#Word Count: 5222

[lostandfoundbook]

Chapter 39

Read it on AO3

Read it on Wattpad

Benji found himself rushing to the hotel, speeding, and passing through every red light he possibly could. They tried to stay safe, but safety wasn't important to Alex right now. Oliver was, and she had been a fool. Why did she always run from the people she cared most about? She was so nervous about confronting the reality that Oliver truly loved her, she couldn't stop to realize she didn't love herself?

She shook the thoughts out of her head as she watched the drive towards the hotel. Her scar ached a bit, which it had never done quite like this. Her entire body was sore, if she was being honest. Everything felt like electricity inside her, and nothing could calm the feeling inside of her body. She was on fire, and Oliver was the only thing that could extinguish her.

"What if he doesn't take me back" Alex voiced aloud. "He will. He's an idiot if he doesn't" Benji replied. It had been four days, which honestly wasn't a long time, but Alex's over thinking had gotten the best of her. What if he had come to the same conclusion she had? What he if also thought the relationship was over, and had already mourned the loss? What if his heart had moved on? What if it was too late? What if? She shouldn't stop. 

"It would make sense in the end if he didn't, you know. I ran away when I shouldn't have. He probably doesn't understand, because he doesn't get me. How am I supposed to expect him to understand when he literally doesn't know? It's not his fault. I feel like an idiot still, but I accept it, at least." she blurted out, filling the silence in the car. It was about a 30 minute drive from Benji's theatre over to the hotel, and it felt torturous. Half way there.

She wasn't exactly ready to bare her heart out, but she knew that this was what she needed to do. This was the right thing. Life felt useless and devoid of meaning without him in it. The sky needed it's stars to shine bright at night, or else it's just sad. Alex understood now why Oliver didn't like the city, and the way it stole his stars away. It had stolen hers, as well. "He's not going to turn you away, Alex" Benji started out. "You're going to go in there and tell him you're sorry and explain yourself, and you're going to be just fine. You won't even need me."

Alex slunk her body lower into the seat of the car. She really didn't like the idea of having to explain herself to Oliver. It made her skin crawl to imagine the way his eyes would stare at her after he knew how damaged she was. He wouldn't care for her anymore. "I'll always need you" was the selection of words she settled on. Another moment of silence washed over the car as traffic started to ease up. "Finally" Benji muttered under his breaht.

It had been slow going. Alex didn't bring anything but herself and her purse, and she was mentally preparing herself to talk to him. She didn't know what she was going to say, but that didn't matter right now. It might've gone over better had it been planned, but she couldn't think about that. She just needed to fix it, and she needed to fix it, now. "Can't we go any faster?" the blonde girl asked. Benji shook his head in reply. "Not without getting pulled over."

Alex let out a groan. "This was a bad idea. I should've just stayed at the theatre. This is all one big sign that I shouldn't do it. I don't even know what I'm going to stay. This was such a dumb idea, oh my god." The girl pulled her hands up to her eyes and threw her head back into the seat. "Hey.." Benji murmured out, attempting to sooth the girl. "It's just traffic. It's New York City. If there wasn't traffic, that would be more of your sign to not do it. It's just a normal day, and you're doing  a normal thing."

"Right. Normal." She replied and stared out the window. "I want to go over what I want to say to him." She could feel her heart string being tugged at as she said that. Realistically, that was the last thing she wanted to do, but it had to be done. She needed, at least, a guideline on what to say to the man. She couldn't get wrapped up in those eyes, and pretend that everything was alright. They needed to talk, and she needed to get it out in the air if she wanted this relationship to survive.

This relationship... it was a finicky thing. It was built off of codependence and necessity. Alex needed Oliver, both physically and metaphorically. When you take away the aspect of one party being better, it all started to slot into place. It felt more real. The connection was already bonded between the two, and maybe there was even a little transference there. He helped her, and she couldn't ignore that. That was a big part of their relationship with each other, was Oliver's ability to provide. It's how he showed his love.

When his mom was sick, hid dad redid her entire wing of the hotel to make her happy. He provided. It runs in the family with them, and it's just Oliver's love language. Alex was the opposite. Her entire life, she was denied love and affection, and the only person she could turn to was her sister. When her brother was born, he was treated as the golden child. The one person who could do no harm.

"I probably need to start with my brother. I haven't told him much about Justin. He just knows he exists. He doesn't know that Evelyn and I practically had to raise him, and that he's the reason why I was so willing to be a mother. He doesn't get it. He knows about my pregnancy, but he doesn't get it, and I don't know how to get that across to him without talking about Justin."

The words hung heavy in her throat. They were only a few miles away from the hotel, and she didn't have much time to think about how it would all tie together. She needed to segue from one topic to the next, because he needed to understand. He could provide so much for her, a room to stay in, food to eat, and clothes on her back, but the one thing she's asking him to provide to her right now is his understanding. It's all she needed. 

"I genuinely think he'll understand, Andie. He was always understanding with me.." If Benji could go back in time and take back the words he just said, he would, because the look that Alex was giving him made him want to curl into a ball and hide away in shame. "Why won't you tell me about it?" She eventually asked. She kind of knew the story already, but she'd never heard Benji's side.

"Same reason you won't tell me about what happened between you two. He makes everything.... needlessly complicated when it really doesn't need to be. We were both younger and dumb and nothing made sense. He had a hotel to inherit, and he was trying to work towards it. He didn't just want to take on something like a nepo-baby, and he wanted to earn it. I wasn't apart of his plans, I don't think, but I never talked to him about it. That's why you have to talk to him, Alex, because you can't let life slip through your fingers then it's that close"

She paused as she took in the mans words before her. The were getting closer and closer to the hotel, and she could feel her adrenaline pumping deep in her heart, like a race horse being set off to the track. She was running and running and running and she was so close to meeting that finish line.

"I know, Benji. I'm really sorry it didn't work out between you two, but, don't you think that, someday in the future, it'll be weird? Like, I'll invite him over to dinners and shit, because he'll just.... be there." She couldn't bring herself to say boyfriend. He wasn't her boyfriend, and this could go wrong at any moment. Nothing was predetermined, and it could go multiple ways. She didn't know what he was going to say to her.

"No. I've moved on. I'm almost positive he's moved on multiple times over. We've lived two different lives, and we're just two different people who don't click together. It never would've worked between us, especially with the competitive nature of the scene. One of us would've crashed and burned, and it wasn't going to be him, and I couldn't let myself sacrifice that much just to be with him. It wasn't worth it, but I think it's so much different with you."

He sighed out as he spoke. "I don't see you sacrificing yourself. It's from a distance, but I see you rising in the charts, and your career is doing good, and he doesn't limit you anywhere near as much as Everette or Mason did, and you really really like him. I think those are all really valid reasons to go back to someone." Alex nodded towards him and sat up in her seat. "Yeah... yeah. I agree with you. When I'm with him, It's like everything clicks together in place like a puzzle pieces. He's my missing half, and I feel incomplete without him."

She could see the hotel in the distance. Benji had sped as much as he could through the backstreets while avoiding police and civilians alike. They pulled up to the front of the building and Benji turned the car off. "You can do it." Was all he said as Alex stepped out of the car. She stared up at the enormous building, and consider how weird it was that, a couple of months ago, she was stood up there. 

The sunlight reflected off of the windows and shone back down onto the pavement, and Alex was alright with the heat, she could deal with the heat, because in just a minute she would will herself to walk towards the building and into the air conditioned air. She just needed to work up the courage to step in. She gripped her hands together and closed her eyes as she stepped forward, feeling the sweat sliding down her forehead. 

She strode across the sidewalk with her palms balled into a fist, and she used one hand to sweep past the revolving doors. She tried to look back towards Benji, but he had already pulled off. It was now or never. Alex had to talk to Oliver, whether she liked it or not, and she really fucking didn't. Being back here, with the smells, and the sights, it made her want to run. Flee, and get far away, because it felt like home. She had returned home.

She walked past the front counter and nodded her head at the woman behind the desk. She waved her hand at Alex as she passed by her, allowing her entry. She eyed down the elevators, and the thoughts came rushing into her head. What if he seriously didn't take her back? What if this was too far for him, and he couldn't deal with somebody who ran? What happens if he says no? How does Alex walk away from this all. 

She could see her hands jittering as she pressed the button to go up. She could hear the clanging and clattering of the elevator, and she could hear the busy chatter of the people around her. She could smell the familiar scent of the hotel, the atmosphere, and the way it made her feel. Almost nostalgic. It had only been 4 days and she missed it already. The doors slid open and she carted herself in, pressing the button to go up to Oliver's floor.

She hadn't really thought this through. She didn't know what she was going to say, and she didn't except him to accept her back. Everything was too complicated, like Benji was saying. She expected him to flee, as well, the same way she did. The elevator dinged upward and upward as it rose. There was no possible way he could accept her back. It just didn't make sense in her brain. She was setting herself up for failure. 

The doors slid open, and she was met with the familiar red hues of the floral wallpaper, the ones she dreamed of ripping down and replacing for the man. One true act of loving compassion. She could nearly fall to her knees and weep at the sight. She put aside all of her emotions for just one minute longer. 'You just have to make it down the hallway' She thought to herself. It was just one more hallway.

It hit her like a tidal wave as she stepped out of the elevator and looked around. What if he wasn't in his room? What if he was busy at work like all the other days, and this was just a failed mission? What was Alex supposed to do then? She made her way down the familiar hallway and remembered all the times the had roamed through here, both with and without Oliver. All of the times she had explored and gotten to know this building. It was her home through and through, and she couldn't imagine a better place to live.

She steadied her breath as she walked up to the mans door and stood in front of it, analyzing the white wood in front of her. She was nervous as all hell, and she couldn't shake the feeling in her bones that something was wrong. The moment wasn't perfect. This wasn't how she wanted to see him again. She wanted it to be a happy moment, where the two of them took each other into their arms, and place soft kisses across each others lips.

She wanted bliss, and happiness, and she knew she couldn't have it. She took a deep breath in as she reached up and knocked on the door. She could feel the cool wood against her knuckles, and she slunk into herself as she pulled away. She had knocked too hard. Too aggressively. She didn't like how she was already doming off. It made her feel this overwhelming dread inside of her body. 

As the door open, Oliver stood before her, wearing a t-shirt and black shorts, and a shocked expression on his face. "Alex" He said out. She didn't know what to say. For the first time in a very long time, she felt small, and inconsequential. She didn't matter. "I'm sorry" was the only thing she could find herself saying. The words blocked up when she tried, and she could feel her emotions crashing over like tidal waves, threatening to drown her city. 

"Alex, you don't have to apologize, why don't we just--" He started to say, but she cut him off. "No, because, that's kind of the problem. I do have to apologize. A lot. For a lot of things, because I've done a lot of things to you, Oliver, and I don't know how we could consider starting a relationship if we can't even talk about it." Her tears spilt down her face, and her hair stuck to the sides of her cheeks.

Oliver looked side to side before ushering her to enter his room. "I'm not saying we can't talk about it. I'm saying you don't have to apologize. You've done a lot of things to me, and I've done a lot of things to you. We need to talk about it, but not out here. Please, just come inside." He finished off and looked at her with his pleading eyes. He wasn't trying to hide her away. He was making sure her privacy stayed private. 

People in the hotel talked, and they talked a lot. There were a lot of celebrities here, and with that, a lot of journalists. She didn't need her business aired out like dirty laundry. She wiped her cheeks and nodded as she stepped inside. He shut the door behind her, and noticed the recognizable living space as she did so, the black and grey muted colors standing out in her head. It replayed the night they kissed in her head like a movie projector. 

"Obviously, I'm sorry for any time that I've hurt you--" And again, Alex cut him off. She was here to make her case, and she needed to be heard. "You've never hurt me." She chewed out. "You made business decisions that I didn't agree with. It was much bigger than anything I could've fathomed, because you're running an entire hotel. I'm just running my career." She wiped the other side of her face as she spoke, and walked over towards the couch with Oliver.

He followed along, politely nodding as he did so to show that he was listening. Another bunch of tears began to leave her eyes and roll down her face. "I just feel like there's so much about me that you don't know, and that you should, because without knowing, you don't really know me. But it feels impossible to talk about, and we never get the chance." She could try to hide her pain, but there was no point anymore. She was wearing it out on her sleeve. 

"I'm listening, Alex, and I'll always be listening." There were sympathetic tears beginning to form in his eyes now. "I don't want you to feel like you have to hide away from me, ever. I'm going to accept you no matter what. I don't know why you would think I wouldn't." he said, and pulled her into a hug. It felt like she had imagined it would: Pure bliss igniting her skin on fire. She missed the touch of his skin dancing across hers, and she missed the way he felt in her arms. 

She let her tears stain his shirt with a dark stain, showing proof that she was human, and she too relied on other people sometimes. Maybe there was a reason it was so much easier to cry around Oliver than it was to cry around Benji. She thought he didn't, but he did understand her. More than she understood herself, even. Maybe it was because he was a critic, but he knew her every flaw, and accepted her in spite of it. 

"I just don't know how you do it." She whined out into his chest. "Do what?" he replied back. She breathed in and sighed out before her own reply. "You just love so unabashedly. You live with no fear. I don't understand how I'm supposed to live my life without the nagging fear that the other shoe is always going to drop?" She pulled away and looked into his eyes, those beautiful ocean blue eyes that capture her soul away, and he stared back at her. 

"Alex, I'm always afraid. I have been since my dad died, and my mom got sick. I learned that I can't live my life regretting the things that I've missed. I've missed out on a lot for this hotel, and for my family. But I do it out of love, and I can't regret it, or it'll eat me alive at night. I have to pursue the things I love, like producing, and theatre.. and you." 

She looked from his eyes, down to his lips, and back up to his eyes. His lips looked so soft, and so kissable, like they were made just for her. She reached up and placed a small peck onto his lips. He pressed back into it, looking for her in the touch. "I've always been afraid, and when I'm afraid, I run, and I'm sorry for that. I didn't mean to hurt you, but I felt like I was suffocating."

She could feel another tear roll down her cheek. He wiped it away with the knuckle of his finger, and pressed a kiss onto her lips. "You don't have to feel bad for running. I don't hold it against you. You needed space, and you took it. You're human, just like the rest of us, Andie, and I wouldn't ever hold that against you."

She could feel a small laugh escape her lips as she pressed closer into the man. He was so kind, and so understanding. She felt like she could escape into him, and breathing in his scent was so entrapping. Like a good kind of smothering, that she missed. She missed his smothering in particular. "My parents would've. That's the problem. My parents were really really shitty people. They never wanted kids to begin with, they just didn't like the idea of having to actually be adults and protect themselves. When they fell pregnant with twins... they hated us."

She buried her face deeper into his chest. He was so warm, and with the A/C running, it felt nice. Like sitting in front of a campfire. "I'm sorry, Alex. You didn't deserve any of that. Just because they don't value you, doesn't mean that other people don't. There are so many of us who love you, not just me." She continued laughing into his chest. It was a nervous reaction, and she didn't know what else to do.

"It feels like some kind of cosmic joke that you understand. You of all people are supposed to hate me." She chewed on her lower lip as she said it. He squeezed his arms around the girl and drew her closer. "I don't think it's a very good joke, if so. I don't hate you. We both had our own problems going on, and we took it out on each other." She nodded into him. It felt comfortable to just talk to him. Why didn't she do this sooner?

"When my parents had my brother, Justin, that's when everything changed. Evelyn and I were 14, and they were always out doing drugs, or doing to bars, or getting arrested for some reason. When they were gone, we had to raise him. We were just kids ourselves, and we didn't know how to raise a kid. We probably fucked up a million times." Oliver pulled away and looked down at her. It wasn't judgmental like she'd expected it to be, but soothing, and warm. "That must have been difficult. I never knew you had to raise him."

She shrugged underneath his arms. "I don't know. We don't really talk about it. It was just expected of us. I don't know what would've happened to all of us if we didn't. CPS showed up so many times and didn't do anything. Evelyn and I kept the house clean, and everything looked fine on the outside. They were always so good at hiding the drugs."

She pulled back closer to him as she spoke. She didn't want to see him. She felt embarrassed of her past, and she couldn't deal with the staring eyes looking down on her. It made her feel even smaller than she already did, and she didn't like to feel small. Alex let out a sigh. "And then, I met Mason. And he was amazing, and great to me, until he wasn't anymore, and he treated me the same way my parents did, but I thought it was normal. None of it was normal, and then I fell pregnant."

The tears bundled back in her eyes, and she brushed them away. "I think maybe, the stress of it all, and everything, It kind of broke me. I was never the same after that." Oliver took a deep breath of his own, processing everything. "No one can expect you to be normal after something like that. You lost something, someone valuable to you. You said it was the one good thing about the situation."

She scoffed under her own breath. "It would have been. But now, I don't even think I'm the same person. It changed me forever, and I don't think I'll ever get it back." Oliver pulled her closer into a hug. "Yeah, but that's not the Alex I fell in love with. I fell in love with all version of you, not just the version you've created for yourself now. I see you for who you are, Andie." 

She could feel her heart swoon. These were all the words she needed to hear. "How did I end up with such a perfect man?" she laughed out before snuggling closer towards him. "Well, first you fell from the ceiling, and then I nursed you back to health. Are you having amnesia again?" He joked out. "No. Obviously, I mean, I was given such a horrible hand in life. I don't understand how I was gifted with somebody like you. 

His gaze on her was sweet and affectionate. She could feel her heart tumbling as she leaned back and pressed Oliver into a kiss, deepening it as far as she could go. She wrapped her arms around him, and felt the cloth of his shirt underneath her fingertips. Everything felt so right. So perfect. She wanted to belong with him for the rest of her life. If there was ever a moment she could her herself go, it was right now.

She parted her lips as the raven haired man vied for her, his tongue dancing around hers in a magical sort of way. She pressed her palm against his chest before pulling away. "You know, I have to have the other talk with you." The man in front of her raised his eyebrow as she tumbled back into the kiss. "Never mind." She said, dragging him closer. Nothing mattered right now. It was just the two of them, alone in this world, existing together. It felt like ecstasy being with him.

There was no better high than Oliver Haven, and she wanted to be apart of all of it. All of him. She needed to be tangled up in his arms, and have him grabbing all over her, and pulling her closer. She needed all forms of contact. She pulled him closer and drug is shirt overtop of his head, and deepened the kiss further.

She pressed a hand across his bare chest and felt the skin to skin contact under her fingers. It was enthralling, and it was like lighting a fire in her belly, and she needed more. She reached around under her shirt and unclipped her bra strap, wriggling herself free from the grasp of it. Oliver brushed his hand across her cheeks and onto her chin, placing his hands across her face. "I need to be with you, Oliver" she pleaded out.

She could feel him eyeing her up like a prized possessions before quickly picking her up in her arms, earning a squeal from Alex. "What are you doing!" she giggled out. "Well, I'm not gonna fuck you on the couch, now am I?" He stated out. Alex could feel her entire body light on fire at that comment. She could've write a more perfect ending to the day. This possibility never crossed her mind, once. She watched at Oliver stripped himself of his shorts, and she joined him by removing her top, leaving her chest bare. 

She was suddenly overcome with the feeling of shyness. She was so exposed, and it had been so long since she was with someone last. Everette, probably. That was not who she wanted to be thinking about right now. She watched as Oliver analyzed her body, searching the scar across her abdomen, to her breasts, back to her scar. "You're beautiful" He called out before crawling his way onto the bed and kissing her. 

"I'd be happier without the scar, you know." She said out. She blushed beneath the mans grasp as he pulled her back onto the bed, kissing and pulled her underneath him. "You're beautiful. You shouldn't think otherwise. Anyone who's made you feel different is blind." He stared down at her body with sultry eyes, and she couldn't help but feel the burning in her gut growing tighter and tighter. She needed to be with him, and she needed to feel him inside her, and she needed to be with him. Now. 

She pulled him closer by his neck and re-position herself underneath him. He ran his hands along her body before trailing little kissing down her, first her mouth, and then her collarbone, and then in between her breasts. He continued his trail down towards her stomach before he slowly lowered himself under her legs, and slowly slipped her shorts off. "You're so fucking hot, Alex. I'm so serious. I don't know how I kept myself away from you for as long as I did."

He placed a kiss on the fabric between her underwear and her heat. She could feel how wet she was from his touch alone, and it ramped up her hormone levels. She was through the roof with anticipation when she began to slide her underwear down, and began licking away between the wet folds. Her head shot back as her body was flooded with release of stimulation as he focused away on her little bundle of nerves.

"Oh, my god" she called out, her jaw dropping as she did so. She could feel her body grind and move with the motions of the wetness on her lower regions, and she could feel him working away at herself. It was a blissful feeling, and she forgot how amazing it could be with the right person. "Right there, don't stop" she called out, and moaned and Oliver slid a finger inside of her wet pussy. He pumped slowly at first, before fastening his pace as he flicked his tongue around her clit. 

Oliver had worked his own dick out of his boxers and began working away on himself as he continued finger fucking her hole. "Holy fuck" Was the only words she could manage before falling into a bundle of moans and groans, wriggling underneath the mans grasp. He laid one hand across her stomach, as if he was staking his claims across her. He quickened his pace in for a couple seconds. "You're so perfect, Alex. Such a perfect pussy. Are you gonna be a good girl and cum for me?" 

She could hear the words, but they didn't register in her head. She was too far gone in the moment. Her stomach twisted and burst like electricity shocking through her veins. She quickly nodded her head, whimpering and moaning out as she did so. "Yes, oh my god, yes please" She cried out, grasping her hand across Oliver's with her left, and the right entangled in the bedsheets. His hands worked faster and faster around himself as he worked himself to the edge.

"I'm gonna-" She began, before she felt the pressure increasing in her body, and releasing again as all her muscles tensed up into an orgasm. "So perfect" He called back, licking up every drop. He pulled his hands out from Alex and dropped his boxers the rest of the way. "And now, I'm gonna fuck you like a gentleman does." 

[magicalbats]

Oh, Captain (Luffy x reader)

Rating: R-18+

Word Count: 5222

Warnings: Afab!reader, gendered language, noncon, physical coercion, outdoor sex, inappropriate use of 5th Gear

A/N: My second ever commission and the lovely donor was kind enough to give me permission to post it for everyone else to read. Thank you for a great experience, @avidbroswer!! 🩷🩷🩷

⭐

Let’s help Luffy, they’d said.  

We’re a crew, they’d said. Family. 

You don’t feel very much like family when you’re running for your life from the very captain you’d sworn loyalty to. Or at least, you’re pretty sure that the strange figure with white nimbus cloud hair is your captain. You’d watched it happen from a (questionably) safe distance, when he suddenly transformed in a surge of sparking static electricity that made your skin crawl like it was trying to escape from your bones but it’s still hard to believe that it was really him. Even having seen the reality of it with your own two eyes doesn’t make it any easier to accept. 

Luffy was supposed to be a dark haired, dark eyed youth in the prime of his life. Not this uncanny version of him that giddily laughs with boisterous amusement while he ping pongs about so violently within the craggy mess of scorched earth in the wake of his battle with Kaido that you can feel the massive chunks of rock slamming into the ground as much as you can hear it. One after another, from the left and then the right, they just keep falling in an almost continuous rain of rubble and ruin. The resulting shockwaves very nearly take you off your feet more than once but you force yourself to keep running even when your sore legs scream in protest, aching from the exertion. It was the only choice you really had at this point. 

And it’s not lost on you that this is technically your own fault for getting so close to the fight but you’d wanted to help. All that talk of family and crew, and unwavering allegiance to the Straw Hats had clearly infected your brain because you’d rushed straight into the danger zone despite knowing good and well that you were the only one close enough to make it in time. Now you were the one who needed help and it wasn’t going to arrive soon enough to do you any good. 

What an idyllic fool you’d been. 

“Ah!” You suddenly get tripped up in all the rocky debris laying across the ground and fall to your knees with a seething hiss. Your palms come back scraped where they’d shot out to catch you but you’ve managed to avoid taking the brunt of it to the face. Thank the stars for life’s smallest miracles. 

Panting heavily, you just sit there amongst the broken wreckage and detritus for a harrowingly long beat, trying to catch your breath. You can still hear the chaotic destruction of Luffy — or the man who had once been Luffy — bouncing around like a rubber ball behind you, completely unimpeded by the laws of gravity or common sense. It sounded like he was having a blast. 

Maybe that was good. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed you yet, so lost within the mess of demolished land and too tiny a speck to even draw his attention. You had a chance to escape then, if that was the case. 

Any such hopes quickly fizzle out when his uproarious hooting and hollering abruptly rushes towards you, getting louder and louder until your eardrums start to vibrate. You suck in a sharp, nauseated gasp and slap your hands over your ears as you twist around to look behind you. Just in time to watch Luffy sail overhead like a shooting white comet. The kickback from his high velocity speed hits you seconds later, tearing a shriek from your mouth when the wind hits you full force and as solid as any wall. 

Too busy ducking down with your head between your knees to protect yourself from the sting of flying rocks, you don’t get to see how he manages to pivot his momentum mid air and land a couple hundred yards away. You hear it though. You feel the shock of impact too, when it races through the ground to make the rubble underneath you tremble. It goes quiet then, and unnaturally still. Suddenly all you can hear are your own labored gasps. 

You hesitate to do it but, realizing you have no other option, you slowly lift your face to peer out over all the fallen debris. Standing at a distance, Luffy just looks at you with a fiercely manic edge in his now golden-yellow eyes that makes your veins ice up. You’re more certain than ever that this cannot be your captain. He should have been giving you the usual bright faced, happy go lucky grin he always did when he inexplicably came out on top against all the odds that were stacked against him. Not this — viscous leer of victory. 

But if this wasn’t Luffy then who in the seven seas was it? 

“Have you come to celebrate with me?” 

His voice isn’t quite the same either. More raspy, like the weight of immense power flowing through him was putting strain even on his vocal cords. You don’t think you like that any more than you like the way he’s eyeing you up as if you were a stuffed pig on a roasting spit. Even for his bottomless pit of an appetite, you’d never seen him look at another person quite like that. 

Cautiously slow, you straighten up out of your defensive huddle. Work to get your feet under you without taking your attention off him for even a moment and then stand so you can prepare to … what, run again? A lot of good that had clearly done you. 

“I don’t think it’s time to celebrate just yet.” You tell him softly. “We need to find the other Straw Hats. Make sure they’re all okay. You still remember them … don’t you, Luffy?” 

Your emotional plea only succeeds in giving him a momentary pause. “But I have so much energy left. I just want to dance and shout, and jump into the air! You’ll join me, won’t you?” 

He takes a step towards you, a rather aggressive one at that, and you quickly back up. Something told you if you didn’t agree to go along with this he was going to try and force you into joining in on whatever constituted his idea of merrymaking. Unfortunately you weren’t sure if you’d survive that, given the state of all the crumbled boulders littering the ground on this now desolate stretch of land. 

“No, Luffy. Not right now. We have to - -“ 

With an abrupt jerk, he lurches forward as if to launch himself at you. His rubbery legs momentarily struggle for traction on the ground, as if they couldn’t quite decide what consistency they wanted to be, but you don’t plan on sticking around long enough to find out. Feeling like you’ve forgotten how to breathe, you spin around and make a mad dash for it, barreling straight into a dead sprint. 

It’s a resounding effort in futility. 

You don’t even make it three whole steps before he slams into your back hard enough to take you right off your feet. 

There’s a split second moment of shock at how fast he’d managed to close the distance, and then the ground is rushing up at your face again. 

That dizzying blur of vertigo inducing free fall coupled with the way your vision tilts on its axis very nearly has you spewing your guts right then and there. But if Luffy picks up on the dire, sickened tinge coloring your wounded grunt he certainly doesn’t act it. He just flings his arms around your middle, alarming in their fleshy elasticity and yet still familiar to you, then hauls you up against his front before you can slam into the rocks. 

Everything happens much too fast for you to keep up with any of it. Your brain is reeling, still trying to recover from the impact of his body colliding with yours and the subsequent head rush that followed. So stunned you can’t even find the wherewithal to protest his treatment of you let alone try to fight your way free. Unable to do anything else, you simply allow your limbs to bonelessly flail when he takes a handful of eager steps forward with you in his arms. 

In the next moment Luffy spins you out away from him, snagging your wrist to stop your momentum and make you jerk to another abrupt standstill. The yank on your shoulder causes it to pop, splintering pain racing up your arm as you cry out. He doesn’t care though. He either doesn’t care or he doesn’t notice, because he just pulls you right back into him again, hard enough to make you collapse with a teeth rattling jolt against his chest. 

“Come on!” He laughs, loud and frenzied, his hold on you much too tight where it’s shackled around your wrist. “Dance with me! Aren’t you having fun?” 

Teeth gnashing to fight back the nausea, you bring your uncaptured hand up and brace it against his shuddering frame. You’re more than just a little surprised to find his heartbeat hammering out a sharp, almost violent staccato against his ribcage, so powerful you can feel it thrumming through his skin. It reminds you of an endless procession of war drums. Too many to count and impossibly loud, their ferocity equally intimidating and awe inspiring. 

What in the world had happened to him? 

You don’t have the privilege of lingering on that question for very long. Couldn’t afford to, as you try to get your tired legs situated under you again so you can stand on your own. “You’re hurting me, Luffy. We don’t have time for this right now. Just let me go. Please.” 

But he doesn’t even seem to register what you’re saying as a plea at all. 

A snickering, raspy laugh rattles up out of him, and you vehemently push at his narrow chest with your uncaptured hand. Shove him as hard as you can. He still doesn't budge though, simply reaching up to snag that wrist too so he can forcefully spin you around in his arms. You feel sick with the rush of motion coupled with the fatigue and throbbing pain in your body but there’s nothing you can do to stop it. He’s too strong, too wild, too lost in whatever manic high he’s slipped into after his fight with Kaido. 

Tightening his grip to lock you against his front, Luffy moulds himself to the line of your back with such an unnatural, rubbery motion that you find yourself fighting not to wretch even as his mouth finds your neck. He nuzzles at you for a brief moment, just brushing his lips over your jackhammering pulse before angling his nose towards the spot just behind your ear. The breath he draws is slow and savory, and he seems to hold it in his lungs for an unnecessarily long time. 

When he at last sighs out, displacing some of the loose flyaways in your hair, an unmistakable rumble low in his chest accompanies it. “Mmm, you smell good. Like victory.” 

What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Luffy, just listen to me … don’t do this. I - I don’t really understand what's happened to you but we can figure it out together. We’ll fix it. I promise. But you need to let me go or - -“

“Let you go? But we’re having so much fun. I want to have even more fun with you but you’re not a fighter, not like he was. And you don’t want to dance with me either.”

He sounds dangerously close to pouting when he says that last bit and you give a halfhearted twist in his hold, testing for any slack. It’s no good though. For as little effort as he seemed to be putting into it, his arms were like iron shackles where they’re criss crossed over your body. Dammit. 

“Why?” You seethe in frustration and fast mounting panic. “Why won’t you just go back to normal, Luffy? This isn’t like you!” 

His frame shakes behind you with the giggles that rise within him, making his whole body vibrate like a mercilessly shaken soda bottle. It quickly grows, rapidly multiplying and expanding until he at last throws his head back with a cackling peel of laughter aimed up at the sky. It’s much too close to your ear and deafeningly loud, reigniting your desperation to get away from him, but your wild thrashing just causes him to laugh even harder. Like he found it hilarious that you were scared and trapped against him. 

“I can’t!” He howls, belly laughing so ferociously it makes you jerk in his hold. “I can’t go back until I’ve used up all of this energy! It feels like I’m going crazy but it feels good too! Amazing even! I’ve never experienced anything like it before! I want to keep going but you can’t fight and you won’t dance with me … but there’s something else we can do together, isn’t there?” 

“What are you ta - -“

He releases you so suddenly you don’t even realize you’re crumpling to the ground until your butt has already hit the rocks, surprising a yelp out of you. Fresh pain immediately races up from your backside in a blinding starburst and you outright hiss as you gingerly start to angle yourself onto your hip in hopes of taking some of the pressure off of where it hurts the most. You don’t quite make it that far though. 

Luffy’s hands are suddenly on your shoulders, shoving you forward to sprawl out rather inelegantly on your front. He follows you down, pinning you to the destroyed ground with his body weight, and you immediately start to panic in earnest. Your captain didn’t look like much more than a lanky beanpole at first glance but he was so densely packed with muscle that he felt like a sack of bricks on top of you. It makes it hard to breathe and the quickened, gasping lungfuls of air you suck in don’t exactly help. Your chest constricts painfully tight as you struggle against him, forgetting all logic and reason in your blind desperation to get away from him. 

He doesn’t even seem to notice though, still just as unbudging sprawled out over top of you as he’d been when the two of you were standing. No amount of kicking your legs or bucking up underneath him even gives him pause, and his greedy hands fumble down to your waist where they squeeze tight enough to rip a hurt shriek from your throat. This doesn’t cut through the manic haze spurring him on either. He doesn’t even waver. 

“What are you — stop that! Have you lost your mind!” 

“I’m sorry.” He snickers, not sounding very sorry at all as he shoves his face into the crook of your neck again. Another deep, savory inhale. Another rumbling exhale right against your pulse. The faintest growl that trails afterward is new though and you go painfully still under him, hardly even daring the blink despite all the grimy dust kicked up in your desperate fight for freedom. 

You’d never, ever heard such a sound come out of him before. It scares you perhaps most of all, and you’d seen many a frightening and unsettling thing since stepping foot into Onigashima. Somehow this just really took the cake though. 

“I’m sorry,” He says it again. Contradicting this, his callous worn fingers dip into the hem of your pants and start to tug at them, jostling you with each insistent pull. “I’m sorry, heheee. I just can’t help myself. If I can’t have you I don’t know what I’ll do. You’ll help me calm down, won’t you?” 

Your mind struggles to process that. He was asking you to help him? Not with words or medicine, or even the endless supply of food he would have otherwise asked for had he been in his right mind. He wanted your body. 

So that’s what it was then. What it all boiled down to. 

If he couldn’t fight you and you refused to dance with him then that left only one other option. He was going to fuck it out of his system. Anything to get rid of all the excess energy running through his body, making him vibrate like a lit fuse on top of you. It made a certain amount of sense, you supposed, but that didn’t mean you had to like it. 

Curling your hands into tight fists against the rocks, numb to the abrasive sting, you draw a rattling breath to center yourself. It doesn’t do much in the way of good. “Please don’t do this.” 

It’s like he doesn’t even hear you, a grunt of victory puffing out of him when he finally manages to get your pants tugged down over the curve of your ass. 

“Please.” You gasp, the sound wet and faltering. 

Completely ignoring you now, Luffy reaches further down to fumble with something lower while his opposite hand possessively curls around your hip to keep you in place. You hiccup rather sadly at the distant sound of rustling clothes, almost completely lost under the violent pounding of blood in your ears, but there’s no missing the fleshy nudge against the back of your thigh that soon follows. It leaves a sticky smear where it touches you, inspiring an eruption of horrified goosebumps in its wake. 

You don’t have to look to know what’s touching you. The innate knowledge of what’s happening and who is responsible for this paralyzing fear that grips your aching heart in a chokehold is horrible and suffocating all at once. Stinging tears spring up and well in the backs of your eyes but you clench your teeth to try and stifle the terrified wail threatening to claw its way up your throat, knowing it would only sound hysterical. 

On one hand you almost couldn’t believe this was really happening, even though the reality of the situation was staring you right in the face. It just seemed almost too implausibly awful to be real. 

But on the other, Luffy wasn’t exactly known for his self control or restraint. You knew this. Had even found it charming at one point or another, so you brace yourself for the worst. It just might be the only thing that ends up saving you. 

“Captain - -“

“I’m sorry.” 

He’s suddenly between your legs, pressing up into you from behind. You go ramrod stiff against him, your whole body clenching in genuine distress, but it does very little to stop him. Like he’s done it a million times before, or perhaps thanks to the instinctive muscle memory bestowed upon every man with a working cock, he pushes right in on your entrance until cunt slips start to part under the pressure. A thin, tremulous groan escapes him at the first kiss of your hot guts against the tip and then he just keeps pushing. Even when your muscles tense up and try to keep him out. Even when he meets a great deal of resistance as your body tries its best to reject him. If anything he almost seems to take it as a challenge the same way he would another combatant or a roadblock standing between him and his goals. 

In this case his goal is clearly to sink himself in you right down to the hilt, and he just puts more effort into his cause the more you try to fight it. Leans his weight into you until it feels like your poor cunt is taking the full brunt of his mass. The resulting stretch of your inner sleeve is painful and drawn out, taking much longer than it otherwise would have had you been even slightly prepped for this. 

Your mouth hinges open but nothing comes out for a prolonged moment as the tears break loose to streak down your face. It feels like he’s tearing you in half! Either he was much bigger than you’d assumed he’d be or by virtue of how tightly your interior walls were squeezing him — or even some terrible combination of the two —  it was like you were being split down the middle. You couldn’t even breathe through the choking discomfort of it and a threadbare, sobbing little mewl dislodges from your throat when he at last manages to shove himself past that first barrier. 

Full penetration is much easier for him to achieve after that but it’s no less painful, and you cry out when he snaps his hips forward once, twice, and finally lodges his length the rest of the way in on the third. A pleased huff slips out of him as he settles on top of you, a fresh wave of giggles quickly following suit. It was like he’d gone mad. So wrapped up in the raving power that had turned his hair white that he can only laugh about it even while he’s buried balls deep in your body. 

That short lived pause is all the respite you get though and Luffy is soon moving, rutting into you with quick, sharp little jabs up into your guts. You shriek at the top of your lungs, clawing at the ground while you kick out behind you, but he ignores this the same as everything else. Lying prone and trapped under him, all you can do is take it. 

“Waah — why are you doing this, Luffy? It hurts! If … if the others find out about this - -“ 

“I know, hahaaa. I know. I’m sorry, but I can’t stop. You feel … this feels amazing! Almost as good as fighting Kaido did!” 

You seethe at that, trying your damndest not to get caught up on it right now but that proves to be more than a little difficult. He really didn’t see any difference between fucking and fighting? Somehow that seemed so typically him, and you think you would have probably joined him in laughing about it under better circumstances. 

But better circumstances wouldn’t have found you being roughly jostled back and forth on the ground by his eager, jack rabbit thrusts. The motion of his hips lacks any and all refinement with no technique to speak of, and yet that doesn’t stop you from seeing stars every time his cock blindly rams into your upper wall. It punches the air from your lungs and materializes out of your mouth in the form of heaving, strained bleats of distress that quickly climb to a higher and higher pitch with each second that goes by. Not for the first time today, you feel like you really might throw up. 

“Ooh, that’s …” He suddenly gasps, lets out a half strangled groan, and drives himself into you even harder. Faster. The force of his pelvis slapping against your upturned ass rapidly grows to a steady, almost constant blur of stinging swats — plap, plap, plap, plap — and you shriek at the rapidly swelling pressure on your gut. “Ooh, that’s good. That’s good! It feels so good! I - I can’t - -“ 

Without warning, your pussy abruptly floods with wet, sticky warmth. He hadn’t even given you a chance to beg for him to pull out. 

Your eyes widen to the approximate size of dinner plates but he just keeps pistoning his hips even as the rest of his shuddering frame gives a series of little jerks to thoroughly empty his balls into you. He shows no signs of slowing down or tiring any time soon though, his limitless energy evidently far outpacing his obvious lack of experience. 

It’s a hard thing to wrap your reeling head around just how quickly everything has happened and yet there’s no mistaking it for what it is. The sensation is completely foreign to you but you innately understood it for what it represented, what it could potentially mean for your future. You’re not half as relieved to have it done and over with as you are terrified of what it meant. 

Even more confounding, however, is that it doesn’t so much as make Luffy slow down let alone stop now that he’s painted your inner sleeve a thick, creamy white. Not the orgasm itself which, considering how much he fills you up, should have thoroughly drained him for the time being, nor the possible repercussions of allowing himself to shoot off inside of you like that. He just keeps going without a care in the world, like it wasn’t his problem and he still had more than enough stamina to keep up the harried pace he’d settled into for the foreseeable future. The only sign of it burning up any of his energy at all is the slightly labored quality his breathing takes on, but that’s it. 

Realizing that this ordeal is still far from over, you give your body a twist and try to angle your cunt away from the constant attack of his cock. “H - hold on a minute, what … aagghhh, what are you doing, Luffy? You - - you can’t just cum inside like that, you idiot!” 

“Can’t stop! Heheehe, I can’t, I can’t, not when you keep squeezing me like that!” 

All but wheezing at the intense pleasure of thrusting into the sticky mess he’s made of you, Luffy presses himself flush against your sweaty back and circles his arms around your middle. You brace to shove him off, or at least try to, but you don’t quite make it that far. 

Catching you completely off guard, he yanks you up against him and practically throws himself back onto the ground. The sudden lurch lodges your stomach in your throat, and you let out a frazzled scream as you land on top of him. That he cushions the impact with his rubbery body only comes as a slight relief when you were struggling just to get your bearings straight, disoriented and stunned in the aftermath of his impulsive decision when you unexpectedly find yourself blinking up at the sky. 

You start to pull yourself upright, wincing, only to quickly realize he’s still got one arm looped around your waist to keep you held in place on top of him. The other is — you gasp when you glance down to see him already fisting his cock in hand, guiding it back to your entrance where it had slipped out in that rush of movement. It’s still achingly stiff and unrelenting, like he hadn’t already spilled his seed in you only moments ago, and your heart painfully wrenches with the fresh wave of dread that comes over you. 

“W - wait, please don’t - -“

The head of him finds your cunt, pressing back up into you again, and you outright sob when he mercilessly snaps his hips to impale you on that stiff length once more. You sway unsteadily at the fresh stretch, trying to decide if it’s better or worse in this position, but gravity soon proves itself your enemy when the weight of you on top of him firmly sinks his cock even further into you than before. It feels like he’s tickling at your ribcage like this, but all you can do is give a wounded little mewl and try to steady yourself. Undaunted, he reaches up to tug your pants the rest of the way off. 

“Luffy,” Sniffling sadly, you fight him as much as you can in your physically exhausted state but it’s no use. Your bottoms come off to leave you bare and exposed from the waist down, sitting upon his cock like a whore on her rightful throne. 

The tears quickly start up again, streaking hot tracks down your flushed, sweaty face while he gets himself situated underneath you. His hips lift, nudging you just a pinch higher so he can brace his feet underneath him while his hands come around to anchor around your love handles. Then, he’s moving again. 

Completely unconcerned by your crying, Luffy flexes his legs to thrust up into you and the same fleshy slap as before quickly rises loud in the air again. Plap, plap, plap, plap. The wet squelch of your seeded cunt sucking him in deep on every upward plunge joins in, adding to the obscene cacophony of noises even as you toss your head back to sob at the sky. You can hear him grunting underneath you, clearly enjoying himself quite a bit, but you couldn’t say the same. Your body was already a sore, achy mess of bruises and scrapes, and this certainly wasn’t helping. You were just getting more and more tired by the minute. 

“Nnghhnnn, please, captain. Please don’t cum inside again, I … I’m begging you!” 

The only response he gives is a low, rumbling groan that seems to bleed into you and reverberate endlessly inside your belly, making you squeeze your thighs together as if to block him out. But of course it doesn’t work. Given the way he stutters over a raspy hiss of your name he actually seems to like the way it makes your walls tighten around him, unintentionally though it may have been. There was really nothing you could have done to dissuade or stop him once he’d set his mind to something, and it seemed he very adamantly had his sights set on using your cunt until his energy reserves finally wore out. 

Distantly, you wonder how long that will actually take. 

“You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine,” He chants underneath you, again and again, even when his hands tighten around your hips to guide you into bouncing right along with him. Having no other choice, you snifflingly spread your legs wide and brace your feet on the ground, moving with him despite the throbbing ache in your muscles. “Mine, mine, mine. My prize. My treasure. My woman!” 

He viciously slams his pelvis up at the end, further punctuating his claim on you, and the sharp stab of his cock rips a wild shriek from your mouth. “N - no, captain, please! I can’t — I don’t want it! Not like this! You’re not … aaghnn, you’re not Luffy! You’re not!” 

The only response he gives is a deranged little laugh that makes his cock jump where it’s wedged inside you. That push on your upper wall makes the tension running through you double and then triple, your heaving gasps coming a little quicker now even as his hands travel up your body. You can’t stop him like this when your own were propped behind you along his flexing stomach to help you maintain your balance in this precarious position. It’s not hard to figure out what his intentions are though, and you screw your eyes shut so you don’t have to watch him grab hold of your top. 

A deafening riiiip tears through the air when he shreds it, the poor cotton helpless before his far greater strength. He leaves it hanging from your shoulders in tattered pieces as your tits bounce free, the stiffened tips already aching and strained long before he greedily palms at them like a starved man clutching at a lifeline. The blinding friction of his calloused palms and fingers on your teats makes your cunt spasm around him and you wail, screaming for someone, anyone to save you from your captain. 

Unfortunately for you, help was still a long ways off and Luffy wasn’t even close to running out of steam.

⭐

Crossposted: here

[milk-luvr-dot-com]

“A New Assistant” - The Thick of It - Chapter 2

Summary: While DoSAC fucks around trying to keep the data wipe a secret, Malcolm and Ivy begin to become more comfortable with one another.

Word Count (this chapter): 5222

Rating: Mature (for adult situations, language)

Warnings: No Ao3 Warnings, Explicit Language, homophobic language, fatphobic language, sexist language, ablest language

Categories: F/M, Gen

Tags: Falling in love, crushes, comedy, slow burn, explicit language, original female characters, AU - canon divergence, mutual pining, additional tags to be added

Chapter 1, Chapter 3

Ao3 link and full work under the cut.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24510592/chapters/59267578

Malcolm walked into the office, expecting to turn on the light. It caught him off guard when the light was already on, and Ivy was sitting across the room at her desk, quietly talking to people on the phone about menial garbage that Malcolm had put her on last night.

"Oh, shit." He said, dropping his briefcase beside his desk and settled into his office chair.

She looked up after finishing her call, "Morning, sir."

"Were you here all night?" Malcolm made a concerned face.

Ivy capped her pen. "No, got here early to sort out Anthony's mental breakdown about his stupid bloody department of education thing." She rubbed her eyes, which didn't smear what little makeup she had on. She looked tired. She could have been lying.

"Well, good morning anyway. Can I fetch you some tea?"

She thought it was a sweet gesture. He always tried to be kind to her, no matter how frustrated or pissed he was at anybody else. He was always patient. Even if he made a smarmy comment, it was all in jest. She had only been there a week, but she knew that Malcolm didn't treat anyone else like this.

"Aren't I supposed to be the one doing the tea fetching?" Ivy smiled meekly.

Malcolm didn't look at her, instead preoccupied with signing into his computer. "Right you are. Can you fetch us some tea?"

She sighed, getting up, "what kind?"

"Earl grey would be fine, thank you, Ivy."

"Mhm." She fetched it, then came back fairly quickly.

As she leaned down to set his cup on his desk, he began, "You ever see that movie with Rory Calhoun, where there's these siblings who sell meat but it's actually made out of human flesh? What's it called again?"

"Motel Hell?"

He snapped his fingers, pointing at her. "Motel Hell. Wow, you must really know your '80s horror films."

She chuckled, "I remember seeing that one at the cinema with my mates."

Malcolm raised an eyebrow, "in cinema?"

"Yeah."

He didn't continue, trying to calculate her age in her head.

"Sir, you're only about 4 years my senior." Ivy slumped into her chair.

Malcolm looked at her in disbelief. "No..." he turned his head to give her a side eye. "No, you can't be."

She pressed her lips together, and nodded. "Yeah. 46, as of July."

"I thought you were  approaching  your 40s. Christ, you look lovely."

"Oh, stop." She swiped her hand at him, grinning and blushing. "You're not that bad, either, Malcolm."

He sighed, "Anyway, uh, my point was that you and I are like the people from Motel Hell. Tag team of..."

"Shit?"

"Yeah, shit. So, I want to see you in action. How about you go up there and see what's.. shaking." Malcolm smiled, using his hands as he talked.

"Alright then. I'll take notes for you." She stood up, making her way up to the DoSAC workspace.

The sound of Ivy's heels echoed through the office space and send the same vibe as the Other Mother from Coraline. Once she rounded the corner, she didn't make a fairer presence.

"Morning, morning, morning everyone." The DoSAC employees looked relieved to see her instead of Malcolm. They really shouldn't have been. "Where's Nicola?" Ivy turned to Olly, who was punching in a phone number.

"Er, she's on a call." He said, which was a total lie, as she had just stood up and looked directly at her before ducking back down again, with a relieved look on her face. Again, she really shouldn't have been.

A blonde haired woman, who's name Ivy recalled to be Robyn, asked weakly, "Does he know...?"

She wheeled around, staring at her. They were the same height. "Hm? Sorry? Does he know what?"

"Er..." Robyn scrambled for something to say, clearly, "the best way to clear a paper jam?"

"I'm not sure, but in my expert opinion, you put a hamster in a tube sock and beat the printer over and over again with it until it works." She bluntly responded, then turned at Nicola's voice.

"Morning, Ivy. Uh, if you could sort out the sack race situation for me, that'd be terrific." She said to Terri, who agreed and asked what she could do. "Ideally, build a time machine so that we could go back and not invite photographers to the sports day."

Ivy rolled her eyes. Terri and Nicola continued for a few more moments, then Nicola turned her attention to Ivy, finally. "So, Ivy-"

"Oh, sorry, uh, Malcolm's calling, hang on just one moment." She made her way to the elevator nook.

"Malcolm, what can I do you for? ....Oh, yeah, it's going okay. Yeah they're being fucking weird, like those boys on that one show, Ghost Adventures. Walking around and shouting every five minutes, 'what was that?' .... no, not literally, sir. But maybe you should come up here, they look like they're about to admit something. They've got it in their little beady eyes. ....Yeah, okay. See you." Ivy slinked back to the main area.

She gave a warm smile on her way back. "Right, my apologies. What's going on, hm?"

"Uh-" Nicola began, but then was cut off when Ivy answered a voice call. "Hello, Rory, what can I do-... WHAT?" She shouted, and continuing, "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? JESUS!"

Ivy ran off, towards the bridge point of the office. She continued to talk to Rory about something regarding what's on the press, something menial, but Rory always decided he was most important. That's why Malcolm gave Ivy the number, for her to handle it. Robyn and Glenn had a very clandestine conversation full of false laughter on the other end of the hall. She took mental note of it. Once Malcolm exited the lift, she ended the call.

They held conversation on their way back to Nicola's office.

"They're being fucking weird."

"They're always fucking weird, why do you need me up here?" Malcolm asked.

She exhaled through her nose. "I'm just worried it might be something big, and I don't know if I can handle it, okay?"

"You can handle it, trust me, you were fine, but since I'm up here anyway, I might as well stay up here." They stopped directly outside of the Secretary of State's office. "We'll talk about this later, okay?" He pointed at her, and they both entered the room.

"Little pigs, little pigs," he teased in a gruff voice, "Let me come in. Don’t worry about the hair on your chinny-chin-chin."

"Malcolm, Ivy, what was your call?" Nicola asked, smugly.

They both furrowed their brows. Ivy spoke first, "is it any of your business?"

"What was our call?"

Glenn tried to get a word in, but Malcolm continued. "You want to know what our call was? Sorry, I didn’t realize I had to run all the calls made through your bed-wetters switchboard, here."

"Usually he’ll just dial 1-1-hate." Ivy jumped in.

Nicola asked, "Malcolm, do you know?"

"Of course he knows."

"No, he doesn’t know."

Ivy gently elbowed him, whispering, "Fucking clandestine."

"There has been a massive irretrievable data loss. The last seven months’ worth of new immigrant details have gone, apparently lost in the computer." She finally laid out.

Ivy’s eyes widened out of shock, and then her brows lowered, angry. Malcolm paused for a minute, beginning to crack a smile and then a maniacal laugh.

"You’re fucking kidding. Nicola, tell me you’re fucking kidding." Ivy began, slowly raising her voice halfway through the sentence.

"Do you know what? Do you know what’s really fucking sad here, is that I don’t even have the energy to pretend I already knew. Which is for the best, because I’m gonna need all of my fucking energy to fucking rip all of your bodies to bits with my bare hand and sell off your flayed fucking skin as a sleeping bag to a normal person!" He turned to Ivy, "Ivy, go and get my bowie knife from my office, because I’d like to start now."

"Can I just say that getting angry actually isn’t going to help anything. I’ve done anger, I’m currently at grief, I’m working my way towards bargaining… whatever, you know, it’s behind me."

"Oh, that’s great. That’s fan-fucking-tastic, minister! You know what, why don’t you just explain your little plan to us here so we can pick out all the problems with it like crows looking for bits of flesh on a fresh piece of roadkill." The short woman spat, crossing her arms.

She sighed, asking Terri to explain the plan. "Well, blaming the department minister might be a high-risk strategy."

"Ooh, high risk. Power serve." He added immaturely.

Ivy smiled, then bit her lip, adding "Saucy."

"My pitch would be that this department is fatally flawed. It’s out of condition, it’s obese, it’s asthmatic."

"That a-girl, back over the net."

“You're really sure about that, Nicola, because-” Glenn began.

"Yes, wise words from the distinguished, elderly, gay fucking tennis coach here."

Olly interjected, "Seriously, I think we should talk about my strategy further because I really think that there's a way-"

"Oh, good, the tiny-dicked ball boy's having a go now, with his tiny little clean white shorts and a pink polo, here we go." Ivy pinched the bridge of her nose, leaning against the black filing cabinets.

"What about Sue Barker's little sister? What's she got to say?"

Robyn made some comment about lemon zinger, before Ivy checked her notes. "Does The Guardian know about this? The Mail?"

"Oh God- you two, can't even handle you, you fucking statue, on your own," Nicola started, motioning to Malcolm, "but now it's fucking Bonnie and Clyde. The Guardian, God I don't fucking know..."

"Shall I find out? Get some feelers?" The woman in the pink power suit asked.

"Yeah, go on, get your feelers out for the lads."

"What do you think, Malcolm, will shitting on the department work?" Nicola suggested, crossing her arms and rubbing one of her temples.

"Oh, sure. Let's cause a bit of friction, here, huh? Let's fire someone, let's fire Glenn!"

"You can't just fire Glenn, no."

"We could fire Glenn."

"Shall I get his file?"

"No! I've got a list!" The sickly fucking Mister Rogers (God rest his soul) shouted.

Ivy folded her hands together, bending down as if she was talking to a child. "Oh, you've got a list? Of what, your favorite fucking toys, you fucking immaculate toddler?"

Malcolm left the room, and so did Nicola and Glenn. "Ivy, come on. You're the new broom, you're sweeping up trouble with one end, broom-handling incompetent staff up the tunnel with the other."

"So how do we play it with the Guardian, then?" She chased after him.

"Smile. By gay. Smile, smile, smile!" Malcolm psychotically smiled. Ivy mirrored him.

"Malcolm, sir?"

"Huh?" He was at his desk again, stuffing his notes for the meeting at The Guardian in a pile.

"Am I coming with... you... to the thing?"

He stopped, looking at her, lost in thought. "Er... yes, but I'm going to need you stay out of the lunch room. Stay in the lobby. Have a lovely beans on toast or whatever it is you cockney bastards do."

She rolled her eyes, shrugging, "Ah, thanks mate."

"I'll call you or come get you if some shitty shit thing happens, like Nicola chokes on a piece of banana or some other disaster."

"I'd expect Nicola to choke on Jeffery's banana, trying to sputter out..." She continued for a moment, mumbling on about calling Nicola a wanker.

"You really don't like her, do you?"

Ivy looked up at him, raising her eyebrows. "No. I really don't. She's a fucking disaster with the press. She's a smug little stinging lit piece of coal thrown in your shoe directly from hell."

"Well, what can you expect from someone so low down on the list?"

She snickered, "Not much apparently."

"Fine. Yeah." Ivy looked up at Malcolm's voice. She was seated on an uncomfortable red seat directly across from the meeting room. She stood and met up with him again.

"Ah, there's your other half, Malcolm." Olly commented.

"Piss off." She answered.

Most of them piled into the lift, and Olly continued. "I didn't think you'd have come today, but I suppose she follows you everywhere, like a little puppy."

"Yeah, what is it with you two, Malcolm?" Terri chimed in. "Are you two dating?"

"Are we dating?" Ivy mocked. "No, we're not. I'm his assistant. He's my boss."

"Hot, isn't it?" The curly haired lanky bitch continued.

She sighed. "Olly, if you don't shut the fuck up, I'm going to tear off your arm and beat your thick skull to death with it." She pointed at him threateningly.

"Ooh, I'm so scared of the oompa loompa in the navy blue skirt."

"Don't fuck with me!" She shouted.

Malcolm shot Olly a stern look, to let him know he meant business. That classic Malcolm look that put fear into DoSAC's veins. He shut up immediately. They exited the lift and out of the lobby, then back inside into the van.

"Hey French Lieutenant's woman, we're over here, come on! What're you doing, marking out your territory?"

Nicola had a look on her face like she'd just seen a ghost. She'd fucked up somewhere along the line, Ivy thought.

"I need some air, Olly, come with me, now." She hurried out the car.

"She's not a post-match puker, right?"

"Fuck's sake."

"I know."

Terri began talking about wine. She stopped, in favor of asking more prodding questions. "How was your first week, Ivy?"

"Fine." She was pretending to write things down, instead drawing a caricature of Nicola in a straight jacket with a text bubble coming off of it saying 'wooden toys!'. She had it turned to Malcolm, who looked at it and smirked.

"He wasn't too hard on you, was he?"

"Nope."

"Are you listening to me?"

Ivy finally looked up. "Nope!" She smiled. Malcolm covered his mouth, checking his Blackberry, and pretending he wasn't grinning. "And I don't work for you, so it doesn't matter."

Nicola returned to the car, apologizing profusely and explaining herself to Malcolm. She ended it with a, "Sorry, Malcolm, I'm really sorry."

"Fucks sake!" He smacked his lap with his clipboard, "JESUS! CHRIST! Well now we've got another adjective to add to smug and glum, FUCKING RETARDED! Jesus! Do you not think it would be germane to check who you're talking to? It's a fucking newspaper office! It's not a fucking, sanatorium for the fucking deaf, is it?! Are you so dense?! Am I going to have to run around slapping badges on people wit a big tick on some, a big cross on others, so you know when to shut your gob and when to open it? Jesus Christ! Oh, but that'd probably confuse you as well, won't it?! That'll be TOO confusing! You'll see a cross and go, 'oh, fuck, X marks the spot! Better tell this little person all about the Prime Minister's fucking catastrophic erectile dysfunction!' Oh, but, not to worry! Not to worry, you've sent Olly over there to deal with it! Fucking Olly! He's a fucking knitted scarf, that twat! He's a fucking balaclava!"

Once Malcolm had finished his tear, he held his face, turning to look out the window. Nicola quietly left the car, leaning against the side of it and rubbing her face. She looked like she was about to cry.

"Sorry, Ivy." He quietly said, apologetically. "Sorry you had to be caught in the middle of that."

She had been silent the whole time, stuck in between those two. "Oh. It's okay."

"Don't I get an apology, too?" Terri piped up.

"No, actually, you don't, you fucking wad of bubblegum. Come on." Malcolm and Ivy exited the van, Nicola saw and followed from the other side. They approached the red head, and Olly was desperately explaining himself to her.

"The department's not really fit for purpose, I mean, Terri's quite bad."

"Not just Terri, I mean I'm not going to name names but Robyn, Robyn's shit. Total shit."

Olly nodded, "Robyn, she's total shit."

"O-kay. Olly, please fuck off." Ivy said, crossing her arms.

"What?"

"Go on. Go and have your fucking lukewarm tea. Mummy and daddy are talking." Malcolm added, shooing him with his hand. "I'm sure that we can settle this matter of you eavesdropping on a private conversation."

The journalist paused for a moment. "It was a public conversation."

"No. You are- you think you're so clever and you are so totally wanking with the wrong crowd here because this woman-" Nicola grabbed Ivy by the sleeve, dragging her in front of Malcolm and into center stage. "This woman, here, is the press."

"Nicola!" She hurriedly whispered. Nicola ran off, whining "Fuck, what have I done?" All the way back to the van.

"Do you think this is going to advance your career? Is this you moving forward?"

"I mean, at least my career has got a trajectory, whereas yours is about to crash head-on into a change of government."

"Don't you worry, girl, because I can still fucking steer some fucking flaming wreckage in your fucking direction."

"Yeah, I'll tell you what, once it's printed I promise I'll come back to you for a reaction quote. How's that?"

"Darling, I wouldn't fucking piss on you, if you were fucking allergic to piss, right?"

"Malcolm-" Ivy attempted to begin to deescalate the situation.

"No, I will fucking-"

The reporter began to walk away, "I'll come back to your wife, here, for a reaction quote, too. That's quite enough for one day. Jesus."

"We're not married!" He shouted after her. "Fuck right off, then!"

As they turned, Malcolm began muttering swear words to himself. "Are you alright, sir?" Ivy asked.

"No! I'm not fucking alright! Shit!" He spat, throwing his hands up. He huffed, "Sorry, it's just-"

"I know." She tentatively put a hand on his forearm that was attached to the hand stuffed inside his pocket. "Sorry, dumb question."

"No, you're fine."

Meanwhile, inside the van, the gang were gossiping like a bunch of schoolchildren about Malcolm and Ivy. Terri pointed, "Look, they're holding hands! They have to be dating!"

"What?" Olly looked out. "No they're not!"

"Okay, shh, shh, they're coming back."

Malcolm and Ivy walked back to their office in silence on their way back. Once they got back and settled back in, Malcolm broke the silence.

"Well that was a fucking whale-sized shit stain on this department."

Ivy clacked in her password into her laptop. Without looking up, she answered "This department is a whale-sized shit stain. To be completely honest, sir, it's exactly what I'd expect to happen."

He chuckled for a bit, then the room went back to silence. Once again, Malcolm broke it. "Ivy?"

"Hm?"

"What did you mean, this morning, when you said you thought you couldn't handle it?"

"Huh? Oh. Er... well, I meant exactly that. I didn't feel that I could handle a big reveal like that. And I had a feeling that was what they were going to do."

"Do you know what? I think you could've handled it."

"Sir-"

"I've seen you in meetings. I know how you've done at your last job. You're quick enough, you're... certainly smart enough, and you've got enough power in your voice to yell if need be. That's a big part of the job, too."

She smiled, warmly, and genuinely. She was blushing, just a bit, too.

"Don't doubt yourself. Okay?"

She sniffled, on the verge of tears. "Okay." As she nodded, a tear dropped down onto the paper she was reading. "Thank you, Malcolm. Thank you."

"Hey, hey, woah." He stood up, "Don't cry, I was just-"

"I know." She wiped a tear away. "It just means a lot to me, that's all." She grabbed a tissue, wiping away drips.

"Okay..." Just then, his cell phone chimed, a notification from the Daily Mail. They'd gotten their grubby little hands on the story already. "Oh, shit."

"What?"

"Mail's found out. Right, gotta get Nicola's spidery arse down here. Pick yourself up, and look alive, love." He punched in the number, and sternly talked into the phone, "Get over here. Now. Might be advisable to wear brown trousers, and a shirt the colour of blood."

Ivy didn't listen to that last bit. She was too focused on him calling her ‘love’. Yeah, it was colloquial around England to refer to women as ‘love’, but it was mostly in a demeaning or sarcastic method of use. It meant more that Malcolm had used it as a term of endearment.

Malcolm began once Nicola - and for whatever reason, Terri - had settled down. Ivy was stationed next to him, arms crossed, like a bodyguard of a mob boss, leaning against the back wall. “I just want to say to you, by way of introductory remarks that I’m extremely miffed about today’s events. And in my quest to try and make you understand the level of my unhappiness, I’m likely to use an awful lot of what we would call violent sexual imagery. And I just wanted to check that neither of you would be terribly offended by that.”

"Did you write that for him, Ivy?" Terri asked, as if they were friends.

"To be honest, I’d rather him not apologize for it, it’s funnier that way." She said starkly and with a bit of sass. "I’d rather him go in unlubed, if you will."

"I think I could do without the theatrics, Malcolm."

"Enough! E-fucking-nough. You need to learn to shut your fucking cave, right? Today you have laid your first big fat egg of solid fuck. You took the data loss media strategy and you ate it with a lump of E. coli. And then you sprayed it out of your arse at 300 miles per hour."

"I simply made a mistake."

"Pretty big fucking mistake." Ivy added.

Nicola furrowed her brow. "God, can you just shut up!"

"Hey, I don’t work for you. I don’t give a flying shit what you tell me to do."

"You got on the record and off the record fucking mixed up! What would have happened if like, George Martin had done that? We’d have no fucking Beatles, that’s what. Now, I don’t give a fuck about that. I’ve had to sit next to Paul McCartney at fucking Chequers."

"The data loss wasn’t my fault."

"Fine, yeah, but I tell you what. It came out pretty fucking fast once you were in there, didn’t it? Which makes me wonder, should I just go and talk to the boss? Should I go and tell him, 'I don’t think she’s up to the job.'"

"You said yourself that if he sacks me after a week, it looks like he’s fucked up."

"Yeah, but that was before, when your only problem was a fucking shit pun in a newspaper and a face like Dot Collen licking piss off a nettle."

"Okay, I messed up, right? I messed up. But I will, from now on listen to every bit of advice you give me. I’ll go on Question Time wearing a push-up bra and a fez. I’ll do the hustings on stilts if that is what you tell me the strategy is because you know about that stuff, Malcolm. I know that. It’s just that I’ve got things that I want to do, all right?"

"Of course you do, like Montessouri fucking rocking horses, I suppose."

“No, no.”

Ivy checked her notes, "Uh, the Mail has the motherload on this, yeah? But you know, you’re going to have to just swallow your pride."

"Uh-huh. Thank you, Ivy."

"Right, what’s the strategy?" Terri clicked her pen.

"Ooh, the Kraken awakes." He sarcastically said.

"No, no no. This is just the first part of the meeting that hasn't been about expletives or fezzes or stilts or teabagging. This is the bit that relates to media management."

"Teabagging?" The assistant inquired.

"I didn’t say anything about teabagging. Do you know what teabagging is?"

"Er… not really, no. I’m told it’s uh… unpleasant."

Ivy and Malcolm made eye contact, both thinking the same thing.

"Who do you want me to call? The Mail?"

"Yes. Go on, get the mail in. The Cheeky Girls back on tour." He escorted them out of his office, closing the door behind them.

"What a day, eh, sir?" Ivy said, returning to her desk.

"Er… Ivy, I’d rather you not call me ‘sir’ anymore. At least not when we’re alone."

"Oh. Okay. Uh, any particular reason?" She began fiddling with some papers, stacking them and clacking the edges against the desk to straighten them.

"No, no. It just feels a bit formal, you know? Like, oh, what’d I do to deserve respect?"

"Mhm."

The room returned to silence. Even though they were a week in, Ivy still wasn’t christened in Malcolm’s eyes. This was her first experience with a scandal that was actually proper. There were no long nights, where they were flip-flopping back and forth with options and the media while the cleaning lady worked around them, not yet. There were no miserable holidays where they spent the time sucking up to another MP. If Malcolm had any friends or social skills, he would have expected to have had a night or two sitting together at the bar after a long night, slowly getting hammered on cheap beer and the occasional hard malt. There was none of that yet. But he still felt like she was here the whole time. Like she’d been through thick and thin with him. He didn’t know if that was just her vibe, or if it was on account of the fact that he was slowly falling in love with her.

Wow, Malcolm thought. He’s admitting it to himself now. That was unheard of. He hadn’t been like this since high school. He hadn’t felt anything towards anyone, especially not since he took this job all those years ago. Shit.

"Hey, Malcolm?" Ivy finally broke the silence. Hearing her voice was such unrequited bliss.

"Yeah?"

"Do you… want to go for a drink sometime? Or something besides work?"

"Why?"

"Can I be honest?"

"No."

"I’m going to anyway. You seem like you need a friend."

He stared at the wood grain on his desk to preoccupy his senses while he thought for a moment. He finally answered, "Okay."

"Huh? Sorry?"

"Let's go, then."

"It's only 3:30, Malcolm."

"Yeah, but it's 5:30 in Finland. Come on, grab your stuff, there's a pub 'round the corner."

"We have work!"

"No, no no, it's okay, we'll just sneak out."

Ivy was taken aback by Malcolm suddenly rebellious manner. I mean, he sort of was rebellious regardless, in a different way. Swearing and hurling abuse at coworkers was his drink of choice when it came to rebellion, but he always stuck around and did his work. It's not like he was straight-lace, either though. He was just never the type to ditch out early.

"Christ, what if the press sees us?"

They sat up at the bar stools. Malcolm ordered them each a beer. "The press won't come near the pubs. They haven't yet, anyway."

"Haven't yet? Do you...?"

"No, not all the time. I usually have a stash in my office." He smiled, joking. She laughed, taking a swig.

"I wanted to be a bar maid when I was younger." She mentioned, offhandedly. "Went to school for it for a few months. Became preoccupied with other things." She continued to explain.

"Really?"

"Yeah. But, enough about me." She shook her head, gesturing to him. "Did you ever think you'd get into politics?"

He sighed, "Not really, no. I uh, went to school for journalism. Started at my local newspaper, which got absorbed by The Independent. Continued there. Slithered my way up the chain." Ivy raised an eyebrow. "I dipped my hands into politics while working there. I left the Indy and worked for what is now called the department of work and pensions, then, again, worked my way up from there."

"Mm."

"What about you?"

"Oh, uh... Well I-I didn't really have a career until my mid 30's. I've bounced at lower level secretary or receptionist positions for a while. In both politics and journalism."

"Yeah, 'cause didn't you work for good old Harry Pickle, the dickle for a while?"

She snorted, almost spitting out her beer. "Is that what they're calling him?"

"What, you didn't know?"

"No! The bloke always kept that sort of thing under wraps, I guess. For his own sake."

"Jesus Christ the man's a fucking control freak."

"I know, oh trust me, I know. I had to wake up early every morning to print out things he could check off to make him feel like he had more control, while I poured sawdust over his idiocy vomit pile and swept it up. Fucking disaster. And when I said I wanted to leave, I think they put me on you because you were the worst to deal with."

He paused, furrowing his brow.

"In their opinion. I genuinely enjoy working for you Malcolm, don't worry." She placed her hand on his forearm that was resting on the countertop. He looked at it, biting his lip and trying not to draw too much attention to it.

Oh God, is she interested in me, is she being nice, or is she just tipsy? He thought. No, we're only one beer in, she can't be. Stop staring, you look like a creepy old man. She's just... so beautiful.

He clenched his fist under the counter, scrambling to find other things to talk about. "Uh, what about before your 30's?" She hadn't moved her gentle hand.

"Oh. Uh..." She looked apprehensive, almost embarrassed. "Well, you know I went to bartender school. But before that I mostly just... stayed at home. I don't have any younger siblings. Actually, no siblings period."

Malcolm smiled. "You're lucky."

She chuckled falsely, "I'm really not. I er... had to take care of my mother after secondary school. She was ill."

"Oh, bless."

"Yeah," she looked down, smiling sorrowfully. "But, she didn't have long to suffer. She died when I was 19." He nodded along, sympathetically. "After that, bartender school. I worked as a barmaid. Got bored with it after a year or two. Then I went to undertaker school, while still bar tending in the nights."

Malcolm raised his eyebrows, shocked. "Really?"

"Yeah. I'm not kidding. If you ever need to mix a black velvet or embalm a body, you know who to call." She giggled. Malcolm laughed a long, admiring her as well. "So, then I worked as an undertaker until aged 33. I was offered to become funeral director, you know, the seedy arsehole who'll tell you shit like 'it's what dad would have wanted' when showing you a 10,000 quid casket. Had no interest there. So I started my assistant job in government, after going to a job fair. And the rest is history."

"Jesus, your life is so much more interesting than mine."

She chuckled. "I don't think it's all that cool. I mean, I've never been outside of Europe."

[janellelucy]

too good at goodbyes

TAGGING: Janelle Puckerman & Cameron Weston

LOCATION: Their  house & the Hospital 

TIME FRAME: Thursday, May 7th; around 2:30pm-ish

WORD COUNT: 5222

NOTES: TRIGGER WARNING: do not read if you are sensitive to any talk about losing a child/miscarrying 

Janelle had drooped her phone into the cup holder of her car driving back home, but as she did she could feel cramps even more. The fact something really felt wrong she really tried to push it away, thinking that it was just because she got so mad at his mom that this would just pass. It wasn't long till she was pulling into their driveway, the cramps weren't as bad but they where still there, and she actually was getting worried about them now. Grabbing her bag from the back seat and then her phone from the cup holder and headed inside. She was greeted by Delilah who was happy to see her "hi sweetie, where's daddy?"

cameron had an off day today, and wanted to finish doing some work around the house. he started in the backyard, cutting the grass, trimming the bushes, the typical backyard upkeep. it didn't take him long to do that, an hour or two tops, and then he moved into the house, cleaning up some things, and finishing up hanging some pictures janelle wanted up on the walls. by the time janelle got home, cameron was starting on dinner, being nearly done as the quiet sound of their alarm system went off, signaling that the front door was open. "i'm in the kitchen, baby!" he called out, continuing to stir the pasta.

When she heard Cam's voice she let out a happy sigh, drooping her bag down on the table they had by the front door and kicked off her converse off, walking into the kitchen. "Hi." She said softly, going over kissing his cheek quickly "How was your day?"

cameron smiled at the bit of attention she gave him, turning his head so he could plant a kiss on her lips, "hey," he let the wooden spoon sit on top of the pot, turning fulling so he was facing her, "it was fine, i got almost everything done. the backyard is looking better, got those pictures hung, cleaned everything up." cam reached forward, wrapping his arms around her body, pulling her into his chest, "how was yours?"

Janelle wrapped her arm around him as he kissed her, letting her lips linger on his for a moment. "wow, and i didn't even leave you a honey-do list" She let out a happy sigh, feeling the cramps hit again, having her flinch a little before she could even answer cam

"i know, i'm really doing good, eh?" he laughed, leaning his head down, letting his forehead rest on hers. cameron could sense her tensing up and he pulled his head away, his brows furrowing, "what's wrong, baby? you okay?"

Janelle pulled away, wanting to say she was fine, but she knew she wasn't "no." She said softly. Janelle's voice was never lower than a whisper, and it was getting there as she felt another pain "i think there is something wrong.."

cameron placed both his hands on her upper arms, worried for what was to happen. she didn't look right - he could tell something was off, "what do you - mean wrong, janelle?" he asked, keeping his voice quiet, though there was a hint of urgency.

Janelle didn't know how to say it, her brain only going one way, and it wasn't the way she wanted it to be going. "It hurts.." She looked up at him as she tried to keep her breath steady but it was pretty shaky as she spoke.. "I'll be right back.." She pulled away from him, going to the bathroom down stairs, closing the door behind her. She pulled down her jeans, and underwear in one movement, looking down. it wasn't covered yet, but there was a heavy spotting, as she let out a sob.

cameron was quick to follow her as she pulled away, not understanding how she couldn't just let him in on something so serious. he knocked on the door, "janell -" he started, though he was cut off hearing her sob. without hesitation, he opened the door, not caring if she would have been angry about it or not. it took him a moment to register the scene in front of him, but once he did, he was kneeling down in front of her, "come here," he whispered, opening his arms.

Janelle had her elbows on top of her legs and her head in her hands, the silent tears flowing. Nothing felt off until today, and this was her worst fear. When Cam came in she barely moved, but did her arms going around him tightly crying into his chest. There was no way it wasn't what she thought it was, but she didn't want to be the one to say the word.

as soon as janelle fell into his arms, he held her tightly, and as close to his body as he possibly could. "it's okay, baby, you're okay," he whispered, moving his hand up to rub along the back of her head. cameron knew exactly what was happening, he knew what the bleeding meant, and he knew it was too late for them to fix anything. his heart was shattered, but he was doing his best to remain strong for his girlfriend, knowing that was what she needed.

Janelle just stayed there in his arms, for a good solid five minutes crying, "i..we should probably go to this hospital." She finally said barely above a whisper as she sniffled. She probably really didn't need to, but if she heard herself say the word, or cam say it, she needed to hear it from a doctor, she needed to know there was no baby.

cameron was prepared to stay there for as long as she needed to, holding her as tightly as he could, trying his best to provide her some form of comfort, "alright, yeah, do you want to go now?" he asked quietly, his hand still moving along her hair. "it's going to be okay, sweetheart, you know that, right? it's okay." he tried again, his voice hopeful, though there was a hint of pain, of sadness.

Janelle nodded her head up and down. "i know." She said, her voice kind of monotone. "I'm.. I'm just gonna go up stairs and change really quick, okay?" She dropped her arms from where they had been tightly gripping his sides. As he let her go, she got up and made her way up stairs. She changed out of her black jeans  and put on a different pair of underwear along with a pad - not wanting to ruin another pair, and then pulled on a pair of sweat pants before going back down stairs.

cameron nodded his head slowly at her response, not really knowing what else he could say to help her in this situation. he let her leave his embrace, sitting back on the bathroom tile as she walked away. his head fell, a hand immediately moving up to run through his hair, tugging slightly on the ends. cam could feel himself starting to get emotional, he could feel himself starting to break, but he quickly snapped out of it and stood up and off the ground. he put their puppy in her little pen, giving her a quick pet on the top of her head before he stood up, looking to janelle, "you ready?" he asked quietly.

Janelle shook her head "no. but guess i have to be." She forced out a laugh, before going back over to him, her arms wrapped back around him. "I'm sorry." She mumbled into his chest. Though she couldn't control what her body did, she felt like it was her fault she lost the baby still.

"it'll be okay," he spoke quietly, wrapping his arms tightly around her small body. he could practically feel his heart breaking as the words came from her mouth. cameron pulled away from her, cupping her face in both of his hands, "you need to listen to me, right now." he spoke, his words firm, yet still quiet, "i don't ever want to hear you say that again. you have absolutely nothing to be sorry for. this is not your fault, this is not my fault, this is not anyone's fault. okay? things just - happen. maybe it - wasn't the right time for us. but - you're not to blame for this." with every word cameron spoke, he could feel his eyes welling up, and though he blinked quickly to keep them from falling, they were still visible.

Janelle let out a sigh as his hands went to her face. She knew he was right, everything he said was true. it wasn't either of their fault. shit just happens. "ok." she reached up though pushing away cam's tears before they spilled over his eyes.

cameron rubbing his thumbs along her cheeks slowly, letting out a soft sigh as he stared at her, "i'm serious, janelle. it's not your fault." he whispered, closing his eyes quickly as she began to wipe at them. he didn't want her to see him like this, so upset and broken, he needed to be strong, now more than ever.

"Okay cam." Janelle repeated herself letting her thumb fall from his face letting out a sigh. "lets just go..okay?" She put her hand on his wrist to slowly pulled them down before she pulled away to grab her bag, and the two of them started outside.

cameron let out a sigh, wishing janelle could just believe his words, but he stopped repeating himself, and let his hands fall to his sides. "yeah - okay," he mumbled, the tone of his voice defeated. he soon walked towards the front door, grabbing his keys and his wallet, sliding both into his pockets and began to make his way outside towards the car.

Janelle let out a soft sigh. she just wanted it confirmed that it was in fact what it was that happened and try and move on. she was already heart broken over it. and she knew cam was too. its not your fault kept ringing in her ears as they sat in the car on the drive to the hospital. She didn't get it, how wasn't it her fault how wasn't it her fault that her own body wanted to reject the baby. She let her head lean on the window watching the outside not saying much on the drive.

cameron made sure janelle got into the car okay before he did the same. a majority of the drive, he kept to himself, and ignored the pressing need to fill up the silence of the car. but after a few minutes, he reached his hand over and grabbed a tight hold of janelle's. cameron needed her to know that he was right here, though all of it. he wasn't going anywhere. the drive wasn't long, but it felt like forever. he pulled into the parking lot, glancing over to her now, "should we go into the er?" he asked, not really knowing how to handle a situation like this.

When Cam had reached over to take her hand, she adjusted them, so her fingers were laced into his, smiling just a tiny bit. "um..i'd assume er? I don't think we'd really be able to go any place else?"

cameron nodded his head, but kept his words to himself, not really knowing what else to say in the moment. he found a parking space, and pulled into it, taking the keys out of the ignition. before she could get out of the car, cameron turned his body, cupping her cheek in his hand, pulling her into him. he placed a kiss to her lips, staying there for a moment before he pulled just an inch away, "i love you. more than anything in this whole world. you know that, right? you're my everything, janelle. despite all the things we've been through, or are going through. nothing will ever make me love you any less than i love you right now."

Janelle shifted a little bit as he stopped the car, ready to get out before he pulled to to him, having her kiss back, almost relaxing a little, as if she actually needed that more than anything right now, though tears filled her eyes again, nodding. "I know. I love you too Cam" She said softly pushing her tears away, shaking her head. "you're my soulmate, there is nothing that the two of us can't do together." She whispered leaning back into him to kiss him softly. cameron let his thumb rub against her cheek softly, hoping that his actions would bring her some form of comfort, "you and me against the world, huh?" he whispered, kissing her back as she leaned in. after a rather long moment, he pulled back, "you ready to go?" cam asked, still keeping his voice rather quiet.

"Always." She smiled her hand reaching for his face as they kissed, but the second he pulled away she dropped it. "As ready as I'll ever be." She nodded, reaching for the car door to get out. Walking inside, the waiting room didn't have many people and that could be a good or bad thing.  She kept her hand tightly in Cam's as she went up to the counter. The nurse greeted her and asked her what was the reason for coming in. Janelle explained it, they took her information, as she gave her id, and her insurance car. Getting things handed back and a wrist band on, they told them to have a seat someone would be out shortly to take her vitals before anything else could happen.

cameron wasn't planning on leaving her side even for a moment, even as she went up to the counter, he kept his hand in hers, holding onto her tightly. he waited as the nurse talked to janelle, rubbing his thumb along the back of her hand throughout the whole interaction. as the nurse told them to take a seat, cameron nodded his head, and lead janelle over to a group of chairs. he waited for her to sit down before he took the seat next to her, his arm immediately wrapping around her body.

Janelle sat down with him, moving as close to him as she could, as she put her things away back into her wallet, trying to keep busy. there was only so much you could do in a waiting room, so with putting those cards back into her wallet she found it a good time to try and clean it out, staying quiet, as she looked at receipts she had crumpled up in there, and her little bit of cash she did keep in there in four different spots trying to put it all back into one pile.

cameron watched as she dug apart her wallet, chuckling softly as she began to organize everything. he leaned his head in, pressing a gentle kiss to her cheek before he let his head rest on her shoulder. after a moment, he began humming softly, the tune to her favorite song, trying again to provide some kind of distraction.

Janelle let out a sigh as he leaned into her as she moved stuff around. "Do you want this?" She asked softly holding out one of those punch cards for a local sub shop that if you got them all punched you got a free thing. she didn't even know how she had it because she couldn't remember the last time she had gone to that sub shop.

cameron couldn't help but chuckle softly, shaking his head at her offer, "i'm good, baby, thank you. do you want me to take it for you so i can throw it out later, though?" he asked, picking his head up just enough for him to be able to look at her.

Janelle looked between him, and the pile of trash that was sitting on top of her bag, shaking her head as she dropped it down into the pile she had for the trash. "No it's fine." She finished up her wallet, putting it in his lap, not wanting to put it on the seat next to her as she started to dig through her bag. She found not one, not two, but three pairs of headphones, two charging cabled, a wall plug, a portable charger, the bag she normally had all her lipsticks in  - empty, a half bottle of water, an unopened starbucks frapachino drink, more receipts, all of her lipsticks - putting them right back into her makeup bag, fifteen hair ties, two half packs of gum, gum wrappers, a bunch of pens, a mini notebook, her broken popsocket, her planner, keys, and last but not least, an ulta gift card at the bottom. "I think i need to clean this out more often" she mumbled, grabbing her wallet back from cam to slip the gift card into one of the pockets, before trying to find spots and homes for most of the stuff, as the trash pile kept growing bigger.

cameron sat back in his own seat, watching her pick apart her bag with wide eyes, not understanding how that many things could fit in a bag of that size, "jesus, janelle, it's like the fuckin' marry poppins bag, isn't it?" he asked, his eyebrows raised, letting out a laugh.

Janelle couldn't help but let out a laugh. "I'm sorry there is no hat stand in my bag." She teased playfully elbowing him.  she got all the trash together getting up and throwing it away before coming back and sat down with him leaving her head on his shoulder. "Please tell me that took me longer than i think it did?"

"what a damn shame," he chuckled, looking over at her, "i was really hoping for like - a pet elephant or something. 'lilah could use a buddy." it was making cameron happy to see a genuine smile on janelle's face, something that had been foreign for the last few hours, "took you like - ten fifteen minutes, i think?"

"We do not have room for a pet elephant." She shook her head letting out a sigh. "I was hoping you were about to say a half hour." she mumbled, the smile fading quickly knowing where she was again. it was only about five minutes later her name was called. She got up, taking Cam's hand  with hers and walked into the little room where they took her temperature, blood pressure, height, weight and everything. When it came to asking more about the pain and the bleeding. "It slides? like right this second it a zero, but back at home it was like a five or a six? and as far as the blood goes it seemed like a very heavy flow." her hand went to her belly and the nurse asked a few more questions before leaving, leaving the pair in that small office. only a minute or two later she was back taking them into the er to a room. "A doctor will be in with you guys in a few minutes."

"dammit, i think we could make room," he teased, offering up another small smile. cameron shook his head at her words, moving to wrap his arm back around her much smaller body. he kept her close until her name was called, and even then, he made sure he kept his hand held tightly in her own. he remained by her side even in the small office, balancing on his toes right next to the chair she was sat in, his hand placed gently on her knee. cam made sure he could stay near her even as the nurse was doing what she needed to do, and as soon as she was out of the room, cameron was leaning in to press a kiss to janelle's forehead, "you doing okay?" he asked in a whisper.

Janelle sat on the bed, her feet dangling off the floor. It was more waiting that she didn't want  to do. "I'm fine." She said looking up to him. "are you okay?" She asked. It couldn't be easy on him knowing that they lost the baby, knowing how excited he was for it too.

cameron stood up slowly, letting his arm move to rest behind her, his hand rubbing up and down her back gently, "i'm okay, baby, don't worry about me," he whispered, pressing a kiss to her hair, "is your stomach hurting you? do you want me to rub it?" cameron was nearly scrambling to find ways to bring her some comfort, it being the only thing he could do in this moment, even if it didn't work as well as he would want it to.

"Cameron." She said simply looking back at him. "Don't make me pull what you did to me earlier." She moved to look at him. "And no. not right now." She told him, pushing her hair behind her ear. "Just don't leave." She said softly.

"oh come on, i'm telling you i'm fine, so i'm fine. i promise," he smiled, leaning in to kiss her forehead yet again. cam kept his hand moving along her back, nodding his head when she said that her stomach felt okay, "leave? never, baby. i'm not leaving." he reassured, shaking his head, his words firm, yet still quiet.

"Uh huh sure." She mumbled leaning into him "So just cause im saying I'm fine, you think I'm actually fine too then?" she questioned shaking her head "no even if they ask you to leave, can you just not.. like i don't want you to go anywhere."

cameron let out a sigh, moving so he could sit on the edge of the bed, keeping his hand moving on her back, “can we not focus on me right now, please?” truthfully, he was still getting used to being open about his feelings with people, and right now, he didn’t want to have to think about himself. he wanted to be focused on her, “i told you, baby, i’m not going anywhere. i don’t care if they want me to leave or not, i’m staying right here.”

She dropped it. she didn't want the fight right now, or try and force him to talk about it. Janelle nodded "alright okay thank you." she moved a little bit so she could wrap her arm around him. "I love you." she whispered softly.

cameron nodded his head slowly, letting his forehead rest softly on her shoulder, "i love you too, baby," he whispered, pressing a kiss to her upper arm, "wanna thumb wrestle?" cam spoke up after a moment of silence, holding his hand up in the air.

Janelle let out a laugh, not knowing how to respond to him "Thumb wrestle?" She giggled leaning up and kissed him "I guess so." She put her hand out with her thumb out

"yeah - thumb wrestle. what else are we gonna do?" he shrugged, sitting up slightly. cameron couldn't help but smile as she giggled, despite the situation they were in, her laugh was his favorite sound, and he missed it more than anything. he curled his fingers around her own, moving his thumb back and forth, "alright - ready? one - two - three - four, i declare a thumb - war!" as he finished his last word, he used his thumb to pretend to 'punch' her own, making sound effects to go along with it.

Janelle shook her head pulling her legs up and crossing them. "Ready." she moved her thumb back and forth as he started it. She was never good at this and knew either she was going to lose or he was going to let her win. Moving her thumb around trying to get his to go down

cameron laughed quietly, trying to move his thumb away from hers. he could easily put her thumb down right now, and win the whole game, but where was the fun in any of that? he continued to move around, avoiding her finger, laughing as he did.

There was no use, his thumb was able to move around quicker than hers. "Just go and win, you're going to anyways." She always hated this game it was more likely for her to win rock paper scissors then this.

cameron shrugged at her words, looking away for just a moment when he heard some people shuffling outside their door. it gave her an opportunity, one that he didn't mean for, but still an opportunity to pin his thumb down.

Janelle watched him look away, and she quickly pinned his thumb down "One two three" she said in less than two second "I win!" she giggled just as the door opened and the doctor walked in. "Ms. Puckerman?" The doctor asked, leading Janelle to nod her head up and down. "I'm Doctor Andrews." She looked down at the paper work "So you came in because of some cramping and bleeding. Had you know if you were -" Janelle quickly cut her off. "I was pregnant. I know I was. and  I know with pcos that its harder for me to get pregnant, and have the higher chances of a.." She stopped herself she still didn't want to say the word. Dr. Andrews nodded. "We can go get an ultrasound and check then if that is what you want." She nodded "please."

cameron stood up quickly when the doctor came in, yet he kept his hand held tightly in janelle's, wanting to make sure she knew that he was always going to be right there next to her. he listened intently to the doctor, moving his free hand along her back yet again, trying to soothe her, as he knew she would more than likely be anxious. cam stayed quiet, not wanting to interrupt either of of the women as they spoke.

As the doctor left Janelle let out a small sigh blinking back tears. "She was gonna tell me without even checking wasn't she." She said somewhat monotone. She let go of his hand  running both of her hands over her face, just wishing this wasn't happening.

without hesitation, cameron wrapped both his arms around her small body, bringing her close to his chest, "she would have checked you out, baby, she has to before she can say anything," he whispered, pressing his lips to the top of her head, "it's okay, sweetheart, it'll all be okay."

"But.." she sighed turning into his body just so she could hold herself closer to him. "It just seemed that way. that she already knew. I know it is what it is but.. be at least fucking positive yknow?"  she mumbled into his chest.

he kept her as close as he possibly could, moving one of his hands to rub along the back of her head, "i don't think she was doing that, elle. she's probably just really busy, and was moving really quickly. it's okay," he whispered, pressing his lips to her head yet again. Janelle just let out a sigh closing her eyes as he rubbed the back of her head. 

Maybe..yeah." She mumbled staying there for a moment not wanting to move.

cameron kept placing multiple kisses to the top of her head, beginning to hum the same song he began earlier in the waiting room. he let his hand continue moving along the back of her head, trying yet again to provide her some kind of comfort. he hated more than anything that he couldn't make her feel good, that he couldn't help her at all.

Janelle pulled away after a few minutes hearing something outside the door. When a nurse walked in with Dr. Andrews and an ultrasound machine. They set it up. As they did Janelle took of the hoodie she had on keeping on the tanktop she had on, as she laid down, moving the top up, and letting the doctor do her thing. She didn't even want to look at them, just looking over at cam the whole time waiting for some type of reaction from him.

cameron moved away just slightly, though his hand stayed tightly in hers, only removing it when she needed to take her sweatshirt off, but even then, he put it right back where it was before. as the nurse and doctor did what they needed to do, cameron let his fingertips brush up and down her arm, hoping the action would distract her in some way.

As Dr Andrews moved it along Janelle's belly where there should have been a baby. There was nothing there, no baby, no heart beat. "I'm so sorry Janelle." She started, but everything after that was a a blur, the only other words she heard was the one she had been trying to avoid saying. "..Miscarriages are more common then people realize.." She closed her eyes tightly holding back tears, her hand still in Cams as she sighed. "I'm going to have some blood drawn before you two leave. Once we get that we can discharge you and we can call you and let you know about the blood work. I also want you to go make an appointment with your obgyn for them to do another round of blood work plus see how you're doing and feeling." Janelle nodded, not saying anything. Dr. Andrews and the nurse left, only for the nurse to come back to take her blood a few minutes later. Janelle rubbed at the spot on her arm where the needed had been, always hating getting poked.

cameron could literally feel his heart shattering in his chest, his whole world was crashing down, everything was on fire, and there was not a single thing for him to do about it. he just had to sit back and watch everything fall. he gripped janelle's hand tightly, looking at her with the most hopeful and happy look he could muster up, something he had gotten relatively good at, though it was clear that a part of him was missing. that something had just been ripped out of him. "you did good, baby, i'm proud of you," he whispered, letting his lips curl up into a smile, speaking only after the nurse came back in to draw her blood.

Janelle grabbed the hoodie putting it into her lap. "Thanks?" She tried to laugh but it was so forced out that it was the fakest laugh she had ever heard from herself. "I just wanna go home." she mumbled.

"baby," he mumbled, letting out a sigh, "i - yeah, alright," he nodded his head, not bothering to say much else other than that. cameron had no choice but to let her hurt the way she needed to, and he needed to realize that he couldn't do anything to help her this time. he stood up fully, holding his hand out for her to take if she wanted it.

Janelle got up off of the bed putting the hoodies back on, grabbing her bag and the discharge papers the nurse gave her. She took his hand walking out, she stopped at the front desk and they said she was all good to go. all janelle wanted now was to wake up from this horrible nightmare.

[rhodirachel]

Fray | Chapter 2 | A BTS Fanfiction

Chapters

| FRAY NOTICE |

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 [END] |

Summary

What you thought was your life turned around by losing your job at a publishing company, another unexpected twist occurs as your life crosses into the fate of someone else- a boy by the name of Min Yoongi, a gang member.

Rating: M (for language only)

Words: 5222

Relationship: Min Yoongi (Suga/ Agust D) x Reader

Warnings: Explicit language, gang details, violence

                                                     “The bell tolls

                                                    And suddenly

                                                I can’t bring myself

                                                    To let you go

                                                      Anymore.”

“Hey… ‘wakey ‘wakey…”

You jolted from the sudden sound and pushes to your shoulder. Once you did, you smacked your head against the headboard of the bed you had been sleeping in.

“What are you doing?” you grumbled, looking towards the person who had woken you.

“Wow, and here I am trying to wake you for breakfast,” the person chuckled.

It took a minute to let your eyes focus, since you had just woken up. When they had, though, you soon saw the face of a rather attractive guy. With nicely tan, smooth skin- broad shoulders, and certainly tall, he looked like a person you would see in a movie.

Your face suddenly flustered out of embarrassment from your previous reaction. Sitting up straighter in the bed, you mumbled. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” the tall man smiled. “How are you doing?”

You soon remembered what the dull throb in your abdomen was from, and nodded. “I’m doing alright, I guess.” You paused for a moment, your nose crinkling a bit, eyes squinting. “ I’m sorry but… who are you?”

He sat down at the end of the bed before answering your question. “My name’s Jin. I’m the oldest out of the boys that are here. I’m assuming Yoongi told you about everything?”

You assumed that was the name of the guy who had saved you. You sighed out of frustration, allowing yourself to sit back slightly. “No, he was actually really vague. He just spouted all this blunt information and then left.”

Jin cracked a smile. “Yeah, that sounds like Yoongi alright. What do you know right now, though?”

You contemplated the quick, short answers that Yoongi had given you last time you were awake- however long ago that was.

“He… he said something about another gang, and how… I was with one now,” you quivered.

Jin could tell the reluctance, or better yet, the fear, in your words. “I understand how you feel right now. Don’t worry. I know that my words might not do much for how you’re feeling right now, given the situation you’re in, but you’re safe here. I can guarantee you that much.”

You nodded your head, feeling slightly better. You wanted more answers, though. “Can you tell me what’s really going on, then?”

“Sure,” Jin said, twiddling with his hands. “But it’s not that pretty…”

“It’s okay. I just want to know.”

Jin sighed. “Okay. Well, for starters, there are two gangs. Our gang, Bangtan, and Hae Chan’s gang, CHAN.”

“Okay,” you said, waiting for him to continue.

“We’re downtown right now, at our ‘base’. A long time ago we found this old building, entirely emptied because it was so run down. We occupied it and began to renovate the place throughout the time we’ve been here.”

“Where downtown is, though, is where all the turf wars are happening right now. CHAN is trying to take the area that we have been able to take control of, but not to have for the same reasons as us.”

“What do you mean?” you pressed further.

“Well, what we do when we take over these areas is that we help the people in the area. Sort of like… a vigilante? I guess that what’s you could call it, yeah,” he answered. “Anyway, that’s basically what’s happening right now. I can’t really go into further details; I think you understand why.”

“Why is Yoongi telling me I can’t leave? That I have some ‘debt to pay’ or something?”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

Jin rolled his eyes. “Wow, Yoongi.”

Your eyebrows knitted together. “What do you mean?”

Jin let out a frustrated laugh. “I mean that he’s full of shit, that’s what. I mean yes, you can’t leave, but that’s not the reason why.”

Your face began to heat up in anger. “Then why can’t I leave then?”

Jin pursed his lips together. “Well, if I’m going to be frank- it’s because no one can really trust you yet.”

Your eyes widened in shock.

Noticing this, Jin explained further. “So, when Yoongi found you, he brought you here- obviously. On the way, though, there were some people from CHAN’s gang that had spotted him bringing you back.”

“So, the people who, well, hurt me- they’re a part of CHAN?” you asked.

“Yes. We’re guessing the people who spotted Yoongi were either the people who had hurt you, or at least knew what had happened. So when they had seen Yoongi with you, they attacked him. We think that the reason they attacked him is that they thought since you had seen what at least some of CHAN members looked like, and given what happened, you would later go to the police and report everything.”

“If you reported everything, the damage would be shattering for them. Thankfully, the ones that attacked Yoongi didn’t have any guns on them, only rookies with knives I guess. Yoongi was able to fight them off, but he did get a pretty bad cut on the leg. He’s okay, though. We’ve all had worse.”

Sighing, Jin pulled himself further onto the bed, resting his back on the wall it was pushed against. “That does leave the one question though: ‘will you tell?’. I’m going to be honest, the other members don’t exactly seem to like the idea of you being here. I’m a little unsure, myself. But I’m glad Yoongi helped you. One less death by CHAN.”

The words he said hurt you, but you understood. You weren’t sure if you liked being here, in the middle of a gang. It sparked your attention when Jin said that they help their people, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous when you added CHAN into the midst of that equation. It didn’t make it any less dangerous either when you thought about how they must have gained their ‘turf’. These guys might help people, you thought to yourself, but that doesn’t always mean they ended up where they are in a just way.

You nodded your head anyway, unsure of what to say. All that could come out what a quick mumble. “I’m sorry.”

Jin let out a laugh and squinted at you. “Why are you saying sorry?”

You sighed. “...I feel like an idiot, you know? I was dropping off my friend, late at night, and even when she was drunk she had enough common sense to know how dangerous it is in the city at night. She offered me a place at her house for the night, but I turned her down because I ‘just had to go home to do work’, which I probably wasn’t even going to do. I was probably going to stare at my books like a complete mess, let out a surrendering groan from exhaustion and pass out on my couch.”

“And I was cautious earlier, bringing her home. When I was at her steps, though, I saw that no one was really around and thought I’d be fine. What an idiot,” I cursed, rolling my eyes in frustration before closing them.

Jin hummed. “So you feel like a burden.”

“Yeah,” you said.

Jin sat up, looking straight at you this time. “Don’t. You made a mistake, it’s okay. I mean, yes, this is a pretty big consequence, but that doesn’t mean you should feel like a burden.” He cracked a smile before saying, “just… maybe don’t go walking around in the city at night anymore, yeah?”

The way he said it caused you to smile too, closing your eyes as you scoffed. “Okay, I won’t.”

“Good,” he said, getting up from the bed. “Can you get up?”

You looked at the wound on your abdomen, all bandaged up. It still throbs just laying down. “I’m not sure, but I can try.”

Sitting up wasn’t exactly the hard part. Even from jumping awake, your wound did hurt but it wasn’t any searing sort of pain. Slowly pushing yourself up, you moved your legs over the edges of the bed. You tried to stand, however your knees buckled shortly and Jin grabbed you quickly.

You hissed from the pain as Jin grabbed your arms and pulled you up, towards him. “Okay, that really hurt.”

Frowning, he apologized. “I’m sorry, I was just trying to make sure you didn’t fall.”

“I know, it’s okay.”

“Here, just grip onto my arm, okay? I’ll help you walk down. I wasn’t joking about waking you up for breakfast,” he says, smiling.

“Okay,” you complied, gripping onto his arm with both of your hands.

You noticed that although the building was certainly old, it held a lot of character. While the room you were staying in was all wood, as you walked down the stairs you admired the busy, garish looking striped wallpaper of the house. To your surprise, the house was rather large in the sense that there were many floors for one to walk up and down from. As you walked all the way down to the kitchen, you counted five different floors you had walked down.

“Are there any more floors to this house?” you asked, surprised from the sheer amount already.

“Yes, there’s one more. There’s a small staircase that leads to the entrance hallway of the house, but that’s it,” Jin affirmed.

As you came to the kitchen, you noticed that the floor you were on was entirely an open floor plan. You saw their living room, their kitchen, and their dining room all rolled into one. It was quite nice, the way it looked. As you were looking around the room, though, you noticed five boys at the large, round dining table in one of the rooms.

They were rowdy at first, laughter and yelling enveloping the room entirely. When Jin helped you to a seat at the table though, the entire room went silent as the boys stared at you. You noticed that Yoongi wasn’t there at the table, only five blank, unfamiliar faces.

“Okay, well I’m going to make some breakfast then,” Jin said with an awkward smile before walking off.

You had never been in a more uncomfortable situation in your life.

What am I supposed to say to these boys? You thought to yourself. Like, hello, sorry I completely intruded on your gang because I almost died and one of you had to save me? Yeah, okay.

“Well, since you’re here, may I ask you what your name is?”

You caught yourself looking at your hands, wringing them together as the person spoke up. Shooting your head up, you noticed the boy across the table from you.

Why do you call them boys? You pondered on this. You knew that they most likely weren’t, but they looked so… young? But not in a jovial, adolescent sense. No, these boys looked like boys who had gone through a lot. With their young appearances being overridden by baggy, dark eyes, cuts, and bruises.

You didn’t notice how much your voice was going to cave until you spoke, it coming out as a dull whisper. “I-I’m (Y/N)...”

The boy nodded his head, smiling. “Okay, well, welcome (Y/N). I’m Namjoon, this is Jungkook, this is Jimin, this is Taehyung, and this is Hoseok,” he said, pointing to each member as he went. “Yoongi isn’t here, but you’ve already met him, and you’ve obviously already met Jin.”

You nodded your head, intimidated, shy of saying anything else.

“So, who are you?”

Your eyes widened as you looked to the person sitting next to you, who Namjoon had said was Taehyung. “‘Who am I’?”

“Yeah,” Taehyung said, giggling at your reaction. “I think that’s better than asking a lot of questions that sum you up, when I can just ask for the summation? It’s better than asking ‘where are you from’, ‘where you work’, and whatever. So, who are you?”

You couldn’t help but smile and let out a small laugh at how peculiar the question was. You were scared, though, wondering if you should really tell them anything- or perhaps, lie. Something inside you said no, however. That you should trust them, and tell them the truth.

“Well, I write,” You said, looking down at your hands again. “My life is mainly focused on writing? On work… I used to be a part of a publication company. Emphasis on ‘used’. I have some friends, but they’re not super close or anything. Wow,” you laugh, “that really sounds dull, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Taehyung, “but that doesn’t mean things can’t change.”

You thought about the situation you’re in right now and laughed again. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

“No one special, either?” The person Namjoon said was Jimin, the person on the other side of you, asked.

“Oh, no,” you said, cheeks turning red at the thought. “But it’s fine. I think that if ‘the one’, or whatever you want to call it, is really the one for you, they’ll show up no matter what. So I just stick to my work, not necessarily reclusive but…”

“Well, you’ll have super-close-friends now,” Taehyung said, his smile wider than ever. He reached over towards you, pulling you into a deep hug. Your eyes popped as you let out a squeak, your cheeks flushing in surprise.

Jimin laughed at your reaction. “Don’t worry, (Y/N), he’s just really affectionate.”

Taehyung let you go, bowing his head as he apologized with a flushed face, “Sorry…”

You couldn’t help but smile at the cute expression. “It’s okay, it just startled me was all.”

“So, you write?” Jimin asked, “What kinds of stuff?”

“Well, I usually just write little things on my own time. When I was working with the publishing company, though, I would have to write all sorts of things with teams. Romance, children’s books, informative, etcetera. I love to write, but sometimes it was dull, I guess? That’s why I would write little things on my own,” you say, straining a smile as you think about the company that fired you. The hours that you wasted writing things that you personally didn’t care for, when you could have been writing something greater.

“I absolutely love reading, you know,” added Namjoon. “Maybe you could show us some of the things you’ve made?”

Your face flushed once more as you thought about the idea. “Uh, well, sure, I mean I’ve never let anyone read them but…” you stammered, “and I also don’t have them with me, because, well, you know…”

Namjoon nodded. “Ah, I know. Well, maybe we could get your things for you? I’m assuming Jin or Yoongi has already told you why you can’t leave.”

“Yeah,” you mumbled, remembering how despite the conversation, they all were probably very suspicious of you at the moment. Everything was going well, and then you were reminded of the reality of the situation. They were most likely watching your every move right now, and you didn’t even know it.

You gazed upwards to look at the two boys who had been awfully quiet during the conversation, Hoseok and Jungkook. While Hoseok, sitting on the left of Namjoon, seemed extremely disinterested and brooding, Jungkook on the other hand seemed very reserved, or shy. Jungkook’s shy aura made you feel awkward, but Hoseok on the other hand made you feel intimidated as you exchanged glances.

“Okay,” Jin pipes, carrying plates of food, “who wants some breakfast?”

Jin laid plates in front of all of you- huge portions of fried eggs, rice, and jjigae. It all looked amazing, and so after Jin sat down, everyone started eating.

“Oh my God,” I said, taking another bite of the food. “This is so amazing, Jin! You’re really good at cooking!”

“Thank you,” Jin smiled.

The entire table went silent as everyone began shoving food into their mouth. You watched as from time to time the boys would get rowdy again, smiling at their silliness.

“Taehyung, stop trying to smudge your food on me! It’s gross!” laughed Jimin.

“Just stay still, hyung!”

You admired the setting in your own little world, far from their own. For a gang, they seemed so unnaturally cheerful. It was perplexing to look at, and to wrap your head around how they were like this.

Soon enough, everyone had finished their plates. Jimin, Taehyung, Hoseok, and Jungkook went to go do the dishes, since Jin had been the one to cook everything. As for you and Namjoon, you had to clean up the dining table, as well as the floor of all the stuff the boys had gotten onto it.

“So, how are you feeling, (Y/N)?” asked Namjoon, brooming the floor as you cleaned the table from where you sat, being there the fact that you couldn’t even stand.

“I’m doing fine, I guess,” you said. “I’m just… there’s just a lot going on right now.”

Namjoon nodded his head. “I understand. It’s different for us, too, but I’m sure more-so for you right now.”

“So, were you serious when you said that you guys could go back and get my stuff?” you asked. You were unsure whether or not you really wanted them to, but it was hard not to bring yourself to trust them, somehow.

“Yeah, we could. It’s the least we can do with all that’s going on right now… because, I’ll just be honest, we don’t exactly know what kind of person you are right now. We can’t let you leave until we know we can trust you.”

You nodded. The words still hurt, and you wanted to go home, but you thought the easiest way to get this over with was from square one. You didn’t want to have to try and get home the hard way, because that might end up in some business you definitely didn’t want to be involved in. Also noting the fact that they saved you, you felt like proving to them they could trust you was the better option, as if it was a way to show them that they didn’t make a bad choice in choosing to help you.

“I understand. And I will prove to you guys that you can- I can promise that much,” You affirmed.

Namjoon turned his head to smile at you before going back to his brooming.

As you continued cleaning in silence for a few moments, your curiosity got the best of you. “Hey, can I ask you something?” you whispered, knowing the boys were only so far away from you and Namjoon.

“Sure, ask away.”

“How… how is your gang the way it is?” you asked, not sure what you meant by that question yourself. “It’s just… they seem so, knitted together, yes, but not in an ‘oh-so-serious-gang’ way, like how people usually perceive them? They seem… much happier. Like Taehyung, for instance. Why is that?”

“Ah,” Namjoon said as he finished his brooming. He got closer to you and sat down at the dining table; you presumed it was because he also recognized how close the boys were to the both of you. In a whisper, Namjoon began speaking. “Well, that’s a long story. It, actually, all leads back to CHAN, the rival gang, too.”

“See, we had all been in CHAN at one point or another. They had picked us up at various points in our lives, promising us things they never delivered. We were all runaway teens, trying to do whatever it was we were trying to do to survive. CHAN would tell us of all the things they could do for us, to get us to join them. When each of us joined, though, sooner or later everything would backfire.”

“They would… abuse us. In one way or another. Jin, for example?” Namjoon whispered, pointing towards Jin who laid on the living room couch, “‘Would make him cook all their food, just to force him to starve for days at a time. And Taehyung, since you mentioned…CHAN took Jimin and Taehyung both, profiting them to industries, or certain patrons who had enough money… I’m not really sure if I should go into the details of what they did to him. He’s regressed a lot, to be honest. That’s why he is the way he is. He’s twenty-three years old now, yeah, but he acts like a kid. It’s a subspace for him; a place for him to escape the nightmares.”

“As for Jimin, he remembers. He tries to take care of Taehyung as much as he can, and Taehyung certainly takes care of him, too. Taehyung sort of has to. Sometimes, because of all the things that have happened, Jimin will just crack. And the only person who can really be there to pick up all the pieces for him is Taehyung. So, they’re really close.”

“We had all met each other at some point or another whilst in CHAN. We bonded, and all became very close throughout the time we were there. One day, though, we decided to start planning a way to escape. Obviously, we did, because here we are. We found this building, began renovating it, and it became our home. All that time, that journey, that’s why we are the way we are. We weren’t, or aren’t, a gang, we’re a gang of brothers. We’re the only family we got.”

Your mouth went agape as he spoke. “Wow,” you exhaled. “I’m… I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Namjoon spoke. “We’re all together now. That’s all that matters.”

You sat back in your chair as you nodded, completely bewildered. You’d heard of the horrors of gangs, or pimps, human trafficking, but you had never… heard it. From someone, people that had actually gone through it. The very moment you were in was mystifying.

“Am I interrupting something?”

You turn your head to see Yoongi standing a bit away from the table, looking at you and Namjoon.

“Oh, no,” said Namjoon, “how come?”

“I need to check up on (Y/N)’s wound,” said Yoongi, almost sounded assertive, as if there was a twinge of jealousy.

“Oh, okay,” smiled Namjoon, “but you’ll have to help her get up, she’s still having a really hard time standing.”

“Okay,” said Yoongi. He came over to you and pulled out your chair, taking your right arm and putting it over his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” you said with guilt, holding onto his shoulders with your arm as he gripped your waist, balancing you while you shifted your weight onto him.

“It’s okay,” Yoongi mumbled.

Even though it was five flights of stairs you now had to walk up, the trip wasn’t as bad as you thought it’d be. As Yoongi kept his hand on your waist, you loved how warm his hand felt. It was warm against your skin, and so soft. The appearance of his hand told a different story, as they looked absolutely chiseled. It made sense though, with how reassuring the grip on you felt. You were actually sort of sad as you finished walking up the flights and he helped you into bed, letting go of you.

“Okay, I need you to lift your shirt up a little bit again so I can look at the stitch,” said Yoongi.

You complied, lifting up your shirt just a tad for him to examine the stitch on your abdomen. He pulled a bottle from his back pocket, along with a cotton ball and a second, smaller bottle. He laid them on the bed before coming closer to your wound, inspecting it.

“It looks fine, I’m just going to wash it with some water first, and put some ointment on it before I rebandage it.”

“You don’t clean it with anything else? Like peroxide or something?” you asked.

“No no no,” Yoongi said, “that’s the last thing you want to do. Things like that can slow the process down, so you just want to clean around it with water. The ointment helps, though.”

He grabbed the first bottle and cotton ball, uncapping it to show water spilling onto the cotton. He took it and gently rubbed around the stitching, but you winced at the sudden feeling.

“Relax, it’s okay. I’m just cleaning it.”

You tried doing as he said, laying your head down and trying to close your eyes so you wouldn’t see any of it. It took a moment, but you were able to calm down. The next thing you felt was a cold lotion across your skin, and you looked up slightly to see it was the ointment from the second bottle Yoongi had. It soothed the skin around the stitch that you had, and it felt a lot better than the stinging mess it was earlier. However, it still throbbed.

“I wasn’t here to have breakfast with you all today because of these,” Yoongi said, pulling out a bandage and gauze from his other pocket. “I didn’t have these in the house when I brought you here, I guess we had used them up already from previous marks. You should have on one though, since stitches can always leak. Thank God you haven’t though, at least not yet.”

He motioned for you to sit up, and as you did he began to place the bandage onto you and wrap it up in the gauze. You looked at him, taking note of how nice he looked when he was focusing on something. As you were looking at him, however, you remembered Jin telling you of the cut Yoongi got on his leg, and went to look for where the mark would be.

Luckily, he was wearing shorts, and you could clearly see the mark that trailed up and along his right calf. It even went around, past the point of your vision from where you were sitting.

“Yoongi, why did you go through all the trouble?” You asked, looking up at him.

Yoongi looked back at you, seemingly perplexed by your question.

“You know,” you added, looking directly at his cut now, “why did you go through all the trouble to help me? I’m sure you could have just left me and would have been done with it. It’s not like you knew me, or even still know me.”

Yoongi’s brows knit together, and he looks down to where you are, noticing you’re staring at the scar he has on his leg. He looks back at you, confused. “And how do you know I got that from saving you?”

“Jin told me.”

“Ah,” Yoongi cursed, “that bastard. Always babbling.”

He sighs, finishing the wraps on your torso. “Like I said. I can’t just let someone die,” he murmurs, shrugging his shoulders.

You lay back into bed once he’s done, wrapping its blankets around you. “How did you even know where I was?”

Yoongi takes a moment, looking down at the ground before sitting on the side of your bed and answering. “...well, I followed you.”

Your eyes popped open, eyebrow raising in the process. “What?”

“It’s not how it sounds, you narcissist. I was following you because you were just wandering around the area, and you obviously didn’t know where you were. I did, though, and so I followed you for a while to make sure that nothing bad would happen. Before everything did happen though, not only were there some guys after you, but there were some in my way, too. By the time I was able to get to you, you were already hurt.”

You paused for a moment before asking your next question. “...Jin told me you guys don’t exactly ‘like’ the idea of me being here. That you guys can’t trust me,” you say out of nowhere, fumbling with the blankets on you. “ And that’s the real reason why I couldn’t leave. Is that true? Namjoon said so, as well. So I’m assuming it has to be.”

Yoongi looked from the floor towards you. You swore you could feel his eyes penetrating your own, like he was staring into your very soul. “Yes, that is the real reason why you can’t leave. But I don’t know about the others, and I don’t know you well, but I just kind of know.”

“Know…” you say. “Know what?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That you won’t tell.”

Something heavy lifted off your chest somewhat. At least it was nice to know that one of them didn’t suspect you of anything, even if you didn’t exactly understand what he meant by ‘know’.

“But who are these people at CHAN?” You pressed further. “I mean, Namjoon and Jin have already told me some, but can you tell me more?”

Yoongi immediately shook his head. “Sorry, but I’m not doing that. You don’t need to worry your head over stuff like that,” Yoongi scoffed. “I can’t believe they already told you stuff about them. Sure, go on ahead and telling stories about people like CHAN to a girl who was almost killed by them. Okay, that’ll go great,” he said sarcastically.

“All you need to know right now,” Yoongi said, staring straight into your eyes, “is that the person who did this to you? He isn’t the worst.”

Before you could even react, someone barged into the room, swinging the door open with huge force. You quickly recognized it as who Namjoon said was Jungkook, panting heavily.

“There’s a shoot-out right now! Three blocks south in the alley!” He yelled before running back downstairs.

Yoongi quickly turned back around to you, gripping your leg gently for a moment. “I have to go now, but do. Not. Move. Not only can you hurt your stitch, but we don’t need CHAN trying to get to you again- this time with an actual reason to come and get you.”

He quickly went to the nightstand that was next to your bed, opening the drawer. In there he pulled out a gun, and handed it to you. “Take it, and use it if you absolutely need to.”

You slowly took the gun, completely bewildered by the situation. “What’s going on..?”

Yoongi ran to the door, but not before stopping to say his goodbyes. “Don’t worry about it. It isn’t something you need to worry your head over, yeah?” and he then left.

You sunk back into the bed, completely shaken by what just happened.

Copyright 2017 © rhodirachel. All rights reserved.

[ao3feed-stucky]

Captain America Is Out and Proud

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2l6JKMq

by PR Zed (przed)

The truly terrible thing about waking up in the future, thinks Steve, is that everyone who looks at him sees Captain America, national icon. An icon 70 years in the making, never mind that he's really only lived 25 years. (Years don't count if you spend them in the ice, do they?)

Or what happens when Steve runs into an old friend from the USO.

Words: 5222, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 2 of Captain America Has a Fella

Fandoms: Captain America (Movies)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Steve Rogers, Original Characters

Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2l6JKMq

[ao3feed-buckybarnes]

Captain America Is Out and Proud

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2l6JKMq

by PR Zed (przed)

The truly terrible thing about waking up in the future, thinks Steve, is that everyone who looks at him sees Captain America, national icon. An icon 70 years in the making, never mind that he's really only lived 25 years. (Years don't count if you spend them in the ice, do they?)

Or what happens when Steve runs into an old friend from the USO.

Words: 5222, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 2 of Captain America Has a Fella

Fandoms: Captain America (Movies)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Steve Rogers, Original Characters

Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2l6JKMq

[oditile]

A Tidytext Analysis of the Weinstein Effect

From: https://www.gokhanciflikli.com/post/weinstein-effect/

Dec 3, 2017 · 3099 words · 15 minutes readPLOT R TIDYTEXT

Quantifying He-Said, She-Said: Newspaper Reporting

I have been meaning to get into quantitative text analysis for a while. I initially planned this post to feature a different package (that I wanted to showcase), however I ran into some problems with their .json parsing methods and currently waiting for the issue to be solved on their end. The great thing about doing data science with R is that there are multiple avenues leading you to the same destination, so let’s take advantage of that.

My initial inspiration came from David Robinson’s post on gendered verbs. I remember sending it around and thinking it was quite cool. Turns out he was building on Julia Silge’s earlier post on gender pronouns. I see that post and I go, ‘what a gorgeous looking ggplot theme!’. So. Neat. Praise be the open source gods, the code is on GitHub. Let’s take advantage of that too.

I still needed a topic, and even though both the Wikipedia plots and the Jane Austen datasets sound interesting to look at, I felt that there is another, obvious choice.1 It has a Wikipedia page and its own subreddit. Also, the title might have given it away. Let’s get to work.

Getting Full Text News Articles

My first instinct was to check out the NYT APIs—it made sense, given that they broke the news (along with the New Yorker). Everything seemed to be working out just fine, until I realised you cannot get the full text—only the lead. Staying true to my strict data scientist training, I googled ‘full text newspaper api r’ and there it was: GuardianR. Sorry NYC mates, we reckon we will have to cross the pond for this one.

Note that any one source will always be biased. If you are not familiar with the Guardian, it’s British and has a left-centre bias. It might be prudent to pair it with a right-centre newspaper, however not all newspapers provide APIs (which in itself is another selection bias). Alas, we will move on just with the Guardian—insert idiom regarding salt. Finally, you will need to get a free API key from their open source platform. You still have to register, but you are only in danger if you vote Tory and stand on the left side of the escalator. Once you got it, install/load the package via CRAN:

library(GuardianR) ls(pos = "package:GuardianR")

## [1] "get_guardian"     "get_json"         "parse_json_to_df"

As you can see, the GuardianR package is a simple one: it contains only three (but powerful) functions. We only need the first one to get a hold of the full text articles, and the syntax is super simple:

#not evaluated articles <- get_guardian(keywords = "sexual+harassment",                         section = "world",                         from.date = "2012-11-30",                         to.date = "2017-11-30",                         api.key = "your-key-here")

Running the above chunk with your own key will get you all articles published in the Guardian in the last five years tagged under the news section ‘world’2 and containing the keywords ‘sexual harassment’ in the Guardian API. The keywords can be as simple or complicated as you want; just add more terms using the plus sign.

You might think the time frame is a bit skewed towards the ‘pre’ era—the news broke out on October 5, 2017. Going all the way back five full years, we are comparing 58 months worth of ‘pre’ to only 2 months of ‘post’ Weinstein. However, luckily for you blog posts are not written in real-time, meaning you get to see a (somewhat working) final result so just bear with me. And no, this is not at all like scientists running 514 regressions and failing to mention this tidbit in their publication. Relevant xkcd.

No, the reason is pure pragmatism. It’s not that running the code ‘live’ and getting the articles ‘real-time’ would not slow down this page—it’s not how it works.3 However, it is good practice to extract a tad bigger chunk than you think you will need, as you can always slice it up later to suit your needs better.

In any case, I am working with downloaded data so I will just load it up. Feel free to subset the data to see whether the results change if you use a different cut-off point. Also, if you go back the same amount of time (i.e. two months before October 5), that would lead to 183 articles for pre and 121 articles for the post time period—it is a reckoning, alright. Going back five years gets us 1224 articles in total; so we actually have 1103-pre and 121-post articles (89% to 11%). That’s more or less cross-validation ratio (well, a bit on the less side maybe), and we will roll with that for now.

articles <- read.csv("articles.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE) dim(articles)

## [1] 1224   27

sum(articles$wordcount)

## [1] 1352717

colnames(articles)

##  [1] "id"                   "sectionId"            "sectionName"         ##  [4] "webPublicationDate"   "webTitle"             "webUrl"               ##  [7] "apiUrl"               "newspaperPageNumber"  "trailText"           ## [10] "headline"             "showInRelatedContent" "lastModified"         ## [13] "hasStoryPackage"      "score"                "standfirst"           ## [16] "shortUrl"             "wordcount"            "commentable"         ## [19] "allowUgc"             "isPremoderated"       "byline"               ## [22] "publication"          "newspaperEditionDate" "shouldHideAdverts"   ## [25] "liveBloggingNow"      "commentCloseDate"     "body"

We get a bunch of variables (27) with that call, but we won’t be needing most of them for our analysis:

#laziest subset for only two variables want.var <- c("webPublicationDate", "body") want <- which(colnames(articles) %in% want.var) articles <- articles[, want] articles$webPublicationDate <- as.Date.factor(articles$webPublicationDate)

The body contains the full-text, however it’s in HTML:

dplyr::glimpse(articles$body[1])

##  chr "<p>Numerous women have accused Don Burke of indecent assault, sexual harassment and bullying during the 1980s a"| __truncated__

At this point, I must admit I resorted to hacking a bit. I’m sure there is a more elegant solution here. I’ll go with this SO answer to extract text from HTML. Basically, the cleaning function removes the HTML using regex. Unfortunately, this does not clear up various apostrophes found in the text. For that, we switch the encoding from ASCII to byte:

articles$body <- iconv(articles$body, "", "ASCII", "byte")

cleanFun <- function(htmlString) {  return(gsub("<.*?>", "", htmlString)) } articles$body <- cleanFun(articles$body) dplyr::glimpse(articles$body[1])

##  chr "Numerous women have accused Don Burke of indecent assault, sexual harassment and bullying during the 1980s and "| __truncated__

This will end up cutting some legitimate apostrophes (e.g. “hasn’t”, “didn’t” to “hasn”, “didn”) in some cases, but we will fix that later on.

Let’s split the data on date October 5, 2017 and get rid of the date column afterwards:

#You can also use negative index for subsetting articles.before <- articles[articles$webPublicationDate < "2017-10-05", ] articles.after <- articles[articles$webPublicationDate >= "2017-10-05", ] full.text.before <- articles.before[, 2] full.text.before <- as.data.frame(full.text.before) full.text.after <- articles.after[, 2] full.text.after <- as.data.frame(full.text.after)

N-Grams and Combinatorics

To me, n-grams are what prisoner’s dilemma to college freshman—that ‘wow, so simple but so cool’ moment. As in, simple after the fact when someone has already figured it out and explained it to you. N-grams are essentially combinations of n words. For example, a bigram (2-gram).4 Using the tidytext package developed by David and Julia, we can create them in a flash with unnest_tokens. After that, we will separate the bigrams into two distinct words. Next, we will subset the bigrams so that the first word is either he or she. Finally, we will transform the words into frequency counts. I’m heavily recycling their code—no need to reinvent the wheel:

library(tidytext) library(tidyverse) #or just dplyr and tidyr if you are allergic #Create bigrams bigrams.before <- full.text.before %>%  unnest_tokens(bigram,                full.text.before,                token = "ngrams",                n = 2) nrow(bigrams.before)

## [1] 1311051

head(bigrams.before)

##        bigram ## 1    the walk ## 1.1 walk from ## 1.2  from the ## 1.3  the gare ## 1.4   gare du ## 1.5   du nord

#Separate bigrams into two words bigrams.separated.before <- bigrams.before %>%  separate(bigram, c("word1", "word2"), sep = " ") head(bigrams.separated.before)

##     word1 word2 ## 1     the  walk ## 1.1  walk  from ## 1.2  from   the ## 1.3   the  gare ## 1.4  gare    du ## 1.5    du  nord

#Subset he and she in word1 he.she.words.before <- bigrams.separated.before %>%  filter(word1 %in% c("he", "she")) #Fix the missing t's after apostrophe fix.apos <- c("hasn", "hadn", "doesn", "didn", "isn", "wasn", "couldn", "wouldn") he.she.words.before <- he.she.words.before %>%  mutate(word2 = ifelse(word2 %in% fix.apos, paste0(word2, "t"), word2))   #10 random samples; the numbers are row numbers not counts set.seed(1895) dplyr::sample_n(he.she.words.before, 10)

##       word1  word2 ## 4403    she doesnt ## 3732     he    was ## 5222    she  wasnt ## 11862   she   said ## 3972    she  wrote ## 3189     he   says ## 3952    she   sees ## 4878     he    was ## 9314     he   went ## 9408    she  noted

#Transform words into counts, add +1 for log transformation he.she.counts.before <- he.she.words.before %>%  count(word1, word2) %>%  spread(word1, n, fill = 0) %>%  mutate(total = he + she,         he = (he + 1) / sum(he + 1),         she = (she + 1) / sum(she + 1),         log.ratio = log2(she / he),         abs.ratio = abs(log.ratio)) %>%  arrange(desc(log.ratio)) #Top 5 words after she head(he.she.counts.before)

## # A tibble: 6 x 6 ##       word2           he          she total log.ratio abs.ratio ##       <chr>        <dbl>        <dbl> <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl> ## 1 testified 0.0002194908 0.0027206771    18  3.631734  3.631734 ## 2     awoke 0.0001097454 0.0010580411     6  3.269163  3.269163 ## 3     filed 0.0002194908 0.0021160822    14  3.269163  3.269163 ## 4      woke 0.0002194908 0.0019649335    13  3.162248  3.162248 ## 5    misses 0.0001097454 0.0007557437     4  2.783737  2.783737 ## 6   quickly 0.0001097454 0.0007557437     4  2.783737  2.783737

A couple of observations. First, n-grams overlap, resulting in 1.6M observations (and this is only the pre-period). However, we will only use the gendered subset,5 which is much more smaller in size. Second, as we define the log ratio as (she / he), the sign of the log ratio determines the direction (positive for she, negative for he), while the absolute value of the log ratio is just the effect size (without direction).

Good stuff, no? Wait until you see the visualisations.

Let There Be GGraphs

Both David and Julia utilise neat data visualisations to drive home their point. I especially like the roboto theme/font, so I will just go ahead and use it. You need to install the fonts separately, so if you are missing them you will get an error message.

devtools::install_github("juliasilge/silgelib") #Required Fonts #https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Condensed #https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto library(ggplot2) library(ggrepel) library(scales) library(silgelib) theme_set(theme_roboto())

We are also loading several other libraries.6 In addition to the usual suspects, ggrepel will make sure we can plot overlapping labels in a bit nicer way. Let’s start by looking at the most gendered verbs in articles on sexual harassment. In other words, we are identifying which verbs are most skewed towards one gender. I maintain the original logarithmic scale, so the effect sizes are in magnitudes and easy to interpret. If you read the blog posts, you will notice that Julia reports a unidirectional magnitude (relative to she/he), so her scales go from

.25x .5x x 2x 4x

whereas David uses directions, i.e.

'more he' 4x 2x x 2x 4x 'more she'

In both cases, x denotes the same frequency (equally likely) of usage. I don’t think one approach is necessarily better than the other, but I went with David’s approach. Finally, I filter out non-verbs plus ‘have’ and only plot verbs that occur at least five times. If you are serious about filtering out (or the opposite, filtering on) classes of words—say a certain sentiment or a set of adjectives—you should locate a dictionary from an NLP package and extract the relevant words from there. Here, I am doing it quite ad-hoc (and manually):

he.she.counts.before %>%  filter(!word2 %in% c("himself", "herself", "ever", "quickly",                       "actually", "sexually", "allegedly", "have"),         total >= 5) %>%  group_by(direction = ifelse(log.ratio > 0, 'More "she"', "More 'he'")) %>%  top_n(15, abs.ratio) %>%  ungroup() %>%  mutate(word2 = reorder(word2, log.ratio)) %>%  ggplot(aes(word2, log.ratio, fill = direction)) +  geom_col() +  coord_flip() +  labs(x = "",       y = 'Relative appearance after "she" compared to "he"',       fill = "",       title = "Pre Weinstein: 2012-17 The Guardian Articles on Sexual Harassment",       subtitle = "Top 15 Most Gendered (Skewed) Verbs after he/she; at least 5 occurrences.") +  scale_y_continuous(labels = c("8X", "6X", "4X", "2X", "Same", "2X", "4X", "6X", "8X"),                     breaks = seq(-4, 4)) +  guides(fill = guide_legend(reverse = TRUE)) +  expand_limits(y = c(-4, 4))

Several immediate and depressing trends emerge from the data. The top active verbs for women cluster on bringing charges: ‘testified’, ‘filed’; whereas male verbs seem to react to those with ‘argued’, ‘faces’, ‘acknowledges’, and ‘apologized’. Women ‘awoke’ and ‘woke’, matching the more violent male verbs such as ‘drugged’, ‘assaulted’, ‘punched’, and ‘raped’. ‘Alleged’ occurs four times more after she relative to he, and there is no mention of denial (e.g. ‘denied’, ‘denies’) after he. A note on word variations: in some cases, it might be better to combine conjugations into a single category using a wildcard (such as expect* in the graph above). However, I thought the tense can also contribute to a quantitative story, so I left them as they are.

Another way of visualising the gendered differences is to plot their magnitude in addition to their frequency. This time, we are not limited to just verbs; however we still filter out some uninteresting words. There are additional ggplot and ggrepel arguments in this plot. First, I added two reference lines: a red y-intercept with geom_hline to act as a baseline and an invisible x-intercept using geom_vline to give the labels more space on the left-hand side. Do you not love tidy grammar? Last but not least, I insert geom_text_repel to give us more readability: segment.alpha controls the line transparency, while the force argument governs the aggressiveness of the jittering algorithm. We could supply it with a fill argument that corresponds to a factor variable to highlight a certain characteristic (say, total occurrence), however there is not much meaningful variation there in our case.

he.she.counts.before %>%  filter(!word2 %in% c("himself", "herself", "she", "too", "later", "apos", "just", "says"),         total >= 10) %>%  top_n(100, abs.ratio) %>%  ggplot(aes(total, log.ratio)) +  geom_point() +  geom_vline(xintercept = 5, color = "NA") +  geom_hline(yintercept = 0, color = "red") +  scale_x_log10(breaks = c(10, 100, 1000)) +  geom_text_repel(aes(label = word2), segment.alpha = .1, force = 2) +  scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(-4, 4),                     labels = c('8X "he"', '6X "he"', '4X "he"', '2X "he"', "Same",                                '2X "she"', '4X "she"', '6X "she"', '8X "she"')) +  labs(x = 'Total uses after "he" or "she" (Logarithmic scale)',       y = 'Relative uses after "she" to after "he"',       title = "Gendered Reporting: Pre Weinstein, The Guardian",       subtitle = "Words occurring at least 10 times after he/she:                  160 unique words (100 displayed) | 11,013 occurrences in total") +  expand_limits(y = c(4, -4))

Plotting frequencies complement the first plot quite nicely. We can infer reported characteristics more easily when there is a tangible baseline. Words around the red line occur after she or he more or less equally: the y-axis determines the relational effect size (with regards to gender), and the x-axis displays the total amount of occurrences. Some additional insights: we see that ‘sexually’ and ‘allegedly’ popping up after he quite frequently. There is also the verb ‘admitted’, as well as ‘denies’ (even though visually it is located above the red line, if you follow the grey segment, it’s located around 1X ‘he’). For women, more morbid words like ‘suffered’, ‘died’ are added to the mix. There are also nuances regarding the tense; ‘claims’ follows she twice more than he, while ‘claimed’ is twice likely to come after he.7

Moving on to the post-Weinstein period (‘the effect’), I quietly run the same code, and plot the equivalent graphics below. Some caveats: with the smaller sample size, I lowered the inclusion threshold from 5 to 2. Additionally, although it is top 15 most skewed verbs per gender, because of frequent ties, it ends up having more than that at the end.

After the scandal broke, we see that women are reported to have ‘complained’, ‘hoped’, and ‘became’. On the other hand, men are vehemently denying the accusations, with ‘denies’ and ‘denied’ being the most skewed verbs following he. Random point: in the pre-period, it’s ‘apologized’, in the post-period, it’s ‘apologised’. Maybe Brexit can manifest in mysterious ways.

Again we turn to the frequency plot to infer more. In addition to denial, men are also reported to use words such as ‘categorically’ and ‘utterly’. Both ‘claims’ and ‘claimed’ occur more after she, not repeating the earlier dynamic regarding the tense. In addition, we don’t see ‘alleged’ or ‘allegedly’ featured in the plot at all. How much of this change can we attribute to the effect? At a glance, we definitely see a difference. For example, verbs display a good variation for both genders. The post-frequency plot features less violent words than the pre-frequency plot. There is a lot more ‘denying’ and not much ‘alleging’ in the post-Weinstein period.

Some are definitely data artefacts. The post-frequency plot is ‘cleaner’—in addition to (and directly caused by) the smaller n—because the cut-off point is set to ‘more than once’: if we remove the filter, all the violence and harassment terms are back in. Some are probably reporter/reporting biases plus the prevalent gendered thinking (that occurs both on a conscious level and below). And perhaps some are genuine effects—true signal. It is still too early to pass judgement on whether the Weinstein effect will result in tangible, positive change. Currently, all we can get is a short, limited glimpse at the available data.

Hopefully you managed to enjoy this rather depressing data undertaking using the tidytextpackage. As usual, the underlying code is available on GitHub. N-grams are powerful. Imagine the possibilities: assume you have access to a rich dataset (say, minimum 100K very long articles/essays). You can construct n-grams sequentially; i.e. 2-grams; 3-grams, 4-grams etc., separate the words, and subset for gendered pronouns. This would give you access to structures like “he” + “word” + “her” (direct action) and “she” + “word” + “word” + “him” (allowing for adjective + verb). Then it would be possible to look for all kinds of interactions, revealing their underlying structure. I will be reporting more on this front, until I move onto image processing (looking at you, keras).

[kingsofcon-bigbang-blog]

Loving You Is More Than Enough

#3: Loving You Is More Than Enough

Author: @archangel-with-a-shotgun

Artist: EmmatheSlayer

Rating: T

Pairing/s: Richard Speight Jr./Rob Benedict

Word Count: 5222

Warnings/Tags: High School AU, Miscommunication, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Fluff, Assumed Unrequited Love, First Kiss

Summary: Rob was perfectly okay with loving Richard from afar. He was okay with being Richard’s best friend, the one who got Richard pumped up for dates with people that weren’t him, the one who held Richard through heartache after breakups, the one who watched Richard choose someone else time and time again. Rob was okay with it. Really.

Link to Fic

Link to Art

[ao3feed-stevebucky]

Captain America Is Out and Proud

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2l6JKMq

by PR Zed (przed)

The truly terrible thing about waking up in the future, thinks Steve, is that everyone who looks at him sees Captain America, national icon. An icon 70 years in the making, never mind that he's really only lived 25 years. (Years don't count if you spend them in the ice, do they?)

Or what happens when Steve runs into an old friend from the USO.

Words: 5222, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 2 of Captain America Has a Fella

Fandoms: Captain America (Movies)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Steve Rogers, Original Characters

Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2l6JKMq