t forget her bra).

The Future is a Foreign Land Music Video

This is mainly just about Nihil’s perspective on the breakup and the instant regret he has once realizing that Sister is gone for good. Though he may be an idiot, Papa is genuinely willing to give up everything to have her again and in his little drug induced haze is dreaming about a future where she does forgive him for all that he’s done. Also the way that dystopian Sister/Papa fucking explode and old futuristic Sister/Papa just fade away makes me think that perhaps there’s an essence of moving on in a physical sense in the future but for my sake (needs to see those old people as much as possible) I pray this is not true.

Final thoughts:

In my humble opinion, I think by the time Maralyn took over as Sister there was a shift in her relationship with Papa Nihil that made them go from strictly sexual to romantic again- the next few chapters and RHRN make them seem almost domestic as they take on more parental roles. This could be because of Nihil’s death and Imperator being able to forgive him because she is quite literally one of the few people that can see/interact with him (she was NOT risking another cheating incident, who knows what that 80 yr old was capable of when he was still alive OR she was just finally able to make peace with it because Nihil in some sense is an entirely different person than the man that cheated on her all those years ago (aka a fucking ghost without a physical form).

At the end of the day these two are STUPID and despite the assumed breakup in the Mary on a Cross music video, I don’t think they’re capable of being away from each other for long. God knows they fucked at least twice directly after watching Papa Nihil kiss three different women in front of her so I really would not doubt that they were still hooking up from the time after the moac mv and before their first older appearances.

[enigmaticxbee]

XF AU - Fic Recs

When the world was unrecognizable and upside down, there was one thing that remained the same. You... were my friend, and you told me the truth. Even when the world was falling apart, you were my constant... my touchstone (or, alternate universe and canon-divergent fics):

Contemporary AUs:

A Companion Unobtrusive by @slippinmickeys - She needed a roommate. He needed a room.

The Annapolis Grant by @slippinmickeys - Fake relationship! Scully hires Mulder to pretend to be her boyfriend.

Aprons and Scrubs by @lokisgame - Scully’s a doctor and Mulder runs a bar.

Five Years and a Lifetime by @monikafilefan @slippinmickeys - One night stand AU. Five years later, Scully and Mulder work at the same pediatric hospital, and Scully's four year old daughter bears a striking resemblance to the picture of a dark haired girl that sits on Mulder's desk...

Skin by Annie Sewell-Jennings - In a world where Mulder and Scully have never met, fate intervenes and brings two worlds colliding in the city of Charleston, as a vicious murderer reigns and a storm approaches.

Sinners Come Down by aster_risk - Six years into her marriage to Daniel, Scully meets Fox Mulder at a bar one night, and they get talking and fucking over alcohol and self-pity.

In the Best Interest of the Child by @mldrgrl - When tragedy strikes, Mulder is forced to take guardianship of his young niece, but the matter is complicated by the arrival of a sister-in-law he's never met.

Historical AUs:

By the Dim and Flaring Lamps by @sunflowerseedsandscience - Civil War AU. Captain Mulder befriends Private Scully who’s hiding a secret…

The Countess and The Earl by @slippinmickeys - Regency Romance!

Old Growth Forest by Andrea - Mulder and Scully travel back to frontier times

Rocky Mountain Interlude Part 1 and Part 2 by Jacquie LaVa and Tess - Mulder and Scully travel back in time to solve the case of a Colorado mining ghost

The Science of Sex by @if-the-seascatchfire - Masters of Sex AU. Mulder and Scully are doctors in the late 1950s who undertake a years-long study about human sexuality, and as part of the research, they also have sex with each other - you know, for the science.

Out of this World:

The Magician by Suzanne Bickerstaffe and Jennifer Lyon - Fantasy series where Mulder and Scully travel to another world full of magic (one of the first fanfics I ever remember reading!)

Out of the Little Grove by @slippinmickeys - Crossover with His Dark Materials (a mashup truly made just for me, my 13 year old self would have been over the moon)

Blinded by White Light by @dashakay - Post-colonization. What are we, but the sum of our memories? A classic.

Julia and Gabriel by Mish - Post-colonization. A new identity, a new, dangerous society, an unchanged heart and soul. Gave me Hunger Games vibes for some reason (although written years before that was published)

Canon-Divergent: Pre or Early Series

Eleventh Hour by Rachel Anton - Mulder travels back in time to find college-aged Scully and change everything.

Belphagor’s Prime by Prufrock’s Love - When Scully disappears Mulder travels back in time to a pre-X-Files Scully for help.

In Another Life by @mldrgrl - What if there was no conspiracy? What if Mulder was just a regular FBI Agent? What if Scully was just a bureau pathologist?

How They Met by @peacenik0 - After an encounter at Scully’s FBI academy graduation party they must determine how to deal with their past and their undeniable attraction to one another when partnered up.

One Week at Quantico by CrossedBeams - What if Mulder had been teaching at the Academy when Scully was training…

Paging Dr. Scully by @mangokiwitropicalswirl - Mulder keeps ending up in Dr Scully’s ER.

Only One Choice by @sisterspooky1013 - Scully was never assigned to The X Files.

The Way Things Are by Sukie Tawdry - A season 1 one night stand changes everything. Baby-fic.

Departures & Arrivals by anarchybeauty - After the X Files are closed in 1994, Scully moves on. Two years later, she runs into Mulder in an airport.

Right Hand Return by humphreywrites - Scully is returned from her abduction with a baby, no memories of anything prior to her captivity and some PTSD.

12 Rites of Passage and 12 Degrees of Separation by Anne Hayes - mytharc story written very early in the series run.

parent_1 by @markwatneyandenesemble - It’s 1996, Mulder’s been off the X-Files for three years, and not speaking to Scully. They’ve almost moved on with their lives. Almost.

Canon-Divergent: Mid Series

A Different Place by @myownsuperintendent - When Mulder successfully brings one of the Samantha clones back from the farm with him in Herrenvolk, she must learn to adapt to a different life.

Once More With Feeling by skinfull - While on a stakeout Mulder is shot in the head and loses his memory.

Iolokus by rivkat and MustangSally - Mytharc AU. Painted across the barren and desolate reaches of Texas, the shadows of the Project put additional pressure on Scully and Mulder's already fragile relationship. After a hostage crisis raises more questions about the Project's breeding program, Scully begins her own investigation, leaving Mulder to choose between saving her and saving himself. Pretty disturbing but fascinating, a classic.

Arizona Highways by Fialka - Mytharc AU. Visions of Melissa lead Our Heroes on a case confirming the existence of a series of Emilys. But does Melissa really have a message, or is it all in Scully’s head? Another classic.

Heuvelmans' On the Track by @mashnotesofthemythopoeic - post-FTF mytharc AU, truly a ride you’ll never forget.

The Leap and Landfall by Ambress - Scully has a one time opportunity for motherhood, given to her by the Kurt Crawfords.

All That Is Dark and Bright by @malibusunset-xf-blog - Emily lives AU.

Five Years and One Night by Shalimar - Scully leaves the X-Files post-Emily but gets drawn back in when Mulder discovers Emily wasn’t the only child created.

Cubed by Louise Marin - Mid-season 6 Scully does a little body-swapping of her own. Can she and Mulder make it back to each other? Do they want to?

The Boy on the Beach and Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 1999 by @cecilysass - One moment she was sitting in the chair. Her chin up, her expression ice. And the next moment she was gone. Fantastic exploration of the Samantha storyline.

Canon-Divergent: Late or Post Series

40 Weeks by @malibusunset-xf-blog - What if the IVF attempt in Per Manum had been successful?

Mobius by L.A. Ward - Post-Requiem while investigating the disappearance of a physicist, Scully finds someone she didn't expect - Mulder. But is it her Mulder?

By the Wind Grieved by Karen Rasch - Mulder is returned several months post Requiem but he doesn't know who he is or what Scully and he are to each other. Together they must reclaim the past before their enemies take away their future.

Deadalive AU by @markwatneyandenesemble - Mulder is returned but is missing several years of memory.

The 13th Sign and 7 Days in May by Prufrock’s Love - Post-Deadalive. Mulder saw no reason for life, death, sex, Armageddon, or emotional dysfunction to stand in the way of true love.

Hurricane Season by rah and beduini - Post-Existence week at the beach with the Scully family and baby Wim.

Terra Firma series by @malibusunset-xf-blog - Post-Existence domestic family drama, a classic comfort read for me.

2008 by MystPhile - With the quest at an end, the X-Files closed in the year 2000. Our heroes went their separate ways. In 2008, they meet in Bloomingdale's and the past, present, and future are explored.

Dr. Scully's School for Exceptional Boys by Prufrock’s Love - More than a decade had passed. Mulder had no reason to hole up in his apartment alone, wearing a Three Dog Night T-shirt with dried mustard on the hem and blue jeans that had seen better days. He wasn't "saving himself" for anyone. Especially not Her. Though she remained epically, beautifully, brilliantly kick-A-S-S.

Machines of Freedom by Amal Nahurriyeh - post-IWTB. The end of the world is coming. And they're doing everything in their power to stop it.

North of Zero by @slippinmickeys - Post-IWTB, post-colonization. The bombs have fallen. The aliens have come. What’s next?

Canon Parallel AUs:

I've got you under my skin by cuits - In a universe where soulmate identifying marks exist and affect a part of the population, would Mulder and Scully's relationship evolve any different? Unfinished but complete through Existence so it still ends in a satisfying place.

Half-light by skuls - Mulder and Scully get a second chance.

The Family G-Man by Neoxphile and FelineFemme - A double tragedy strikes Mulder the week before Christmas of 2003. What if he could go back and change things, save the son one lost and give the other the family she wanted? Could it keep them safe?

[piracytheorist]

How do you think Yor and Loid navigated some plot holes of their relationship? For example, how would they justify to their associates they recently started living together after a year? People probably don't know where they lived, though, so they assumed they always lived together. Another issues is how justify being married for a year but Yor just changing her name in the beginning of the series? I guess people just don't question it too hard.

To be honest, I think it's just something the narrative is glossing over because it's got more important stories to focus on. And I don't actually mind. Stories don't need to be fully detailed on everything.

That said, maybe a way they tried to explain living apart was by saying that they were giving Anya the space to grow accustomed to Yor. They could say that having Yor immediately and suddenly move in with them could cause Anya to be distressed and hate Yor, so even though they decided to marry, they took their time getting Anya used to the new situation. Which couldn't be further from the truth, by the way, Anya was super excited to have this new woman live with them only knowing she kills people, lmao

As for the name change, the only thing I can think of as an explanation is that during the supposed year after she married, she never met someone new at her job and thus never introduced herself as "Yor Briar". Everyone who knew her a year later already knew her from before. And honestly, considering her job is desk work at city hall, it's very likely that she actually didn't meet anyone new in that year. She had the coworkers who already knew her, and since she was shy and quiet - especially before meeting the Forgers - she could just pretend that "Yeah we got married but it was a very small wedding and we took some time getting his daughter connect with me so I didn't move in with them immediately so it wasn't a big deal plus I'm shy so I didn't think to make a deal of it".

As she's said, she's spent most of her time working and taking care of Yuri - who probably only moved out a couple years before the start of the story - so it's safe to assume she didn't have time for hobbies and other activities, so another point that she possibly didn't meet any new people and had to explain the sudden name change.

So, to sum up, kind of a plot convenience, but one that could be explained through the character's previous position.

As for Loid, I'm guessing that, if he had the time to position himself as a psychiatrist in the hospital before meeting Yor, he probably said from the beginning that he was married, since getting a wife was already on the agenda. No-one knew him before - and technically, Loid Forger didn't actually exist before - so there wasn't any change he had to "introduce". He was just brought in as Loid Forger, psychiatrist, (re-)married with a child, even if he didn't have a wife at that point.

(anime only fan here, don't spoil me for the manga)

[eleanorfenyxwrites]

The Man From Y.I.L.I.N.G.

Chapter 6: "Family Matters"

Jess's art for this chapter was inspired by this gif from the movie, which is definitely one of the funniest little quick humor moments in my opinion: Tumblr Post

--//--

SUITE B203 - 监理处 LUXURY RESORT

“You got my mark PREGNANT?!” Jin Guangyao cries in something perilously close to despair. Jin Zixuan at least has the good grace to look sheepish. The same cannot be said for Qin Su, currently busy giggling into her hands and watching the two of them through her fingers as she at least tries to pretend like she isn’t having the best night of her life watching them argue.

“No!” Jin Zixuan protests after a moment of spluttering. “She wasn’t your mark yet when I got her pregnant!”

Jin Guangyao doesn’t resist the urge to slap his hand over his eyes as Qin Su loses the battle with her giggling to throw her head back and cackle instead.

“So let me get this straight. You’ve been on an extended holiday for months while I pick up the jobs father would normally send you on only to find that what you’ve been doing instead of working is starting a family with the Jiang Heiress, who I’m now meant to be investigating because she’s probably in league with the Yiling Laozu, who I’ve been instructed to stop at all costs?”

“That sums it up really nicely, Yao-ge,” Qin Su offers through her snickers. “God if I’d known you two have this much fun working for Guangshan I might have reconsidered joining the family business.”

“You definitely wouldn’t, A-Su,” Jin Zixuan sighs. “Trust me, it’s not fun at all.”

“No. No it is very much not,” Jin Guangyao mutters. “Father is going to murder me if he catches wind of this. When was the last time you spoke to him?”

Jin Zixuan wrinkles his nose a little. Jin Guangyao wants to flick him right in the middle of his stupid, perfectly-proportioned forehead.

“It’s been at least a few weeks now, I think? Definitely before we realized A-Li’s situation, I’ve been avoiding his calls since we found out. He still thinks I’m off following his grand tradition of sleeping my way through every brothel in Yunmeng. Oh..Uh…sorry, Yao-didi.”

Jin Guangyao ignores the accidental blunder with an ease only his brother is granted, takes a deep breath in, and shakes himself all over once in a dubiously successful attempt to get himself back on track.

“Okay. Okay this is fine. I need to go check in with A-Huan and Mingjue, you two just..just stay here, I want every scrap of information you both have on the Jiangs once I’ve made sure those two aren’t killing each other.”

“Ohh so the pretty one is already ‘A-Huan’, is he?” Qin Su titters and raises her eyebrows at Jin Zixuan, who raises his right back at her with a knowing little smirk — even though there’s nothing to know! “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“I miss being an only child,” Jin Guangyao hisses at the pair of them as he stalks out of the room, his sister’s laughter following him out into the hallway.

Jin Guangyao doesn’t even bother knocking at the door to 191, he just lets himself in with his stolen key to find Lan Xichen alone, curled up comfortably in the armchair with his feet up and reading a newspaper (his book is still sitting on Jin Guangyao’s nightstand. Oops). Lan Xichen barely even glances up at his entrance, just meeting his eyes long enough to give him a tiny smile that somehow manages to dissipate his irritation with Jin Zixuan like it was never there.

“Huan-ge. Where’s Big Red?”

Lan Xichen gestures with his chin towards the ensuite. “He’s been in there since the moment we returned; at least half an hour.”

Jin Guangyao raises an eyebrow at that but Lan Xichen just shrugs and gets back to his newspaper, hunkering down a little further in the chair to get more comfortable.

“Mingjue? What is it with you and doing questionable things in bathrooms?” he calls with a knock on the wood. “I heard you put the heir of Yao Textiles in the hospital today.”

Nie Mingjue’s tone is dry as the desert when he replies, muffled through the door and talking over the sound of faint splishing, “He had soft bones.” Jin Guangyao is not going to laugh at that. He’s not. A little more snappish, Nie Mingjue adds, “And don’t question my methods.”

No, Jin Guangyao is actually, definitely not going to laugh. Rude.

“What’s this, A-Yao?”

Jin Guangyao turns his attention to Lan Xichen’s gentle concern to inform him, “Tough guy in there had a bit of an incident with a few nice young men in the bathroom.”

“They were not nice, and they had it coming!”

“Mingjue,” Lan Xichen sighs and tips his head back for a moment as if something on the ceiling will help him find the strength to chastise his ‘fiancé’.

“You need to control your temper, Mingjue,” Jin Guangyao reminds him.

“And you need to keep it in your pants, Meng Yao.”

Jin Guangyao freezes at that and feels the blood drain from his face. “What?”

“He thinks you seemed…awfully cozy with Jiang Yanli—” Lan Xichen murmurs with an apologetic little grimace. Jin Guangyao can’t help but notice that he doesn’t say he disagrees. “—as well as the young woman who recognized you just as we were leaving.”

“The Jins are notorious for running honeypot missions, but I don’t work that way, nor do I approve while we’re supposed to be working together,” Nie Mingjue adds, still muffled through the door — good, since Jin Guangyao isn’t sure what his own face is doing and he’d very much like to punch Nie Mingjue in his, so it’s better for everyone involved that they’re not currently in the same room.

“Need I remind you you are engaged to Huan-ge in order to get close to Lan Qiren and use him to find out where Lan Wangji is?” Jin Guangyao can’t help but point out that particular hypocrisy. “What is that if not the very definition of a honeypot?”

“We aren’t sleeping together,” Lan Xichen protests, his ears flushed. “In fact I apparently spent last night in bed with you.”

That accusation — it might not be much of one, but it certainly feels like it could be if pressed — stops Jin Guangyao short, and he knows in an instant that he hasn’t managed to hide the genuine flash of hurt that just spiked through him.

Jin Guangyao clears his throat and tugs on the hem of his jacket to twitch it straighter. “I’m not sleeping with anyone, and even if I were it would be none of your business. However, if you must know, I’ve found out that Jiang Yanli is romantically involved with someone who can be very useful to us. And as for the second young woman — she had better have been comfortable with me, considering she’s my sister.”

Jin Guangyao straightens his jacket again in the awkward silence that follows the explanation that he shouldn’t have even had to give in the first place. Any desire he might have had to tell his companions that he’s got such a good lead on information about the Jiangs has been thrown very firmly out the window, and he has more than half a mind to just leave them to stew in their guilt.

“A-Yao—” Lan Xichen starts, sitting up a little straighter. Jin Guangyao shakes his head and starts to head for the door, though he only makes it a step before Nie Mingjue yanks the door to the bathroom open abruptly with a spill of red light from behind him and steps around the frame to stand right next to him.

“Look at this.” Jin Guangyao folds his arms over his chest and, after a beat of considering his options, reluctantly leans over to see the freshly-developed photos Nie Mingjue is holding out for his perusal. “I’m using film that’s been treated for gamma radiation. These spots—” he points to a dark, blue-green, slightly wavy patch on an otherwise monochrome red photo of Lan Qiren “—mean that something has been in close proximity to radioactive material within the last 24 hours. Look.” He flips through his little stack to the next photo, this one of A-Qing and Jiang Wanyin talking next to the yacht taken from some distance back from the docks, both of their hands clearly covered in those same dark patches despite the distance the photo was taken from. “They’ve got the supplies moving already, I’m sure of it. We need to act fast.”

Jin Guangyao takes the stack of photos and flips to the last for himself, this one of Jiang Yanli when she’d been kissing his cheeks to say goodbye. Her hands bear the same marks as the others’, the dark stain of it spreading to his elbows where she’d been holding them to pull him in close.

“Hm. You know what I’m going to do with this?” he asks Nie Mingjue. “Sleep on it.” God that was worth it just for the gobsmacked expression on Nie Mingjue’s annoyingly handsome face.

“What?”

“Goodnight, both of you,” he smiles and heads for the door before either of them can stop him again. If he’s going to have to choose between getting his siblings’ thoughts on the situation or talking it through with the companions he apparently can’t even trust not to assume the worst of him (when he’s given them no reason to!), then the answer is obvious.

Once back in his room, he finds Qin Su and Jin Zixuan where he’d left them, chatting idly and picking through the snacks he’d had brought down for them all to share.

“Why’s your girlfriend covered in traces of radioactive material?” Jin Guangyao asks his brother, tossing the photos down to the bed next to Jin Zixuan’s hip.

“Is she??” he asks, bewildered, and picks up the photos to study. “Oh. That can’t possibly be good for the baby, can it?”

“My guess is no, ge, so why is she in contact with it?” Jin Guangyao sighs. He settles onto the tiny sofa next to Qin Su and accepts a palmful of sunflower seeds from the bowl of them she’s munching her way through.

“I don’t know! We don’t really…talk about work when we’re together.”

“I swear, Zixuan, if you’re about to tell me that for months you’ve kept each other too ‘busy’ to so much as talk—”

“Not like that!” Jin Zixuan hurries to say, face beet red and his expression more than a little desperate as he looks to Qin Su for help, though she’s too busy laughing again to be of any assistance. “Well…maybe sometimes like that. But no! I just mean..we talk about other things. Like…what we want with each other in the future, what we’re worried about, what we like, things like that. It’s really Wanyin who wants to talk business all the time, but that’s what he’s got Qing-jie for.”

Jin Guangyao’s attention sharpens and he sits up straighter, though Jin Zixuan doesn’t notice as he’s started flipping through the photos with a little frown.

“Qing-jie?”

“Oh I know this one!” Qin Su pipes up. “You saw her today, Yao-ge! She’s been with the Jiangs for years now, longer than a lot of the people that work for them. Most people figure that she’s Jiang-jiejie’s personal assistant, but there were rumors when she first got involved with them that there’s more to her than meets the eye. Apparently she’s there for all of their meetings no matter how private, and she’s pretty much always talking business with Jiang Wanyin. I also heard from some aunties a while back that she and Jiang Wanyin got married when the Jiang siblings came back and started rebuilding Jiang Shipping after the war, but I don’t know if that part’s true. It seems like someone’s always gossiping about Jiang Wanyin’s marriage status every other month, so who really knows.”

Jin Guangyao blinks through the implications of there being, perhaps, another key player behind the scenes so high up in the Jiangs’ organization, someone who can hide in plain sight as well as he can, if not better. And if she really is married to Jiang Wanyin? Jiang Yanli, sweet and kind Jiang Yanli, might not be the driving force behind their connection to the Yiling Laozu at all — what if this woman is?

“You said you talk to Jiang-guniang about what she’s worried about,” Jin Guangyao says.

“Yes…what about it?”

“Has she been worried about anything in particular lately?”

Jin Zixuan sets the photos down again to give the question due consideration, brows scrunching together again as he thinks.

“Not…really? Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. I mean she always worries about her brothers, but that’s just part of being a sister I think, isn’t it A-Su?”

“Mhm, it’s true. I worry about you two and Xuanyu all the time, especially since I know even a little about what you’re doing for a living.”

Brothers.

Plural.

Jiang Yanli worries about her brothers.

Jin Guangyao opens up the folder in his head (a photo-perfect copy of the folder his father had left them that day he’d briefed them for this mission), and he flicks through his memories of the photos until he settles on the one he wants.

Jiang Yanli caught and held between two tall, lanky men, one of whom is a younger Jiang Wanyin, and the other the Jiangs’ late ward, Wei Wuxian. He’d recognized Jiang Wanyin from a different photo that day as well, and with a mental flick he pulls out the photo of Lan Wangji with some of the Yiling Laozu’s highest ranking staff that he’d shown to Lan Xichen that first night in East Yunping.

And there, standing in between Jiang Wanyin and another, softer looking man he still doesn’t know, stands this mysterious A-Qing, Qing-meimei to Jiang Yanli, stern and sharp-eyed, so different from her unassuming presence at the party that even he nearly hadn’t recognized her at all.

But no, it’s definitely her: she’s got the same sweetheart face, the same round ears, the same wide, dark eyes.

She’s trusted by the Yiling Laozu.

She’s invaluable to the Jiangs and involves herself in all of their business dealings.

Jin Guangyao is on his feet and heading for his suitcase before he can think twice about it.

“A-Yao?” Qin Su asks, startled.

“Is that your sneaksuit? Where are you going?”

“It’s better for both of you if you don’t know,” Jin Guangyao shrugs off their concern as he disappears into the bathroom to change into..well he wouldn’t call it a sneaksuit, that sounds weird, but he supposes Jin Zixuan’s right enough; Dark, comfortable trousers, a dark knit sweater with a high collar, his usual utility belt strapped around his hips, a pair of back holsters strapped criss-cross over his chest, and a leather sheath with his favorite knife strapped securely to his upper thigh, and Jin Guangyao’s ready to infiltrate the Jiang Shipping warehouses.

He reemerges in record time and Qin Su stands to leave with him. “I really don’t like this, whatever it is,” she warns. “You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Jin Guangyao soothes her with a smile. “And if anyone catches me I’ll just say I’m there on official business for the father of the next generation of little Jiangs.”

“Not funny, Yao-didi,” Jin Zixuan huffs. “I’ll stay here until he’s back, A-Su, don’t worry.”

Jin Guangyao hides the way he wrinkles his nose at his brother’s meddling as he slides on a dark jacket to hide all his various weaponry, but he’s in too much of a rush to bother arguing about it. He ducks out into the hallway with Qin Su on his arm and together they head down to the lobby, just another well-dressed pair ostensibly heading out to dinner for the evening.

They part ways a few streets over from the resort, where Jin Guangyao puts his sister in a rickshaw to her hotel on the other side of town and disappears into the shadows between streetlights to head for the river for the second time today.

... -.-. . -. . / -... .-. . .- -.-

JIANG SHIPPING RIVERSIDE INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX — YILING

The Jiangs’ Yiling warehouse is a long, hulking sprawl of buildings surrounded by plenty of space for transport trucks and barbed wire fences, the entire complex hugging (and partially enclosing) a deep bend in the river in a way that likely ensures that there’s no traffic up or down the waterway without their approval. It’s an incredibly strategic location if one wants to be in the business of owning everything on the water between here and Yunmeng — a fact that Jin Guangyao is capable of appreciating in the abstract as he makes his way past the outermost ring of patrolling security to head for an untended stretch of fencing. It requires a handful of minor acrobatic feats up and down a few walls between areas of the complex, nothing too strenuous; he’s just starting to feel good and limber when he reaches the fence and takes shelter behind an empty supply truck to pull out-

A hint of movement a few feet away snags his attention, and when he turns his head it’s to find none other than Nie Mingjue kneeling half in shadow behind the rear bumper of the same truck in the split second before every bit of artificial light in this half of the complex abruptly fizzles out.

Jin Guangyao sighs, hangs his head for a long moment to lament his lot in life, and turns to approach his (ugh) partner with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Is this what you call ‘sleeping on it’?” Nie Mingjue asks with a sardonic glance up at him from under his lashes.

“I suppose I have you to thank for the lights?” he snarks back.

The moonlight is just bright enough for him to see the flash of Nie Mingjue’s teeth as he smirks up at him with a short, “You’re welcome.”

Jin Guangyao grinds his teeth for a long moment before he steps closer and drops down to one knee next to Nie Mingjue. “Listen — I work better alone,” he says shortly. Nie Mingjue studies him for a long moment before he shrugs.

“So do I.”

Jin Guangyao absolutely will not admit that something of an understanding passes between them in that moment. He’s just going to…breeze right past that. He does not enjoy working with this man, and he never will.

“It’s just for tonight,” he says, “and tomorrow morning it’ll be like it never happened.”

“Agreed.”

Jin Guangyao nods, that sorted, and turns to the fence to start snipping at the links as quickly as he can.

He’s only managed to cut through a few links when Nie Mingjue clears his throat very pointedly and asks, “What is that?”

Jin Guangyao brandishes his clippers in his direction for a brief moment. “Super hardened boron, sharpened by a CO2 laser,” he smirks as he returns to his snipping.

“We have approximately 10 minutes before the power comes back on and that’s how you’re choosing to cut the fence?”

“Well what was your plan, glare at it?”

Jin Guangyao glances over at his companion, startled by a burst of red light accompanied by a high-pitched but barely audible electrical whine. He looks up from the device in Nie Mingjue’s hand to find the red light is throwing the dimples hidden in his self-satisfied smirk into deep relief.

“What-?”

“CO2 laser.”

Jin Guangyao grits his teeth and waves for Nie Mingjue to get on with it then, and when he’s sliced through the fence as easily as a cleaver through a block of tofu Jin Guangyao stands and dusts off his knees. Nie Mingjue holds one side of the split fence aside for him with a sarcastic sort of ‘after you’ gesture and Jin Guangyao ducks through, darting quickly across the open space between them and the nearest access doors into the main warehouse.

“I’ll take the bottom,” Nie Mingjue says when they spot the dual locks on the door.

“I’ll take the top.”

They pause at the door for a moment, assessing. He might have…just slightly underestimated the height of the lock. Jin Guangyao looks up at Nie Mingjue, finds the man already looking down at him, but there’s no way in hell he’s changing his answer so Nie Mingjue doesn’t either, he just ducks down to his knees again to start pulling some ridiculous contraption out of his pocket — it’s got earphones, for basic lockpicking — while Jin Guangyao stretches up on his toes with his trusty universal pick in hand.

It’s the work of a few seconds and a particularly deft flick of his wrist before he feels and hears the tumblers disengage and he steps back to peer along the side of the building, keeping a watch out for the patrol — that’s headed straight for them.

“Mingjue,” he mutters as the man fumbles with his stupid gadget.

“Quiet.”

Jin Guangyao huffs and watches the bobbing pair of flashlights grow closer.

“Anything I can do to help?” he tries again when it’s clear that yes, they are in fact about to get spotted before they’ve even made it inside.

“Yes, be quiet!”

The door rattles again as Nie Mingjue attempts to get the device placed just right and Jin Guangyao swats him on the back of the head.

“Just let me do it,” he hisses and drops to his knees. Nie Mingjue twists smoothly away and up onto his feet to swap places with him, gun held at his shoulder to keep lookout. Jin Guangyao pops the second lock just as easily as the first and stands to pull the door open, waving Nie Mingjue in ahead of him with a little bow.

He shuts the door behind them as silently and quickly as he can — with all the stealthy reflexes of a man who lives a decent portion of his adult life hiding from Madam Jin — and exhales a sigh of relief as the guards try the door not two seconds later only to find it safely locked once again. He glances down at the absolutely useless device in Nie Mingjue’s hands and exhales another, longer sigh through pursed lips paired with a raised eyebrow that he hopes comes across as judgmental as he intends.

They watch each other for a long moment as the door rattles behind them, and when they hear the guards moving on Jin Guangyao gives Nie Mingjue his best mask of a smile and extends an arm to wave him further into the echoing warehouse.

“Shall we?”

Nie Mingjue just stares at him so Jin Guangyao goes first, heading deeper into the silence of hulking machinery and gleaming chrome.

“Loving the way you work, Big Red,” he calls over his shoulder, unable to resist the dig when Nie Mingjue had criticized his work (his perception of Jin Guangyao’s work) not even an hour ago.

Jin Guangyao steps further into the space as his eyes adjust to the lack of lighting save for moonlight coming in through the banks of windows roughly 30 feet overhead, just below the ceiling. He spots a row of what looks to be a series of laboratories along the mezzanine overhead and he points up at the darkened windows with a glance at Nie Mingjue at his side.

“You want to take the labs and I’ll take down here?” he asks. Nie Mingjue shrugs which is…so not helpful, but whatever. “Fine. Meet me on that gantry in five minutes. Try not to get lost,” he points to the structure overhead in question before he heads off into the shadows around the corners of the room without another word.

-... .-. . .- -.-

Why does Jin Guangyao have to be so competent?

Not that Nie Mingjue isn’t as well, he knows he’s good at what he does or else Wen Ruohan wouldn’t have let him (or Nie Huaisang) live this long, but there’s just something about Jin Guangyao that snags his attention and keeps it.

He watches Jin Guangyao dart off into the darkness with barely a whisper of fabric rubbing or the clunk of his boots on the cement floor and he shakes his head to refocus on his own assignment.

He takes the stairs two and three at a time up to the mezzanine and starts peering through the windows of the labs at the top of them, though he’ll admit it feels a bit fruitless to be looking for something out of place when the whole point of a lab is to keep things clean and neat. (And it’s not as if they’re just going to leave crates of enriched uranium laying out in the open overnight no matter the circumstances.)

Still, they know that the Jiangs are working on something — if they’re right then they’re working on a lot of somethings — and the evidence of that doesn’t just disappear when the goods start moving as they so clearly have. His grip is confident on his pistol raised at the ready near his shoulder as he makes his way methodically down the bank of labs and turns the corner to the next, gaze sharp as he hunts for he doesn’t quite know what.

-... .-. . .- -.-

Jin Guangyao makes quick, thorough sweeps of the ground floor of the warehouse, Geiger counter in hand and chattering softly in the way of all small gadgets. He scans every single storage tank, overhead crane, and suspicious machine of unknown purpose he can possibly think of, waving the probe near anything even remotely capable of being contaminated and watching the needle stay obstinately within the normal range.

He finishes his sweep of the ground floor quickly and heads upstairs, leaving the labs to Nie Mingjue as promised but heading for the catwalk suspended over the central space to scan more tanks and heavy machinery, his patience thinning as everything comes back negative, negative, negative.

-... .-. . .- -.-

Nie Mingjue turns the next corner and finds a door left ajar. He takes it, entering this row’s labs and passing through them directly rather than looking into them from the outside, but the new perspective offers up nothing that the previous hadn’t — there’s nothing here. Papers are neatly in order in their folders, the enormous computer banks nearly the size of the labs themselves lining the walls are shut down and dark for the night, lab coats are hung neatly on designated hooks; every single surface is tidied up for the night. His frustration builds as he comes to the end of this third row and finds himself on the gantry Jin Guangyao had pointed out from below, his (temporary) partner just stepping up to meet him at the junction of their two paths.

Nie Mingjue shakes his head and Jin Guangyao sighs as he stuffs his Geiger counter back into his utility belt with a head shake of his own.

“I didn’t find anything either,” he reports. Nie Mingjue is just opening his mouth to suggest a new place to look when he glances over Jin Guangyao’s shoulder and spots a lone guard far too close for comfort, his deep blue uniform the perfect camouflage in the gloom of the unlit warehouse. Nie Mingjue snags Jin Guangyao around the waist and ducks with him into the last lab he’d just passed through, determinedly not thinking about how easy it is to just pick him up and haul him where he wants as he tucks them both into the tight space of a shadowy corner just beside the door.

“Let go of me,” Jin Guangyao hisses with a slap to Nie Mingjue’s hand pressed tightly against his stomach; Nie Mingjue just claps his free hand over Jin Guangyao’s mouth instead with a little smirk and a flash of vindictive pleasure that isn’t even tarnished by Jin Guangyao licking and gnawing on his palm like a child in retaliation. (He’s got a little brother, he’s pretty sure Jin Guangyao can’t throw anything at him that Nie Huaisang didn’t hit him with a hundred times as a boy.)

Jin Guangyao goes still as the guard comes around the corner, murmuring something too low and quick for Nie Mingjue to catch into the radio in his hand as he steps right into the lab with them a mere half a foot away from their hiding space.

He straightens up and lets go of Jin Guangyao at the sight of a glint of glass and metal on the guard’s exposed wrist, his heart sticking in his throat and his entire body yearning for the watch he can just barely make out through the shadows.

He’d know that watch anywhere. 

Nie Mingjue pushes Jin Guangyao behind him and slips out of hiding (ignoring Jin Guangyao’s hissed, “Wait!”) as the guard crosses to the changing cubicles on the other side of the room, nudging a few of the lab coats aside to open a hidden compartment containing a bright yellow hazmat suit. Nie Mingjue steps up into place behind the guard, plants his feet roughly shoulder width apart, and extends his right arm straight out to the side, taking a few wide practice swings inward as the guard chatters on into his radio, unaware.

On the final swing, Nie Mingjue puts proper momentum behind his swing and smacks the side of the guard’s head, catching it as it falls to the side with the other hand to leave the man standing upright and slumped ever so slightly to the left, apparently knocked out cold.

“Okay…why?” Jin Guangyao asks as he emerges from the shadows, peering up at the unconscious guard with narrowed eyes. Nie Mingjue ducks around to lift the man’s wrist and steal back —

Oh.

“I thought it was my father’s watch,” he explains, gruff. He shifts to start digging through the opened secret locker at least in part to hide the fact that he’s embarrassed. “My mistake.”

“And ah..what exactly did you…do to him?”

“It’s a Nie technique, takes years to master,” he says as he rummages through the toolbox on a shelf at the top of the cubby to start identifying its contents. “It’s called the Kiss. So long as no one touches him he’ll be unconscious like that for about 20 minutes.”

“Handy.” Nie Mingjue blinks in surprise for the simple praise and glances over his shoulder at Jin Guangyao — who he can abruptly see perfectly.

“Generator’s back on,” he notes as the lights in the room and beyond all flicker back to life. “Look at this. Radiation gear and a protective suit in the back of a strange lab — in an antiques shipping warehouse?” With the lights back on he suddenly notices a little electrical box in the back wall of the cubby, and when he flicks open the lid it’s to find a pair of buttons, one green one red. “Next to a hidden button?”

Jin Guangyao shares a glance with him and nods, so Nie Mingjue clicks the green button and steps out of the way as a section of the floor just behind their feet starts to slide away with a soft hydraulic hiss. When the section of the floor has slid a few feet back, it reveals a staircase down into a reinforced concrete space full of pipes and red-lit gleaming steel.

“And we wouldn’t have found that without my father’s watch.”

Jin Guangyao rolls his eyes at him and Nie Mingjue is pretty sure he mutters something rude under his breath, but he heads down the stairs without any real complaint; Nie Mingjue is willing to count it as a win. 

The stairs lead down to a short hallway, the end of which cuts off abruptly at a vault door as tall as he is, every single high-security measure on it gleaming under the overhead lights.

“You want to try this door too, or shall I?” Jin Guangyao asks him with that unfairly handsome smirk. Nie Mingjue glances down at him out of the corner of his eye and snorts.

“All yours, Little Viper.”

“Excellent choice. Hold this then,” he says, holding out the geiger counter chattering softly in his hands; before Nie Mingjue can do more than glance at the dial of numbers on the front of it Jin Guangyao is pressing a device of some sort from his utility belt into his hands saying, “This too.” Nie Mingjue watches on, bemused, as he pulls something else again from the belt and swaps it for the second. “Unwrap that,” Jin Guangyao nods at what seems to be a leather pouch, which Nie Mingjue unrolls curiously to find an assortment of gleaming lockpicking tools that he starts poking through as he listens.

“This —” Jin Guangyao starts as he attaches the device to the dial on the front of the vault and sticks the little headphone attached to it in his ear “— is a Jiangxi Yuanjin high security vault, Class C, model 1703-B. It has a four-wheel combination mechanical lock, internal relockers triggered by different common mistakes made, and fully synchronized cylinders all the way around the central mechanism.”

Nie Mingjue glances up when Jin Guangyao turns a lever with a satisfying metallic clunk, his little device for the combination dial whirring away through some sort of pattern that he’s just going to assume is correct. Jin Guangyao takes his earbud out and re-winds it loosely around the spool in the middle of the device before he comes back to Nie Mingjue, swatting his hand away from his idle perusal of his tools to dig around for a one inch wide, flat strip of metal, which he pulls from its slot along with a suction cup from another pocket of the pouch.

“It is very nearly state of the art, but not the latest Jiangxi model. The earlier models had a design flaw—” he says as he pats Nie Mingjue’s hand and turns back to his task without seeming to think about it “—and it’s a flaw I intend to exploit.”

Nie Mingjue blinks at Jin Guangyao’s back and then down at his own hand…and goes back to digging through the delicately implements to amuse himself with trying to figure out what each one is for (how many ways are there to pick a lock, after all?) instead of thinking about whatever…that gesture was.

He glances up again when Jin Guangyao returns to him, this time with an entire panel off the front of the door in hand. He glances at it for a moment before dumping that into Nie Mingjue’s pile of things to juggle along with the little tool he’d apparently used to pry it off.

“Still, this is very difficult to open; but — and this is very important — not impossible,” Jin Guangyao continues as he returns to the door yet again to stick his hands inside the cavity behind the panel he’d just removed and turn some new dials Nie Mingjue can’t see well enough to identify. 

Nie Mingjue snorts and wonders if this monologue is strictly necessary. He doesn’t bother to examine why he finds Jin Guangyao’s monologuing quite a bit more entertaining than Wen Ruohan’s, even though it’s clearly being used for similar dramatic effect. Maybe those two would get along better than Nie Mingjue ever has in Qishan. It’s highly likely that he doesn’t actually want to find out.

Jin Guangyao steps back as tumblers audibly fall into place and a light clicks on inside the panel in the same moment his gadget on the combination lock stops spinning, a little bulb above the dial lighting up green. He looks up at the door with his hands on his hips in obvious satisfaction as suddenly, through the muffling of bulletproof steel, comes the rhythmic, syncopated clanging of each of the series of cylinders that ring the interior wheel withdrawing away from their casing in the door frame to disengage the lock.

Damn him.

That’s kind of sexy.

Jin Guangyao steps forward the moment the clanging stops to start turning the massive spoked wheel in the center of the door, well-oiled steel gliding effortlessly in his expert hands. “The flaw, if you’re wondering, was that the people who designed this model weren’t actually very good at stealing things.” Jin Guangyao turns his head to watch the piston attached to the wheel turn into place just so, and after a beat the final piece of the lock disengages, the door popping open a millimeter as the internal pressure is finally released.

Jin Guangyao finally turns to look at him over his shoulder with a pleased smile as he takes the handle and begins to walk the well-balanced door open, calm and casual.

“I, however, am.”

Nie Mingjue blinks at the open vault in front of him, hands still full of his own gun, Jin Guangyao’s tools, and the panel off the door. With an effort, he swallows down anything embarrassingly wanting that he might say that he would absolutely regret once the adrenaline of the evening fades.

Jin Guangyao frees his Geiger counter from the jumble in Nie Mingjue’s hands again and it crackles instantly, needle leaping from one end of its arc to the other as Nie Mingjue watches the readout over his shoulder. Nie Mingjue gathers his wits enough to ask, “Did you disengage the alarm?”

Jin Guangyao raises an eyebrow up at him, smarmy and self-assured. “The 1703 models don’t have an alarm.”

Nie Mingjue squints down at Jin Guangyao and nods in (thoroughly mocking) approval, lips pursed to keep himself from smirking, as said nonexistent alarm starts blaring from a loudspeaker right over their heads.

“Loving your work, Viper,” he can’t possibly be expected to resist teasing. Jin Guangyao yanks his belongings back out of Nie Mingjue’s hands before he darts into the vault and Nie Mingjue uses his newly-freed grip to aim his gun at the stairs they came down, his blood up and adrenaline even higher than before, though the stairs are still empty for now.

He glances over his shoulder to find Jin Guangyao standing perfectly still over a long open metal box of some kind (alarmingly nuclear missile-sized) and his heart rate spikes as he faces th stairs again with a shout of, “Let’s go, A-Yao!” that echoes back at him off the walls of the bunker.

Just barely over the sound of the alarm he hears shouts starting out in the lab and he glances back over his shoulder again to find Jin Guangyao seemingly empty-handed and running straight at him. He snaps into action, gun at the ready as he takes the stairs two at a time back up to the lab with Jin Guangyao hot on his heels.

-... .-. . .- -.-

Jin Guangyao tucks the…whatever little thing he’d picked up out of the otherwise empty container (damn them, the Jiangs are fast with getting their shit cleared out) into his jacket and trades it out for one of the pistols holstered in the small of his back. Nie Mingjue’s broad shoulders make for a decent shield to shoot from behind, which he quickly discovers when they reach the top of the stairs and barely make it around the corner before they’re caught by two guards pounding down the catwalk to come investigate the whooping siren.

Jin Guangyao fires off two quick shots echoed by a sharp snap from Nie Mingjue’s silenced pistol and they’re off again, pounding through the middle levels of the warehouse with clattering and clanging now that stealth is a lost cause.

Guards shout behind them, around them, the warehouse swarming with men in Jiang blue and amethyst pouring in from outside and all aiming semi-automatic rifles or pistols straight at them. Jin Guangyao puts on an extra burst of speed as he follows Nie Mingjue through the labs he’d just investigated, trusting his partner’s mental map of them to get them back to the exit. He fires off a few warning shots over his shoulder at the men hot on their heels and ducks down to avoid a spray of glass when the next burst of rapid-fire blows out the windows that look out into the main warehouse bay.

Nie Mingjue’s trajectory spits them out of the labs at the bottom of an enclosed staircase that only goes up, and Jin Guangyao flies past him when Nie Mingjue darts to the side to let him up first so he can cover their retreat himself. Jin Guangyao manages to find a scrap of attention to spare on the thought that it’s actually…nice, to have someone covering his back for once. He hasn’t had that since he was stationed in Europe, and actually he’d trust Nie Mingjue more than a solid 3/4ths of the people he’d spent his years fighting the war (and reclaiming art) with.

At the top of the stairs Jin Guangyao looks up to the highest level of catwalks overhead and fires off a few rounds at the guards he can just spot through the grates, baring his teeth when he misses but they at least duck away from the gunfire and give them a few seconds of breathing room, so it could be worse. Nie Mingjue behind him fires off a few more shots at the guards coming up the stairs they’d just ascended, and the second he’s done Jin Guangyao takes him by the hand to drag him further into the warren of metal grates and catwalks at a dead run, the main floor far enough below them now that his vertigo threatens to tip him over the banister.

Nie Mingjue’s hand tightens around his as he overtakes him and takes the lead again, feet pounding on the metal in a steady, booming rhythm that helps settle Jin Guangyao again enough to follow after him and duck for cover behind a wide metal cabinet halfway down a catwalk between the two halves of the cavernous space.

More bullets whiz right past them to pang off the metal handrail of the gantry as they press tightly together behind the cover and catch their breath, heads tipped back so they can look at each other out of the corner of their eyes without needing to turn their heads and get caught unawares by the men still taking shots at them as they close in.

Jin Guangyao fumbles for the…something he’d taken from the empty box in the vault and holds it up between them. “Does this mean anything to you?” he shouts over the deafening patter of automatic gunfire.

Nie Mingjue nods, reloads, and risks sticking his head out long enough to squeeze off a few shots and buy them another moment of breathing room. “It’s part of a centrifuge — for refining uranium!” he shouts back in between bursts of rattling gunfire, his hand coming up to wrap around Jin Guangyao’s wrist again, completely engulfing it so he can give it a little shake as a fresh volley of bullets clang and bounce off the lockers around them. “I’m not staying here!”

“Where the hell are you going to go?!”

Jin Guangyao turns his head to follow Nie Mingjue’s glance past his shoulder and feels himself pale at the realization that they’re quite high up, and Nie Mingjue is going to —

“Swimming!” he shouts and aims past Jin Guangyao to shoot out the windows looking out over the river because yes. He’s running to jump out of them and into said river.

Fucking bastard —

Jin Guangyao gives himself approximately half a second (he’s feeling generous) to gather himself for the fall and makes a sprint for the same window, leaping off the edge of the sill with his eyes firmly on the water —

That he’s not at all on the right trajectory to hit.

He falls with an undignified oof straight onto concrete and loops of mooring line, rolling off the pile of rope with a groan when his entire body stops vibrating from the impact. Nie Mingjue laughs over his head, and Jin Guangyao grumbles through hauling himself wincing to his feet. He takes at least a small bit of vindictive pleasure in knowing that Nie Mingjue had done the exact same bullshit stunt to the exact same effect, if the way he’s hunching over a little further than necessary to hotwire the speedboat he’s helped himself to is any indication.

Jin Guangyao scrabbles to join him as fresh gunshots patter down onto the pavement on all sides with a spray of concrete and gouged wood from the dock, and he lets Nie Mingjue drag him half-into the boat just as the engine roars to life. They tear away from the quay less than second later, Jin Guangyao clinging onto slippery, polished wood in an attempt to not go flying off into the churning black water.

... -.-. . -. . / -... .-. . .- -.-

Jiang Cheng stands with his hands on his hips in front of his wide open, top-of-the-line, high security, bullet- and thief-proof reinforced steel vault, and wishes it wouldn’t be completely undignified to plug his ears so he wouldn’t have to hear his stupid brother laughing his ass off at his expense.

When Wei Wuxian stands upright again (leaning heavily on Wen Ning’s shoulder to manage it) Jiang Cheng gestures at the phone beside the vault with a jerk of his chin.

“Call Jie, have her ring the Supervisory Office and get this ‘Meng’ guy’s room number. You’ve had your fun but it’s time to close in.”

“Aw c’mon Jiang Cheng, don’t be so mad!” Wei Wuxian needles. Jiang Cheng, not nearly as immune to his brother’s needling as one would think after their entire lives spent together, just shoves him towards the phone and gestures for his brother-in-law to fall in step beside him.

“Come with me, A-Ning, let’s go do some damage control.” At least one person around here doesn’t make him despair for the whole human race; Wen Ning draws up smoothly on his left, leaving Jiang Cheng’s whip arm free, and pulls his pistol from the holster on his back.

“Clean up your mess, Wei Wuxian!” Jiang Cheng shouts over his shoulder before he hurries off to join the fray over their heads in an attempt to get things under control.

... -.-. . -. . / -... .-. . .- -.-

YILING CITY — 莲花 VILLA

Jiang Yanli is just putting the finishing touches on her nail lacquer when the phone at her side rings, abrupt in the quiet peace of her Yiling City apartment. Her heart jumps in her throat as she lifts the handle off its cradle to tuck it between her cheek and her shoulder.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” Wei Wuxian says over the sound of distant gunfire and, closer at hand, a jangling, whooping alarm blaring in her ear. Jiang Yanli sighs and holds the phone a little away from her ear in an attempt not to be deafened. “The plan worked, they bought it, hook line and sinker — do you feel like bringing Meng Yao in yourself tonight?”

“Mm I suppose I’d better,” she sighs again and laments that the drive to the Supervisory Resort is probably going to smudge her perfectly painted manicure. “Leave it to me A-Xian, just don’t let A-Cheng get carried away?”

Wei Wuxian laughs, short and sharp, and she smiles a little as she caps her lacquer again with a flick of her wrist. “A tall order, shijie, but you know I’ll do my best!”

“You always do,” she hums. She hangs up when the line clicks dead and picks the phone up again immediately to ring the operator.

“Yes, hello? The old Wen Supervisory Office Resort, please,” she requests and listens to the switchboard click, the line ringing through. It’s answered promptly by the night concierge, and she makes sure to smile widely enough for it to be heard in her voice as she asks, “Hello, Meng Yao’s room, please.”

Jiang Yanli blows on her nails to dry them a little faster as the line rings and rings, and when she knows she can reasonably claim to have attempted to get in touch with her new friend she hangs up and stands to get dressed to go out, as she’s fairly sure her silk slip and matching dressing gown alone would cause a bit more of a stir than she’s looking for this evening.

... -.-. . -. . / -... .-. . .- -.-

SUITE 191 - 监理处 LUXURY RESORT

Lan Xichen is sitting in the center of his and Nie Mingjue’s bed, propped up on a few pillows and trying his damndest not to chew on his thumbnail, when the bedside phone rings and he leans over with the appropriate amount of haste to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Xichen.”

“Good evening, Shufu.”

“I hope I’m not calling too late?”

Lan Xichen leans back against the headboard and drops his hand into his lap as quickly as if he’d been scolded for the habit like when he was a boy.

“Not at all, I was just…No, it’s not too late.”

“Hm. It was good to see you today, Xichen, but..I’m afraid I was a bit too harsh on your…fiancé. I’d like to apologize to him.”

Lan Xichen glances down at the empty bed beside him and tucks his nail between his teeth again, only remembering not to bite at the last moment. The lie that he’s asleep is right there on the tip of his tongue, but he lets it go with a sigh. Old habits die hard, and all that. “He’s stepped out. Will I tell him you called?”

“..Mn. I also thought I could take you for lunch tomorrow, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you. I can pick you up at 12.”

Lan Xichen rubs at the spot of tension between his brows with a fingertip. “Yes, Shufu.”

“Good. Goodnight, Xichen.”

“Goodnight.”

The line clicks off and Lan Xichen takes a deep breath in before he dials down to the concierge.

“Yes sir?”

“Room 304, please.”

Another click, and then the line ringing just long enough to leave him sure that no one will answer. It’s been such a long time after all, how can he be sure —

“Mn?”

Xichen closes his eyes and takes a deep breath in.

“Everything is confirmed,” he tells his brother, the first words he’s been allowed to say to him in over a year.

He hangs up without another word and sets the phone aside to keep waiting for Nie Mingjue to come back safe and sound.

[afreakingdork]

READER STAN DROPPING IN FROM A HOSPITAL BED AND BOOOOY THIS CHAPTER IS FEEDING ME SO MUCH BETTER THAN HOSPITAL SANDWICHES GYAAAAAAHHH. He said it!! he said it!!

Everything Leo's done and he's outclassed by SANDWICH /j but oof. I knew Leo must have an understandable miff against Reader but seeing him admit just how deep that jealousy goes?? Because of course. Because Donnie's his *twin*, because they've had this song and dance of being at eachother's throats and in spite of that Leo still yearns for some sort or connection or an excuse to sever it completely.

It lowkey makes me remember the discussion if how WS!Donnie would react to his close-canon self/Crush too much self. How would *Leo* react to seeing a version of him that got into Donnie's space freely and without worry? A version of himself that got to wholly have Donnie as family,as a full fledged twin brother with no hard eggshells to walk on?

READER STAN, YOU ARE HOSPITALIZED?!?!?! I HOPE YOU'RE OKAY!!!! I'M SENDING HEALING VIBES!!! 😭😭😭 IM WORRIED ABOUT YOU!!!

This Leo reveal is so momentousness because I've been sitting on it for years and you've summed it up so nicely here! If we think about the timeline first in Weak Spot, though scary, when the bastard's three are introduced, we seem them as a little scary, but Leo is trying to do this bit in the midst of it and it doesn't fit and it feels wrong. Then when reader really meets Leo, he's bitter and paranoid and nothing like that person and so knowing what we know now, you see the aptly named song and dance was Leo's only source of connection. As bitter and cruel was it was, as lethal, it was the only one he had and that worked, but then we piece in more such as how Leo talks about how Donnie was finally gone, how they finally beat him back and there's such a bile there, like that's not something he wanted and then Donnie reappears, with some human, and he's different, he isn't playing the game and by all accounts he's wrong. Donnie is new and not the person Leo has known almost a lifetime and this upset Leo so so very deeply. Then, then, we place a recent piece about how reader said they understood Leo's banter comment from chapter 60. That's Leo comment about how they always do banter from chapter 19. In 60, Leo laughs. Leo laughs. Why laugh? Just because of the callback or because of something else? Because Leo then specifies he's lost his mind. Because reader doesn't get it. Because reader has made a critical error. Reader interfered.

I don't know! That came from somewhere where I've been sitting on this for WAY WAY too long!!! Thanks for letting me expound on it!

Oh DOING THAT WITH LEO!? THAT'S DELICIOUS, LET'S SEE: WS!Leo would need to talk to CTM!Leo. He would need to hear the story, just seeing it would not be enough for him. Hearing this other Leo talk about being the ultimate wingman and how he sacrificed for the team and all he did would bring WS!Leo to absolute tears. CTM!Leo would be sort of embarrassed like, hey big guy, it can't be that bad right? And WS!Leo would clamp a hand on his shoulder and try to suck it back up and tell him he did a good job which would surely water CTM!Leo's eyes from that (older) adult and self approval! For canon, he'd watch it like he were watching the TV show and just smile.

[apoemaday]

The Hurting Kind

by Ada Limón

1.

On the plane I have a dream I’ve left half my torso on the back porch with my beloved. I have to go

back for it, but it’s too late, I’m flying and there’s only half of me.

Back in Texas, the flowers I’ve left on the counter have wilted and knocked over the glass— I stay alone there so the flowers are more than flowers.

At the funeral parlor with my mother, we are holding her father’s suit, and she says, He’ll swim in these.

For a moment, I’m not sure what she means, until I realize she means the clothes are too big.

I go with her like a shield in case they try to up-sell her— the ornate urn, the elaborate body box.

It is a nice bathroom in the funeral parlor, so I take the opportunity to change my tampon.

When I come out my mother says, Did you have to change your tampon?

And it seems a vulgar life all at once. Or not vulgar, but not simple.

I’m driving her now to the Hillside Cemetery where we meet with Rosie who is so nice we want her to work everywhere. Rosie as my dentist. Rosie as my president.

My shards are showing, I think. But I do not know what I mean so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands of headstones behind it. Minuscule flags, plastic flowers.

You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving and the electronic voice repeats, Turn Left onto Wildwood Canyon Road,

so I turn left, happy for the mundane instructions. Let us robot at once.

Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there.

She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.

2.

A famous poet said he never wanted to hear another poem about a grandmother or a grandfather.

I imagine him with piles of faded yolk-colored paper, overloaded with loops of swooping cursive, anemic lyrics

misspelling mourning and morning. But also, before they arrive, there’s a desperate hand scribbling a memory, following

the cat of imagination into each room. What is lineage, if not a gold thread of pride and guilt. She did what?

Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children, a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline?

I told my friend D that and she said, What if you want to kill your own bloodline, kill like it’s your job?

In the myth of La Llorona, she drowns her children to destroy her cheating husband. But maybe she was just tired.

After her husband of 76 years has died, my grandmother, (yes, I said it, grandmother, grandmother) leans to me and says,

Now teach me poetry.

3.

Sticky packs of photographs heteromaniacal postcards.

The war.      The war.        The war. Bikini girls, tight curls, the word gams.

Land boom. Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. Southern Pacific.

We ask my Grandma Allamay about her mother for a form.

Records and wills. Evidence of life. For a moment she can’t remember her mother’s maiden name.

She says, Just tell them she never wanted me. That should be enough.

“Red sadness is the secret one,” writes Ruefle. Redlands

was named after the soil. Allamay can still hold a peach in her hand

and judge its number by its size. Tell you where it would go in the box

if you’re packing peaches for a living. Which she did,

though she hated the way the hairs hurt her hands.

4.

Why do we quickly dismiss our ancient ones? Before our phones stole the light of our faces, shiny and blue in the televised night,

our elders worked farms and butchered and trapped animals and swept houses and returned to each other after long hours and told stories.

In order for someone to be “good” do they have to have seen the full tilt world? Must they believe what we believe?

My grandmother keeps a picture of her president in the top drawer of her dresser, and once when she was delusional she dreamt

he had sent her and my grandfather on a trip to Italy.  He paid for it all, she kept repeating.

That same night on her ride to the hospital, she talks to the medical technician and says,

All my grandchildren are Mexican.

She says it proudly. She repeats it to me on the phone

5.

Once, a long time ago, we sat in the carport of my grandparents’ house in Redlands, now stolen for eminent  domain,

now the hospital parking lot, no more coyotes or caves where the coyotes would live. Or the grandfather clock

in the house my grandfather built. The porch above the orchard. All gone.

We sat in the carport and watched the longest snake I’d ever seen undulate between the hanging succulents.

They told me not to worry, that the snake had a name,

the snake was called a California King,

glossy black with yellow stripes like wonders wrapping around him.

My grandparents, my ancestors, told me never to kill a California King, benevolent

as they were, equanimous like earth or sky, not

toothy like the dog Chacho who barked at nearly every train whistle or roadrunner.

Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort of horse he had growing up. He said,

Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it rubbed the bones in the ribs all wrong.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers.

I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

My grandfather carried that snake to the cactus, where all sharp things could stay safe.

6.

You can’t sum it up. A life.

I feel it moving through me, that snake, his horse Midge sturdy and nothing special,

traveling the canyons and the tumbleweeds hunting for rabbits before the war.

My grandmother picking peaches. Stealing the fruit from the orchards as she walked

home. No one said it was my job to remember.

I took no notes though I’ve stared too long. My grandfather, before he died, would have told

anyone that would listen, that he was ordinary,

that his life was a good one, simple, he could never understand why anyone would want to write

it down. He would tell you straight up he wasn’t brave. And my grandmother would tell you right now

that he is busy getting the house ready for her. Visiting now each night and even doing the vacuuming.

I imagine she’s right. It goes on and on, their story. They met in first grade in a one room school house,

I could have started there, but their story, their story is endless and ongoing. All of this

is a conjuring. I will not stop this reporting of attachments. There is evidence everywhere.

There’s a tree over his grave now, and soon her grave too

though she is tough and says, If I ever die,

which is marvelous and maybe why she’s still alive.

I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing

my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves.

Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?