#a huge step for me as someone afraid of a) commitment and b) family in general

[tleeaves]

One day, in a time or another universe where all the factors have been satisfied for me to have a child, I hope that child loves the ocean in a way I never could. I hope they don't fear it as I do. I hope they come running up to me on tiny legs with a picture book in their hands as they show me enormous whales and sharks and jellyfish and wilder things.

In the end though, it's not really just about the ocean. I hope that I don't pass on all my fears to my child and I hope they enjoy things so passionately that they feel like sharing that stuff with me forever.

This thought post was brought to you by me getting emotional and wistful at the sight of a baby mobile with whales and sailboats hanging on it. I often wonder if parents have a hand in fostering a child's love for certain things. If a whale mobile as an infant and toddler might lead to an adult who still finds comfort in sea creatures because I chose to hang those for them growing up before they could choose their own things.

[strawberrysoup]

Pocketful of Posies || Chapter 1

You’d been hiding for years and years now; from your family, from society, from alphas and packs. Suppressants were dangerous but effective and necessary for an omega who refused to be owned—but no suppressants were strong enough to fool the nose of a super soldier, who together with his pack would stop at nothing to bind you to them forever. 

pairings: dark!Avengers x reader word length: 3.3k chapters: 1/? warnings: A/B/O dynamics, power imbalances, noncon and dubcon sexual situations, loss of autonomy, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat — this is a dark!fic, read at your own risk. Open the read more and CTRL + F, search “content warnings” to skip to detailed trigger warnings at the bottom of the chapter.

Cleaning rich people’s vacation homes hadn��t been your dream job growing up. You had such high hopes when you were a kid, well into your teens, of becoming a zoologist. It had started off like most kid’s dreams—in kindergarten you wanted to be a veterinarian. That grew into wanting to become a herpetologist, but then you wondered, why limit yourself? As a zoologist you could be around tons and tons of animals, studying their behaviors and ecological impacts. It was about half way past your fourteenth birthday that you realized none of your dreams mattered.

You woke in the middle of the night to a crippling pain in your stomach, an unbearable heat boiling under your flesh. You must’ve been screaming, because your parents burst in frantically—only to stop dead upon stepping past the threshold. At the time you had no idea why, but it had been shock. Omegas were rare nowadays, more and more betas were being born while the number of omegas dropped. It was a point on contention; betas could breed with alphas, rendering the omega almost obsolete but alphas, especially ones with packs, wanted omegas.

Personally, you figured that evolution had decided to take things into its’ own hands. Everything about omegas spat in the face of adaption; they were small and delicate, hardwired to obey alpha commands even to their own detriment, experienced a full weeks’ worth of being completely and utterly incapable of survival on their own—

Well, unless one acquired (through whatever means necessary) methods to prevent it that one. Heats, a homegrown threat guaranteed to commit acts of violence at least twice a year. By the time your first had worn off, your parents had already jumped into action. They had three different packs bidding on you. Your mother had been bubbling with glee, talking about how wonderful it was that she had produced an omega when she herself was a beta. Your very existence was about to rocket them into both fame and fortune. So, you ran away. That same night.

It had been shockingly easy to locate illegal suppressants. They taught all about them in school, how they were horrible and taxing on an omega’s physiology. Suppressants masked an omega’s scent, prevented their heats, and (in your opinion) were the best invention of the twenty first century. You couldn’t have given a flying fuck about what negative impacts they might’ve had on your body—death would be a reprieve. Unfortunately you’d yet to have any of the widely touted negative effects (effects that you were pretty sure were made up to keep omegas afraid and compliant) and so you found yourself cleaning rich people’s vacation homes just over the Canadian border.

You’d been living out of your car since you first bought it at sixteen, for five hundred dollars. You gave a creepy beta a blowjob to get your license forged. It was the best investment you’d ever made (not that you had the opportunity to make many) and the clunker was still getting you from point A to point B and that’s all you needed. You had to move constantly, staying in one place too long meant people started to notice you, especially in the small towns you frequented in Ontario. But there was so much forest surrounding you that every once in a while you could just drop off the face of the earth, camping so deep in the woods no one would stumble across you. It made staying anonymous so much easier.

That was actually the current plan, after you finished cleaning this last massive cabin; to abscond into the woods for a while, until you’ve faded from everyone’s memory. You won’t return to this town for at least a year. You’ll spark recognition when you return, but not enough for anyone to consider you more than an outsider in their close-knit community. The kind woman who lets you work for her cleaning company so sporadically will remember you when you ring her, the only person particularly thrilled to hear you’re back for a few months.

You do an excellent job and you do it fast— you can thoroughly and perfectly clean a 6 bedroom mansion by yourself in less than 10 hours and you were paid under the table so you didn’t require overtime, which Mrs. Hunt loved (there was no tax to be taken from an unreported cash payment though, so it was a fair trade in your opinion). You would work yourself to the bone, 10 hours a day everyday there was work available for at least three months and then dip without any expectations until the next time you returned, when she was gushing over the amazing reviews your work had gotten the last time you were around.

It was symbiotic existence—you were paid well for your efforts, more than enough to sustain living out of your car for months at a time, and your performance drove her online reviews into the 4.9 stars range and made it feasible for her to raise her prices. Mrs. Hunt didn’t ask any questions either, even when you requested to only work alone and couldn’t provide any identification beyond a driver’s license.

You were finishing up the kitchen in what was definitely one of the nicest places you’d ever cleaned when your phone went off in your back pocket. It made your skin prickle. Very few people had your number and you couldn’t think of a single reason they’d ring you instead of texting unless something was wrong.  You propped the mop against your shoulder and dug out the phone, frowning at Mrs. Hunt’s name on the screen.

“Hello?”

“Oh sweetie, I’m so glad I got a hold of you! How are you doing?”

“I’m well, Mrs. Hunt,” you answered, your voice coming out semi-robotically as you strained not to sound panicked while continuing the conversation like a normal fucking person, “I’m just about done here, I was finishing the dry mop in the kitchen when you called and then all I need to do is pack up.”

“Oh perfect! I was calling because the owner just rang me, apparently some of his packmates will be arriving a bit earlier than anticipated—potentially within the next hour. Something about someone getting caught up at work, I’ll spare you the details. But if you’re almost done then you’ll probably be gone by the time they arrive.”

“Certainly Mrs. Hunt,” you’d immediately started frantically dry mopping the moment the words ‘within the next hour’ escaped the woman’s mouth, phone clamped between your ear and shoulder. “I’ll be gone in the next few minutes.”

“Now even if you aren’t its okay,” the concern in her voice meant that your own had betrayed you, waivered when you responded without your knowledge. “I always warn the owners that if they arrive before the scheduled time that there’s a possibility the house won’t be done and/or there might be people actively working in the house. You won’t get in any trouble, okay?”

“R-Right, thank you ma’am,” you swallowed heavily, finishing the last swipe across the tile in the kitchen and hustling back into the foyer. “I really won’t be but a minute though. I always keep all of my equipment put away and together if I’m not using it, so I really just need to pack up the mop.”

Which you’d already shoved into the rolling cart you picked up each morning that held all of your cleaning supplies provided by the company.

“Don’t forget your bucket too!” Mrs. Hunt sounded smiley again, “I’ll leave the key under the mat so you can stow your cart tonight. Have a good one swee—.”

“You too!” You might’ve hung up a touch too soon to be considered polite, shoving the phone back into your pocket and running into the kitchen. There was no time to dwell on manners. 

The mop bucket was sitting on the counter, already washed and dried and waiting to be put away. You’d started keeping your things completely put away at all times the same day you’d been accosted by a homeowner who arrived home earlier than expected while you were still trying to pack up. You’d tried to put your notice in that night, a couple of years ago now, but Mrs. Hunt begged you not to—promised it would never happen again. This must’ve been her best attempt at preventing it. At least you had already planned to leave town tonight anyway.

You nearly sprinted back to the cart, haphazardly tossing the stupid bucket on top and wheeling it towards the huge front doors. You’d just stopped to reach around and grab the handle when the knob turned and the left door was pushed open, nearly hitting your cart.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he was a beta, curly haired and dark eyed with pale skin, wearing a pair of glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Did I knock anything over?”

“N-No, sir,” you pulled the cart back a few steps, nearly trembling with the effort it took not to blast right past him, especially when you noticed him carefully scenting the air. "The house is all clean, I was j-just leaving.”

“Thank you, for getting everything clean for us. We don’t get to come out here as often as we like, I’m sure the place collected a lot of dust in our absence,” he smiled, looking both parts shy and calculating to your well trained eye— and you had no time for such consideration.

“Not too much, h-have a nice night!” You could feel your pulse racing and that was bad. Even the good suppressants, the ones that most of your money went to, had difficulty completely masking the scent of panicking omega.

“Did you use bleach?” The question caught you off guard and you almost jumped when he put a hand on your cart, glancing through the array of chemicals.

“Y-Yes, in the bathrooms. I wasn’t informed of any sensitivities—”

“Nothing a little fresh air won’t take care of,” you wanted him to stop looking at you like that, like there was some pale flash of recognition behind his eyes. “Would you go open the windows in the bathrooms upstairs? I’m afraid my nose is pretty sensitive, several of my packmates are similar.”

You did not like that his nose was especially sensitive and you hated that his packmates were similarly afflicted. It felt like getting punched in the face with a fight or flight instinct, your brain immediately demanded that you leave the cart and run past him—fuck the cart, fuck the job, you could find something else.

“Oh, and do you have the key to the front doors? I might as well get them from you now instead of us having to go down to the office tomorrow.” Your hand immediately dove into your pocket, yanking out the single key and dropping it in his palm. “Thanks— and the windows? Sorry, I just can’t go up there until it’s aired out.”

He wasn’t a huge man but the way he filled the doorway made you second guess trying to run past him, even if he was greying at the temples and looking a little rumpled. It was strange, you wouldn’t usually have such an intense reaction to a beta, but something about him was vaguely unsettling. So instead of trying to make a run for it, you turned on your heel and forced yourself to calmly walk up the stairs. There were four massive bedrooms in the cabin, each with its own bathroom and you’d need to go through and open the windows for the three bathrooms that had them. It meant darting into huge bedrooms, dodging expensive furniture and knickknacks and trying not to dirty the freshly mopped and swept hardwood floors in the process.

It took about five minutes but you felt like you’d run a marathon, your heart was pounding and there was sweat at the nape of your neck. All you wanted was out of the stupid fucking house, immediately. You dashed down the stairs and turned the corner, seeing your cart right where you left it. The door was still open too, but the beta was no where to be seen. You immediately darted forward, grabbing the cart tightly and beginning to push it past the threshold—

You were stopped in your tracks at the sight of two unnecessarily broad alphas. Both were tall, the white man standing just an inch or so taller, with a full beard and blond hair. The black alpha had facial hair too, a cleanly edged goatee to match a faded cut. Both were incredibly attractive and putting off waves of pheromones, to the point that your head floated for a moment.  Your lips clamped shut on a whine, instinct trying to push through and alert the two powerful alphas of your presence. Instead you ducked your head and continued out the door.

“Hi there, sweetheart.” Your gaze snapped up, immediately locking with a pair of dark brown eyes. “You the housekeeper?”

“Yes sir,” you answered quietly, stopping short in front of them when neither moved out of your way. “Sorry to have been here so late. Have a good evening.”

Both were still smiling, still pointedly not moving.

“My name’s Steve, that’s Sam,” the blond’s nose twitched, just slightly, and you realized he was very discretely scenting the air. “Nice to meet you. Do you live in town?”

“N-No, please excuse me,” you nudged the cart forward just an inch but they still didn’t budge and panic began coursing through your blood with renewed vigor, “excuse m—”

“Your scent is… confusing,” Steve’s head tilted to the side, “I don’t mean to be crass, of course, but I couldn’t help but notice.”

“It’s always been this way,” the response was automatic and your brain began shutting down all unnecessary functions; you were about to have to run and hope your omega physiology would make you faster than them.

“You smell almost like an omega,” he continued, both hands coming to rest on his hips, emphasizing the width of his shoulders. “But not quite?”

“I’m a beta.”

“Are you sweetheart?” Sam’s voice was a rumble, his head tilted to the side while his dark eyes burned holes into your skin.

The tone an alpha used with naughty omegas was deliberate and tightly controlled, the same as a command or a purr or a growl. It was on purpose, an attempt to nicely draw out the correct response. He wanted you to admit you were an omega, to tell them the truth of your own volition. The fact that your hindbrain desperately wanted to comply was a completely different issue—one you didn’t have time to address right now.

“Positive,” you breathed, clenching your fists tightly around the handles of the cart for just a second before deciding to leave it behind; you’d never be coming back here, there was no reason to worry about preserving your job.

Your eyes were quick and indefinitely perceptive. Being an omega was one step up from being a prey species, it came with inherent instincts that made you especially good at predicting behaviors. After all, an omega was only as good as their ability to please and soothe packmates. One of the single upsides to being an omega was that you were fast though—fast enough to outrun most alphas. And you only needed to go about a hundred and fifty feet, once you were in your car you could certainly get away. So the second you realized the pair was about to shift, moving to face each other more than you, you darted around the cart and dodged to the left.

It wasn’t your fault, honestly. There was no way you could’ve known you weren’t dealing with normal alphas. The blond was so fast that he almost moved between blinks—one moment he was still, the next he’d wrapped his arms around you and tugged you back into his chest. His arms were like steel, one wrapped around your torso to keep your arms pinned to your sides while the other carefully held your chin. Your hindbrain was screaming now, submit, submit, make alpha happy and you bit down on your tongue to hold in the whimpers, the omega sounds your throat was trying to produce.

“Shhh, shh, calm down,” it was half a tone away from being a purr and you continued to squirm while you still could—an alpha command was coming, you could feel it in your bones.

“Let Steve smell you,” Sam was rumbling instead of talking again, a similar half purr to how Steve had started speaking. "Everything’s okay, omega.”

You felt a nose nudge down your neck, towards your scent gland and you bared your teeth at the man in front of you. “I’m not an omega!”

“You smell like omega,” Steve’s breath ghosted over your skin and you fought a shiver. "Sort of. It’s buried, under… beta… sour beta?”

“What sort of suppressants are you on, sweetie?” You startled as the beta from earlier emerged from the house, wiping his hands on a dish towel absently. "Are you cutting them with anything? Heroin, or coke? It’s okay, you just need to tell me.”

“Tell Bruce sweetheart,” Sam coaxed, automatically moving to roll up the sleeves of your shirt, evidently looking for track marks. "Where do you get them?”

“I’m not on suppressants!” Your voice was almost a shriek at this point, desperately imitating the behavior of an angry beta rather than a terrified omega. “I’m a beta! Get off of me!”

“Okay, okay, here then,” Steve’s arm around your torso tightened, the one on your chin beginning to work its way down towards your jeans. "There’s only way one to tell for sure.”

Shock and fear and humiliation; an array of emotions swarmed through your body as his hand popped the button but those were the three you could identify and you immediately started thrashing your legs—he was going to check if you had an omega ridge and then everything would be over. It was a defining physical characteristic that couldn’t be passed off as anything other than what it was: a boney protrusion meant to catch on an alpha’s knot so they could be locked in place. In females it was found in the vagina, prominently featured directly before the g-spot so a knot would cause persisting pleasure. For males it was similarly positioned next to the prostate.

“Calm down, calm down!” Sam crooned, hands coming up to cup your face as while Steve’s slithered down the front of your jeans and into your panties. "It’s okay sweetheart, no matter what. Whatever Steve finds, you’re okay. You’re safe. We’ll keep you safe.”

The thrashing was doing nothing but tiring you out, you’d already been intensively cleaning for the past 9 hours without a break and it certainly wasn’t dissuading the hand slithering between your folds. You bit down on your tongue harder, until you drew blood to prevent the whimpers—you couldn’t make that stupid sound, you’d never make that stupid, pathetic, whiney noise, you couldn’t. Not even when a long, thick finger penetrated and sunk knuckle deep. Not even when the pad of said finger brushed your g-spot before hooking onto the ridge, tugging gently in a way that would’ve caused blinding pleasure had you not grounded yourself with the pain of biting your tongue.

“There it is,” Steve’s voice was soft, finger carefully running the length of the ridge. "A nice deep one too.”

“How long have you been taking suppressants?” Bruce prodded quietly, coming to stand next to Sam. “I need to know what sort of damage we’re looking at.”

When you didn’t respond Sam sighed, fingers brushing gently over your chin as he directed you to face him. "Please don’t make us use an alpha command, sweetheart. We just wanna take care of you. Tell Bruce how long you’ve been on suppressants, please.”

You regarded the handsome alpha for several short moments before spitting a mouthful of blood directly into his face.

 content warnings: assault, noncon vaginal fingering

edited 7/9/21 - still on hiatus

[apriorisea]

Ok I’m seriously convinced you’re secretly one of the members...(Joonie is that u???) loool but for real, you write their personalities so well. So not a request, but a question?? Their “concepts” aside (like, “golden maknae etc”)... key personality traits & flaws for each of the boys? Like “passionate, sensitive, a perfectionist, or overly self-critical, etc” Which member(s) is hardest to write?Hope this made sense, I’m just super interested in your take on this :)

--First off, you’re so nice!!! Thank you so much:) And also, thank you for this question! I love things like this---even though it’s obviously all just my personal speculation 😅I listed my thoughts down below, but I would love to hear any thoughts (whether in agreement or disagreement!) anyone else might have!  As for which member is hardest to write, for me I typically struggle a little more with Taehyung and Hoseok. For Taehyung, I think it’s probably because our personalities are pretty opposite (again, HUGE grain of salt, since I don’t *actually* know any of them in real life, so I’m just going off the little info we have), so it takes me a little longer to write his stuff. For Hoseok, I think it’s because there is so much more to him than meets the eye and his personality is difficult for me to pin down sometimes. 

Again, thanks so much for your sweet words and thought-provoking requestion (it’s a word now)! I hope you find my take interesting! 💕💜

Seokjin: 

Conscientious - I think Kim Seokjin is very, VERY aware of his role in any given setting. He knows what’s expected of him and how to do it without bending any of his personal boundaries/rules.

Private - I firmly believe that we will never know the true personality of our Mr. Worldwide Handsome. I think he decided early on that to survive in this life, he was going to have to separate his stage persona from his personal life---and he guards this separation fiercely. This is also one of the qualities I admire the most about him: his unwavering commitment to keeping pieces of himself just for him. My personal opinion is that he is the member that gave up the most of a “normal” life and, while he did so knowing the consequences of this choice, he’s found ways to “rebel” and keep his own autonomy (think: responding to fans in a very “blunt” manner [Marry me? No.], cutting/coloring his hair against company wishes, refusing to give-in to fan-service he is uncomfortable with  [thinking specifically of that one time the host tried to get him to kiss Taehyung and he just started yelling over them when they tried to insist], his penchant for avoiding overly ~revealing~ outfits, etc etc).

Professional - I mean, just a continuation of both of the points above. He always knows when the cameras are watching and how he should act accordingly. But---and this is important---I am in NO WAY saying he’s being fake or disingenuous. The Jin we see on stage, in MVs, RunBTS, and even Bon Voyage/In The Soop is the real Jin---it’s just not all of him. He chose the Idol Life as his career, as a profession, so he would never be caught violating the terms that he himself has set to fulfill his responsibilities. What little we know of his family leads me to believe that he was groomed from a young age how to navigate high society and the professional world; now it’s just a slightly different world and society he floats through. 

Responsible - He takes the job of eldest brother very seriously. Though the baby in much of his younger life, as soon as he got 6 little brothers he stepped effortlessly into his new role. Making them food, driving them to school, helping them feel at home in a new place, providing silent but tangible support... My personal favorite is the way he willingly makes a fool of himself to relax the others, to help them calm down during stressful situations and break the ice. 

Good memory - I want to be careful how I explain this, because I don’t want it to come out wrong. I think Kim Seokjin has a very good memory. If you were decent to him and his brothers during the hard times, he’ll remember that going forward. If you were cruel to or dismissive of him as a young exchange student abroad, he’ll never forget. However, I also think he’s cunning enough that you would never be able to tell which category you fall under unless he wants you to know. 

Hard-worker - I mean, just the endless amounts of anecdotes we have about him practicing his vocals and choreography all night long should be enough evidence for this point, but I still sometimes feel like he doesn’t get enough credit. We all know the story of how he got placed in BTS, but I don’t think people appreciate how damn hard he has worked to grow into this life. He was a college student, set on a completely different life with completely different expectations, scooped off the street and told to learn to sing and dance and look. at. him. now. Listen to that vocal range, look at the Black Swan choreography or the way he seamlessly joined the dance break of ON---he has worked HARD and I don’t think we should forget about this. Just because something doesn’t come easy to you, if you’re not naturally gifted, it doesn’t mean you can’t work to achieve it. 

Basically I just love Kim Seokjin with my whole heart.

Yoongi:

Empathetic -  This word is the beginning and end of how I would describe his entire being. I think Min Yoongi is a very empathetic person. He sits back and observes, and he’s aware of everything. You know when you first get into BTS, there’s always the stories of him being the “scariest” member or the “toughest” or the quietest (especially in the earlier days of BTS, because can we just talk about how much happier he has been this last year-year.5?? How much more himself he is at all times? How much more comfortable??? We love to see it.) But I think his quiet watchfulness just gets frequently mistaken for scary or tough. In addition, his empathy allows him to connect with others in a special way, to acknowledge them and build them up (thinking of that one V-Live or whatever where Jungkook says something kind of under his breath---something about a past life?---and Yoongi not only hears him but turns to him and explicitly validates his feelings and thoughts, OR the times when he tells Jimin that he really likes his singing voice).  

Protective - He doesn’t like unkindness in any way, shape, or form. He doesn’t tolerate cruelty or bullying. And let’s not forget: he sees everything. Every slight, every intentional dismissal, every dig or jab, every “diss track” lyrics. Every single injustice. Now, he can stand up for himself (when he deems it appropriate, because I also think he’s pretty good at picking battles), but his true force comes out when those he loves are belittled/threatened/disrespected. He is fiercely protective of those he loves. 

Emotionally Intelligent - Obviously, I think he’s also just intelligent-intelligent, but I want to focus on this aspect for a moment, because I think this is a quality that gets overlooked in people in general. He is aware of the importance of emotions, both his own and other people’s. It’s in the way he recognized that he and Taehyung were polar opposites and made a concentrated effort to understand him better. It’s in the way he unabashedly announces that they hold hands when they’re arguing. It’s in the way that he insists that there is more to life than school, grades, others’ expectations. It’s also in the way he knows exactly how to make the others laugh, the way one of his sharp-witted comments or physical-comedy bits can break a tension or diffuse the moment. It’s all over every single one of his songs. It’s in the way he calmly handles challenges and has a unique relationship with each of his brothers according to their needs. He treats his relationships---with the members, the fans, staff, friends, family, whoever---with care and respect and maturity. 

Compassionate (read also: Cinnamon Roll) - Yoongi understands darkness because he has experienced it himself, and he will do whatever he can to make sure no on else suffers in the same way. He takes care of the people in his life, usually by doing little things or quiet things (think: the reason they call him the “dad” of BTS). He’s not afraid to correct people when they’re wrong, but he always manages to do it kindly. He’s also a complete pushover for the ones he loves: think of how he each member of the maknae line has a different but special relationship with him, think of how Jungkook can basically crawl all over him and hit him and annoy him and bother him and he never bats an eye, think of the way he showed up with chicken because he didn’t want Hoseok to be alone, think of the way he goes fishing with Jin because he knows his big bro loves it so much, think of the way he never ever yells at anyone when he’s angry, think of the way he softens his tone when explaining things. Cinnamon. Roll. 

Straight-forward - He’s blessed with the ability to be blunt but not cruel. I actually personally really hate the word “blunt” because, in my experience, it usually comes into play when someone is explaining that their rude, offensive, and ignorant comment *isn’t* rude, offensive, or ignorant---they’re “just a blunt person.” But I think Yoongi is someone who is actually able to be straight-forward (a much better term than the dreaded b-word) without slipping into carelessness. He says things how they are, but, using his emotional awareness and intelligence, he’s able to say it calmly and kindly. If you’ve messed up, he’s going to tell you you messed up---but he’s also going to help you figure out the next steps and volunteer to walk with you while you take them. He’s going to call out bad behavior---but always remind you that he loves you no matter what. He’s going to critique the song you wrote---but it’s going to be 90% positive comments and 10% suggestions of what could be better/smoother/more understandable. I also feel like he is someone who expects the same in return: he hates liars and has a low tolerance for bullshit. 

Basically I just love Min Yoongi with my whole heart.

Hoseok: 

Duality - Now, I don’t mean duality in the way you can compare his precious ray-of-sunshine moments to the times he absolutely blows everyone away on stage (though this is obviously a thing). I’m referring more to the way he can be both ray of sunshine and serious-business all at the same time. Like Jin, I think Hoseok chose an Idol persona (though I think his decision was prompted more by a desire to be uplifting and cheerful and our hope) and exists comfortably within those parameters. However, unlike Jin, I think Hoseok doesn’t mind if people see the other side sometimes, too. He’s not afraid to set down the bubbly-Hobi persona, even if cameras are rolling. He’s not afraid to be emotional,  whether that’s over-the-top happiness, or genuine overwhelmed tears. He can wear a flower around his face and make cute noises and then the next second he can snap at the maknae to not fool around near a pool so he doesn’t get his clothes all wet. It’s not an act either way, he’s just both. 

Good judgment - Obviously, we know that Jung Hoseok is a hard-worker. We know he’s dedicated his life to his craft, first with dancing and then with rapping. He can be an intimidating dance captain, someone who takes it seriously and pushes everyone to be the very best they can be. His work ethic is insane, and he never accepts less than his best---but, in comparison to others on this list, I think he is able to critique himself fairly and kindly. While he demands perfection, he doesn’t tear himself apart to find it. I think he has the ability to assess something or someone and come away with a fairly unbiased opinion. 

Comfortable - This is hard to describe in just a word, but I think he has a way of making people feel at ease in his presence. Even as one of the biggest superstars on the planet right now, you get the sense that he never wants to make people feel uncomfortable or intimidated or uneasy. Something about his mannerisms, his bright smile, his personableness, make him seem approachable. I think it’s also why Namjoon’s been known to say that BTS couldn’t exist without Hoseok, why Yoongi values his friendship so much, why Jungkook is constantly snuggling him. My personal opinion is that he was instrumental in bridging the gap that sometimes might have occurred between Namjoon and Yoongi in the early days; his comfortable presence eased some of the tension that (I’m guessing) may have naturally arisen between two of the greatest young rappers in the game when they were first working together. Hoseok just wants everyone to feel comfortable and at ease around him.

Kind - I think Jung Hoseok is just a genuinely kind human being. I think he is trusting and loyal, but also just the sort of person who will make it his mission to make you smile on a bad day. Just the fact that he chose to make his stage persona someone who is full of hope and happiness speaks volumes. Knowing his own personal struggles, he extrapolates this knowledge to guess how others could feel, and throws himself into the role of positive, happy, sunshiney, hope. It’s his kindness that motivates this behavior. 

High standards - This goes along with his good judgment, but I think Hoseok expects a certain level of competence from everyone around him, in whatever capacity they’re working. Again, this goes along with his desire to have the entire group work on a bit of choreo until it’s right. I think that, because he pushes himself to be the best and fulfill expectations, he looks for this same dedication in others (what comes to mind is that moment in some interview where Namjoon is struggling a little [cos English is the WORST, ugh] so Hoseok looks over at the interpreter like “what exactly are you doing, do your job, help him translate”). 

Basically I just love Jung Hoseok with my whole heart. 

Namjoon: 

Unbelievably intelligent - I know this one isn’t exactly shocking, but I still feel like it needs to be mentioned first and appreciated more. Namjoon is crazy intelligent, academically speaking. He thrives on the pursuit of knowledge, on contemplating and discussing higher concepts, on learning new things that feed his curiosity and his soul. While I also think this crazy-high intellect can sometimes hinder his ability to connect emotionally with people, it’s also this exact quality that makes him so well suited for the role he has been thrust into---not just in the group, but in the world. 

Nerdy - Bicycling, bonsai trees, reading, tiny creatures, art exhibits. He is unabashedly and desperately passionate about the things he likes. He isn’t afraid to love something just because he loves it. He goes all-in on things that he’s interested in, whether they’re “cool” or not. His curiosity pushes him forward, needling him to learn everything he can about things he’s passionate about. He sinks himself into these hobbies wholly (think: carrying a book or two with him everywhere so he can get some reading in, visiting as many art museums and exhibits as possible on days off, making cutesy noises at stingrays and scooping teeny-tiny crabs out of the sand to tell them how beautiful they are).

Macro-focused - He strikes me very much as the sort of person who loves to talk about concepts and ideas and philosophies in great terms. He loves clever wordplay, he likes to reflect on his place in the universe, he wants to discuss the complexities of life and human nature. His quick-mind devours these topics, and I can imagine he could sit for hours with you debating philosophy and discussing art. On the flip side, though, I think he isn’t so good with minutiae---and by “minutiae” I mean everything from being more aware of his physical surroundings to dealing with personal things. For example, I think he’s brilliant when he discusses happiness and hardship and joy and pain and love and humanity in the songs he writes...... but he’s not exactly the first person you would go to if you were having a tough or emotional personal time. Don’t get me wrong: obviously he cares about the people in his life, he cares about people in general---but sometimes all you need is a hug and pat on the back to encourage you and Namjoon would instead launch into the greater implications and consequences of human nature in an attempt to help you feel better.

Logical - I know this seems like a given, but while I think others on this list are more emotionally-intelligent, I think logic is one of Namjoon’s greatest strengths. For example: if another member is crying or upset, Jimin would notice they’re upset and immediately go and hug them and wipe their tears away; Namjoon would notice they’re upset and immediately look for the source of the problem. Once identified, he’d take the next steps to rectifying the problem, because logic dictates that if the problem gets solved, then the other member would be happier. If there was nothing to rectify, he’d attempt to comfort them with cold, hard facts. (I’m thinking about that time when Jungkook got upset because he felt like he messed up his performances, and Jimin immediately hugs him and comforts him and tells him he was great, while Namjoon assesses the situation and starts talking about how he himself actually, objectively messed up, so there’s no logical reason for Jungkook to be upset right now.) He dreams and enjoys literature and the arts---but when it comes to handling practical, inter-personal issues, he’s much more comfortable with logic. 

Vibes - I really didn’t have a good word to describe this thought of mine, so let me just get right into explaining: I think Namjoon is, generally speaking, one of the smartest people---if not the smartest person---in the room. He’s aware of this fact without being arrogant about it, but it is the truth. Because of this, I think he’s frequently called on to explain things, to expound on them, to teach or interpret or decipher. I think he enjoys this role, because he loves talking about things he’s passionate about (see above: nerdy) but sometimes...sometimes I think he just desperately wants someone he can vibe with. Someone who can match his level intellectually. Someone whom he doesn’t have to teach. I think he is over-the-moon ecstatic when he meets someone he can vibe with in any way---whether that’s intelligence-related or passion/hobby-related. I don’t know, I just sometimes feel like he chooses to spend his personal time with people who can match him in some way, whom he can vibe with.

Basically I just love Kim Namjoon with my whole heart.

Jimin:

Caring - For me, Park Jimin starts and ends with this characteristic. He cares. A lot. About a lot of things. He cares about his brothers, he cares about his family, he cares about his friends, he cares about ARMY, he cares about music, he cares about his dancing, he cares about fashion, he cares about how he’s perceived, he cares about doing his very best, he cares about the future generations, he cares about those who are less fortunate than him, he just cares so much. Along with Yoongi, I think he is incredibly empathetic. How many times do we see him basically sprint across a room or a sandy beach or a campsite or a stage to get to an upset member? He reads people’s emotions and has a natural instinct to take care of them. Like anything, though, I think his biggest strength can also be a great weakness: sometimes he cares too much. How many times has he worked until his body is covered with pain patches, until his feet bled, until he almost passed out? All the weight he lost, because he cared about his appearance? How hard he worked at being “hardcore, manly” Jimin, because that’s what he thought people cared about most? All the times he cried after a tiny mistake, because he cared about being perfect, because he cared about others’ perception of him? Park Jimin cares so/too much and it’s one of the most defining things about his personality. 

Social Intelligence/눈치 - One thing I love the most is how he has such a unique relationship with each one of his brothers. Now, obviously, every single combo in Bangtan is different and unique and special. But I love watching Jimin’s relationships with the others so much, because he’s so aware of what they need. Truthfully, I think Jimin is hyper aware of others in general. If you’re trying to sneaky-cry at a crowded party, Jimin is the type of person who would somehow appear at your side, ready to help you feel better. His empathy and sensitivity allow him to assess what each individual needs the most from him and act accordingly. He knows Taehyung should never be left alone when upset, knows that if Jungkook is actually crying then something is very wrong, knows that Leader RM sometimes needs to just be his one-year-older hyung Namjoon, knows exactly how far he can push Yoongi’s buttons, knows to laugh at Jin’s dad-jokes (especially when they’re for the benefit of the group), and knows that Hoseok needs to be reminded how much cohesiveness he provides the group in general. 

Self-Critical - All right, I feel like this one might be a little controversial, so hear me out. Like I mentioned earlier, he cares a lot, and part of that translates into caring about himself---caring about his achievements, his performance, his appearance. It’s partly the classical dancer in him and partly just his personality. He wants to do and be his best always. But.... I do think that he has learned to be much kinder to himself over the years. Gone are the days of starving himself to get rid of his cheeks, the tearful breakdowns after a single missed step in a performance, the acting outside of his true personality because he thinks that’s what he’s supposed to be. I think we now very much see a Jimin who has come into his own, who has accepted himself for who he is (including his flaws), who has embraced every part of him. This doesn’t mean that I think he never has to fight the nagging voice in his head, or struggle with insecurities, or swallow down the urge to berate himself after a less-than-perfect performance---he still expects the best out of himself, still wants to be the best. I just think he’s found a way to critique himself without absolutely tearing himself apart. 

Cunning - Yet another word that looks and sounds derogatory, but isn’t really in this context. Like a lot of other empathetic, sensitive, socially-intelligent people, knowing exactly what people need and are feeling also allows him to know weaknesses. Weaknesses he would never exploit---unless he wanted to. I actually don’t think we see much of him using others’ weaknesses against them, but in my opinion, this quality is linked to two of his other quirks: 1) his talent and complete lack of guilt for cheating at games and 2) his penchant for pettiness. I don’t really know how to explain my thought-process here---not well, anyway. But I feel like Jimin is so tuned into the important things (so concerned about the important things) that little things, like cheating at a game, don’t matter to him much. And, if he can use his usually sweet and helpful and hard-working, honest self to get away with it, even better. On the flip side, I don’t think he enjoys or endures confrontation as much or as well as, say, Yoongi might---so he expresses himself in a quieter, underhanded way. (The moment that’s coming to mind is that one time they were at an American event and he commented, in Korean, about how unorganized things seem to be.) Jimin is the sweetest, most sensitive, empathetic little cinnamon roll---until it’s time to win a game, or until he’s feeling a little prickly and petty. 

Basically I just love Park Jimin with my whole heart.

Taehyung: 

Individualistic - Kim Taehyung knows who he is. He knows what he likes, what he wants, what he thinks. He is going to wear whatever he wants, paint whatever he wants, say whatever he wants, and do whatever he wants. He’s a person who seems to have figured out a long time ago what makes him happy and how to be his true self around others no matter what---and this something I greatly envy. If he wants to learn the violin, he’s gonna buy a violin and play some scratchy Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on a hotel balcony---because that’s what he wants to do. If he wants to write a song, it’s going to be in his style, the way he likes it. If he wants a really cool, avant-garde piece of artsy clothing, he’s going to spray-paint it himself. If he has an opinion on something, it’s highly likely that he’s spent quite a bit of time forming this opinion---but once that’s his opinion, that’s his opinion. That’s what he thinks, there’s no need to listen to others or change. I think this quality, this ability to be himself so  freely and earnestly, is both one of the reasons he’s able to make friends so easily and be beloved so quickly (see: “Bangtan’s True Baby” and “Wooga Squad darling”); and one of the reasons others (including the other members, by their own admission) can’t understand him well at first. I think it has brought many good things to his life, but has also played a significant part in some of the struggles that he has had. He’s precious, but also very easily misunderstood.

Not Very Outward-Sensing - Notice I very purposefully don’t go anywhere near the words “self-absorbed” or “self-centered”---because he’s not. On the contrary, I think Taehyung feels very deeply for the people in his life (see below: Emotional), but his ability to care for them is sometimes inhibited by his lack of outward-sensing. If Jimin is the king of 눈치/social awareness, then Taehyung is the absolute opposite (which is why it is unendingly intriguing to me that two of his closest relationships in BTS---he and Jimin, he and Yoongi---are comprised of one person who lacks this awareness [Tae] and one person who has all the awareness [Jimin, Yoongi]). He would never hurt someone’s feelings on purpose, but quite often he’s just not paying a whole lot of attention to what other people might be feeling or experiencing. He’s not concerned about walking on eggshells, because he feels that as long as his intentions are good, nobody can be too hurt or too uncomfortable with him or his behavior (A great example of this is the infamous Spring Day Dance Debate from “Burn the Stage.” In Taehyung’s mind, he saw something that should be changed and needed to be addressed, so he called it out. It never in a million years would occur to him that the way he phrased it or the way he kept harping on it could be a source of irritation or discomfort to Jin. To him, it was a very black-and-white, clear-cut situation: something was wrong, he had an idea of how it should be fixed, therefore nothing bad could/should come of him speaking his mind in the pursuit of this perfect solution he created). He seems like the sort of person who, after accidentally hurting your feelings, would sympathize with your hurt and want to make it better, but focus more on the fact that he didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, so it’s not really his fault. 

Emotional - I think he is very in-touch with his emotions, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. For example, if he’s upset, he wants everyone to know and acknowledge that he’s upset. He doesn’t like feeling ignored or passed over, and where others might let it slide, he’s not afraid to speak up about it (I’m thinking about the time there was a question directed specifically to Yoongi about being from Daegu and Taehyung immediately pointed out that he was also from Daegu, and kind of pouted a little until it was acknowledged). Also, although it’s never been said explicitly, I think he is one of the members who potentially struggles with depression. He can take things very personally and to heart. But this is likely because he has such a big heart. He loves unabashedly and he’s very vocal about who he loves---think of all the times he’s said and posted comments along the lines of “Please love all seven” and “Please love each of us equally.” He also can be very protective (thinking of that one Weverse post where he lowkey chewed somebody out for posting an unflattering photo of one of the others) and blunt when defending those he loves. I mean, he created a whole new word just to express how much he loves ARMY! When he’s sad, he cries. When he’s happy, he giggles. When he’s angry, he expresses it. When he’s disappointed, he doesn’t hide it. To me, he is a near-perfect example of someone who wears their heart on their sleeves. 

Contradictory - One of his most endearing qualities. He is not very outward-focused---but he bought a pair of gloves because he remembered that Jimin offhandedly mentioned that he needed some. He doesn’t read other people easily---but he (so far) is also pretty darn good at completing accurate Vibe-Checks for those who come in contact with BTS. He doesn’t always see as much as the others might---but he also notices certain things they might miss. The beauty of his being is that he can be both things at the same time and not seem out of place.

Basically I just love Kim Taehyung with my whole heart.

Jungkook: 

Confident Yet Perfectionistic - Now listen: when I say confident, I don’t mean that he never struggles with insecurities. I mean confident in the way that his whole life (at least his whole Idol life) he had 6 older brothers who encouraged him to try and do anything he wanted---and then supported him no matter the outcome. Being raised in an environment like that, where you’re encouraged to try things, where you have people who love you constantly praising your efforts and providing a safe space for you to fail, you gain a certain amount of confidence in your abilities, in yourself. I think this is actually a big part of the Golden Maknae moniker: yes, I think he is the type of person to whom things may come quite easily and who is naturally skilled in several areas---but it’s also a little easier to conquer new things when you have years of encouraged-successes under your belt. He has gained a confidence in himself over years of trying and working his tail off and eventually succeeding; he knows he can do anything if he works at it enough because he’s always been able to do everything he works at. Where the perfectionistic aspect kicks in especially is this: there are a lot of people who have a natural affinity for lots of things. There are lots of people who can pick up something new and be decent right away (I honestly think Taehyung is another person like this, someone who can pick new things up pretty easily)---the difference is that Jeon Jungkook is the type of person who takes that natural affinity and runs with it. He’s not satisfied with just being good at something; if it’s something he really wants to do, he throws his whole heart and soul and self into it. In my opinion, this sets him apart from people who could be considered “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” He trusts his process and uses it to be the very best he can be in whatever he does.

Introverted -  Obviously he’s not the only introverted member of Bangtan, but I do think that his specific life experiences require a little more discussion on this topic than the others. By his own admission, his childhood ended really early. He didn’t focus much on school because he was focused on his career; he never got to have the typical high school experiences most of the others had. At an incredibly young age he was thrust into a totally different life that required being in the spotlight---and while this definitely brought unique challenges, he loves his life as a musician and performer. I think out of all BTS, Jungkook especially lives for performing. He lights up on stage and is at his absolute happiest when performing (and performing well). And yet none of this changes the fact that he is absolutely an introvert, someone who needs to recharge with just a little alone time. Alone time. Not easy to achieve when you live in the same tiny dorm with 6 other boys. Not easy to achieve when you are constantly surrounded by brothers, staff, instructors, producers, cameras, and fans.  

Maknae - I can’t explain this well, I know I can’t, but it just is such a huge part of him that I feel like I need to try. In so many ways, Jungkook is a typical baby of the family. It’s evident in the way that he unabashedly idolizes his Rap-Mon-hyung. In the way he constantly cuddles and sniffs and snuggles Hoseok. In the way he’s not afraid to pester Yoongi or tease Seokjin. He also seems like someone who is much more of a fixer than a listener; meaning, if you go to him with a problem, he’s going to be focused on how he can fix the situation, not on just listening and sympathizing/empathizing with you, a trait that I feel comes easily to babies of families (not that *all* youngest children have this, mind you) because they’re typically not the ones confided in, so if something is brought to them they want to help make it right (massive generalization, I know, don’t kill me). As discussed above, he’s also confident in himself because he’s been raised with older siblings who have always told him “yes, you can.” He’s just Baby in all the ways that stick with a person even as they grow older. 

Trusting - Jungkook strikes me as the sort of person who trusts fairly easily---and, more importantly, unshakably. He has no problem admitting to millions of ARMY that he ripped his pants on stage or V-Living while drunk (I don’t care what he says, babyboy was at least a little buzzed) because he trusts us. He could easily follow Namjoon (or any of his brothers) to the ends of the earth. He takes every opportunity to speak earnestly and wholeheartedly about how much he genuinely loves ARMY, because he trusts that that love will be returned. 

Basically I just love Jeon Jungkook with my whole heart. 

[chavacerilla]

chava fluff alphabet

a/n: i’ve noticed a significant lack of fanfiction for my main chava, and by significant lack i mean there’s literally nothing here. so here it is, a whole ass alphabet for my husband i love him word count: 9232

A = Attractive (What do they find attractive about the other?)

Chava finds everything attractive about you, but most importantly, he loves your smile. There’s something so special about how you sparkle at him, the corners of your eyes crinkling and your cheeks so perfectly rounded. The apples of your cheeks fit so perfectly in his hands, and he loves to capture your grin between his palms. If he could, he would keep your smile in his pocket until the end of his days, but that would mean it would cease to be yours, and that’s too much of a price to pay. So he settles for making you beam as often as he can, and basks in the warmth that covers his skin.

But above all, there’s no better feeling than the way you smile into his kiss, your teeth gently pressed against his lips, and he can’t help but pull you in again and again. He swears it’s his destiny to have fallen for the sunshine you pour into his life, and the days only get brighter.

Is there anything about Chava Cerilla that isn’t attractive?

The most attractive thing about Chava is his demeanor. He’s both the sharpest thorn and softest petal of a rose. He’s the perfect description of someone your mother would’ve called “rough around the edges,” but every time you meet his gaze, you know immediately that he’s got his entire heart open just for you. Anything you could possibly ask for, Chava’s ready and willing to get for you.

He’s passionate – every brush of his skin burns with affection. His eyes are constantly thoughtful, yet so, so intense. And God, when he pulls you into his strong arms, you feel so lucky that he’s got you, because you could absolutely just melt into his touch.

B = Baby (Do they want a family? Why/Why not?)

Chava absolutely wants a family. He can’t wait to have as many kids as possible, and let them run free along the plantation. There’s such a wealth of knowledge he’s attained that he wants to be able to pass along – what color of coffee cherries are the most perfect, the fastest route through the hedge maze, and even how to tie your shoes so they don’t come undone during the day.

There’s so much that your abuela taught Chava that he wishes to teach to someone else – or hopefully, a few someones. When Chava sees you, sitting in his passenger seat, staring out into the Colombian sky, he sees a future. A beautiful, wonderful future full of children and laughter and watching movies even though there might be school the next day. He remembers the days that you had together when you were young. Stories of abuela and Aurora and the mornings around the plantation are dying to be told to young ears. Those days full of imagination and wonder for the world.

He knows that he’ll see a glimpse of it again, if not now, then at the very most, the moment you both lay eyes on your firstborn. That feeling of magic is sure to come back when you finally, after all this time, have a child of your own. Together.

He knows he’ll cry immediately, overwhelmed with love at first sight. Oh, how he hopes that your kids will have your eyes – your abuela’s eyes – and a little piece of her will stay alive through them. He knows that he’ll kiss you both constantly until the end of his days. He’s not scared of waking up in the middle of the night to change diapers and never getting any real sleep again. Chava’s so excited, and would be reading parenting books and talking to all the townspeople, just to try and be prepared for what he knows is the most terrifying thing in most people’s lives. He’d stay up for hours talking to Aurora about Lucia and what her experience was like, wondering about how he can be the best father that he can be. His dream is to be the kind of parent your abuela was to him.

Everyone in town would be buzzing about Chava Cerilla’s first child. The descendant of La Dama Roja. Las Tres Hermanas would be teaching him how to braid hair, even though they know he wouldn’t need to know for another couple of years at least, but he asked so sweetly, how were they supposed to say no? Old man Beto would be handing off a new checkers set, and joking about how he always knew you two were meant for each other. Beto would sit with Chava for hours, just teaching him checkers strategies, that he knows Chava wouldn’t need for a long time, but Beto knows he might not be around long enough for that, so he gives what he can now.

You know that your children would be so massively, totally loved, by not just you and Chava, but the entire town. Still, it’s hard not to be afraid of having children. All that power to shape an entire person for better or for worse – it’s terrifying. But Chava has your back. Forever. It’s a lifelong commitment, but he’s never been more ready to commit to anything, especially when it comes to you.

Oh, and there’s going to be so many times when he falls asleep with your kids safely resting on his chest, cuddled up against him, a small sleepy smile resting on his face.

C = Cuddle (How do they cuddle?)

Overall, Chava’s a huge cuddler. He loves any way he can feel your touch against him. Your warmth is just a comfort to him, and the endlessly strong and brave man for a moment just becomes your lover. He doesn’t have a specific preference, but his go to is just pulling you close to him, letting your head rest on his chest. The sound of his heartbeat will be music to your ears, and the way you draw shapes on his skin makes his heart ache towards yours. It’s the best way to see the sky above you, whether you’re in the back of his truck or laying out in the fields. He counts the stars reflected in your eyes before pulling you into his kiss, soft and languid against your lips.

He loves feeling able like he can protect you from anything, and wrapping you in his arms is a wordless way to speak his truth: he will love and defend you for all his life. Touch is really important to him, and it’s definitely one of his top love languages. When it’s hard to explain how he really feels, he’ll hold you, rest his head on top of yours, and just breathe. You’ll understand.

That’s what it’s like to be in love.

D = Dates (What are dates with them like?)

Going on dates together would be the sweetest nostalgia mixed with the excitement of getting to know each other. Spending most of your life apart, he’d have so many stories to tell you as you walk through the streets, arm in arm, until you get to your destination.

If you went for dinner together, he’d hold your hand across the table, squeezing it every time he remembers he loves you more than the world. Fancy dinners would be far and few between, but there’s nothing he’d love more than to see you dressed up. He’d put on his suit, and you’d get ready together, gently humming to music as you sit on the bathroom counter to put your makeup on. While he runs his fingers through his curls, you’d press your freshly glossed lips to his cheek. A smile would cross his face, but a fire sparks within his eyes as he pulls you into his arms, peppering soft kisses against your face as your laughs bounce off the bathroom tiles. One of his favorite moments is when you finally slip into your dress, and you share the intimate silence as he zips you up, his warm hands running over the fabric and he’ll whisper under his breath,

“How did I get so lucky?”

Each and every date ensures that he can lay his entire heart out for you. And in all honesty, that just means having a place where he can feel the world melt out under his feet until it’s just the two of you. It could be absolutely anywhere, just as long as he can see you smiling.

E = Everything (You are my ____ (e.g. my life, my world…))

You are my wish come true.

Chava spent years wishing on fireflies or “baby stars” as you would call them back when you were kids. Each time he walked through the cool night, he’d see those estrellitas and his heart would ache. His lips would move before he could even process what he was saying, and your name would fall into the open air.

“Regresa a mi.” (Return to me)

And every night, he’d walk through his maze, the soft grass crunching underneath the sole of his boot, and count the estrellitas until he lost himself in wishes for your return to Colombia. Sometimes, he’d bump into your abuela while wandering the plantation, and they’d walk underneath the milky moonlight, and she’d tell him stories of the two of you.

For a long time, he hid that he wanted to see you again. He would pretend like he was just asking out of curiosity. “When will she come back? Is she ever coming back?” and abuela started to pick up that his curiosity was not as simple as he had made it seem.

One night, he told abuela that he wanted to see you again back in Colombia. He told her it was his greatest wish. She smiled a knowing smile, and rested her frail hand on the side of his face.

“Chava, mijito, do you remember when you were little? She came when the sun was hot and you couldn’t bear to leave each other’s sides. Not for a single moment.

You were running around, playing tag, and she tripped up the stairs on the porch. My poor granddaughter, sitting on the steps. Her lip was pushed out all the way to the ocean and her eyes were full of tears. I remember wondering if she could even see.

But Chava, do you remember what you did?”

“No, abuelita. Not a clue.”

“You went right up to her and gathered that girl into your arms. She cried and cried and you just held her for as long as it took for her to calm down. I thought someone was going to call the police because of her wailing. Pero, Chava, you stroked her hair and wiped each of her tears away -”

“I did?”

“Are you surprised?”

“No.”

“Then let me continue.

Once she stopped crying, you picked her up and carried her into the house. You were both so small, so sweet. But you set her down on the couch and ran as fast as you could to get the bandages. When you returned, you wiped up the dried blood from her and when you placed the bandage on her knee, you pressed a besito to it, then you stayed on the couch together until you fell asleep.

And that’s when I knew.”

“Knew what, abuela?”

“I knew you loved her, mijito, and I knew you were going to love her for the rest of your life.”

F = Feelings (When did they know they were in love?)

Chava never had a defining moment to tell him he was in love with you. He’s always been in love with you. From the first moment you stepped onto the plantation, Chava has had his entire heart full of love for you.

Back then, it was just puppy love. His heart yearned to be with yours, but he didn’t know why. He walked with you wherever you wanted, played every game you wanted to play, and when you played house together, he’d kiss you on the cheek when he left “for work” and would tell you he loved you before the playhouse door shut behind him.

By the time he turned sixteen, it was beginning to be something more. He’d stare at the swirling ceiling, praying for the summer to come again. Though the heat could be excruciating and the sweat would pour down his back, you were the coolest shade and the sweetest lemonade. He’d suffer through it all for just a day by your side, capturing the tadpoles in the pond. You were his first kiss, and God, if he thought he loved you then, it was only going to get worse.

The summer before he turned twenty, he accepted he was in love with you. No other girl in town had compared to the time he spent with you. He’d never felt a connection to anyone the way he did to you. Your hearts were tied together even though you were 1600 miles apart. He spent hours poring over English books abuela gave him, just so he could put it into words. He never really had anything more planned than “I love you” but he was ready. He was so ready.

But you never came back.

Abuela said something bad happened to your parents, and you weren’t coming this summer. He’d never wanted anything more than to just hold you like he used to, and tell you he’d love you for the rest of his life. But how was he supposed to tell you, when you were so far away?

Every summer after that, he waited patiently for the day he’d finally tell you he loved you. And by the time he turned 24, he’d just accepted that you weren’t coming home. Not to him. Though his feelings could only grow stronger, his walls grew as he found himself more and more inside El Fantasma’s grasp.  

And Chava loved you enough to let you be.

G = Gentle (Are they gentle? If so, how?)

He’s so endlessly gentle. But he’s not afraid you’ll break. He holds you with reverence. You’re everything to him, and he’s constantly in awe of every part of you. Chava’s entire life has been building up to you, and when you’re with him, sometimes he forgets you’re not part of his imagination and you won’t fade away at his touch. His lips press softly against yours, his hands resting easy on your skin, and you just melt into him.  

That doesn’t mean he’s not passionate though. When Chava really shows his passion and devotion to you, it makes your head completely spin. He’ll pull you against him and leave you breathless. He’ll steal all the air from your lungs and claim it as his own, clinging to you, because finally, his whole world is in his arms.

H = Hands (How do they like to hold hands?)

Chava’s hands are always on you, whether that be on the small of your back or interlocking your fingers together or letting his hand rest on your thigh as he drives his truck.

He likes holding your left hand, knowing that one day you’ll wear his ring on it. The fact that you hold his right hand is a gesture that you’re his priority. And when you switch sides and hold his left hand with your right, he gives his dominant hand to you, because you were always the one destined to hold it.

His thumb constantly grazes the back of your hand, memorizing the feeling of your skin underneath his. He’ll press soft kisses against your hand, and if you close your eyes, you can feel him whispering between kisses,

“I love you.”

I = Impression (What was their first impression?)

Chava doesn’t remember the first time you came into his life. He was too young. You were just there. Not all the time, obviously, but the impact you made was permanent, in the same way meteors strike the earth. When you were gone, there was an obvious crater – a hole – in his life.

But there is one person who remembers.

One day, while on his walks with abuela, he got curious.

“Abuelita, do you remember when she first came to Colombia?”

“Sí, mijito.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“Siéntate, Chava.

You were very small. Small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. They were coming for the summer, just when she was old enough to fly on the plane without causing too much of a ruckus. But they had just landed, mijo, and you were so excited that someone else was coming to visit.

I’d told you that you’d have a new friend about a month before, and you wouldn’t stop asking when they’d be here. I told you that if you kept asking, they wouldn’t show up, because you’d get too annoying. But you were hoping to become best friends, and I didn’t have the heart to tell you that they’d only be here for the summer.

So when they finally got here, I could see how excited you were. You didn’t stop smiling all day, and you chased each other around the fields until the moon was high in the sky. You didn’t know her yet, but she immediately became your favorite person in your small world. She was always special to you, from the moment you laid your little brown eyes on her.”

J = Jealousy (Do they get jealous?)

Chava can get a little hot headed and jealous at times. Abuela wanted you to marry either him or Sergio, and God, every time that lawyer is around you, he could honestly punch him in the face. He won’t say anything for sure, because he doesn’t want to come across as controlling, and he knows you’re allowed to live your life as you wish, but that doesn’t mean he won’t stare daggers at Sergio.

When the lawyer comes up to you, Chava will pull you just a little closer to him, his strong arms tense around your waist. From the corner of your eye you can see his jaw clench and the vein in his neck bulge as the heat surges in his chest.

But you stand on your toes to press a kiss to his cheek, and you practically hear his heartbeat falling steady again. He’ll close his eyes, feeling the warmth of your lips against his skin and take a deep breath.

He’ll remember that you belong fully to each other, and peace washes over him.

K = Kiss (How do they kiss? Who initiated the first kiss?)

It’s kind of strange to think about, but Chava is experienced, no doubt about it. It’s a small town, and he’s definitely not a bad option. So over the course of his life, he’s been on a few dates and found himself in a few relationships. Though they didn’t work out, he learned every trick of the trade and put them in his back pocket, just waiting for the day you return home to Colombia.

For Chava, the best part of a kiss is the anticipation. You meet his eyes, hazy with need, and as you lean closer, he always takes a moment to wait. He breathes in the air from your lungs, forever trying to describe the feeling bubbling within him before he rushes towards you, finally letting your lips connect.

Each kiss languidly pressed against your lips is heaven on earth. His hands are constantly pulling you closer to him, holding your face, or tangled in your hair. He can’t stop how his hands desperately roam over you, constantly losing himself in your kiss. He loves to start slowly, letting his tongue drag across your bottom lip, and then as time moves, his heart beats faster and his kisses get more and more wanting until you’re dizzy from it all.

But it wasn’t always like that.

The first time you kissed, it was during the hot Colombian summer.

Chava sat on Abuela’s bed, the early dawn pouring over his tan skin.

“Abuelita, did you know she was my first kiss?”

“Dime, por favor.” (please, tell me)

“It was probably mid-July. Really, really hot, so we jumped into the creek. I brought one of those little plastic bags so we could catch tadpoles, and we ended up getting two in one bag. They’re always so fast, she was convinced that they couldn’t be separated. They were in love.

So she said they wanted to get married. They had to get married. So we spend all day, running around and picking flowers off the coffee shrubs to decorate the riverbed. She taught me how to make those – cómo se dice –

Daisy chains.

So we spend all day, weaving stems and flowers, preparing for this wedding, and as it started to get dark, we put fireflies in your jars.”

“Dios mio. My jars?”

“Lo siento, abuela. But yes, your jars. She would run after them, capture them in her hands, and I’d hold the jar. I just wanted to feel her hands against mine.”

Abuela reached out with soft eyes to put her hand on Chava’s cheek, running her frail thumb over his stubble. “Ay, mijo.”

“I know, I know. But once we had everything set up, and we were about to start the wedding, it was dark. I was holding the tadpoles in their bag. There was no moon. No light. And with only the fireflies to light the path, I slipped in the mud, and I- Abuelita, I knocked over all the jars and then I dropped the bag. The tadpoles, they swam away. My heart just sank.

It was all she wanted, all day, and I ruined it.”

“Oh, Chava, you didn’t mean it. Your legs were always so funny when you were young. She probably knew it was an accident.”

For a moment, Chava let his walls fall, laying down against the sheets and pressing his cheek into the pillows. Abuela ran her hand along the side of his face, brushing her fingers through his hair as he loses himself in the guilt of an action that happened over a decade ago.

“I still felt so horrible. And as I was sitting there, covered in mud, she sat down next to me. I was confused, obviously. She was wearing that white dress you bought her from the tailor. I remember thinking I’d ruined that too.

Pero, she leaned over to me, and she kissed me. I think she wanted to make me feel better. But Abuelita – I’ve never experienced another kiss like that.”

“Chava – mijito. That was a kiss of true love.”

L = Love (Who says ‘I love you’ first?)

Even though Chava frequently is known for treading lightly, planning each step before he takes it, he tends to run into everything headfirst when it comes to you.

He says I love you first.

One night, you were walking through the plantation together. The moon was high in the sky, the stars twinkling brightly overhead. Hand in hand, you let the wind lead your steps, and you found yourselves at the entrance on the hedge maze.

Without a word or a second glance, you dart inside, immediately hearing Chava’s laugh ring through the air as he gives chase. You seemingly move without any sense of direction, but you’re determined run makes him smile.

From a distance, he hears your delighted giggles as you reach a dead end. As you turn to face him, he sees your palms cupped together, hiding something in the space between.

Your voice is almost a whisper as your eyes soften towards him, “Chava, come see.”

As you let your hands open, a single firefly soars from between your fingers. Immediately, Chava’s sucked back into the memory of your first kiss, fireflies dancing around your heads, as your lips fell against his.

Overwhelmed with the feeling once again, he leans in to kiss you, holding you tight against him. The way your mouth grazes against his feels like home, and he can’t believe he’s finally returned to it.

He says what he’s known his entire life.

“I love you.”

M = Memory (What’s their favourite memory together?)

One time, Chava spent the whole summer talking about glow-in-the-dark stars. He saw them on abuela’s tv once, some infomercial that lasted way too long in between cartoons. But he was immediately taken by how cool they seemed. He’d never seen anything like it, but he desperately wanted some.

He didn’t actually spend every minute of every day talking about it, but he did spend a lot of time hoping to see them one day. You thought they were cool, but knowing Chava liked them too only made them better.

So immediately after you returned to the United States, you begged your parents to get you some. You begged and begged until they gave in, taking you to the store to pick out your very own glow-in-the-dark stars. But you didn’t put them up. You shoved them into your suitcase until next summer, not wanting to ever forget them. They’ll be safe there.

But the problem was that glow-in-the-dark stars don’t last that long. By the time you opened up your suitcase the next June, they had long lost their glow, becoming faded green plastic. Hot tears ran down your cheeks as you thought about how you’d disappoint Chava, but you didn’t dare tell your parents. You felt like they’d scold you for waiting so long. To make them buy a present that you’d eventually give to someone else.

So you packed them anyways, and when your parents parked the car on the plantation, you got out and ran straight into his arms, sobbing and clutching useless stars. He hugged you tight, immediately asking what was wrong.

“Chava, I ruined them.” You cried, showing him the box.

He furrowed his brow and marched you straight into the house, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. Closing the door, he inspected the stars through the clear plastic, and ripped open the package. They spilled out, scattering along the wood floors, but he noticed one, faint, green glow underneath a bag of rice.

A single star, surviving the test of time.

It was one of the widest smiles he’s ever worn. He was amazed by how beautiful it was, even though he’d never seen them in their full glory. You spent the next hour in there, taking turns making wishes on the faded plastic star until the pantry door swung wide open.

Abuela stood before you, hands on her hips.

“There you two are! I have a surprise for both of you.”

And in her hands were glowing green galaxies.

N = Nickel (Do they spoil? Do they buy the person they love everything?)

He loves to worship you in any way he possibly can. He presses kisses to your lips every morning and every night and every chance between. Chava doesn’t necessarily have the means to spoil, but he’d be damned if he didn’t show you his love every single day. You’re technically the rich one in the relationship now, with the sixteen-million-dollar estate. Chava’s just the plantation manager. It doesn’t bother him that you’re the one with the money, but he still saves up to buy you anything that you may mention in passing.

You could mention one night that you wish you had some mint chocolate chip ice cream, only to find it in the freezer the next night. It’s all the little things together that Chava loves to do for you. He’ll always bring you breakfast in the mornings, no matter what. He’d even try to do it when he’s sick, but you have to shove him back into bed and trade places for a day.

And even after everything he does, at the end of each day, he shows up with a red rose from the florist in town. He couldn’t go a day without showing you he’s so madly, truly in love with you.

It’d drive him insane if you didn’t know.

O = Orange (What colour reminds them of their other half?)

When you think of Chava, you think of green. Green like the everlasting Colombian coffee fields he walks through. Green like the hedge maze he’d spent so long cultivating to perfection. Green like the strength and calm you can see always running through him. The warm emerald green that shines through Chava makes you feel safe and secure.

While you walk through the plantation, and you run your hands through vibrant green leaves, you can’t help but think of Chava. His hands have loved every branch of every tree along this plantation over and over again. You think of those same hands running along your skin, and instantly feel the shivers running down your spine.

Green is the color of his love for you, ever growing and endlessly full of life.

When Chava thinks of you, he thinks of the deep blue night. The beautiful, almost black sky littered with flecks of shimmering stars. He thinks of the nights you spend collecting fireflies, running underneath the swirling, oceanic heavens. The deep blue is stable and trustworthy. He’d never doubt how the night returns after the sun sets, and he’d never doubt you. Not in a million years.

As he lays underneath the sky, he hears your voice in the constellations, deep and rich. You’re such a different kind of lovely to him, you might as well be royalty. He knows how beautiful the blue would be against your skin, and spends time just imagining it with a smile spread wide across his face.

Also he’s heard of the phrase “something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue” and he cannot wait for the day. His sky, his heaven, his deep blue ocean, his world, forever becoming his.

That’s what blue means to him.

P = Pet names (What pet names do they use?)

Chava uses a lot of different pet names. There’s not one word that can fully express how he feels for you, so he uses them as he sees fit. His two favorites are “mi alma” (my soul) and “mi cielito” (my little heaven). You’re the most important thing in his world, and the other half of the heart he feels like he’s always been missing.

When you were young, and you’d play house together, he’d come “home from work” and call you “cariño” (sweetheart). It’s what his parents called each other, when his father would come home and kiss his mother on the cheek. He’s always wished for their kind of love, and now he has it.

Sometimes he calls you “estrellita,” remembering all those nights he spent wishing on fireflies for you. On those teeny, tiny stars, sitting in the palm of your hand. Other days, he calls you "mi sol” (my sun), thinking of how your radiance exceeds that of any star, but is the reason his whole world is warm and vibrant.

When he calls you “mi media naranja,” he’s thinking of everything you shared during the summers, splitting everything down the middle (though secretly, he’d always give you just a little bit more). Mi media naranja translates literally to “my half an orange,” but more closely translates to English as “my soulmate.” One half of an orange only has another perfect half. Chava is absolutely sure you’re his.

Q = Quaint (What is their favourite non-modern thing?)

Chava doesn’t keep his phone on him at all times. It’s never really been necessary, because he knows where everyone on the plantation is at all times. If someone’s deviated from their usual schedule, someone else knows where they are. He’ll leave it somewhere like on the bedside table or the kitchen counter, and when you try to call him, you’ll hear it ringing throughout the house. You end up settling on the fact that it’s easier to just shout from your house and play telephone until he comes to the house, chest heaving because he ran from wherever he just was.

He’ll plop down on your bed, trying to catch his breath as you smile, placing a hand gently on his heated cheeks.

“So what do you want for dinner?”

“Cariño, did you really call me over for this?”

“It’s important!”

He sighs playfully, running callused fingers through his hair, “I’ll come back early and we can make empanadas together.”

He stands back up, wiping the wrinkles out of his clothes. Leaning down to meet your gaze, his warm hand lands on the side of your face. The pad of his thumb brushes against your skin as he whispers, “You’re lucky you’re very pretty, mi alma.”

And with a kiss, he’ll pop out the door and back to the field.

As someone who doesn’t use his phone very often, Chava’s a huge fan of handwritten notes. Not always the kind that are sent in the mail, but the kind that are left along the refrigerator and on your nightstand. He writes a lot of things down constantly, to remember everything that happens. A notepad and pen sit in his jacket pocket to use at all times.

He’s constantly got a lot of responsibilities, and he keeping track of it all is important.

But inside his notebook is a bunch of little notes you’ve left him that he’s shoved back between the rings and pages.

“Have a good day, Chava!”

“I love you.”

“I hope it’s not too hot!”

And he’ll leave you little notes back and leave them around the house.

“Mi cielito, I’m going to be home late, no need to wait up. Lo siento.”

“Thinking of you, mi sol. - Chava”

“I cannot wait to kiss you again. I will kiss you a thousand times over. xx”

R = Rainy Day (What do they like to do on a rainy day?)

When the days get rainy, Chava likes to spend his time outside.

During some of his more troubled days, frustrated with the loss of his parents and the treatment of him and Aurora, Abuela would take him into the open green grass and stand him underneath the pouring rain.

“Chava, feel your tears and let la lluvia wash it away.”

The rain pelted his skin, stinging his nerves until he could no longer feel anything else.

Thunder crashed into his ears, leaving him deaf and quieting his thoughts.

Lightning striking in the distance illuminated his tan skin, highlighting the tears streaming along his cheeks, now indeterminate from the rain.

The salt of his sobs covered his tongue as he fell to his knees in the dirt.

The metallic smell of iron and red blood washed away, leaving only the earthy scent of fresh rain in its wake.

Abuela held Chava as he howled and wept with the rushing wind, rocking him as she whispered,

“Mijo, replace your senses with la lluvia.”

So when it rains, he has the tendency to drop everything and stand in the rain. He doesn’t necessarily want to be alone, so if you go up to him, wrapping your arms around his waist and feeling the weight of his body against yours, you can just barely hear him beneath the storm,

“Only la lluvia.”

S = Sad (How do they cheer themselves/others up?)

Chava’s not too good at cheering himself up. He tries pretty hard not to be sad too often. And with everything that’s happened in his life, he’s built up pretty big walls to hold off the pain. It’s a lot easier to feel nothing than the hardship brewing inside of him.

Yet, to feel is to live.

If he’s feeling down, he won’t push it away by trying to cheer himself up. He’ll take the wave as it crashes over his head, and wait for the current to bring him back up. You’ll find him either walking around and letting his thoughts lead his steps, or nursing a beer and losing himself within the starry sky. Sometimes both.

But he usually does most of it alone.

Chava lets time sweep him off of his aching feet, falling into his memories. Once he finds the source of his pain, he chooses to explore it.

One of the guys he works with on the plantation just had his second child. He was struck with thoughts of his parents, before the fear of El Fantasma.

The gaping hole left in his heart hurts, but he pushes his focus to what he loves, rather than what he’s lost.

He remembers the times he and Aurora and his parents were all able to be laughing on one room. He remembers the sound of their voices bouncing against the walls. He remembers how they always smiled until long after the sun had set, singing songs and telling stories they had already heard.

The pain in his chest slowly subsides to a sweet nostalgia for the life he once lived.

Unable to stand by any longer, you approach him slowly, letting your shadow touch him before you do. The moment you’re within arm’s reach, he pulls you close to his chest, pressing soft kisses to the top of your head.

“Chava?”

“Yes?”

“Are you okay?”

When you look up into his hazel eyes, you see tears brimming over the rims. You push them away with the pad of your thumb, a gentle promise for better days.

“I will be, mi amor, I will be.”

But when you’re sad, Chava wouldn’t dare leave you alone. He pulls you into his arms, replacing every one of your thoughts with his heartbeat. The warmth of his fingers pour over your skin as he runs them up and down your arms.

He immediately jumps up to get cookies and milk so you can indulge in the sweetness and while truly feeling your sadness. You smile immediately at the gesture, chocolate chip cookies warmed until they’re gooey on the inside and soft from the milk.

After that, he lies there with you until you feel like talking about it, until your tears run dry and your smile returns to your face. And if you don’t feel like talking about it then, he’ll do anything he can to make you comfortable until you do. He’ll give you all the blankets and pillows from around the house to build a fort for you and turn on some gentle music to let you process your thoughts.

Chava will never let you get too far into your sadness. He’ll always pull you back.

T = Talking (What do they like to talk about?)

Chava talks a lot about the past and the future loves to reminisce and daydream. He’s always the nostalgic about what has been, but even more so a romantic for what could be.

“Mi cielito, do you remember when we were very young? You had just gotten out of school and come straight here. They taught you how to ballroom dance, and you’d won first place in the school competition.”

“Yes! I thought it’d be fun to teach you. You always stepped on my foot, but abuela said we would’ve won any competition.”

“She said it was because we cared so much for each other, it showed in every movement.”

“Do you think she knew that we’d end up together?”

Chava laughs, wrapping an arm tight around you. “Think? She knew. She only spoke English to me for an entire year, just so I could be able to talk to you when you came back.”

“She did?”

“Oh yes. She said ‘Chava, you have to meet her where she’s at. You must learn English.’”

“That sounds like abuela.”

“She also said we’d have really beautiful children.”

“Do you think we would?”

“I know we would.” He hums, staring up at the ceiling. “A little girl then a little boy. Like me and Aurora. They’d have your smile.”

“What if they had your smile?”

“They won’t. I know they won’t.”

“And what makes you so sure?”

Chava turns to meet your eyes, resting his hand on the side of your face, “Your smile is much too beautiful to not be passed on to our kids.”

U = Unencumbered (What helps them relax?)

Chava is usually just a little bit tense. With El Fantasma constantly watching, he’s not usually very relaxed. He tries his best not to let it interfere with his life, but once he’s had a target on his back for as long as he could remember.

Being with you is a good way to get him to relax. He’ll smile bigger, let his laugh become a little louder, sit back in his chair for once. Sometimes, you’ll go run and pull out the old board games, and you’ll play for hours. You’ll hate him by the end of Monopoly, but you’ll see him genuinely relax with a beer in hand and all the properties on his side. It always makes you smile.

And although he’s pretty relaxed around you, he’s cautious. He’s aware of every noise and shadow. Especially with someone gunning for you as well, he wouldn’t dare let anything happen to you.

But sometimes, when the sun has long set, he’ll walk around the house. The wind guides his feet, and he just wanders from room to room, seemingly lost in thought. But if you’re quiet enough, observant enough, you’ll see his lips moving. He’s barely audible, but he speaks. It’s quick, and mostly in Spanish, but you don’t need to know what he’s saying to know what he’s doing.

He’s talking to your grandmother.

“Today was nice. The sun was bright. We haven’t heard from El Fantasma in while, which is both good and slightly worrying.”

He smiles softly to himself, running his fingers through his curls. “I think I might propose soon. It’s been a long time coming, I know it and you know it. I find it funny how you’ve known it all our lives.”

With a chuckle, he turns, and you duck back into the shadows around the corner. “I still have the ring you got me. I thought I’d never have a use for it. I think you were the only person who thought she’d come back.”

He flops down onto the couch, staring at the warm yellow ceiling light. “I’m glad you were right.”

He gets quiet enough that you can no longer hear him, and for a second you’re not sure he’s even talking anymore. He is.

“I want to ask for your blessing, abuela.”

When Chava sits up, you see him smiling.

You quickly run back to the room, trying to be as quiet as possible as the lights around the house flicker off. Jumping into the bed, you curl into the warmth of your blanket as Chava’s shadow begins to trail down the hallway.

The cool Colombian night washes over you as Chava lifts up the blanket, but as soon as he slips in next to you, you’re enveloped into the warmth that you’ve fallen so in love with. You can feel the tension released from his muscles as you wrap your arms around him.

You send a silent thank you to your abuela.

V = Vaunt (What do they like to show off? What are they proud of?)

Chava definitely likes showing off his body just a little bit. He works all day around the plantation, just building up muscle. It’s hard not to be proud of the fact that he looks really good.

But he won’t ever explicitly tell you about it. His shirts are very well fitted across his broad shoulders. It’s hard to keep your eyes from travelling over the fabric as he flexes.

He knows.

The whole town knows.

There’s been a few murmurs here and there of strip poker sessions, many months before you showed up but so late in the night that the sun dares to rise. And alongside every single murmur is Chava’s name.

They speak of how the shady bar lights drag across his tan skin and over his muscles. How he throws his shirt over his shoulder before sitting back in his chair and bringing a beer to his lips.

There’s a favorite moment of yours, though.

God, the moment he puts his truck into reverse, setting his hand on the back of your headrest as he stretches to look behind you. His jawline somehow manages to get sharper as the muscles in his neck pull, exposing skin that you desperately want to run your lips over.

He can see the blush crawling up on your cheeks as you stare at him. It’s shameless, but you truly can’t help but take in the moment. He’ll bite his lip to stop a smirk, and raise an eyebrow at you, feigning innocence until you crash your lips against his.

W = Wedding (Do they ever think of getting married/proposing?)

Chava’s thought of your wedding for most of his life. He couldn’t help it, especially with abuela being part of his planning committee. She had a binder at the ready, with everything that she wanted to be a part of your wedding.

“Pero, abuela, this isn’t your wedding!”

“Chava, I do not care.”

It had to be on the plantation. It had to be, or else abuela might come back and crash your wedding. She also wanted red roses, specifically.

So when the moment came that he thought about proposing, he went to get the binder. It lives on the highest shelf in the house, high enough that abuela always used a chair to grab it down, and high enough that you’d never look up that far.

The binder weighed heavy in his hands, and he looked at the first page.

Chava, when you’re ready to propose, I have a ring. Ask Beto.

X = Xylophone (What’s their song?)

Besame Mucho.

Besame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez – Kiss me a lot, as if this night were the last time.

Que tengo miedo perderte después – for I’m afraid I will lose you afterwards.

Quiero sentirte muy cerca, mirarme en tus ojos, verte junto a mí – I want to feel you close, to look at myself in your eyes, to see you close to me

Piensa que tal vez mañana, yo ya estaré lejos, muy lejos de ti – I think that maybe by tomorrow, I will already be far, far away from you

Every day, Chava loses himself in the feeling of your lips against his, the warmth of your tongue moving over his, the way his heart melts as you tangle your fingers in his hair.

With El Fantasma constantly at his back and the sudden death of your abuela, he refuses to let a day pass by that you don’t feel incredibly, radically loved by him.

Before the passing of La Dama Roja, Chava was very, very sure that he’d never see you again. It’d been much too long since the last time, but his feelings seemed to only grow stronger each day. So when you came back, he vowed to give you as many kisses as you wished.

But there’s a sinking feeling he gets in his gut. It burns more and more each moment he settles on the thought.

Maybe one day, you’ll see something better. A man who’s not being chased by a Colombian gang. A man who can provide for you better than he can.

Chava always kisses you with everything he has, pouring every ounce of love into it, so if you were to ever leave, he’d know he’d given you his all.

Would he know the bittersweet pain of your last kiss? Or would he be ignorant to whatever demise would ultimately befall your relationship?

Maybe El Fantasma will finally catch up with him.

But even though he may have his fears, there’s something special about the way you look at him. It’s a glimmer somewhere deep in your eyes, sparkling back at him. It’s like looking deep into the night sky, but if he looks past the stars, he sees himself.

It’s shocking at first – he’s literally gotten lost in your eyes. But there’s really something quite shocking about the moment he sees himself. It crashes over him like a wave, and suddenly he’s flooded with emotion.

And he pulls you close to him, unwilling to let you go anytime soon.

Y = Yes (When, how, where do they propose?)

Chava’s known all along where it was going to happen.

It was just a normal day for you, the sun came up and came back down. You’d spent time with everyone on the plantation. It seemed like everyone needed or wanted to see you, passing you from one person to the next.

Las Tres Hermanas pulled you into about an hour of sorting, saying you should close your eyes and do your best to help them. It turned out to be a trainwreck. You couldn’t seem to tell what was good and what wasn’t, but they managed to sort everything out. What took you an hour took them not even five minutes.

And then Aurora asked that you make some desserts with her. You ended up spending a few hours chatting and baking and singing along with the wind. It wasn’t bad, but by the end of it, the sun was just about to fall over the horizon for the day.

But just as you were about to put on your coat, Lucia barges into the kitchen, demanding that you help her with her math homework. It’d really been a while since you saw trigonometry, but you decided to stick around and see if you could be of any assistance anyways. By the end, it was more like Lucia taught you than you helping her. And the sun had officially retired, letting the moon take its place in the sky.

“Don’t go yet!” Lucia shouted, grabbing onto your sleeve as you began to stand up from the table. Sleep started to drag at you, and it all felt a little strange, but when you looked into her face, you saw something that made you stay.

“What’s wrong?” You ask, concern flickering over you.

Lucia’s eyes flash with anxiety as her fingers tighten around your wrist. “I’m having… boy problems.”

It all makes sense now.

You return to your seat, letting Lucia talk as long as she needs. It’s a story that seems to wind without end, and kind of seems like something that would happen in Gilmore Girls, but you try to give the best advice you can.

“I think Dean seems like a really nice boy, and he seems to really care about you. Maybe you should tell him you love him too?”

And after another couple of hours of stories, you can see Aurora come out from her bedroom. It almost looks like she gives the smallest, most imperceptible nod. But the moment she does, all of Lucia’s problems seem to melt away.

“You know what, I think I will tell him!” She says, before promptly pushing herself from the table and running to her room.

As your mind swirls with everything she’s just unloaded onto you, the front door clicks open, and you see Chava shrugging off his jacket.

Immediately, you go up to throw yourself into his arms, and he laughs as you bury your face into his chest. It’s a hearty laugh, strong and deep as he tightens his arms around you.

After a few moments lost in the sound of his heartbeat, you look up into his eyes, softening at the sight of you in his arms, and he presses his lips to yours. The world melts away, replaced with the sweetest feeling of his kiss.

Pulling away, he presses his forehead against yours, smiling. “Mi alma, come with me. I have something to show you.”

You take his hand as he wraps his jacket around you, leading you out the door.

You follow him until he leads you to a very familiar pond. It’s lit gently with fireflies in jars, and flowers thrown along the ground. The yellow light falls from the little bugs, mixing with the white of the moon. The wind whistles around you as you remember the time you were last here.

The tadpole wedding.

Your first kiss.

Chava immediately takes your hand in his, and as you look up at him, you see him framed completely by twinkling stars. He smiles as you fall into him, wrapping your arms tightly around his waist.

“This is familiar, yes?”

“Very, very familiar, Chava.”

“Good.”

“Why did you do this?”

When you look up into his hazel eyes again, they’re shining. You’re completely stunned at the sight of him, a warm hand gently resting against his heart.

It beats rapidly underneath the tips of your fingers.

“I love you, cariño. I have known this all my life. This was the place I fell in love with you. You kissed me after I ruined our whole tadpole wedding. I tripped because I was lost in thought. I just kept thinking about what our wedding would be like, when we were all grown.

But then you left. And I tried to move on as best I could. It was hard. I knew I could never love anyone else as much as I loved you, even if we were just kids.”

“Chava, I-“

“Listen, estrellita,” He chuckles, “And then I thought I’d never see you again. Abuela was certain you would come back to Colombia. I’d never seen her so sure about anything. But the moment I laid eyes on you for the first time, after all these years, I was in love with you even more than ever before.

You give me so much life. Everything is so much better with you in it, I never want you to leave.

Mi cielito, mi media naranja, mi amor,”

Your heart skips a beat as your name falls from his lips.

“Be my past, my present, and my future.”

And he gets down on one knee.

“Chava-“

“You must stop interrupting me.” He laughs. “I’m almost done.”

His eyes brim with tears as he looks up at you, surrounded by white moonlight.

“Marry me.”

Z = Zebra (If they wanted a pet, what would they get?)

After you get married, he’d probably ask if you wanted to get a dog. When he was young, his family had a German Shepherd to watch over the house, but he loved that dog more than he thought possible.

He calls him Santo, and they walk together throughout the plantation every day. From the moment that he gets up for work, Santo walks alongside Chava until they’re done with morning rounds, then takes a couple laps on his own.

Everyone loves Santo. You got him as a puppy, and raised him around the plantation, so everyone who’s worked there has gotten to know the little guy until he became not-so-little anymore. Aurora and Lucia are really fond of Santo. He’s family to both of them, and Lucia is always sneaking him little pieces of her dinner.

And after everything that’s happened since your abuela died, you feel safer having Santo around, sleeping at the foot of your bed. You know he would do anything to protect you, just like Chava would.

[dopescotlandwarrior]

Bluegrass-Chapter One

                       A special thanks to @statell​ for your help and wisdom

Chapter One

Claire bounced out of bed feeling amazing and full of energy. From her hilltop home, she could look out over the most beautiful expanse of bluegrass fields below that were covered in misty fog at this early hour. It was an inspiring view of the best Kentucky had to offer. Setting down a steamy mug of strong coffee she went through her morning yoga poses breathing in the crispy air gratefully. She pressed her hands together in front of her heart, bowed slightly, and said “Namaste” to the beautiful day.

“God I love days like this.”

She pulled her scrubs on, and a hat atop her fresh-scrubbed face, and bounced out the front door looking for her ride. Typical, she thought, he is late again. She looked at the hands of her watch, 7:38, that guy will never amount to much being late all the time. She didn’t like the energy shift and carefully pressed her body into a particularly hard yoga pose as she closed her eyes and welcomed her calm center. The pose balanced all her body weight on the ball of one foot, the other leg pulled into the air behind her. She took a deep breath in and exhaled slowly. On her second intake of air the ear-splitting horn of her supercharged Ram, a hospital on wheels blared from the road. The shock was enough to topple her pose, twisting just in time to let her ample butt hit the ground first.

Dusty cursed watching her fall, feeling like a total idiot. His excitement was on overload this morning, so happy to finally be early and prove to Claire he could make his commitments. She said 8:00 and it was now 7:45, a true miracle for him, except Claire was now laying on the patio concrete after he scared her half to death. “Goddamnit, when am I gonna think before I do stuff?”

He ran to help his employer off her ass and noticed her scrubs. They were treating the yearlings today at Highland Brothers Farms and they would be there all day. It was a big deal for Claire, and he thought she should have dressed more…something. Dusty pulled his hat off and watched her feet rise into the air as she used her temporary time of the ground to pull a perfect headstand.

“Ah, Doctor Beauchamp, are ye ready to go? I’m sorry I honked at ye and made ye fall. Now ye got dirt on yer pants.” He didn’t dare look at her on the ground, so he spoke to her cowboy boots.

“You are late Dusty.”

He was about to launch into an argument, but her boots swung to the ground and she popped up with a red face and smiled at him.

“Let’s go.”

Claire jumped into the passenger seat of her amazing vehicle. It was her biggest investment after graduation. With a price tag of almost two hundred thousand, the vehicle did everything a mobile vet would need. Claire had structured their working relationship where Dusty would keep her truck at the end of the day. She only had to jump out, wave as she walked up the steps to her cabin in the woods. It wasn’t easy for Dusty to drive away knowing she had no other vehicle, but this is how she wanted it.

As Dusty fell under Claire’s spell he googled the vehicle and almost passed out at the price. With a fully stocked hospital in the converted bed, he estimated two-hundred-fifty thousand dollars. He gripped his computer desk and tried to breathe. The next weekend he recruited his buddies to come and build a garage to park it in. He installed the best security he could buy and finally felt worthy of her trust the first night the electric garage door closed the vehicle in for the night.

The workday did not end when Claire waved him goodbye. Dusty would wash off the caked-on mud and vegetation that collected in the grill and wheel wells from driving into the farms. Once a month he would wax and buff until he was dripping with sweat. Sometimes she would notice, sometimes she wouldn’t. Either way, it was his honor to do it.

Dusty would grimace and complain to his friends about her demanding nature and lack of appreciation, it’s what young men in Kentucky did when they worked for a female, especially a woman doctor. But it was a kaleidoscope of emotions he felt every day, running interference between her and the world. He was in awe of the young veterinarian and her extraordinary diagnostic abilities.

Claire had her nose in a medical book when Dusty jumped into the driver’s seat. He was at war with himself to mention her scrubs and finally asked if she wanted to change before they left. Her head jerked up at him as her heavy black glasses slid down her nose,

“change into what Dusty?”

“Ah, never mind, not important. Let’s go.” He exhaled a miserable breath wanting to kick his own ass for being such a pussy. He had spent half his paycheck on starched new clothes for today to show respect to the great Jamie Fraser, owner, and breeder at Highland Brothers. Claire’s reputation for being a super healer was burning across Kentucky and doors were opening for her in the most prestigious farms, Highland Brothers being number one on the list.

Claire pulled a stack of files onto her lap to update her treatment notes while Dusty drove. She asked him questions on every file she opened.

“What did we do to the Miller gelding?”

“Drained the abscess, front left chest, forty cc’s of penicillin.”

“What about the Hildebrandt mare that foundered.”

“Restrained in her stall, estimated three months, the family wants to save her.”

“Oh! Thank God.”

This continued through the forty-minute drive to Highland Brothers. Dusty had a stunning mind that remembered every detail of each day. Every animal, every owner, breeder, barn ranking, problem mares, sick and injured horses. Drugs, dosages, and who still owed her money. She looked at his handsome face and sighed, making him look at her and blush. He always blushed when their eyes met, and he quickly looked away.

Claire knew he would make huge contributions to equine medicine. He was already an expert on grain nutrition, and he hadn’t started vet school yet. It was the reason she pushed him so hard.

“I really don’t know what I will do without you, Dustin. Have you chosen a school yet now that you have so many to choose from?” She put her hand up to stop him from talking. “I don’t want to discuss it actually, it makes me…. not happy. Hoooooly bloody shit! Look at how the superstars live!”

Claire’s mouth hung open as her eyes took in every detail of the fancy compound. She swept her eyes across the acres of green, as far as she could see. As they got closer, she saw horses on the track with jockeys and trainers, along with mares and foals in the pastures. She looked ahead at a large Bay gelding being led to an outside arena.

“Doctor B, what do ye think of Jamie Fraser?”

“Who?”

“The owner of Highland Brothers.”

“Never met him.”

Dusty rolled his eyes and realized his boss was not impressed with celebrity in the horse world. If he wasn’t hailed in her medical world or mentioned in her books, he was insignificant.

Claire’s practiced eye scanned the horses she could see as they were being led, running the track, or grazing in the beautiful meadows around the complex. She wasn’t happy with what she saw and felt from them.

She approached the Bay gelding and ran her hand down his back while the handler looked annoyed.

“I am Doctor Beauchamp and this horse is sick. Back up please so he can breathe. The man knew who she was and gave her space. Claire placed her open palms on both sides of the horse's face and stood perfectly still for five minutes as the horse dropped his head into her hands. She jumped back into the truck and looked wide-eyed at Dusty.

“He is sick Dusty, he said they all are, even the babies.”

“Ah, Doctor B, here’s the thing, ye need to keep that part to yourself if ye can. We talked about how it creeps-out the breeders and how they don’t believe in yer gift. Remember?”

“I remember something about that, but I don’t have time to pick my words around these people.” Her face had gone white and her eyes wide and worried. “They are all sick. Someone has done this to them,” she whispered.

Claire walked through the large housing facility that kept some of the most expensive horses in the world. She stopped in front of a beautiful gray mare, stunning actually. She approached feeling the horse’s exceptional health and vitality. Claire was doubtful this horse could be immune to whatever this was. She touched the beast and listened. The mare wanted to leave this place, not afraid of getting sick, but to get away from her rider. Claire felt an evil cold settle into her bones.

“I’m here now. I won’t let them hurt you.”

She went stall to stall gaining more of the story feeling alarm bells go off in her head. She looked for Dusty, he had an important role to play in this rescue. What Claire saw next almost made her heart stop and she took off running as fast as she could. The housing complex was huge and a man with the grain cart was shoveling something into the feeders at the other end. She pushed herself feeling her thighs on fire from the effort.

“Stop! Please stop!”

The man looked up at the woman running full speed for him and just stopped like he was frozen. When Claire caught up to him, she was panting but very thankful he listened to her. She could hear Dusty run up behind her and turned to lock eyes with him. Her voice was quiet, but he heard the stress and felt the immediacy.

“They are eating it, whatever it is that’s making them sick! Look at that horse Dusty!”

She pointed to a large thoroughbred that had backed himself into the corner of his stall, as far from the offending food as he could get. Dusty asked the worker to show him where the feed is kept. Claire continued walking the line of stalls.

She found the breeding wing and it almost crippled her when she touched the mares, fat with foals. She touched them and made promises to help, overwhelmed by how many had given up, ready to accept death because they were so sick.

She was running again trying to find Dustin or the owner that let this happen. She felt the enormity of loss that was coming as all these horses would lay down today for the last time. She started yelling for Dusty at the top of her lungs until he was running toward her. His face told her he found something, whatever it was. Dear God, she thought, who could do such a thing.

“I think I found it, Claire, there’s a shiny coating on the rolled oats. I told that man to lock down the feed room, stand guard, and not let anyone in. Fraser is in a meeting you need to pull him out."

“Triage Dustin, back the truck into the complex, park halfway down this aisle, don’t let the motor run for a second longer than you have to. Hurry!” Minutes later her enormous dually was backing down the aisle, just as Jamie Fraser was running for it yelling at Dusty to get that vehicle out of his barn.

Claire watched him run up on Dusty who stood his ground and pointed at her. Fraser was yelling but she couldn’t be bothered with that, she felt a distinctive change in the energy around her and looked to her side in time to see a horse collapse.

When the first horse went down right in front of her, she shrieked for Dustin to bring fluids and rushed into the stall.

“No, no, no, no! Don’t go” she shouted grabbing her stethoscope pressing it into a quiet chest. She heard another horse fall nearby and another. She bent over, sobbing, and held her stomach. They would all die if she didn’t galvanize against the horror. She was running for the truck as Fraser turned wicked eyes on her. He was roaring at her and she hit him at a full run telling him to get out of the way!

She called out a cocktail of drugs to load into 20 CC syringes and a large gauge needle to shoot the life-saving mixture into the jugular. They were both filling syringes as fast as possible.

“I assume you are James Fraser. Your horses have been poisoned, they will all die in the next few hours, many already have. If you want to help, call every veterinarian you know to help us. On the double Mister Fraser!”

Jamie put fingers to his mouth and blew a loud strange whistle. Two men ran toward him, white-faced, and stopped, waiting for orders. Three cell phones came out and the men called for reinforcement. Dusty ran behind Claire with a sack full of filled syringes. She administered the drug cocktail very fast and listened to the heartbeat stabilize before running to the next. Other men were driving their rigs into the complex and running for the drug protocol. Dusty gave the drugs and dosage and the veterinarians stared back at him frozen in place.

Jamie Fraser was on the verge of collapse, but he ran behind one of the doctors holding the precious syringes. Claire was on her knees doing an emergency cesarean section of a dead mare. Her hands were a blur and Dusty stood above her ready to split the tissue and pull the distressed foal out. Another vet stood watching Claire, eyes wide at her ability to move that fast. He grabbed a blanket to cover the foal and rubbed until he saw movement.

Jamie Fraser looked at the body of his favorite broodmare, ripped open savagely to save a baby that was worth a fortune. Claire ran by him coming back in five minutes with a large bottle of warm milk and enormous nipple. She pressed it into Jamie’s hands and looked into his anguished eyes.

“Please, save the ones we can.”

She pushed him gently toward the baby who was clearly needing some comfort. Jamie wrapped his warmth around the baby and offered the bottle, encouraging the colt to drink.

Claire watched with gushing eyes. She knew they had to assess the loss, pronounce prize horses dead, and prepare for the next round of drug therapy. Fraser was so big and strong. He seemed so capable and willing. She felt her body inch toward him and then kneel next to him. She corrected the angle of the bottle and then leaned against him and sobbed.

Jamie was overwhelmed with this little veterinarian who took command like a general and was spot on with the drugs that would save his horses. When she collapsed into him, he quickly wrapped an arm around her and supported her while she fell apart. He held the bottle for the colt in the other hand. Dusty walked over to her and bent to help her up but Jamie shook his head.

“It’s alright laddie. I’d say she’s earned it.”

Just like that, Claire stopped crying and stood up. A nod to Fraser and she was onto her next task.

The next half hour culled the sickest from the rest. Those that were on death’s door were struggling. Claire put her hands on one gelding’s face and heard or felt how sick he still was. She was very sympathetic at how awful he felt and let him know she insisted he live.

“Dusty! Positive-feedback hypovolemic protocol with 5 cc of digitalis, mix with a quarter dose for hypertension, on the double if you please. Claire grabbed a loaded syringe and ran for the sick gelding. He had given up and was taking his last few breaths as she pushed the cocktail into the huge vein in his neck. He seemed paralyzed, his big head suspended and shaking very low to the ground. She watched him as the other veterinarians questioned her protocol suspiciously. She moved to the gelding’s side and he pushed against her needing her reassurance. Dusty sat on the corral bars watching and waiting, hardly breathing.

The horse gave a healthy snort and lifted his head to a normal position. His tail whacked at flies and he shook his head like he was throwing off the illness.

“Dusty, you know the cocktail.”

Dusty dropped off the bars and jogged to the truck with the other vets watching the mixture he pulled into multiple syringes. Three of the vets left saying the protocol was too much risk. Those that stayed bravely followed Claire’s orders and pulled numerous horses from death’s door.

Claire wrote the milk recipe on a notepad and went to find James Fraser. It took all her strength to hold tears back when she saw his grave face. He moved toward her and the little colt followed so close he plowed into his butt when Jamie stopped in front of her. Even this newborn had the strength to knock Fraser right into Claire’s arms as she laughed nervously feeling a jolt of lightening shoot to her feet.

“Sorry. Ye have a theory lass?”

“I’m sorry to say I do Mister Fraser but it’s not a theory. Someone who has access to the horses and their food tried to kill them, all of them, near as I can tell. Dusty, my assistant, is taking blood and fecal samples and we must carefully get samples of every bag of feed, guarding against cross-contamination. Fortunately, we were able to lock the feed room within minutes of arriving.”

“There are feed rooms throughout the building!” Jamie whistled again and the two men came running. Hearing the order to lock down the other four grain rooms they took off in opposite directions. Claire watched them and prepared to tell Fraser what would be needed for the samples when she went rigid and pale. Fraser could see her hands shaking at her sides.

“What is it!”

“Do…do you have a water main that can shut off the water to the horses?”

Fraser heard the tension in her voice and started running. Claire was very aware of the thirst from her drug protocol and wondered how much they had consumed already.

“Sweet Jesus.” Claire ran along the stalls spilling the water as she went. This high-tech facility used floaters in the water buckets to make the water turn on automatically. She pushed the buckets sideways to spill the water only to hear the faucet above them run a fast stream to refill it. “Come on Fraser, turn it off.” Finally, she could spill the water and the faucets did not turn on. She ran along the stalls spilling the water and reached for her phone.

“Dustin! Hold off more samples we need to get the water out of the stalls. The water main is off, hurry!”

Jamie and his two managers came back and joined the effort to empty the water buckets. When Fraser came back to Claire his face was a mixture of fear, sorrow, and white-hot rage.

“Take a breath, Mister Fraser, there will be time for punishment unless we blow it and start making mistakes. I need to think for a few minutes and form a plan” She walked away mumbling and touching her fingers like she was making a list. She intended to lock herself in her truck for some quiet time but there wasn’t time for such a luxury. She ran back to Jamie panting from the effort.

“Those two men you work with can they be trusted?”

“Aye, with my life.”

“Please call them, or whistle, and tell them to listen to me, please hurry.”

Claire watched the large roll away doors to the outside clearly terrified about something. Fraser whistled again and his two best friends since childhood were racing toward him. “Listen to the doctor boys, do as she says.”

Claire pulled the group into a tight circle so she could speak quietly. She explained her fear of the next strike against Jamie.

Someone who was trusted to have access to the horses and feed tried to poison them. Dusty believes it’s a glycol-based poison so it’s cumulative, over time. Somehow they got all the horses to peak at the same time. I would not think it possible, but it happened so this person is knowledgeable, smart, and determined to bring this place and Fraser down in a glorious murder fest by ruthlessly killing the world’s best horseflesh in the process. I don’t know how long it took to pull this off, but I know the person responsible is close by and may know we thwarted the grand plan with minimal loss. This fucked up bastard will be coming for you Fraser, tonight, now!” Pretend you’re him and you can barely contain your rage, what would you do? Right now, what would you do!”

The three men flinched when she yelled the question. “Call the boarders and the trainers. Anyone with notoriety and a horse stabled here. Tell those people they’re all dead and its Jamie’s fault.” Claire waited while the men wrapped their heads around the enormity of the hatred behind this attack. Jamie’s voice was heard above the others,

“He’ll call the press and start a media frenzy that will go around the world. It will be so easy. People will stampede this place and destroy evidence, prevent the samples, maybe put me in jail until every animal is gone and the evidence is ruined. Jesus Sassenach please help me, tell me ye got a plan.”

Claire looked up, surprised all three of them were looking at her to answer. “Dusty has water and bowl swipe samples and every grain that was opened. If we can clear the water as the source and get the buckets full it’s a win for us. She looked at Dustin sitting on corral bars nearby and told him to go. Dustin drove slowly until he was out of the barn where he left tread on stones racing away.

“We need to pull in the authorities. If there’s anyone you know and trust, call them. Mister Fraser, can you estimate the financial loss attempted today?”

Jamie scanned the stalls as he calculated a rough estimate. “Fifteen to twenty million.”

“Well, that pushes into the territory of the FBI and I’m in favor of bypassing local police, at least until we can process the crime scene. For that, we need a forensic team. Let’s hope a twenty- million- dollar loss will get us one. Last, and most important, we need to remove the dead horses and hide them. I am so sorry gentlemen but six horses dead in their stalls will seal your fate. Game over, you lose.”

“I know what to do.” Jamie pulled Angus and Rupert to walk with him while Claire called her friend at the university where a pacing Dusty waited.

The horses were getting desperate for water and Claire felt their tremendous thirst and heard the hooves banging against the bars. What could they do if the water was the source? Turn them all out and let them fight for the little that collected after a rain? It would be brutal and bloody.

Claire felt like she would split down the middle from the accumulating tension. She walked the line of stalls watching for distress in the horses. She stopped and looked up and down the aisle, noticing for the first time how many stalls were empty. She saw name tags on each of them but no horse. She estimated half of the animals were gone.

The walking calmed her down a little but she couldn’t wait any longer to call the lab. She prayed they were done with the water.

“Hello Michael, you are my hero today. Do you have any results on the water yet?” She held her cell phone so tightly she feared it would crack and still could not relax her hand.

“I love hearing your accent, Claire. I’m so sorry about what happened today.”

“The water Michael?”

“Yea, I have the results of the water. The phone in the lab actually has a cord, can you believe it?”

“Michael?”

“Yea, hold on I’ll grab the report.”

[mrneighbourlove]

Burnt Heart: Ch 6. Trading One Pain for Another

At the Hylian Kingdom's castle, a Hasai in armour gave the King of Hyrule a respectful bow. His militia waited outside castle grounds for him to return, and he had traveled a long way to do arrive to this country. Before he could start his mission, the Hasai wanted to be civil and cordially with the Hylian government. Would make things easier in the long run. "King Covarog. My name is Agent Hresvelg. As a member of the Dorami tribe to the Hasai people, I'm tasked in arresting criminals and securing runaways for her majesty, Emperor Zannah. I am here with a squad of Theron to acquire one such runaway. I ask for your blessing to bring back a Hasai hiding away here in Hyrule. I promise that lethal force, or even use of weaponry or magic will not be used unless absolutely necessary. We will be in and out without being even a nuisance to the lives of your people. Is this information to your liking?"

Covarog wanted to have his wife makeup some excuse that he could not be here at this meeting. He always hated dealing with diplomatic issues pertaining to Zannah. Even over the years, he still could not shake the feeling that the Empress was always up to no good. Still, he remained somewhat civil. So, when his wife dragged him tot he throne room, he did his best to be... cordial.

"A criminal or a runaway?" Covarog repeated. "You must understand my surprise. The Empire has such strict rules and regulations, that there are hardly any of the such."

"Might we ask exactly what this person has done?" Zarazu wished to have a bit more information. "If this person has caused harm to my citizens, I would prefer to deal judgement with Zannah, not apart."

"A runaway. We know that Hasai are allowed to live in Hyrule. We'd never take a citizen who freely lives in Hyrule away unless they committed a crime against the Empire itself. Even then, we'd discuss the matter with you first. This Hasai in particular we are after fled Empire territory with damaging information that could cause infrastructure in the Empire to be crippled for a time. We believe that they might be a threat to themselves, as well as others." Hresvelg gave a nod of his head to Covarog in particular. "My grand father was the once the war hero Grand Admiral Bellum. I believe you were only a child when our people were at war, but I think you would know him. He was a level headed man, known for keeping his word and keeping respect amongst allies and enemies. So please know, I swear on his grave and family legacy that we will not be a danger to your people in our operation."

"We understand, though, before you take this perpetrator back to the Empire, we would like to speak to this person." Covarog explained to Hresvelg. "Put a face to a name, and understand why this happened, especially if they were working with another unpleasant character here in Hyrule. We do not want either of our nations in turmoil."

"A fair request, don't you agree, sir?" Zarazu asked the agent.

Hresvelg shared his grand father's poker face. He was glad too, because how the hell was he supposed to respond to that. Sorry, but his Emperor ordered that the Hylian royalty not witness the target, but I'm sure you can understand right? And he loathed lying. "I'm afraid it's highly important that the runaway is brought back immediately to Empire territory for questioning. They are also a teenager, so I imagine their parents must be ready to deliver quite the earful to them for their misbehaviour. However, out of good faith, I promise I will bring to you alive and as unharmed as allowed any unsavoury characters we have found them with. Is this request acceptable?"

"A kid?" Zarazu now sounded concerned. "How can a teenager get such vital information?"

"You know as well as I do that some children are trained to be deadly, my queen." Covarog reminded her, knowing full well of the Empire's hostile tactics. "Very well. Bring them here."

That would be good enough to not have Hylian forces interfere. "As you wish."

And that wasn't him making a promise either. Leaving the castle, Hresvelg flashed a light in the sky. Flying above a single was received, and the command was given a go.

~

Two weeks had passed since Grievous had arrived. So many days since Zizi had left her house. The Waku girl didn't know how she could help patch the relationship of her father and his wife if she didn't return. In the meantime, she slowly dropped her guard around the family, yet it seemed that Kahli never opened up to her the way he did with his other children. To them, despite tensions, he was warm, attentive and loving. Everything a father should be. To her, he was still rather indifferent. Outside, she was playing on chess board with Urboro. Kahli forbad her from initiating challenges of physical combat, so Grievous thought of different ways to see which siblings she could defeat in some ways. "My knight takes your rook."

"Annnnd... checkmate." Urboro knocked over Grievous' king with her queen. "You left your king unguarded. A knight shouldn't leave his post unless necessary. Got a little too ahead of yourself there, Grivy. I think you should stick to checkers, you beat Manaco seven times already in that game."

Grievous looked at the board, stunned in disbelief. How did she miss that? Glaring at Urboro, she didn't like the fact that she made a bet over a game of chess. "Don't be a jerk. Best two out of three."

"I'm not a jerk, I'm just took extra lessons from Uncle Ralnor in chess." Urboro grinned widely at Grievous. "Do I detect a tint of..." She held over her eyes, pretending to look, teasing. "A sore loser?"

"I just don't like you undermining my value as an intellectual. Just name your stupid prize for winning." Grievous crossed her arms, embarrassed at her loss.

"You shall have the honor of painting my toenails." Urboro set down a jar of polish in front of Grievous. "And I will paint yours."

"Painting nails? I don't understand the need."

"Of course you don't…" Urboro opened the bottle. "It's to look pretty. Feel good about yourself. To catch someone's eye, make them notice you."

"Confidence? Like my face paint? But no one can see your toes under most circumstances." Grievous had a new thought enter her mind. She never had an opportunity to speak of such things with her other half siblings or other students at the academies she attended. "Do you think I'm pretty?"

"Your lover in bed can." Urboro winked at Grivy. "A girl has got to be prepared." At her question, Urboro stared at her. "Of course you're pretty. You got an adorable tail, a huge butt, your breasts aren't that big but so what, if you'd wipe off that face paint, I guarantee you'd have a date by the end of the day. I can give you some flirting pointers and---" She gasped. "We should go bar hopping. I can totally get you a guy with a shredded eight pack."

"Wait. Are you talking about sex?" Grievous tightened at her shoulders, her tail waging back and forth anxiously. Was her butt really that noticeable? Was it due to her tail? "I'm not well versed in such matters. Are you?"

"I'm dating a Hylian blacksmith who is built like a boulder." Urboro nearly purred. "Muscles and such a big dick. Size does matter you know, but also how they use it." Her jaw nearly dropped next. "You don't know about sex?! Wait... you haven't had sex before, have you?!" She nearly squealed. "Oh goodness, I'm so totally going to get you laid."

"B-b-but what about the life bond? Wait..." Grievous' mind raced, her thoughts unable stop herself from thinking information through, even for her own good. "Before I left, one on my older half siblings at the academy was caught in what an officer described to us as an 'oral act' with another student. They would have been punished, had they not discovered neither became overly attached. They thought it was a miracle and summarized it was due to us being half-bloods." She snapped out of her thinking when she saw Urboro only smile even more. "Wait! That doesn't mean I'm looking for sex right now! I must look so bizarre to the people of this land. Is it even that good?"

"We're halves, Grivy. You're half Dal, half Waku. I'm half Lorleidian, half Waku. The Hasai life bond doesn't apply to me." Urboro flipped back her hair in a showy manner. "So you're probably not bound by it either." She then giggled, "And bizarre? Grivy, anyone who is 'new' and 'unique' is translated as exotic. You'll have men chasing your tail. Literally." She then paused. "Unless you want a woman?"

"I, um, never gave that part of my life any consideration." Grievous paused, looking at the clear nail polish bottle. "... you never told me if its good or not."

"Yes, you silly, it is good." Urboro then instructed. "Now, hold still. Appearance is one thing, but adding a little accessory never hurt anyone." She expertly started to paint Grivy's nails. "Hrm. I think metallic purple is your color."

Holding still would have to come another day. From the corner of her eye, Grievous spotted a hand motion from behind the barn. If the Kikai Empire had drilled anything into her with her teachings at the military academy, it was military tactics and strategy. Not care for her own safety, Grievous dove past Urboro, causing nail polish to slip up her leg in stroke. With an open arm, Grievous lightly close lined her half sibling to the ground to safety as an electric ball skidded by her head, every hair standing on top as a result. It appeared she was to trust her instincts to move. The trajectory of the shot would have hit Urboro had she dived left or right instead.

Men in black armour from head to toe stepped out from cover, weapons for capture using slings or shock sticks drawn, but others had crossbows trained if more violent means were necessary. "DAL! GET ON THE GROUND!"

"EEEEEEKKK!!!" Urboro was not expecting a full tackle and released a loud 'oof' when she hit the ground, feet straight up in the air. When the ball of lightning sailed past the pair, Urboro knew that there was trouble. Either someone was after her or after Grivy or trying to hurt her father. More than likely, it was Grivy, but she hoped this could be resolved... peacefully and without electrocution. "Hold onto me!" Urboro instructed Grivy, "And hold your breath!"

With that, the earth opened and swallowed both of them.

Electric shots from slings could be heard sizzling against the earth, voices being garbled by the layer of dirt between them. "Encircle the house! She's not getting away."

Grievous did as she was told, however, being trapped fully under the earth was nothing like trying to breath under water. This was far darker and murkier than she'd like.

Outside, the Theron Elite wasted no time covering any exit that the house provided. Going from assassinations to bounty hunting was

It took nearly a full minute, but Grievous and Urboro emerged inside one of her mother's greenhouse's. Coughing, the Zemlja then apologized between breaths, "Sorry, it's COUGH been a while since--ACHOO! I had to do that."

"What about your siblings still back at the house? We have to go back. Where's father?" Grievous took deep breaths after having to hold it in a pinch.

"Mom has a COUGH emergency defense system of sorts." Urboro brushed some dirt off Grievous' clothes. "Oh wait, that's right, she didn't tell you about Venu'sa."

"A what?"

Back at the house, Kahli was waking up from the behest of one of his other children. "What is it?"

"Daddy, I think someone bad is outside." Zaltana was peering through the window, hugging her stuffed dragon. "Venu'sa isn't sleeping anymore."

"Let's get away from the window, shall we?" Chatima led his baby sister away from view.

"Dad, what's going on?" Huyana asked her father, exiting her bedroom. "Sakari and Satinka say that there's more Hasai outside."

Hasai? At his house? With his children here?! Kahli's eye grew with fury. He knew this was an inevitability with Grievous showing up and staying. No way in heaven or hell Zannah would allow the possibility of this secret to spread. He should have left sooner to see her, but with Zizi still gone, Kahli had a duty to look after his children. "Stay here kids."

Kahli tightened his fists as he went to his door. Sure enough, he saw vines slivering, but no attack made by the guardian as of yet. Theron trained their weapons on him from different areas, positioned around fence posts or trees, and Kahli paused, taking a deep breath to channel his energies for battle if necessary. "Get off my property."

Agent Hresvelg had a bow an arrow ready in his grip, shouting from behind the barn for cover, "Give us the girl Sir Kahli. We don't want any trouble."

"You coming here with weapons pointed at my house, at my children invites conflict. I don't care if you're special forces. I will burn you to cinders if you don't back away."

The Hasai looked to their field commander, unsure what to do. "Orders sir?"

"Do not engage. Sir Kahli! I think it would be best for everyone if we stayed calm and orderly. The Emperor values the girl’s life. This isn't an assassination."

"Then why did she send you now? The Theron are Zannah’s death squad."

Hresvelg paused at this statement. There was truth in that, but missions were a mission. "I have no reason to lie to you. My orders are my orders."

Before Kahli could start his eruption of fire to give them a warning, he felt his spine shudder from a collision of pain against him. The metallic punch of T0-D brought him to his knees. "Declaration: Agent. The target is not here. Search the plantations. She must have not gone far."

The Theron nodded, running off into pairs, only a few staying behind to give their commander support if need be.

Kahli grunted, turning his head to look up at the Android. "What the hell."

"Apology: I didn't want to have to hurt you, but it looked like an altercation was about to occur, and I'd like it if you didn't kill any of the pristine meatbags. Also, that was for failing to mention you had broken your arrangement with the Emperor. What were you thinking keeping the girl here? I know she's been staying here for a while."

The man couldn't kick the robot from under his feet, so he rolled away, immediately running between it and his house. "T0-D. Tell your men to stand down. I'm going to see Zannah regardless. But if you take the girl, we'll have problems."

"Curiosity: Oh? Like what?"

The Waku put a finger against his head, pushing his hair tightly. "Or I blow myself up."

~

Zizi had spent the last two weeks in the Forest Temple, meditating and listening to the earth. It calmed her. Between Skull Kid's pleasant company and reconstructing parts of the temple, she felt a bit like her old self. Actually, she felt younger, like she was relieved of burdens in some ways. If Skull Kid could work miracles, making her feel like a kid again was definitely one of his talents. It made her forget her worries and heartaches just for a little while. Though, she knew she had to face them at some point. So, the Zemlja sat in the middle of the temple and harnessed her magic, green energy floating throughout the structure, into the ground, and around her in the air. There, she conversed with Zemlja himself.

"You still don't think you can forgive him?"

"Why should I? He lied to me. Kept this from me."

"He couldn't reveal it. Hasai physiology is very different than Lorleidian."

"I know that! It's just... I've never felt this angry before. Not even at Vul'kar."

"You have a right to be angry." Zemlja offered wise advice. "But if you continue to let it eat at you, you will find nothing but misery. And here, you have been drowning in it."

"... I know."

"It's hard to let go of hurts sometimes, isn't it?"

"Very hard."

"Then perhaps you better focus on what you do have, before you lose it."

"I already feel like I've lost him."

"But have you?"

"... I don't know. Why would he even love me after I lashed out at him? Doubt him? ... I can't forget what he did."

"No, you won't, you never will. Though, you cannot blame all the blame on him."

"You're right... the blame is Zannah's."

"Correct, it is hers. Do you still wish to cause her this type of pain as well?"

"Yes. She hurt me. Hurt my family. I thought her a friend."

"Then you must be careful... and not be foolish. Patience is your friend."

"Lorleidians don't condone violence."

"And violence isn't needed."

"No. No it's not.”

"Be careful, Zizi, and leave your thoughts of Zannah behind for now. Your family needs you."

"... we'll talk again soon?"

"I'll be here if you need me."

And with that, Zizi was pulled out of her trance by the tugging of Venu'sa's activation.

"Skully!!!" Zizi hurried out of the temple to the earth. "I'll be back! Gotta go! I'll bring you some cookies next time!" Jumping into the open earth, the Zemlja moved through the ground as fast as the wind through the leaves. Kahli's distress... she could sense it. Something was wrong, something was very wrong, and she was not going to let anymore damage come to her family... and she arrived outside her home, right in front of Kahli. Was he going to kill himself? The woman tackled him with all her force, and pinned his arms to the side, sitting on him. "... Kahli..." She looked at him with a glare. "If you ever dare to do that again, I'll divorce you for sure."

Kahli fell to the ground, shocked by his wife suddenly appearing from nowhere to hit him to the ground. He stared at her for a moment, before slowly turning his attention at the more concerning issue. "Zizi... we have a more pressing matter."

T0-D's eye flashed between blue and red, his mind thinking over Kahli's threat. "Illogical: Your threat has no merit. If you kill yourself, not only will you fight against the life debt you owe, but you will be leaving behind your children. Not to mention, Hasai do not commit direct suicide. In all my years I've never seen such a thing possible. I don't believe that you could do it. Give us the girl or I can't promise people might get hurt in the process."

Zizi got to her feet, looking at the Hasai troops and T0-D. She had a giant frown on her face. This was, indeed, a more pressing matter, though she had to keep her in mind Zemlja's words. There would no room for being foolish. Zannah would know that she knew now. Nothing could change that.

"... I know about the girl, Tod." Zizi informed the robot. "And I know about the debt." She struggled to say the next words. "We may not have started off on the right foot, but... I thought we became friends after a while. Tell me," She took a sharp inhale. "That day you offered to help me bake cookies... were you just manipulating me like any other 'meatbag' so Zannah could stab me in the back?"

"Reflection: The Emperor instructed me to watch over you, yes. But it was I who wanted to take the time to get closer with you. Her order was very open ended Zizi. The Emperor and I knew that you'd never have agreed to the process. That you couldn't share Khali. Baking with you was a wonderful beginning to what I believe was your start for a friendship. However, I never expected to have doubts. I knew if you ever discovered the truth, you would not be able to accept it. And I dreaded to think on how you would view our relationship after due to me being told to keep you in the dark. Can you imagine? Me? Having dread? Illogical at surface level, and yet, a reality I must face. Here we are now. I'm sure that the girl told you everything now. Is it so bad though? They aren't treated badly. Every Hasai goes through military training. The new generation of Waku are merely being given extra training. They are still relatively young. They will be able to make other careers for themselves in the Empire if they so choose. Zannah did it for the greater good of the tribes and the Empire. Although, I can predict this hardly matters to you. Manipulation and being stabbed in the back were your choice of words was it not? I'm sure you feel this was merely a betrayal. I wonder how you look at me now. I wonder how you look at Kahli. Hurt no doubt. But can't you see logic was put forward? I'd gladly cook cookies with you again, yet I fear a 1 in 14,000 chance of that ever occurring again. Ah, I've spoken far too long. Kahli. You won't kill yourself, and I have my orders to bring the girl. Can you give me a logical explanation to not take her?"

"... so that's it. That's all it ever was. Boiling down to orders and commands and keeping secrets." Zizi was quiet for a moment before saying. "Friends don't treat friends like this, Tod. Orders or not. I don't know really what you feel or if you can even feel guilty. Dread? Sure, you felt that before when you had to fight a formidable foe. I remember, I was there when you fought Malik." She swallowed thickly, "Do you think I would have ever done this to Zannah? Or even to you, be it possible? ... then again, if Zannah never considered me a friend in the first place, just another pawn to be moved on her game board, I suppose my logic doesn't apply." The Zemlja was trying to keep tears from running down her face. "Everything was perfect. I was happy, my family was happy... and then this happened. And I... I can't begin to tell you how much I wanted to just... just scream. I wanted Kahli to hurt like I hurt. I lashed out at him, and I shouldn't have. I should have just kept my emotions in check, but I can't do that, Tod. I'm not... I'm not like Zannah. I'm not like you. I can't sacrifice one person for the whole. I want everyone to be okay and to be safe, and feel loved." Zizi then stated firmly. "And Grievous doesn't deserve at all to be treated like a tool. She's her own person. She deserves her own life. If she doesn't want to fight, if she doesn't want to go back, if she doesn't want to leave here, then she shouldn't have to. She's with family now, Tod. It doesn't matter that I'm not her mother, she's still mine in a way. I will protect her, she's innocent in all this. All she wanted was some answers. Does she deserved to be punished for that? She's a child." She asked the robot, trying to appeal to his sense of loyalty and regret. "Would you want me to drag you away from your family?"

Kahli stared at his wife, unable to find the words. All he had fill him was shame.

T0-D paused, raising a hand to his 'chin' to think. "Answer: The girl has a biological mother she lives with. She has hundreds of half siblings she knows at the academy. In more years, her training will be complete. What makes you so much more special? We all have a part to play Zizi. It is selfish to put yourself above the greater whole. Countries and Empires wouldn't be able to function if everyone was so selfish. You aren't her family. We'd be returning her to her real home. So, it is indeed different then if you were to try and take me away from my own family." His claw pointed towards Kahli. "Query: He is the father, but you are not the mother. This girl is not your responsibility. And my dread is a form of guilt I suppose. To have a friend has been eventful, joyful to certain receptors. It's nice to access my memory of these more joyful times. Now, I still see no reason to not follow my orders. Zannah holds her trust in subjects and in family. To her, friends cannot be a part of her life. Family she can pour her love into and know it is a bond only death can separate. Subjects, she has a loyalty to nurture her people and them in return give undying loyalty and respect. I do regret your pain Zizi Slatki. Zannah does to. But she did what she did for the greater good. I believe in her goals to bring prosperity to every subject of hers. As her family, and as her oldest subject, I have a duty to fulfil."

Kahli squeezed his wife’s hand. "Don't take the girl. I believe Zannah would find me to be a higher priority."

"Doubt: Why is that?"

"The life debt has lost its secrecy. It's chains around me are so much lighter. I believe that she'd want to speak to me to try and correct that, would she not?"

T0-D was still, calculating multiple possibilities to carry out next.

"I'm human, Tod. Humans are selfish, and my love is selfish, but in a good way. I don't care the Grivy isn't mine, she still showed up on my doorstep asking for help. That makes her my responsibility, even if Kahli doesn't want to acknowledge her." Zizi told the robot, literally shaking from grief and sorrow. "A good leader wouldn't try to hurt one of her subjects in this way. A good leader would consider what others want. A good leader would forget her stupid quest for power and conquest, and focus on her family and try to make friends with those who cared about her. Zannah is no leader... she is simply a manipulator." She asked him. "If Zannah doesn't want my friendship in her life, then she doesn't regret a single thing she's done. By the spirits, I was right about her this entire time, but I didn't want to see it. I wanted to believe Kahli about her, I wanted to believe you about her, but it's all dragon-shit. All Zannah cares about is power. That's the way it has always been." The Zemlja couldn't stop the tears now. "I doubt Zannah even cares about you, Tod. When has she ever asked what you want? I tried to amend my behavior towards you, I tried to treat you well, and you..." She choked on her words with a sob. "You tricked me. Zannah used Kahli. She threatened to take away my babies to get what she wanted. I tried so hard... so damn hard to believe in the better good of others, but it has done nothing but brought me pain and misery. Are you really going to make me lose faith in you too?"

"Reflection: I'm sure my soul is impure in your eyes. What I want is the betterment of the Empire I call home. The largest sacrifices require the strongest wills. And Zannah has steeled her will to take on any challenge. A good leader will sacrifice additional comforts to give her subjects all the essentials of living. A good leader uses her power for the betterment of those people. Zannah broke her friendships for the sake of bettering her people. She cared so deeply for her people that she made the heartbreaking choice to sacrifice her friendship with you. I calculate, given her condition, she might step down from her current position and elevate herself for the betterment of her people. I did trick you. I won't lie to you Zizi Slatki. Because I believed in her cause. Even if I didn't like the thought of seeing you hurt."

Kahli hugged his wife tightly, resting his head over her shoulder. With a kiss, he whispered into her ear. "Let me go. You can watch over Grievous while I find a way out of this debt."

So that was it... Tod admitted it. Both of them, Zannah and her robot, intentionally hurt her.

... what did she do to deserve this? What did her husband do? Her family?

"I don't want you to go." Zizi sobbed, holding onto Kahli tightly. "I want you to stay here. I want things to go back to how they were."

"I can try to make things right. You have to give me that chance. Please, I beg of you Zizi."

"Statement: I am honestly sorry to see I hurt you Zizi. Kahli, do you consent to seeing the Emperor?"

The Waku looked over his shoulder, hurt and angry. "Only if you call off your hunt for my daughter."

"Don't go, I don't want her to hurt you. I've already hurt you and I shouldn't have, and I don't want to lose you, I don't care if all your other kids show up on our doorsteps, please don't leave me. If Zannah takes you away, I'll be lost." Zizi begged her husband. "No, you're not." Zizi took a shaky breath. "You just told me, Tod. You believed in Zannah. You didn't believe in me."

"Additional Statement: Those two things aren't mutually exclusive in my eye. I see now, however, it would be illogical to try and change your mind. Goodbye Zizi Slatki."

Kahli gave his wife a peck on the cheek, rising away from her. "I won't let her. You have my love on that."

"You promise?" Zizi looked so... so defeated. So heartbroken. So sad. "I can't... trust her anymore."

"I promise to you. I promise on my unending love for you. She won't take me away from you."

Meanwhile, at the greenhouse, Theron guards finally found their target. On the left and right flank, two cornered Grievous and Urboro. They had crossbows ready to fire with the graze of a finger. "Don't. Move."

Agent Hresvelg entered centre stage, taking off his helmet. Grievous expressed surprise at seeing him. "Teacher?"

The man's purple eyes looked sad and tired to see her. "Why did it have to be you Grievous. You had such promise."

"I wanted freedom my mother wouldn't give me. That the Empire couldn't give me."

"That why you decided to come specifically to Hyrule? To your birth father?"

"I wanted to see him too. Teacher. I'm not going back."

"Grievous. You're one of my most outstanding students. You've shown so much potential, and you want to throw it all away? You could be a great commander if you put your mind to it."

"But that's not the life I want." She planted her feet, grinding her fingers into her palm as she made a fist. "I want to fight my own battles. I want to fly where ever I want. I want a parent who loves me. I want siblings I can actually who aren't so laser focused in following the Empire. I- I want to learn what sex is like after going to bars with my sister. " She unexpectedly gripped Urboro's hand, wanting to feel her support.

Hresvelg frowned, perhaps a little disgusted by her behaviour. "Because of your desertion, the Empire wants you out of sight and out of mind. You might have been able to have been able to have the future you wanted in ten more years with hard work. You were always a serious student. You took your training seriously. You didn’t have time for foolish behaviour. It's why you were given the name Grievous."

"But that's because you all raised me that way. It’s all I knew. That life might be acceptable to the others, but not to me."

The agent drew a flint lock, cocking the gun in the direction of Grievous’ heart. "I have to ask you to come with us. At this range, you can't do your little disappearing act. And I truthfully don't want to hurt you or the girl. I will give you the count to three. 1."

Grievous didn't move, her body spreading out to protect Urboro from fire.

"2."

Just before he got to three, another Theron appeared behind him. "Sir. The mission is being called off by General T0-D."

"What?"

"We are to leave with Sir Kahli back to the Empire to deliver him directly to the Emperor."

"I see..." Hresvelg put his pistol away back into his holster. "Well Grievous. I don't know when I will see you again, but I hope you are serious about your current life choices."

"I am."

Seemingly satisfied, Agent Hresvelg turned to leave. The Theron at the sides disappeared as silently and as quickly as phantoms.

"Wait, they're taking Dad?!" Urboro looked a bit afraid. Her mother always warned her that Zannah could have a horrible temper. If they were taking her father away, what would happen? "Grivy, what's going on?!"

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Both the girls picked themselves up and ran to the house. When they arrived, however, all the Hasai were gone. All that remained was a distraught Zizi lying on her knees, with other children gathering with confusion.

Manaco had rushed from work to his parents' house when he heard the rumors of Hasai being present in Hyrule. When he saw his mother on the ground, and no indication of his father's presence, he feared the worst. Either Zannah was going to kill his sire or keep him prisoner... or worse.

"What should we do, Manaco?" Keira asked her elder brother. "They took Dad. That robot was here too. It must be serious if Tod was here."

"I... I don't know what to do." Manaco told his sister honestly. "I think that the only thing we can do is wait."

“Wait? What about the well being of our father? Aren’t you fighters?” Grievous questioned, guilt heavy on her mind. It was becoming clearer to her that he took her place. But why?

"Grivy, there's five of us that are of age. We are all good fighters, and we can defend ourselves, but taking on an army is not within our capabilities." Ahusaka informed his sister with a heavy sigh. "Even we know when to admit we're no match for a battle."

"Unfortunately, he's right." Manaco admitted. "We... we need to take care of Mom for now, and just wait. That's all we can do without endangering the rest of our family."

Grievous’ tail curled low, her feelings on the matter heavy. Turning to Zizi, she barely got the words out with a steady tone. “I’m sorry I came here. I’m sorry they took him away. I’m sorry I broke you two up. Kahli is a good man. He loves his children. He loves you. I shouldn’t have come here if I had known you’d be hurt so deeply.”

"It's not your fault, Grivy." Zizi felt so... hollow. Empty. "You're not responsible for this... Zannah is."

"I'm going to take Mom inside," Manaco told his siblings. "Will all of you try to calm Venu'sa down? She doesn't need to be grabbing a stranger and eating them."

"We can do that." Urboro assured her brother. "Take care of Mom."

"Grivy, we could use your help watching after the younger ones." Miku asked. "Do you mind?"

“Of course. It’s the least I can do. Miss Zizi? You’ll give Father another chance will you not?”

"I will, I just... it's hard to process all of this." Zizi said very softly. "I'm so exhausted..."

"That's okay, Mom. You can rest. We'll take care of everything." Manaco lifted his Mom into his arms, carrying her. He had never seen her so tired before, not even in the hot sun working with plants. He was worried, and it showed. "We'll keep Urboro away from the stove too."

"I heard that, you fu---fudge-head." Urboro had to catch her language in front of her smaller siblings.

Grievous turned to find the little ones. She hoped she knew what her father was doing. In so many ways, today had taken so many losses.

________________________________________________________________

Previous Ch. https://mrneighbourlove.tumblr.com/post/612492318747082752/burnt-heart-ch-5-reflection

Next Ch. https://mrneighbourlove.tumblr.com/post/612606875698085888/burnt-heart-ch-7-burning-bridges-repairing

Crossover with @ridersoftheapocalypse. Shared Extended World with @s-kinnaly

[monsters-under-the-willowtree]

The Forest Walk: Bonito Part 1

A story about finding maybe a little more than you bargained for while out bird watching in the forest near your home

Male Monster + Ungendered Reader 2000 Words

The metal chain-link gate clinked shut behind you, a cheerful sound that was reminiscent of after school sports and watching your friend’s baseball games. The early summer sun had just peeked over the treetops, bathing the world in yellow and lighting up the tender new growth of the forest in verdant green.

Caticaw National Forest was an enormous stretch of land known to be the ancestral home of many ancient creatures. There had been years of debate over whether or not it would be a National Forest or a Reservation but since this particular stretch was mostly home to solitary creatures or small family groups with no system of government on their own it was finally decided that having Forest Rangers and the National Forest Service helping out was the best solution for everyone. Humans and Paranormal alike. Technically this particular gate led into private land but the owner was the founder of the town and all were welcome to enjoy the natural beauty of the place as it bled into the government land behind it.

This private / public gate that led onto the private / public land was no ordinary gate either. It was absolutely covered in little locks. Much like the River Seine and other places around the world this gate had become a traditional place for lovers and best friends and family to come and place a symbol of their commitment to staying “locked” together. Your mother had placed a lock here with your name and your brother’s name engraved on it in the hopes that maybe a little superstitious luck would help you two stay close even with a seven-year gap between your ages. Who knows if it helped or not, you had a pretty good relationship even if there was a lot you didn’t really see eye to eye on. Even after so many years of it being here you couldn’t help but look for it every time you came to this simple latch gate.

And come here, you did. Rather frequently in fact. There were all kinds of neat plants and animals on the property but with so many of them being terribly skittish you had learned to take along a set of binoculars or else miss out on some pretty spectacular sights. One in particular had caught your eye the previous week. You could have sworn you had seen an albino deer but by the time you had fumbled the binoculars into place the white deer-shaped speck was nowhere to be found. So now you were back and eager to see if maybe the specter had been more than just a trick of the light.

A cool breeze ruffled your jacket but the day was already growing pleasantly warm. Soft dirt tracks lazily trailed their way through a grassy meadow where you accidentally spooked a family of pheasants, across a wooden bridge that carried itself over a mossy lake, and back into the dappled shade of the old forest. The soft crunch of undergrowth under your feet adds to the singing of the songbirds and the rustling green leaves create such a relaxing atmosphere that it’s hard not to stop and sit for a while. But you’re on a mission. And there will be time to stop and smell the wildflowers later.

One hour. Two. Three hours of walking and looking hasn’t been exactly in vain. You’ve seen and heard plenty of birds, played peek-a-boo with a weasel, and followed a little family of bunnies around. You’ve found multiple fantastic walking sticks and traded up several times. Patted a fat bullfrog on his little head. And even pocketed a cool rock. But no deer. Not even the usual kind, much less a white one. You’re about to call it a day when you see something through the trees.

Something B I G.

It’s hard to make out, even with the binoculars, but it’s earthy in color from what you can tell (not bear colored or any of the local big predators colors) so you leave the dirt trail and slink towards it as quietly as possible. The creature is on the move, meaning that it takes some time to catch up with it, but when you do your breath is stolen.

Beautiful green feathers with huge blue eyes cascading down its back into a regal train that just barely brushes the forest floor. Wings that look big and long enough even tucked against its side, to be mistaken for a surfboard. A long graceful neck that leads up to a petit head crowned in trembling little bobbles of feathers that dance with each step the Avian takes. His face is perhaps a little broader than a normal Peacock’s head would be, his jaw a little squarer, but he mostly looks like a very, very, VERY large bird. At least 5 foot 8, which might not sound as massive or intimidating as some other creatures but for a bird with razor sharp talons and a beak to match he was just as intimidating as he was stunningly gorgeous.

He had spotted you before you had spotted him and he eyed you keenly from one of his beady side-placed eyes. His body posture, the way his wings were held just a few inches out to his sides, indicated that he was prepared to fly if you posed any threat to him. Still, from this angle he looks nothing short of a prince. The way he carries himself has the most regal air to it you almost drop to one knee out of respect. And then, realizing that it probably wouldn’t hurt anything, you act on that impulse. Slowly, of course, you don’t want to spook him. Then, when your knee sinks into the undergrowth and he still hasn’t taken off, you find the wherewithal to speak.

“Hi... my gosh you’re so pretty.”

He preens under the compliment, reaching his long neck around to run his beak through a few of his feathers that he has deemed not quite perfectly placed. A quick inspection of the remainder of his feathers completed he resumes his regal airs and holds his beak high.

“Thank you.” His voice is a bit of a shock, you’ve never met an Avian before. Or any sort of talking bird before. It has a vibrating quality to it that reminds you so distinctly of listening to an older radio that you can’t help but glance around and see if maybe there is one nearby. You wouldn’t have expected a voice that reminds you of the TV robot character Bumblebee from someone so lovely and so clearly not robotic. But you clearly saw his beak move and since there doesn’t look (or sound) like there is a radio nearby you must assume that he really did speak to you. And so you tell him your name.

“I am Bonito,” he returns. This makes you grin and your chest hurt a little with the effort of keeping your giggles in. It’s a fitting name, but still a tad unexpected. 

“Bonito means ‘beautiful’ in Spanish. Is your family from Spain or Mexico?”

“My mother was a traveler before she settled down here with my father.” He stalks closer and now that you are close enough to really see him it is obvious that he walks with a terrible limp. You can help but gasp and ask if he’s hurt. The narrowing of his eyes is a bit unexpected but after a moment of looking you over he seems to decide that your question is genuine and he sighs, hobbling over to you so you can see his leg. There on his ankle is a lock just like the ones that are hanging on the gate you pass through to get here. It’s too small and by the way his delicate ankle is swollen around it, the foot beneath discoloring.

“When I was a child I had a friend that lived in the town nearby. We were kids, young and stupid. They told me about the gate and the locks and one day just before their family was moving away they brought one with them for us to lock on the gate together. A token of our friendship and a hope that one day we would see each other again. We joked a little about how small my legs and feet were compared to the chain link fence and just to tease they slipped it around my ankle. I did not realize that there was no key to it and clicked it in place so I could pretend it was a beautiful bracelet. It wasn’t until later that we realized my mistake. They wept bitterly and tried to convince their family to stay one more day so we could get it off. Their parents could not be swayed. And so they were taken away. It has not been a bother to me until recently. I am finally big enough to outgrow the lock and I am afraid that soon I will either lose my foot to my own stupidity or lose my life to something hungry and without my same limp.”

“That’s terrible.” Your heart aches and you reach out to carefully turn their ankle from one side to another so you can get a good look at it. “Why didn’t you come into town and ask someone to help?”

“It isn’t our territory,” he explains, even though that doesn’t make as much sense to you as it does to him. The confusion on your face makes him sigh again, this time with a wince as one of your fingers carefully moves the lock a little. “I am not one of the Fair Folk. But many of the Avian here live together with them. Their traditions have become our traditions. We follow their rules, not necessarily because we have to but because they are good to us and protect us and we’ve been in the same area for so long that it wouldn’t be right to break them. There’s too much iron in the lock for them to help and too many rules about just wandering into a human town to ask for help for me to get help from anyone.”

His voice croaks a little at that last sentence. Even if you don’t quite know how to read his emotions on his strange face it’s clear enough that he’s upset about the hopelessness of his situation for it to tug at your heartstrings.

“Can you fly?”

He shrugs with his wings. “I can but not forever and landing on one foot is a lot harder than you might think. I could break my only good leg if I do it wrong.”

You squint down at the lock and tighten your lips, thinking and determined. “Can you fly closer to the town? I can go get some tools and bring them back here. I suck at lock picking, but I can try it. And if that doesn’t work then I can try cutting through it... actually it would probably be faster to just go straight for cutting through it. I really don’t think I could pick it.”

For the first time Bonito looks at you dead on and you can’t help but laugh at how different his face looks. No longer regal or majestic, he looks more like the most confused, baffled, wide-eyed, ruffled bird you have ever seen. You of course apologize profusely for laughing. And even if it maybe doesn’t sound as genuine as you would have liked over the fact that you can’t stop giggling while giving the apology, he does accept it. He agrees to fly himself closer to the town nearby the fence and wait for you there. And you simply cannot get home fast enough, hands practically shaking while you and your father gather tools from your home and then drive to your grandfather’s home to borrow a few more so that you have the best chance possible of saving Bonito.

[technicallycleverdetective]

Prompt for @izgu6ljena: Person A of your OTP getting married to someone who isn't Person B, and B running out during the middle of the service with tears streaming down their cheeks.

Fabrizio was not comfortable in suits. He owned only two and they emerged from the wardrobe rarely enough that only his close family knew. Well, his close family and one other person. That was the reason why he’d been forced to hire one, just to escape the affectionate teasing that would surely have come his way, assuming Ermal wasn’t too distracted to acknowledge Fabrizio’s presence at all.

 He pulled at the collar, forgetting that he’d already opened two buttons to help him breathe. They did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest.

 He took a deep breath and felt his ribs contract again, a sound in his throat that sounded dangerously like a sob, but no-one was close enough to hear it. He bit his lip. He could keep it together for an hour. This was an important day for Ermal and he’d invited Fabrizio as a friend, to share in the joy of the occasion, not to ruin it with his ridiculous fantasies.

 The situation had reversed so unexpectedly. Fabrizio didn’t know what had happened, but he knew that Ermal was happy. Of course he was. He’d told Fabrizio at the time that he was devastated, that he’d never wanted it to end, that he still wanted her back. They were writing their song, still in the first flush of tentative friendship with no idea of where it would all lead, but apparently Ermal’s thoughts remained unaltered. She’d changed her mind and then it was as if the whole year and a half had meant nothing.

 It wasn’t as if Ermal hadn’t made things clear from the beginning. She was the love of his life and Fabrizio was a bit of fun, light relief. She was the one he couldn’t live without. The woman who could effectively click her fingers and he would drop what he and Fabrizio had and…

 The church bells were pealing with a single, rhythmic tone. A couple of late guests he didn’t recognise were running up the steps, the woman clutching her hat. They smiled at him and he gave a self-conscious nod. It was time to go. He walked into the church and found himself in a hallway around a garden, Roman columns decorated with black and white mosaic, and a grey font just outside the door of the main church. The ceiling soared high above the old wooden pews and every window was made of stained glass, casting colours all around the space. It was an old, hallowed, austere hall.

 Ermal was already standing up there, in front of an ornate white marble altar with red carpet leading down the aisle, wandering a little aimlessly back and forth. He saw Fabrizio and grinned, waving like a child in a school Nativity. His suit was similar to Fabrizio’s, except he had a waistcoat and a neat shirt, and a necklace. He was glad to see the necklace. It was some small sign that it was still his Ermal. He hadn’t lost him completely. Except he wasn’t his Ermal anymore. He’d have to get used to thinking like that.

 He walked up the aisle and tried to ignore that little voice in his head screaming, ‘It should have been me, it should have been me.’

 “Bizio!”

 Ermal jumped down the last step to hug him and Fabrizio held him tightly, savouring the smell of his skin and the ticklish feeling of his hair against his face. This was ridiculous. Ermal wasn’t going to war. They would still be friends. He already knew, however, that this represented a break from which there was no coming back. Ermal would feel awkward about the past they’d shared, or else Fabrizio would be unable to move on, and one of them would walk away in the end. So while he still had this privilege, he would make the most of it.

 He pulled back and, without thinking, held Ermal’s face between his hands. He did it all the time, but not now, it wasn’t appropriate anymore. Ermal was still smiling like he didn’t see anything wrong and perhaps he didn’t. Fabrizio had always been tactile even before they got together. Was this just a friendly gesture in his mind?

 “Nervous?” Fabrizio asked.

 Ermal smiled wider and shook his head, and Fabrizio let go and stepped back. He needed to go to his seat. If he stayed here, he’d just keep touching Ermal and it wasn’t right in front of all these people. He found his way to a pew and sat down. He didn’t know the people beside him, although he recognised Ermal’s family ahead of him. His mother, sister and niece were in the front row. His brother was up at the altar now. Fabrizio hadn’t noticed him before. He looked around the crowd. The only faces he knew were Marco and Andrea, side by side at the church door, watching the road.

 Before Fabrizio was quite ready, the organ began to play. Everyone turned to face the door, except Fabrizio. He kept watching Ermal. He saw that bright smile which was so familiar, and until recently had been so often directed towards him. Even now, Ermal was the most beautiful man he’d ever seen and Fabrizio had an awful feeling that he always would be, no matter what.

 The voice screamed louder, ‘It should have been me.’

 He’d always known this about Ermal. His ‘single man’ veneer was razor thin. Not so far below the surface, he’d always wanted to just fall in love and settle down with someone. And Fabrizio had thoroughly persuaded him that he wasn’t the man to provide that, with his vehement anti-marriage sentiments. It was true that he didn’t like marriage. He didn’t like the ceremony, he feared being trapped in an unhappy relationship held together by legal handcuffs, but right now the idea of making a lifelong commitment to Ermal seemed very attractive.

 The music had stopped and the minister was addressing the congregation with a cheerful smile. He looked as if he loved taking weddings. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…”

 ‘Too late,’ the voice taunted. ‘You lost your chance.’

 Perhaps that was why Ermal had kept his heart safe from him and never let things get too serious between them. If Fabrizio had been more open with his feelings, or kept his mouth shut more, could he be the one standing up there now? The thoughts of what could have been were torturous.

 “Ermal, will you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, in sickness and health, for richer for poorer, till death do you part?”

 There was a slight pause, enough for a rustle of anticipation in the audience, enough for Fabrizio to fervently pray to hear a “No.” “I do.”

 He felt like he’d been stabbed. The pain was so real that he glanced down to look for an injury, but his body was intact.

 “Will you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband…”

 He had heard enough. Accepting this invitation had been such a terrible mistake. What had he thought would happen? Did he believe his mere presence would be enough to change Ermal’s mind back, when it hadn’t stopped him from doing this in the first place? Did he hope to stand up and stop the wedding like he was in a terrible drama?

 ‘Foolish arrogant idiot,’ the voice snapped. ‘You deserve to be alone.’

 He stood and rushed into the aisle, running blind as his hands covered his face to catch the tide of tears. It didn’t matter in that moment that he was ruining everything, that everyone was staring at him, that he had given away the extent of his feelings at the worst possible time and lost whatever scraps of Ermal’s friendship could have been salvaged. He just needed to get out of there or he was going to scream.

 “Bizio!”

 Part of him wanted Ermal to let him go, another part wanted him to follow, and the two warred viciously. In the meantime Fabrizio was outside the church, running for the great stone gates that would take him to the streets and an escape, but he didn’t get that far. He fell to his knees in the car park and started to cry uncontrollably, huge gulping sobs that left him barely able to breathe. This was the worst heartbreak he’d ever felt. It was like being ripped to shreds from the inside.

 “Bizio!”

 Ermal’s voice was much closer now, right behind him, and then he was shaking him. Fabrizio jolted forward and gasped, the car park changing in an instant to a dark room. He scrambled around, feeling bedclothes, seeing curtains, a bedside cabinet, a silhouette with distinctive bushy hair. His sight was blurry and when he blinked, he felt that his eyes were wet.

 “Ermal?” He gripped the first piece of skin he could find and he was real, he was warm, he was here. “Did that happen?”

“Did what happen?”

 “Are you married?” Fabrizio asked urgently.

 Ermal frowned, but Fabrizio must have looked truly panicked because he answered quickly. “No, of course not. Did you have a dream that I was married?”

“I…”

 Slowly, but surely, the lines between reality and fantasy were beginning to be redrawn and Fabrizio had never been so glad to discover that he’d been dreaming.

“It must have been that show putting ideas in your head” Ermal remarked, resting his head on Fabrizio’s chest. Show? What show? Oh yes, the reality show about those couples getting married on the same day as their first meeting. That had only been on as background noise for cuddling. Fabrizio hadn’t realised that it had filtered into his brain. He ran a hand through the soft curls and realised that he could do that for as long as he wanted, whenever he pleased. The thought made him want to laugh.

 “Who was I marrying?” Ermal asked, a mischievous note in his voice, drawing circles on Fabrizio’s skin as he spoke.

 In his addled state, he nearly answered without thinking, but reality fully reasserted itself just in time and he pulled up short. “No-one. I…I didn’t focus much on them. I only saw you.”

“Aw!” Ermal lifted his head and kissed his cheek. “Don’t worry, I haven’t married anyone behind your back.”

 “Thank you.”

 He received a light kiss on the lips and then Ermal lay back down, cuddling him close. He was asleep within minutes. Fabrizio did not return to sleep. He was half-afraid of waking up in a different world again, one where Ermal was not by his side, even though he knew that was ridiculous.

 ‘Do you want to marry me?’ the voice whispered tentatively.

 His sudden wish to stand at an altar had been the result of panic, not a reasoned thought process. He didn’t want to get married. He never had. But Ermal did, or would. Maybe his subconscious was trying to give him a warning that the current arrangement couldn’t last forever. Ermal deserved a full-time partner and if Fabrizio couldn’t do that for him, he’d find someone else who would.

  Maybe one day, when they were in a more romantic setting and had more time than the four hours allocated before Ermal’s flight back to Milan, the right moment would present itself. For now, he put a kiss in his boyfriend’s hair and held him close, finally allowing himself to drift back to a peaceful slumber.

[abusebehindcloseddoors]

I Was in an Emotionally Abusive Relationship, and I Didn't Even Realize It

April 7, 2019 by MACY CATE WILLIAMS

At 23 years old, I fell fast and hard for an outgoing, charismatic man. When we began dating, he made me feel special, beautiful, and loved. I decided that any negative aspect of our relationship didn't matter because he loved me so much — there was a reasonable explanation for all of it. So when he proposed to me after almost a year of dating, I was overjoyed. I found a guy who wanted to commit his life to me. We were going to build a future together.
Six months into our engagement, that image of our life crumbled to pieces. My fiancé decided that he didn't want to marry me anymore, and it felt like a tragedy. I dreaded telling my friends and family; I was devastated. But their reactions to my news were not what I expected at all. One friend broke into tears. Another told me she was proud of me. My family felt guilty that they had let the relationship progress as much as it did.
They were relieved that my engagement to this man was over. Everyone had been scared for me, and I didn't get why. I was confused.

This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, wasn't it? But then, loved ones started telling me of times when they wish they had said something to me. Times when my fiancé would put me down or yell at me in public. And as more people stepped forward and told me that ending this relationship was a good thing (including this guy's own close friends), I came to a horrifying realization.
I was emotionally abused, and I could not admit to myself that it was happening at the time.
There were glimmers of problems from the beginning of our relationship, but I made the choice to ignore them. He would say little things to me or shout for a moment, but I brushed it off. It didn't become bad until we moved in together a month after our engagement.
My friends only saw what was happening in front of them, but behind closed doors it was even worse.
The first memory I have of definitive emotional abuse was an evening just a week or two after we moved into our apartment. We were sitting at the bar below our place having a drink when I noticed that he was getting Snapchats from a girl he nicknamed Kate Upton in his phone. I had mentioned to him once before that this made me uncomfortable, so when I saw that she had popped up once again, I questioned him about it. And he became furious with me.
He immediately stomped up the stairs to our apartment, and I quickly followed behind. He was livid. He told me I was ridiculous and jealous for questioning if he would be inappropriately interacting with another girl. And I felt terrible that I would ever question him — we were getting married, after all.

But the more I cried and apologized, the more he screamed at me. I began to have a panic attack and I melted down to the ground, curled up in a ball in the hallway. But instead of stopping the yelling, he stood over me and continued to scream. I started hyperventilating. He told me I was faking it and I was pathetic. After he finished the shouting, he walked away from me. We were silent for about 20 minutes, then we got into bed and went to sleep. The next morning, he said he was sorry, but I needed to calm down with my emotions. So in the end, I was the one apologizing for what transpired the night before.
This was not a one-time thing. There were many more fights like this. And in the end I was always the one made to feel guilty. How dare I ever question him — he proposed to me. How could I do that to him? I was disgusted with myself for doubting him on a regular basis. I told myself that it was my anxiety making me paranoid.
But the screaming wasn't the only problem. This man would criticize me, put me down, and make me feel small constantly. If he didn't like something I was wearing, he would make sure I knew it. He told me I wasn't very funny and he didn't get why my friends laughed at me. He would constantly belittle me for being clumsy. I was afraid to spill something in front of him.
Another problem entirely was his lack of respect for people close to him. I watched him yell at his family on a regular basis over the tiniest things. He started off being incredibly close with my parents (they even helped him pick out my engagement ring), but as soon as we started planning the wedding, everything changed.
I started gaining weight. I became very quiet at work. I saw less of my friends. I felt bad about myself, but I didn't understand why. Wedding planning was not fun; I found it stressful. Like always, I told myself it was all in my head.
He had a lot of opinions about how he envisioned our wedding should be, and if my parents or I had a differing opinion, he was angry about it. We weren't putting a dime of our own money into the big day, so I felt weird about his resentment toward any ideas other than his own. When I tried to tell him that, he would tell me I was wrong. "Don't you love me because I have a lot of opinions?" he would say.
He stopped visiting my family with me. When I mentioned my parents, he would make snide remarks about them. I stopped talking about them altogether because it made me uncomfortable. My family loved me, and all they were trying to do was give us a dream wedding.

I loved this guy so much that I didn't care how I was feeling on the inside. I would do anything for him, and he knew that. So when he told me he was unhappy in our relationship, I asked him what I could do to fix that. All he could say was that he didn't know.
Eventually he told me that proposing to me was a mistake, but he wanted me to stay with him to see if we could work things out. More specifically, if I could fix all the things that were "wrong with me." And I did stay for a while. I so desperately wanted him to wake up and realize that no woman would love him the way I did. But he went about every day like things were normal, and I woke up every morning filled with dread, unsure of my future.
I asked him what was going on with our relationship a couple times, and each time it would result in an intense fight where we would part ways and stay with our families for a night or two. He told me I was impossible to talk to because I was too emotional.
After a weekend without hearing from him, I texted him asking if we could meet at the apartment and talk. His response — "Why?" I told him we needed to figure out what was going on, and he told me it wasn't a good thing for him personally to talk to me. We ended things.
I said I was moving out, so he went through everything I owned and put it in the middle of the family room. "I hope I made it a little easier for you," he said. While I sat at my parents' house (my new temporary home) and cried for a week straight, I received texts and calls from all over town — people told me he was out drinking most nights with his friends. They were confused by his actions. It hurt.
He blocked me and my friends from every social media platform. But that didn't stop the awful screenshots of his tweets bragging about going out and joking about needing a wingman. Even his friends were not loyal to him because they knew he turned me into a shell of the person I used to be.
A week later, on top of everything I had just gone through, I learned that he was not faithful to me. He was sending all sorts of photos of his penis to another girl before we were even engaged. Several people who knew about the exchanges informed me, even providing physical proof that the "other girl" admitted to all of it.
When I confronted him and his parents about his infidelity (bravest thing I've ever done, by the way), he pulled me to the side and asked me why I was trying to ruin his life. "We're done, Macy," he shouted at me. "You're trying to cause drama."
But I wasn't trying to cause drama. For the first time in my life, I was standing up to him. He had made me feel so guilty for questioning him all this time. And that feeling in the pit of my stomach was right all along. After trying to protect him and our relationship for a year and a half of my life, I was done. I missed who I used to be. I missed being happy. I realized that I had dedicated a huge period of my life trying to make sure I didn't make someone mad, and I was exhausted.
Why am I telling you this story? Because I know there are other people out there like me. People who lose themselves in the name of love, even if that love isn't healthy. Nobody deserves to be screamed at. Nobody deserves to be berated. I didn't understand that before, but I certainly know it now.

I was so scared to write about my experience, but now I feel empowered by it. I wanted to protect my former fiancé because a part of me still loves him, but I'm finished doing that now. I am trying to remind myself that yes, I am smart, funny, and strong. I didn't feel like I was any of those things for a long time. I'm having a hard time telling myself that now, but I will believe it again soon.
If you feel like you're being emotionally abused, trust your gut. Don't make excuses for it like I did. Learn from me. Talk to someone you trust. You may feel like you can't live without your partner, but you can. It will hurt. I'm still hurting every single day. But little by little, you will find yourself again. You won't believe you lived the way you did because of how happy you are now. And you will be stronger for it.

[bffhreprise]

Entry 364

 I yawned and stretched, smiling as I looked at my siblings sprawling on our furniture.  Sleeping on the floor was incredibly easy with the thickness of the blankets here and the lushness of the carpet, not that I needed to sleep on a floor anymore.

 Last night had been incredible.  We dined, we danced, and we met all kinds of people that Mila had wanted at her birthday party.  I was actually acclimating to a sentient computer faster than I would have believed.  Talking with her was just natural, there was no question of her being alive.

 Feeling hungry, I decided to head to the kitchen and see if Marco had saved any food for us.  If not, I’d collect some fruit.  The convenience of food here was going to make us fat.  As I left our room, I nearly bumped into someone and exclaimed in surprise.

 James was there, tall and unwavering.  He smiled as he said, “Good morning.  Mind checking on your siblings?  Training starts in fifteen minutes, and I didn’t catch any of you at breakfast.”

 “S'excuser.  I’ll get them.” I assured him quickly before heading back into the room.  I shook Babette’s shoulder as I passed her and then kicked our brother.  Anything less than a solid kick would never wake him.

 Feisty as ever, Babette jumped at our brother, assuming something was his fault.  I tried to stop them, but they weren’t listening.

 “I didn’t wake you!  She did!” insisted Achille as he pointed at me.

 “You probably made her!” claimed Babette as she attacked him again, knocking him through our lovely table.

 I knew we’d need a sturdier table, but things were made to look nice more than to handle bodies being thrown at them around here, not that our old home held up any better.

 “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” I told them urgently, knowing James was waiting.

 He knocked.

 “Ouch!” exclaimed Achille after Babette took advantage of his distraction to kick his leg.

 Then she scampered off to the door before he tried to hit her back.  “James!  Good morning!” exclaimed Babette in English, obviously oblivious to how she looked.  Her hair was a frizzy mess going in every direction and her new pajamas now had a torn sleeve.

 “You three have thirteen minutes before I expect you in the gym for this morning’s exercises.  If you ask nicely, Emma will probably help mend whatever was broken in there.  If she can’t, Mila might assist you.” he replied, his voice leaving no question that there would be consequences if we were late.

 “Merci!” she exclaimed cutely, putting on a front to try easing the tension.  “Achille stumbled onto the coffee table.”

 “I did not!” he argued, earning a smack from me for arguing in front of James.  He had the nerve to block, so I really let him have it until he exclaimed for me to behave.

 Considering James was here, I might have gone overboard, but James didn’t say anything, merely nodding before walking off.

 “Must you two make a scene in front of James!?  Did you forget yesterday already!?” demanded Babette as she rounded on me.

 I stared at her indignantly before saying, “Me!?  He was the one who had asked for you two to be woken up!”

 “You should have warned us!” insisted Babette, putting her hands on her hips as she glared at me.

 “You two didn’t let me get a word in!” I told her.

 “Hey.  She attacked me!” insisted Achille till we both glared at him.

 “Just get ready!” ordered Babette before jogging to her room.

 She rarely let anyone else have the final word, always making things seem like someone else’s fault.  I stormed off to my room and looked around for what might be good for some exercise.  My siblings and I had enough Slayer blood in us to not really need exercise.  Well, maybe we did with the food here, but we weren’t mere humans.  James was probably underestimating us.

 Nearly at the same time, we all met in the common room and headed out without a word.  Thankfully, Mila was kind enough to light the way for us, creating illuminated arrows on the hall’s endless mirrors.

 When we arrived in the gym, we stopped and stared.  James was fighting everyone and didn’t seem to be struggling at all.  Brandon had become a giant, but his huge fists were easily knocked aside, often toward someone else who had to duck out of the way.  The floor warped and moved with plants growing up out of it to lash at James.  He easily deflected those, sometimes shattering branches with a casual movement.  A wolf darted around the others, nipping at James and darting away faster than I could clearly follow.  That wolf eventually became Cosette in a smooth motion as she blocked for Kayla, who had been fighting as well as the rest of them from what I could see.

 The young girl had a type of telekinetic magic, which she used to block debris, catch her fellow attackers when they were thrown, and occasionally to attack James from other directions as she ineffectually punched or kicked at him.

 When Babette tapped my shoulder, I turned to see where she was pointing, and my mouth dropped open.  There were arms and legs on the ground around Dani and Portentia.  I remembered Dani’s frightening skill with magic and her physical strength quite well.  Seeing her be obviously outmatched by the extraordinarily pale girl with her black staff was more than a little frightening.

 If not for seeing James fight nearby, I would have thought Portentia was a master of masters at fighting.  She had a way of diverting Dani’s attacks that left the other girl vulnerable for a hit very frequently.  Dani would block with magic or twist just enough to evade as often as she took a hit hard enough to knock her back several feet.  Neither of them seemed to care about the mangled limbs around them, but my eyes kept returning to the pile.  Suddenly, both were swept away by a spell and lined up next to the ones who had attacked James.

 He smiled as he faced them, saying, “Time to get serious, everyone.  Don’t want the triplets to get the wrong idea about our exercises.”

 “Wh-What happened over there?” I asked into the brief silence after James had spoken as I pointed at the limbs.

 “Sorry.  Portentia tends to cut off her limbs if someone attempts to bind her.” explained James with a casual shrug.  “I should have warned Dani.”

 “You really should have!  It’s disgusting, Daddy!” she exclaimed with a grin, not looking disgusted at all.

 “You’re the one who repeated the tactic.  Three arms and two legs is a bit much.” he replied with a frown.

 “B-but… she…” started Achille, who was pointing at Portentia.

 James smiled again and said, “Yes, she regenerates instantly, never tires, and will hunt you relentlessly if you commit a crime.  Best to abide by the law.”  Then he playfully winked.

 I nodded, not wanting to even attempt fighting Portentia after what I just saw and heard.  Whatever she was, she was beyond me.

 “Portentia!  Again!?” demanded one of the twins as she strode into the room.  “Emma, you owe us another finish for our doors and floor.”

 Emma winked and asked “Where?”  The plants grew back into the floor and a shiny finish covered the spots that had warped.

 “Fine.” stated the perturbed woman.  Then a torrent of water shot past her, scooping the blood and limbs off the floor and carrying them away through the door behind her.  “No more missing limbs today.” she ordered.

 “I don't know if I will ever really be used to this place.” claimed Maple as she shook her head.

 I hadn’t even noticed her, Jemal, Brenna, and Dejon hanging back by a wall during the chaos.  At the moment, I really understood how she felt.  The skill at magic and fighting I just witnessed made what I was used to seeing seem like beginner’s work.

 “You will in time.” insisted James.  Then he walked straight at my siblings and me.  “You three will be working with Raine today.”

 Raine was suddenly standing by him.  “B-but… I-I…  R-Really?” she asked in surprise.

 James nodded and said, “Achille, Babette, and Heloise need to review the basics, and I am quite confident that you have seen enough in your months here to be a capable instructor.“

 “B-But they’re… afraid.” argued Raine.

 Never to admit fear, Babette quickly said, “Am not.”

 “I certainly don’t want to make you angry.” insisted Achille as he stepped in front of our sister, blocking her with his arm.

 After taking a calming breath, I said, “I want to learn.  Just seeing you people… Even the kid is incredible.”

 “Plus, Raine speaks fluent French and at least fifty other languages.  I haven’t checked how many too recently, but she learns at an absurd rate.” added James proudly as he looked at the blushing girl.

 She didn’t argue, stepping up to us with no apparent confidence, though she could have torn us to shreds on whim if she felt like it.  As she tested us, we were very well aware of the difference in strength between us.  When she moved my arm to correct my position, I couldn’t have fought her.  There might as well have been a wall gently pushing me into place.

 Unlike how Raine walked, seeming to be the most timid person I have ever seen, her martial arts were top notch to my eye.  She flowed effortlessly from position to position in her demonstrations with not a hint of hesitance.  I didn’t doubt James when he assigned a half-demon to teach us, but I couldn’t understand why this incredibly powerful person was so…  awkward… when not instructing us.

 “Mila, do you know why Raine is…” I started once we were back in our common room, hesitating as I decided how to put it.

 “Scared.” stated Babette bluntly, ignoring Achille’s ashen expression.

 “Where some people with power take pride in it, Raine has always worried about unintentionally hurting others.” explained Mila.

 “A compassionate demon?” questioned Babette in surprise.

 Sounding amused, Mila said, “Half-demon, but yes.  The Master wasn’t lying when he told you that Raine is one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet.  You’ll get to know your co-workers much more quickly if you spend some time with them.  Unlike at your old job, you really are with friends here.”

 I nodded, trying to picture it.  There had always been us three and everyone else.  Trusting anyone outside of the family was like asking for a knife in the back.  Yet, I trusted James.  If he wanted me dead, there was no reason for messing with our heads.  After realizing that I was only picturing myself and James hanging out, I forcefully tried picturing what hanging out with Raine would be like.  I’d have to overcome my fear for that picture to be anything but unnatural.  Picturing myself hanging out with Cosette seemed almost worse, despite what she did for us yesterday.   The girl was too intimidating.  I hadn’t thought Brandon was intimidating until he became a giant today.

 Who here wasn’t intimidating?  Jemal?  I doubted we could hang out with him without his sister around, and she was really young.  Dejon seemed unapproachable.  Maple, maybe?

 Babette shoved me.  “Let’s get some food after I shower.  I’m starving.” she told me, dodging when I tried to shove her back.

 “Leave me some hot water!” exclaimed Achille with a grin.

 “Fine.  Achille can bring us some food while we get cleaned up.” I announced, heading to my room to figure out what I wanted to wear today.  Having so many clothes now made things more complicated, but I liked it.

 Achille sighed loudly, but I heard him heading to the door.  We’d clean up, eat, and then see what else we were supposed to do for today.

[that-quiet-girl-who-writes]

Broken~Part 19 (Jughead Jones)

A/N: Would you look at that. 2 parts in 3 days. I think you could say I’m improving! I will try to keep the consistency I swear

Summary: You, Betty and Veronica break into Grundy’s car

Pairing: Jughead x Andrews!reader

Word Count: 2038

Warnings: Arguments, Car break in? Is that a warning?

Masterlist

Broken Masterlist

I got some sleep that night, but I mostly just watched Jughead. I swear it wasn’t in a creepy way, he just looked peaceful, something that was hard to obtain with what was happening in our town. We got up early so that neither Archie nor my dad would find Jug in the house too early in the morning. He snuck out the window like usual and said he would meet me at school.

Once Arch and I were at school, he spotted Jughead and dragged me towards him. He immediately told us both that Betty had found out about him and his music teacher last night.

“She’s not gonna write about me in the paper, is she? Like she did with Chuck?” He asked Jughead. I rolled my eyes at how stupid my brother could be sometimes.

Jughead scoffed, “Dude, seriously?” We turned the corner and Jughead continued to put up flyers that I had only now noticed. He put one up on the wall as he explained to Archie that Betty would never do something like that. I tilted my head and got a better look at the poster which said “Last Drive-in”. The Drive-in was closing? How come nobody had told me? What about Jughead? Where the hell was he gonna live if he refused to live with us?

“Y/N/N? Y/N/N are you okay?” I snapped out of my thoughts. Instead of being greeted with the poster on the wall, I saw Jughead’s face. “Y/N/N?”

“Hi, what? What’s going on?”

“You zoned out and you started breathing kinda heavily. What’s wrong?”

“...the drive-in, Jug. Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered. Jughead looked back and realized that the poster was what I had been looking at. He looked over at Archie, who looked confused as to why I was upset over this.

“I’ll take her to class Arch, you can go.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. We’ll see you later.”

“Ok. Bye, Y/N/N.” He said, walking away with a confused look on his face.

“Jug.” I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jughead sighed, “Because I knew if I did, you would try to make me come stay with you.”

“Damn right I would, you can’t just live on the fucking street, Jughead.”

“Y/N/N, it’s still the same as before, I’m not gonna just drop in on your family’s life, okay?”

“We don’t care! If it means that you can have a roof over your head, we do not care about having another person in the house. Please, Jug. I won’t be able to sleep thinking that you are not in a proper bed.”

“You don’t sleep anyway.”

“I do when you’re next to me.” I was almost close to tears, arguing with him like this. It’s not like we were really fighting, but any sort of argument always made me upset pretty fast. There was a moment of silence, before Jughead sighed.

“Okay, I’ll come over the night after the drive-in closes, but after that I am going to find somewhere to stay.”

“What about tonight?”

“And I’ll come over tonight.” He smiled. I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him tight, feeling at least a little better about his situation.

“Jug?” I whispered.

“Yeah?”

“Promise me that you won’t lie to me about where you’re staying.”

“I won’t.”

After that, he dropped me in class. The school day went by fast and the next thing I knew, Betty and Veronica were pulling me out the front doors of Riverdale High.

“I told Archie I would take you home.” Betty informed me.

“Annnd from the rush we’re in, I’m going to assume that that is not where we are going.”

“Not yet. Do you know where he’s gonna be tonight?”

“He told me he had an essay due on Thursday… maybe he’s doing that.” I attempted to cover for him.

“C’mon Y/N/N, I asked you because you won’t lie. I know you know where he’s going even when he doesn’t tell you, so where is he?”

“...Grundy’s.”

Veronica rolled her eyes, “Of course.”

“What? Where are we going?”

“We are going to break into her car.”

“What!?”

“I showed Archie some stuff about how Geraldine Grundy didn’t exist until last year. He’s still not convinced that there’s anything to be worried about, so we’re going for more physical proof.” Betty said.

“And you think you’re gonna find that in her car?”

“I have no idea, but we’re gonna find out.”

There was no way that Grundy had left the school yet, so we went to Pop’s, got something to eat and only left when it was starting to get dark. Now, I really hate being outside in the dark, but I figured I’d be fine as long as I stayed close to my friends. As quietly as we could, we walked up to Grundy’s car and Betty commenced her break in.

“How do you even know how to do that?” Veronica asked, looking concerned about her friend. Betty let out a happy little laugh.

“My dad and I fix cars together. Thank god she drives an old…” Betty trailed off as the door opened. Ronnie walked over to the other side and I followed her. Betty unlocked the door and I sat on Veronica’s lap once she was in the passenger seat.

“Okay,” Said Ronnie, “before going any further, if I’m committing a felony I need to at least ask the question, are you doing this because you still have feelings for Archie or?”

“No, Veronica! We’re doing this because Grundy has Archie under some kind of sexual spell and he won’t listen to reason. We’re looking for anything that proves Grundy isn’t as clean as she says she is.”

So we started searching. We opened up every little compartment and looked in between the front seats until Betty looked behind us and pulled a small grey box out of the back seat.

“Bobby pin.” She said holding out her hand.

“Okay, Ms. MacGyver.” Ronnie pulled a pin out of her hair and handed it over. Betty bent it and attempted to open the box. It popped open and Betty gave us a satisfied smirk.

“I learned that from the Nancy Drew detective bo-”

“Okay, go!” Ronnie said in a rushed tone while repeatedly checking outside to make sure nobody had left the house. I laughed a little remembering all the times Betty had pulled out the Nancy Drew books when we were kids. We would spend an afternoon in her bedroom just reading them and then pretending to solve mysteries.

Betty began rummaging through the box, picking out an I.D. card with the name “Jennifer Gibson” next to Ms. Grudy’s face.

“Oh my god. Oh. My god.” Betty mumbled.

“Jennifer Gibson? Who the hell is Jennifer Gibson?” Veronica asked, taking the card from B. Getting a closer look at it, ‘Ms.Grundy’ had previously lived in Minneapolis.

“That’s not the only thing.” Betty said, staring into the box. She pulled out a gun. I grabbed Ronnie’s arm as if that was going to protect me. Not that I needed protecting when Betty was the one holding the gun.

“Betty, I think we should go.” I said.

“Yeah, okay.” She said, softly. She put the gun in her pocket and opened the driver’s door to get out. Veronica and I exited the other side.

“Betty! What the hell are you doing?” I asked. I wanted to yell, but I was afraid that somebody would hear me in the late night silence that fell around the neighbourhood.

“What?” She asked as if she hadn’t done anything.

“The gun!” I whisper-yelled. “Why would you take it? What if she notices?”

“She won’t, it was a locked box in the back of her car, how often would she even check it?”

“Say that sentence again! I’m pretty sure you would notice if the gun you keep in a locked box in your car went missing! Just put it back!”

“Y/N/N, it’ll be fine. If something goes wrong, the blame is on me not you.”

“I know, but I don’t want you mixed in with this either. I’m already at fault here! I’ve been keeping this from everyone for months and now Archie might actually be in a lot more trouble than we thought he was. If something happens to him, I’m gonna blame myself anyway, god, we should tell someone. Oh my god, what if something happens-”

“Y/N/N! What’s your point?” She asked, trying to stop me from rambling for too long.

I took a deep breath. “...I don’t know.”

“Then let’s go, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

We walked down the street, past the park and down a couple more streets until we were back at my house. I unlocked the door and we sat down in the kitchen with some drinks, thinking over what we had just found.

We were only there for a half hour when the door opened again and Archie stepped in.

“Oh god.” He said, rolling his eyes as soon as he saw B and V standing in our kitchen this late at night.

“Please, don’t tell me you’re still on this crazy witch hunt.”

“It’s not a witch hunt and it’s not crazy.” Betty said.

“Yes, it is. Y/N/N, tell her she is crazy for cyber stalking Grundy.”

“She’s not crazy” I said. Betty smiled, satisfied with my answer, but I still continued. “...and it’s not just cyberstalking anymore.”

“What?!” Archie exclaimed.

“Y/N/N, that’s not helping.”

“He asked me a question, I just gave him an answer.”

“What is she talking about?” Archie asked.

Betty looked over at Veronica. “We were just in Grundy’s car.”

“What? You were in her car?” Archie looked around at the three of us.

“Yeah, and thank god we were. We found a gun.” Veronica said.

“And an I.D. with the name ‘Jennifer Gibson’. This is proof Ms.Grundy is not who she says she is.”

“Then who is she?”

“Obviously some sketch queen named Jennifer Gibson.”

“Archie, what if she had something to do with Jason’s murder? She taught him, she made you lie about him, we know she was at the river, she has a gun!”

“So does Dilton Doiley, but you never thought he killed Jason!’

“Open your eyes, Archie.” Said Veronica. “Jason was her student last year. Everything about her is a huge, bald faced question mark.”

“Okay, whatever her name is, she’s not a killer.”

“You didn’t ask her, did you?” Betty said. “About her name. Why there’s no record of her before last year?”

Archie shook his head.

“Why not?”

He just shook his head again and left the room. We listened to his footsteps go up the stairs and into his bedroom. I only stood still for about five seconds before following him. I walked through his open door as he threw his bulldogs varsity jacket on a chair in the corner of his room.

“What?” He asked in an annoyed tone.

“I don’t know.”

He sat down on the bed with his head in his hands.

“I don’t know what to do, Archie.” I said, making him look up at me. “As much as you won’t admit it, or at least not to other people, you are in a bad situation. I want to help you, the way you’ve helped me so many times these last few years, but I don't know what to do.”

“It’s not your problem to fix, Y/N/N.”

“It is if my brother is in danger. This is what we call a dangerous situation, Archie, and I don’t know if you’re gonna be okay when it’s all over, therefore, I am aloud to interfere and be upset about it.”

“Okay.” He sighed. “If I ask her about the name, will you leave this all alone.”

“Yes. If she somehow has a valid reason, I will try my best to stop worrying about you.” Now we both knew that I would never stop worrying about him, the same way he would never stop worrying about me, but it was good enough for now.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Taglist (All stories): @purelittleblueberry @runs-with-sciss0rs @kapolisradomthoughts

Taglist (Broken): @natalieroseg @notalwaysfair @purelittleblueberry @goneghost123

Taglist (Jughead): @letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked

[etc-greys]

Season 14 Episode 2: Get Off on the Pain

Songs of the Episode:

Now I See by Claire Guerreso

My Rules by Jadagrace

Ready by Hael

Look After You by Aron Wright

Bad Behavior by Izzy Bizu

Synopsis:

Megan is out of surgery and is devastated it didn’t work. Mer broke all the mugs in the Attendings lounge and Webber and Maggie try to talk to her. Arizona finds out Carina is Deluca’s sister.  Jo does the walk of shame and what accidently steps on Glasses’s glasses. Bailey is angry about having to wear heels on the job because of society’s perception of women of power having to dress with heels. Maggie and Alex try to cheer up Mer, but ultimately influence her to find a new innovative solution. She’s going to do an abdominal wall transplant, with the help of Teddy, Webber, and Bailey. April is avoiding Jackson. Jo needs to talk to someone about Glasses, but has no one. So she urges Ben to be her new Stephanie until she can find a new one and as she gets his approval, Glasses shows up with her ID badge, you know the one she left on his mother’s basement floor. Yeah just let that sink in... lol and to make it worse Alex is close behind and straight up laughs in her face. Ben tries not to laugh, but isn’t sure what Steph would do ahaha.  

       Mer presents her case to Megan and she wants it, even if the rest are skeptical. She finally puts aside her light and go with the flow attitude and reveals to her family how even though she’s scared she doesn’t want to be a hostage to her body and bed, like she was for years in Iraq. She wants her medical freedom and while she can’t control the outcome, she can make her own decision. Now Jackson is being weird to Maggie. Mer offers to the Sub I’s that the one to find a donor ab wall will get to scrub in on the surgery. Carina asks Bailey if she can do her not so pg research study at GSM. Her study focuses on how sexual stimulation can help with pain management and the possibility of a drug that helps with sexual enhancement for women. At first Bailey is skeptical, then she looks to her heels, and then she realizes it's important to support other women.

Amelia is prepping the teen for surgery and motivates the father to be strong. Meanwhile Jackson protests her plans to proceed with Bailey. Again Bailey looks to her heels and supports Amelia, I mean Amelia is the head of neuro and she is capable of making the decision on her own. And Bailey switches her heels to her comfy shoes, while Mer recruits Jackson for her surgery. Teddy, Owen, and Riggs all try to get Megan’s son to the U.S., but they can’t find a lawyer to represent them. The search for an ab wall is troubling as the Sub I’s suggest a woman who's been deceased for 3 days, a woman with a gunshot wound to the abdomen, and a man. Bailey, Maggie, and Amelia check in on Carina’s research. Alex tells Mer that Jo slept with Glasses and she compares it to when she slept with George. Jo tells Ben why she slept with Glasses, and she opens up to him about how in the past she’s slept with guys who’ve hurt her. He then brings up her past of beating up some of the guys, and explains how it was self defense. But they are interrupted by none other than Glasses, who found the perfect donor. And she sharked him, like Mer did to Christina in the first ever episode of Grey’s. Jo defends herself to Glasses who is pretty upset that she stole his surgery, but then ALEX COMES IN AND DEFENDS HER!!! And then he laughs at her again for sleeping with him.

Teddy, his mom, and Megan all confront Owen on his marriage to Amelia. Deluca questions Amelia’s motives of helping the teen. She defends herself by saying that she doesn’t want the family or the boy to lose himself to an addiction to drugs from the constant pain he’s in.

Ben talks to Jo about her situation, as Bailey is in earshot. He tells her that Karev was only trying to protect her and that he’s not the type to hurt her. Then Bailey stepped in, told him never to tell a woman how she should feel, he accepted it and walked away. After Bailey chimes in a message of female empowerment/strength (yesssss Bailey!!) and then in essence repeated the same advice (she’s the best!).

The Owen intervention continues, and tension rises until Megan asks him to take her son if she dies. Meanwhile Arizona visits Carina in her research lab and they share a really sensual moment. Then RIGGS PROPOSES TO MEGAN....until they’re interrupted by Mer who found a match...talk about awkward...

Owen goes to confront Amelia. And says and does all of the wrong things. First he suggests, mind you this is out of the blue, that she go to therapy, or be put on medication because while she’s an amazing person no one else sees it and something's wrong. She then counters that Teddy is still in love with him, Megan doesn’t like her, and that's his motivation to have her evaluated. Then she goes on to let Owen go be with Teddy. Mer tells Jo not to apologize for being a shark. Webber and Maggie share a sweet moment where he tells her that when she does something spectacular, which is often, he likes to take some credit for it (over Ellis).

Ben finds Alex and tells him what Jo told him. Ben tells him that Jo is afraid of him, given what he’s capable of (beating up Deluca). Megan’s surgery is a success! Amelia calls Jackson in to fix the mess she made of his jaw and he’s infuriated. But his surgery ended up being a success. Jackson warns that if that happens again, she’ll report her to the medical boards and get her licensed revoked.

April and Jackson talk. She finally is truthful with him, she tells him the pain that she’s in. She can’t do the casual sexual relationship, she needs the whole thing and he can’t provide that. She’s in so much pain that she decides it's best for her to move out. OWEN AND TEDDY KISS... but Teddy tells him she won’t be with him while he’s married. Amelia takes part of Carina’s trial. Bailey throws away all her heels, while Ben tries to convince her to keep a few pairs ;).

WARNING ABOUT TO FREAK TF OUT.. THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING...

ALEX TELLS JO THAT HE LOOKED UP AND FOUND HER HUSBAND..yes you read that right..he was honest with her. Then he apologizes for doing it without asking her.And he promises her that he would never physically hurt her, and that he grew up with an abusive father, he’s seen it first hand and he could never do that to her. (brb crying, omg I love him so much....) Shocked, she realizes that he saw Paul and didn’t kill him. And confirms that he didn’t do anything to him. THEN SHE WALKED AWAY.... BUT WAIT WHAT OMG.... SHE KISSED HIM....and the rest is history. And they’re back <3.

Mer finds out that MEGAN TURNED DOWN RIGGS PROPOSAL BECAUSE SHE THINKS HE’S STILL IN LOVE WITH HER! And Mer walks away as fast as she can.

Amelia comes out of the MRI machine and notices a scan on the screen and finds out that SHE HAS A HUGE BRAIN TUMOR. YUP. LET THAT SINK IN. AND FADE TO BLACK.

A Few Additional Thoughts:

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ve probably gotten to know who my favorites are. So it won’t surprise you when I tell you this 2 hour premiere was A. Fantastic, B. Riveting, C. A lot to talk about. So bear with me as I tell you some of the major things I found important, but also some of my favorite parts. This one's a long one, but I promise the going forward they’ll be shorter :). I’m going to combine episode 1 & 2 since they were presented together.

So major improvement so far is: Communication. Everyone was actually honest and open with each other, we which haven’t seen in a little while. Like Alex coming clean with Jo, Mer telling Megan the truth, and April telling Jackson how she feels. This to me seems like they are all coming into their own and realizing that what's best in the long run is to be honest with one another.

There has been some major comic relief so far this season. I mean even the opening scene with Megan, which was heartfelt, but it also could’ve been a real tearjerker. Instead they made it light and sweet. And even with Jo sleeping regretfully with Glasses, and Alex laughing at her instead of being defensive. Or one of my favorites, Arizona being schooled on the latest dating lingo... even if it’s not the fun kind. I’m loving this lighter sweeter air.

But don’t worry, it had it’s fair share of seriousness. For one it talked about the double standards of women in the workplace vs men. Bailey who’s the boss, fully embodied it’s meaning when she stood up for Amelia, approved Carina to do her controversial research study, defended Jo’s right (and all women’s right) to embrace their feelings/opinions unapologetically, backed Mer on her innovative surgery, and finally when she took off her symbolic heels and traded them in for her work clogs (going against societal pressure that a woman must do a “man’s” work in heels). Bravo, Bailey, bravo!

We also had a glimpse into the conversations that need to be had to improve and modify our immigration laws. These two episodes also exposed us to a bit of what is to come as we learn about Megan’s prisoner of war story. I think this will be an interesting story and provide us some needed perspective on the realities of some of the things that can happen to our veterans/soldiers overseas. Thank you to all of our service men and women for your time and commitment!

It touched briefly on the domestic violence and abuse story line. We see Jo as she begins to open up more freely about her past and I think this proves she’s slowly healing. Ben wonderfully and truthfully tells her never to blame herself for the way men treated her and that under no circumstances was it her fault. With this he tells Alex that Jo is afraid of him given her past, which pushes Alex to talk to her. Thanks to the help of Ben, Alex assures Jo that he would never hurt her. And when she found out that he didn’t do anything when he found her husband, it proves to her that he can be trusted. Honesty brought them back together (and Ben). But I truly believe her history with domestic abuse is an important one to tell and it’s one that’ll probably be further explored and broken down this season (allowing conversations to be started within our communities).

*A little side note. I just want to point out how crucial Ben has actually been in Jolex’s love story. I mean last season he was the one who told Deluca that Alex was going to take the plea to protect Jo, which ultimately lead to Deluca dropping the charges. And this season Ben tells Alex that Jo is afraid of him given her past and this pushes him to talk to her and the rest is history. So THANK YOU BEN!*

Then there was the shocking final moment in which we learn of Amelia’s brain tumor. I’m still in shock, as I’m sure you are too. But I think that the story is important because it reminds us that we must take care of ourselves. I hope this inspires people to stay on top of self care by getting regular check ups and taking time to do the little things for yourself as well. Praying for you Amelia!

Overall this was a great premiere and I can’t wait to see where this season takes us! Cheers!

[whitewolfofwinterfell]

I feel like you're supposed to like defan... and I do to a degree, but there's something that also makes me "dislike" their relationship... I cant put my finger in what it is, but I just don't really get that feeling from their relationship, that I "should get". I don't know if it is just because I haven't seen any other seasons than the first three, and therefor haven't seen the progress or development of their brotherhood? Idk

I do understand what you mean. Personally, I’ve always been back and fourth about Defan. On the one hand part of me feels like the show was rooted so much in their brotherhood and that theirs was the true love story of the show, since they were both so damaged and went on a journey to heal from the individual wounds of their past, whilst at the same time trying to navigate a healthier relationship as brothers. 

Warning: This is gonna be anti-Defan, anti-Damon and anti-Delena. 

I think as the seasons went on the Defan relationship definitley grew, particularly in seasons 7 and 8 because their relationship got so much more focus with Elena being gone. So if you continue to watch after season three, you might change your mind about them. 

I’m gonna be completely honest and say that my main issue with Defan stems from my bias towards Stefan as a character. I just love Stefan so much and I feel like Damon was the worst influence in Stefan’s life. I know they both did things to hurt each other and neither of them were perfect, but in my opinion, Stefan always did so much more for Damon. 

For me, the fact that Damon spent three entire seasons constantly forcing himself on Stefan’s girlfriend, when he knew a) how much Stefan loved her b) how much she meant to him c) when Elena didn’t even want anything to do with Damon and explicitly told him on multiple occasions she didn’t see him in that way and loved Stefan, is enough to completely undermine everything about Defan’s relationship. And this isn’t me talking from a Stelena shipper’s perspective, it’s me speaking from a moral perspective. When your sibling is in a relationship you do not under any circumstances overstep the boundaries with their partner. Personally, I wouldn’t even let myself be open to developing feelings for any of my family’s partners. The second a relative (or friend) introduces me to their partner, I immediately acknowled them as being exactly that - my relative’s partner. That means they are not someone I can ever be with, they are not someone I am allowed to develop romantic feelings for and they are certaintly not someone I would ever dream of making a move on (for lack of a better term). I understand feelings can sometimes be out of our control, but if I was ever in a position whereby I’d unknowingly developed those feelings for a relative’s partner, the second I’d realised, I would do something about it. I would distance myself from them, avoid having one-to-one conversations or any kind of interaction that could cause those feelings to grow. And so, from this perspective I cannot forgive or excuse Damon’s behaviour. 

He forced his way into Stefan’s life and from the very beginning wanted to develop those feelings for Elena, just to spite Stefan. In 1x03 he compelled Elena to kiss him and even when Stefan showed Damon forgiveness and saved his life multiple times throughout season 1, Damon never once stopped weasling his way into Elena’s life. In 1x11 he kidnapped her against her will and drove her out of town whilst she was unconscious all so he could get her on her own basically. He took any opportunity he could to flirt with her and push the boundaries such as the scene in Elena’s kitchen in 1x13 where he deliberately crashed into her and Elena told him to stop and said “That move was deliberate.” In 1x22, he kissed Katherine thinking it was Elena, not giving a crap that she was his brother’s goddamn girlfriend and his behaviour only got worse in season 2. In 2x01 he forced himself on her when she made it perfectly clear she did not want to kiss him and told him she loved his brother, he murdered her brother in cold blood. In 2x08 he told her he loved her even though she told him “Damon, don’t go there” and then compelled her against her will. And those kind of blatant proclamations of love from Damon to Elena were common throughout season 2, even though Elena was in a committed relationship with Stefan. Damon didn’t even try to hide his feelings for Elena from Stefan, he would rub it in Stefan’s face, as though he had a right to have those feelings and announce them and act on them. Like, who the hell does that? In season 3 when Stefan was gone he upped the anti even more. He forced Elena to remember the things she felt while Stefan was gone. I mean…seriously, bro? Your little brother has literally just sacrificed everything, thrown himself into a black hole that he spent decades fighting to rip himself out of all to save your pathetic life and you repay him by taking the woman he loves and the only light and hope he had during that dark time away from him? Bravo, bravo. Don’t even get me started on the fact that he failed to uphold the deal he made with Stefan in 3x22 where they agreed the brother that Elena didn’t choose would leave town. Not only did Damon stay in town, but he still was delibrately over-stepping the boundaries with Elena, even though she had already had the opportunity to choose Damon and made a clear choice to be with Stefan. And then after everything Stefan had been through in season 3 (all as a result of the price he had to pay to save Damon’s life), Damon decides it’s totally fine to tell Elena he’s happy her and Stefan broke up and then to jump into bed with her the day after their breakup. Give the brother of the year award to this guy, huh? This may seem like it’s turned into a huge anti-Delena rant, but it’s really not, because all any of this does is show that Damon as a person and a brother, had absolutely no respect, compassion, loyalty or love for Stefan. How could he if he was so willing to hurt Stefan like this and then never even apologise? In fact, if anything, Damon spent the seasons after he and Elena got together making out Elena had always been his girl and that she was the love of his life, totally disregarding and forgetting that Stefan had loved her once too. 

I understand that Damon has been there for Stefan in other ways, but in my opinion the way Damon behaved regarding Elena alone is completely unforgivable where Stefan is concerned. How can we root for a brother relationship where the girl caught in the middle is placed of higher importance? Because she was. Every time Damon chose to act on his feelings for Elena in seasons 1-3 (and the beginning of season 4) he was choosing her above his brother. 

Let’s not forget that Damon killed Lexi. If it wasn’t already bad enough that he was the cause of Stefan losing Elena, he murdered Lexi in cold blood, who really was the most important person in the world to Stefan. Damon knew how special Lexi was to Stefan, what she meant to him and he chose to kill her all to stop the Founder’s Council suspecting him of being a vampire. What sort of pathetic reason is that to kill an innocent person and the best friend of your brother? It’s another clear example of Damon’s complete disregard for Stefan’s feelings. 

On top of that we have his promise of an “eternity of misery”. Of all the things that disgust me most on TVD, that has to have taken the biscuit. The fact that Damon was so cruel, so bitter, so twisted that he held a grudge against his little brother for over a century just shows how awful the Defan relationship is, in my opinion. Yes, Stefan shouldn’t have forced Damon to turn, but he did and that’s it. Stefan was a 17 year old boy, he’d witnessed the woman he loved get murdered (Katherine) along with his brother, he died himself, he found out his father was the one that pulled the trigger on them, he accidentally killed his father, turned, his emotions were heightened, he was high on blood, afraid to lose his brother and coerced him into completing the transition. I’m sorry, but I do not understand how that act makes Stefan deserving of “an eternity of misery”. For starters, Damon murdering Lexi beats that a 100 times over. That is so much more evil, calculated and cold than what Stefan did. Damon killed Lexi because he wanted to, it was premeditated and he knew exactly how that would impact Stefan. Stefan made Damon turn, believing he was doing the right thing in keeping his brother alive and he had no idea what the aftermath of that would be. But did Stefan promise Damon an eternity of misery when he killed his best friend in front of him? Did he promise it to Damon when he found out he’d kissed Elena or told her he loved her? What about when he killed Zach? Or when he was so busy rolling around with Elena that he failed to notice his own brother was drowning in the bottom of a quarry for 3 months? No, Stefan never did that because he was a decent and forgiving person. 

I understand that as brothers there was never a choice in Stefan and Damon loving each other and that’s supposed to be the message of their story, I feel. That no matter how badly they hurt each other or how toxic and twisted their relationship came, they were bonded forever and they couldn’t fight that. But, I stil reject Defan’s relationship in terms of it being good for Stefan. Stefan’s life would’ve been a thousand times happier without Damon and that is a fact. Stefan was miserable for essentially his entire life because of Damon and ended up dying for him too, just when he was about to get a chance to live a happy life. 

I think because I have a brother who I’m incredibly close t I understand the bonds of that relationship so much and when I even imagine doing to my brother what Damon did to Stefan…I can’t fathom it. When you have a brother, particularly a younger brother (as I do) nothing can sever that chord and nothing can trump it. It’s a love you’re born into, that is with you from the day that younger sibling is born. It’s a love that is protective in nature and although it’s problematic at times (because let’s face it all siblings bicker and argue), at it’s core it’s a selfless love. I would sacrifice myself for my brother’s happiness (which Stefan did for Damon multiple times, but when did Damon did it for Stefan) and most importantly, I would never, ever betray him. Damon knowingly betrayed Stefan multiple times or did things he knew would hurt him and it’s difficult to root for a relationship like that. 

No matter how you look at it, Damon was such a dark and negative influence in Stefan’s life from the day they became vampires and that continued right up until 8x16. I mean, Stefan died (pointlessly might I add) all because he had been forced to feel like he owed Damon something because he coerced Damon to turn all those years ago. That isn’t a healthy, mutually beneficial and loving relationship between two brothers, that is damaging and tragic. It’s a relationship whereby the focus was always on Damon’s suffering, on how Stefan had hurt Damon, how Stefan had to make amends to Damon and he died doing that. The question is, when the hell did Damon make it up to Stefan? Even with all the things Damon did for Stefan, in my opinion it never made up for the awful things he’d done and the pain he’d caused.  

I love Defan in the sense of the potential they had and also the friendship between Paul and Ian which transcends onto the screen, but I never liked the way they were written on the show. Whenever I’ve wrote TVD fics I’ve always portrayed the Defan relationship in a different way - the way I think they should’ve been written - whereby it’s much more of an equal relationship. I think the writers got swept up too much in the messiness of their relationship and the resentment and they should’ve focused more on fixing it. But even up until the last seasons there were still constant issues in their relationship, which were uncomfortable to watch at times. 

So I do completely understand why you’d feel the way you do about Defan, particularly since you’ve only seen the first three seasons which is basically where Damon completely fucks Stefan over repeatedly. I think in the end, it’s hard for most TVD fans to fully get on-board with the Defan relationship because there’s this naturally ingrained Stefan vs Damon debate. It really isn’t something that I think people create deliberately, it’s just that people naturally have a preference to either Stefan or Damon. That makes it hard to really appreciate and enjoy the ship, because I think one of the most basic things any ship has to have in order for you to get on board with them is two characters that you like. Unfortunately, when it comes to Stefan and Damon very few people like them equally and you’ll find that those that prefer Stefan (such as myself) think the Defan relationship is all about Damon and compromises Stefan whilst those that prefer Damon think it’s all about Stefan and compromises Damon. That’s likely where your issue with Defan stems from, too - your preference to either Stefan or Damon. But regardless, the final scene in 8x16 where they reunited in the afterlife was pretty darn cute. That’s actually the only moment where I truly looked at them and felt like they’d finally put all of their past issues behind them and they were just brothers again. That was beautiful to see, but I feel like we should’ve gotten to that point with them way before the finale. 

[hiddlesfashion]

#TodayInHiddleHistory

January 30, 2014: the March issue of Elle UK was released featuring Tom Hiddleston A God Among Men. 

A video posted by The Fashion of Tom Hiddleston (@hiddlesfashion) on Jan 30, 2017 at 5:50am PST

full interview below 

Tom Hiddleston: A god among men?

Hollywood A-lister, ELLE writer, YouTube sensation – Tom Hiddleston’s cult status is evident on every platform. And, as ELLE’s Annabel Brog discovers, he’s not afraid of revealing, well, everything.​

When ELLE’s Editor-in-Chief Lorraine Candy was at Wimbledon last year, she rather naively tweeted afterwards: ‘I sat next to actor Tom Hiddleston and his girlfriend Jane. He’s a very funny man.’ She has never – bear in mind this is a mother of four who edits a fashion magazine, which puts her high on a certain demographic hit-list – been trolled like it. The responses veered between righteous fury that she had outed Hiddleston as being ‘With Girlfriend’, and rather bloodthirsty expressions of envy that she had, you know, talked to him.

Tom Hiddleston inspires fervour in his fans. He’s an extraordinary actor who has won universal acclaim – his roles include feckless Prince Hal in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown; sweet, doomed Captain Nicholls in Spielberg’s War Horse; and currently the blood-drenched warrior Coriolanus at the Donmar Ware- house – but it’s his performance as pallid, sociopathic god of mischief Loki in the Thor and Avengers Assemble films that catapulted him into the stratosphere. To put it in context: Hiddleston recently donated a pair of signed Converse to the Small Steps charity auction, alongside the likes of Mick Jagger and Kate Moss. His shoes sold for £4,500 (more than anyone else’s). He is very appreciative of the interest, while simultaneously being uncomfortable with the idea of fame. ‘Do I like it? It’s sort of inconsequential in a way, a weird corollary to everything else I’ve done. I cannot tell you how surprising it is. It’s like, really? REALLY? I honestly try not to think about it too much.’

We are nestled under a heater in the beer garden of a north-west London pub on a chilly December evening. Hiddleston is drinking whiskey, which is part of my cunning strategy to break him down – he has always given me the impression of being very prepared in interviews – but it doesn’t work. After five shots, he remains entirely in control.

Nonetheless, he is rather adorable: ferociously bright (he went to Eton, then Cambridge, where he got a double first), earnest ('I know. I’m sorry. I can’t help it’), obliging, and old-fashioned. Partly that’s his classical- ly handsome face, partly it’s his impeccable manners, and partly it’s the way he constructs his sentences.

Describing his favourite book, William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, for instance, he says, 'Like all life, it contains multitudes’; or, on opening up to new people, 'I fear I am initially quite private.’ When he is sure of his subject – talking about work, family, culture – he is eloquent and assertive. When he is less certain – typically on the subject of himself – his voice rises slightly in inadvertent questions: 'I’m solitary [but] I don’t think that’s a good thing, I think I’m better in company?’ Or: 'I know that there’s this thinking capacity, which is possibly not a good thing?’

Tom William Hiddleston is 33 (on 9 February, to be precise), a middle child with one sister 15 months older, and another five years younger. His childhood sounds like a simple, pleasurable place. 'I have memories of climbing trees and watching The Snowman, with David Bowie introducing it in his snowman scarf.’ He starts to laugh. 'When I actually learned who David Bowie was, I was like, “That’s the man from The Snowman”. And people were: “Never say that again. That’s Ziggy Stardust. Shut up!”’

His parents are incredibly proud of him: 'It’s taken us a while to get there. It’s one of those conversations I don’t have with them, but I just know that they are [proud]. If we [he and his mother] start talking about it, we will both collapse in a heap of tears. It’s moving to make your mother proud.’

Growing up surrounded by women has had a glorious effect on his view of them. 'I believe in the strength and intelligence and sensitivity of women. My mother, my sisters [they] are strong. My mum is a strong woman and I love her for it.’ He is also – praise the Lord for men like Hiddleston – very romantic. When asked about love and relationships, he simply says, 'Honesty is a gift – to be honest about who you are and how you feel – because it encourages intimacy, and intimacy is really where’s it at. To be known and know someone is an amazing feeling, and you don’t get there if you’re pretending to be anyone else.’

Hiddleston voices Captain Hook in Disney’s Tinker Bell And The Pirate Fairy (out this month), and has a high-impact cameo in Muppets Most Wanted. But his next lead in a film is in an homage to both strong women and love. Only Lovers Left Alive is an enchanting, funny, somnolent Jim Jarmusch project in which he plays Adam, a 500-year-old vampire rock star with suicidal leanings. 'Adam is a delicate soul,’ says Tom. Adam is, indeed, delicate, but he is also (and this is where Tom’s gift for comedy comes into play) sweet and entirely useless, a reclusive musician suffering the despair of being eternal. Think undead My Chemical Romance fan. He stars opposite Tilda Swinton, who he says is just like her giddy, optimistic character, Eve. 'She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, and it’s seemingly effortless. She’s very, very warm. Tilda and I would be laughing sometimes and Jim would come in and say [he adopts a lazy Ohio drawl]: “Taaammmm, you smile a lot, man. And Adam doesn’t smile so much.”’ He also loved the purity of the love story. 'Adam is so deeply flawed, and depressive, and melancholic. But Eve just loves it, loves his commitment to it. We were trying to make a film about acceptance. And true love is an acceptance of someone else for who they are.’

So Hiddleston is clever, eloquent, charming, sensitive and earnest. But then there’s that other side, the spontaneous and silly side, best seen on YouTube, where he has become an inadvertent sensation due to the fact that 'I don’t know what my boundaries are, I just say yes to things’.

That’s how he ended up throwing some serious shapes on Alan Carr: Chatty Man, which, for the record, was 1) not planned: 'I promise I had no idea I was going to do that’; and 2) the genuine Hiddleston disco experience: 'If you asked me to dance now, it would be the same moves. That’s my dance.’ He can also be seen sing- ing Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror on Korean TV, because the talk show host asked him which part of his body he had most confidence in and he said his voice. (And, yes, he was tempted to say something smutty: 'I’m English, so I’m dirty.’) His own favourite clip features him teaching the Cookie Monster a lesson in delayed gratification. ('Are you saying if me wait, me going to get cookie?’) 'I’m proud that I’ve met him.

He’s the Cookie Monster, a cultural icon. My mum loves it and my niece loves it. She’s two years old and she thinks there’s nothing illogical about Uncle Tom speak- ing to the Cookie Monster.’

So when we meet for the second time, after he comes off stage at the Donmar, I am tempted to see if the no-boundaries thing is for real. There is beer involved (the man can drink) and a line of questioning veering from the absurd to the inappropriate. Put it this way, he’s a very good sport…

Annabel Brog: Will you throw me your best insults? 

Tom Hiddleston: [Laughs] Why are we doing the insult game?

AB: Just go with it, I can take it.

TH: Um. 'You utter, utter [with increasing emphasis], utter c**k’ is good.

AB: I just wondered if foul language, delivered beauti- fully, sounds less foul. Which, in fact, it does.

TH: When I get angry with myself, when I forget lines, I’ll be like, 'You absolute f **king f **k c**k b***ocks p**s f **k. You, you… f **ker’.

AB: You say that to yourself ?

TH: Yes.

AB: How do you feel afterwards?

TH: I feel better! The word f **k is enormously satisfying. 

AB: OK, I am going to describe teenage Tom to you and you are going to tell me how accurate I am.

TH: [Grins] OK.

AB: I’ve realised this may be quite insulting. Please remember it’s only a game.

TH: That’s totally fine. It may well be more favourable than the truth.

AB: Teenage Tom wasn’t uncomfortable with girls, but he didn’t get to touch one for quite some time. First kiss, 16.

TH: NO! [Emphatic] First kiss 10! Yes, 10 years old, tongues and everything. [Laughs] She was a huge crush, we were in the same class, a lot of note swap- ping, and eventually it all went down in a cricket pavilion on an autumn night. It was very thrilling.

AB: I got it so wrong.

TH: I was sometimes quite alarmed by friends of mine at school who didn’t have sisters, the way they treated girls, the way they spoke about them… I was like, 'Guys, they’re not aliens, they’re human beings.’

AB: You hear stories about Eton schoolboys, and the fan girls who line the cricket pitches when they play… TH: I don’t relate to that at all. I didn’t have a serious relationship until I was about 19. I fell head over heels in love and I was with her for two years, and it was an amazing relationship. So I don’t know who those girls are, who line the cricket pitches.

AB: How would you describe yourself as a boyfriend?

TH: Very honest, I hope. God, I don’t know. I hope I’m fun, I hope I’m a good time. Sponta- neous, surprising, affectionate? I hope, kind. Dancing… a lot of dancing. I insist upon dancing. Anywhere. Anytime. The more dancing, the better.

AB: [Referring to an incident last year when Tom, on a press call with Swinton for Only Lovers Left Alive, was photographed in a revealingly tight trousers] Cannes. Trousergate. Discuss.

TH: Trousergate?

AB: Please tell me you know what I am referring to.

TH: What are you… I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about. Cannes?

AB: Oh God, really? Oh no. OK, OK, shall we move on? 

TH: [Squeaky] What’s trousergate? [Clears throat] Trousergate…

AB: Maybe I should just get it up on the iPhone and show it to you.

TH: OK, get it up on the phone.

[AB types 'Tom Hiddleston Cannes’ into Google Images and hands him the phone]

TH: [Slowly] Ohhhhhh heavens…

AB: It has a Tumblr account and everything.

TH: Oh God. [Laughing but horrified] How monumentally shaming! What does one say to something like that? What do I say? Do I need to explain it? I don’t think I can.

AB: Would you like to move on from this subject? 

TH: Maybe. Yes…

AB: OK.

TH: [Determined] Look, I had a very interesting experience going to Cannes. An airplane in Heathrow caught fire and they shut down the whole airport. There were no tickets on Eurostar. All the flights from Gatwick were booked. So I got in a taxi and drove to Dover. I got on the ferry at 2am, with people on the booze cruise, and students going on hockey tours, got to Calais at 5am, another taxi to Paris airport, flew to Nice, landed about 11.30am, went through customs, got in another cab and drove to straight to THAT photo call, where THAT picture was taken, having changed in the car on the way there. So I think I look all right, for someone who’s been up all night.

AB: You look great. [Long pause] It’s just a shame no one’s looking at your face.

TH: [Laughs] They’re looking at Tilda! That’s what they’re looking at.

You can’t really profile Tom Hiddleston without going there on his looks. He is, in the flesh, a deter- mined and imposing physical presence. If you have seen his Coriolanus – raging with pride and betrayal – you will know this, and on the ELLE shoot it is evident most when we film him running. Hiddleston has a fine-looking run. He may look like a matinee idol; he may speak like a 19th century poet; but watch him run and you are suddenly very aware that he is 21st century man. It would be nice, I suggest, to see him in a role that’s unquestioningly modern. 'I would really like to,’ he says. 'I’m knocking at the door, honestly.’

As expected, he is game for anything on our shoot. He hurls plastic chairs across the warehouse, he sprints down Scrubs Lane, and he scares the crap out of the whole team by leaping over the railing of a 10-foot stair- case, which would have ended his Coriolanus run rather spectacularly if it went wrong. At the end of the day, Hiddleston is hard to pin down. He tells me a story,about a spontaneous, solo trip he took to Hawaii after he flew to LA to audition for a part he didn’t get.

'I went canoeing with whales, ran around the island, climbed the volcanoes. There's this beach where all the surfers go to challenge themselves, the waves are like 30 feet high, and I was introduced to this lifeguard by some landscape gardeners I met. We were watching these kite surfers and I was in awe, frankly, of their courage and I said, "Why would you do that? It's so dangerous." And he looked at me with this amazing, generous smile and said [adopts a US accent]: "They're just trying to answer the same question we're all trying to answer, man." And I said: "What question is that?" And he said: "Is it enough?"'

So there you have it. Tom Hiddleston: big talent, big laugh, big thinker, non-planner, great dancer. In his own beautifully phrased words, he is 'just as complex and contradictory as everyone on this planet'. Or, in our rather more base words, pretty damn hot.

[uta-no-knb]

FNAF 2 "Scariest Game Ever Made!" ~ (Akashi x Reader)

Part 2 of the Five Nights at Freddy's game. This time, the victim is...Akashi! Reason why will be explained at the end.

Note: Title is owned by Markiplier (all titles in the FNAF saga will be titles from his videos).

It was one of those rare moments in Akashi Seijuro's life; for once, he doesn't have to do any work in regards to his father's business. He walked into his room and sprawled out onto his bed. This was also a rare opportunity in his life; he was actually able to take a nap. Closing his eyes, he let out a sigh of relief as he started to slowly drift off into a slumber.

Yet, he couldn't help but get the feeling that this opportunity was to good to be true. Pushing that thought out of his mind, the red-head closed his eyes, slowly drifting off into a light slumber.

"Akashi!" You exclaimed, barging into your boyfriend's bedroom.

The red-head opened his eyes in shock, as he got up and sat normally on his bed.

....It was indeed to good to be true.

He looked up at you, his red eyes narrowing. "(Y/N). Was that really necessary?"

"I'm sorry Sei-chan. I just got excited and -"

"What if I had been changing?" he asked. A smirk appeared on his face as he saw your reaction; your face was bright red.

"N-not the point," you stuttered, turning your head away from him.

He chuckled. "What were you excited about, my empress?" he asked, motioning for you to come and sit next to him.

With a skip in your step, you plopped yourself down next to him. "Well, I want to play a game with you."

"You finally want to play Shogi?" he asked, excitement appearing in his voice.

"The day that happens, pigs will fly," you replied, rolling your eyes.

"Then does this game involve your laptop?" he asked, as you nodded excitedly. He sighed. "What is this game?"

At this point, you had hopped off the bed and were sitting on the floor, booting up your laptop. "A horror game," you said with a smile.

"....Which is?"

"Five Nights at Freddy's. " you said with a huge grin on your face.

Akashi's eyes widened a bit in surprise (you didn't notice because you aren't observant on reading people's body language). "No," the emperor said, lying back down on his bed. "You interrupted my nap so I could play a silly game like that with you?"

"B-but Sei-chan," you whimpered, only to be silenced.

"I said no, (Y/N). If you want to play a game, it should be one that stimulates your brain, not rot it."

"It's a strategic game," you pouted, looking into his red eyes. "You need to have patience and-" You paused when you realized something; something that could be used to your advantage.

"It's okay, Sei-chan. We don't have to play," you started, closing your laptop. "I mean, I'll just call Lola to let her know that she won the bet."

"Bet?" he asked, sitting back up again. "What kind of mischief are you and your best friend up to now?"

"Nothing major....yet," you replied, with a sheepish grin on her face. "We made a bet to see whether or not you would play the game because you were scared."

"I'm not scared of anything, (Y/N)," he replied, getting on the floor with her and opening up her laptop once again.

"Everyone's scared of something."

"The only thing that I am scared of is losing you to someone else," he said, taking his eyes off the screen and looking into your (e/c) eyes.

You smiled and kissed his forehead as you headed towards the door to turn off the lights.

"....Why are we playing in the dark?"

"I want to see you get scared."

The red-head chuckled. "Silly (Y/N)," he said, wrapping his arms around you so you were sitting in front of him.

The start-up screen turned on, revealing Bonnie, Chica and Freddy in their creepy states.

"What in the world? (Y/N), what kind of game is this?"

"You'll see," you said as you got out of his lap and resumed your place next to him. "

"These things-is this the second game? Wouldn't it make sense for me to play the first?"

"The first is too easy for you, Seijuro. I wanted to give you a challenge." You paused for a brief moment as Akashi moved the mouse cursor over the new game button. "Would you like a brief summary before you start?"

"Enlighten me," he replied, looking at you.

"You are the new nighttime security guard at the new and improved Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Your job is to monitor cameras and make sure nothing goes wrong after-hours. The previous guard has complained about "conditions"; namely, the characters trying to get into The Office(he has since been moved to day-shift). So to make your job easier, you've been provided with your very own empty Freddy Fazbear head, which should fool the animatronic characters into leaving you alone if they should accidentally enter your office." (1)

"...This game sounds-"

"Regardless," you said, cutting off the emperor "You sure you want to play this game, Sei-chan?"

"(Y/N), I'm playing. I will show you that nothing, and I mean nothing scares me. After all, I'm-"

"I know, 'you're absolute'.

The red-head smiled and turned his attention to the computer. "I'm not afraid of any bear."

Sei-chan, you have no idea what's in store for you

Night 1 12 AM

"Uh, hello and welcome to your new summer job at the new and improved Freddy Fazbear's Pizza," the guy on the voice recording said.

"Who is that?"

"No one knows," you chuckled.

Uh, I'm here to talk you through some of the things you can expect to see during your first week here and to help you get started down this new and exciting career path. Uh, now, I want you to forget anything you may have heard about the old location, you know. Uh, some people still have a somewhat negative impression of the company. Uh... that old restaurant was kind of left to rot for quite a while, but I want to reassure you, Fazbear Entertainment is committed to family fun and above all, safety. They've spent a small fortune on these new animatronics, uh, facial recognition, advanced mobility, they even let them walk around during the day. Isn't that neat? But most importantly, they're all tied into some kind of criminal database, so they can detect a predator a mile away. Heck, we should be paying them to guard you. Uh, now that being said, no new system's without its... kinks. Uh... you're only the second guard to work at that location. Uh, the first guy finished his week, but complained about... conditions. Uh, we switched him over to the day shift."

"Complaints? Why would I want to work somewhere that has complaints-"

You face-palmed, as the voice continued.

So hey, lucky you, right? Uh mainly he expressed concern that certain characters seemed to move around at night, and even attempted to get into his office. Now, from what we know, that should be impossible. Uh, that restaurant should be the safest place on earth. So while our engineers don't really have an explanation for this, the working theory is that... the robots were never given a proper "night mode". So when it gets quiet, they think they're in the wrong room, so then they go try to find where the people are, and in this case, that's your office.

"Ok so the animatronics come to life?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"So our temporary solution is this: there's a music box over by the Prize Counter, and it's rigged to be wound up remotely. So just, every once in a while, switch over to the Prize Counter video feed and wind it up for a few seconds. It doesn't seem to affect all of the animatronics, but it does affect... one of them."

"Wait, so that music box can only be used for one of the creatures?"

"Seijuro. Shush and listen to the man!" you exclaimed.

"Uh, and as for the rest of them, we have an even easier solution. You see, there may be a minor glitch in the system, something about robots seeing you as an endoskeleton without his costume on, and wanting to stuff you in a suit, so hey, we've given you an empty Freddy Fazbear head, problem solved! You can put it on anytime, and leave it on for as long as you want. Eventually anything that wandered in, will wander back out. Uh, something else worth mentioning is kind of the modern design of the building. You may have noticed there are no doors for you to close, heh. But hey, you have a light! And even though your flashlight can run out of power, the building cannot. So, don't worry about the place going dark. Well, I think that's it. Uh, you should be golden. Uh, check the lights, put on the Freddy head if you need to, uh, keep the music box wound up, piece of cake. Have a good night, and I'll talk to you tomorrow."

The call ended and you knew that the game has begun. ~~~~~~~~~~~~

Night 1 3 AM

Akashi was currently looking through the cameras, eventually landing on the room where Bonnie, Chica and Freddy are.

"...(Y/N), did one of them move?" he asked.

"Yup. Now you have to go around and try to find him."

"How do you know it's a boy?" he asked, as he panned over to party room three, where Bonnie was currently "hiding"; being accompanied by a guitar.

"I have my ways," you said.

"Lola?

"Shut up and play," you exclaimed as he chuckled.

The red-head turned his attention back to the game and moved the mouse over Party Room 4, only to jump slightly.

"What the hell is that?"

You laughed as you looked to the screen; Bonnie had chosen to appear in the party room, very close to the camera.

"That's Bonnie!" you exclaimed. "Did she scare ya?"

"No," he said, turning his attention back towards the security cameras.

Night 1

5 a.m.

Akashi continued to search the different rooms, and that was when you noticed one of the other animatronics was now on the loose.

Should I tell him? you asked yourself. I feel like I should, since that's what a good girlfriend who has played this game before should do. BUUUUUT, I'm not like other girls, so I don't think I will.

Turning your attention back to the screen, you saw that Bonnie was currently hiding in the right air vent. However, Akashi kept looking back at the cameras, not noticing that one of the other animatronics was out.

"Okay, I think I'm safe from that bunny," he said, as he went to the Party Cave to wind up the music box.

The moment he took the mouse off of the security cameras....

"What the hell?!" Akashi yelled, as he shoved the laptop off of his legs and scrambled backwards. "What the hell was that?! What jumped out at me?!"

You on the other hand were too busy rolling on the floor, laughing.

"(Y/N)," he started. "What. Was. That?"

"That..that was Chica," you said in between laughs. "One of the other animatronics."

"I swear I checked all of the rooms-and they were all accounted for," he mumbled, watching the screen return to the main menu.

"I told you. You need to have patience with these games, not to mention a strategy-"

"How was I supposed to know there were all sorts of things I had to look out for?"

"...If you weren't so busy talking while the phone call was going on, you would've heard the suggestions," you deadpanned. You then noticed that he had clicked on the "Continue" button. "You're going to play again?"

"...I'm not letting some damn chicken beat me," he said.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Next Day

You woke up in the Akashi mansion; since your boyfriend had your laptop, and you value your laptop as if it were your child, you wouldn't leave without it. Yawning, you got out of the bed in the guest room and headed over to his room.

I hope he slept last night, you thought as you opened the door to his room.

The moment the door opened, you didn't see him; his bed was perfectly made. Thinking that he might've gone out already, you turned to leave, only to stop at the sound of a mouse clicking. Walking over to the side of the bed, you sighed.

"Sei-chan! Did you sleep?!"

"No time for sleep," he said, in a low voice as he gazed intensly at the screen in front of him. "Must. Defeat. Bon-Bon." (2)

Bon-Bon?  You said to yourself. He's sounding a lot like Markiplier.

With a sigh, you sat next to him. The one thing about your boyfriend that irked you a bit was that he was stubborn; the moment he has a goal in mind or his mind set to something, he will not stop until he beats it.

"Sei-chan. You need to sleep-"

"When the game is over, (Y/N)," he said, in an almost robotic tone.

With a sigh, you left the room and made a phone call.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Ring! Ring)

"What's up slut!" a voice said from the other line.

You couldn't help but chuckle. Ever since you introduced her to a parody of the anime "Free!" called "50% Off", Lola would greet you with Thuggisa's catch phrase. (3.)

"Morning."

"Did you play?" She asked, her voice getting excited.

"We did. However," your voice trailed off, recalling what you had just walked in on a few minutes ago. "Seijuro didn't sleep at all last night. He-"

"I knew it! I win the bet!" she exclaimed. "Pay me-"

"Listen," you said, your voice getting serious. "He didn't sleep because he was playing the game all night."

There was a pause on the other line. "....Seriously?"

"Yup. I walked in on him this morning and he was still playing."

"What night is he on?"

".....would you believe me if I said he was still on night one?"

There was laughter on the other line. "Night one?! Priceless! That should be the easiest-"

"Apparently not for him. He-" You were cut off by a loud yell and the sound of glass breaking. "Gotta go. I'll see you tomorrow!" you said, hanging up and running back into the room.

"Sei-chan, what happened?" you asked frantically. You turned on the lights and the worried look on your face went away. You saw the red-head lying face down on his bed. "Sei?"

"I've been defeated," you heard him mumble as you walked closer to him. "I lost to a stupid bear."

You sat next to him and began to rub his back. "It's okay Seijuro," you said. "The second game is hard."

"There were too many things that I had to do! How are you supposed to do it?!"

"Patience is whats needed in these games-"

"There are more?" he asked, raising his head off of the bed.

You nodded. "Yup. The final game just came out a few weeks ago."

Akashi groaned. "Promise me we'll never play that game again, (Y/N)."

"...Don't be moody because you, the absolute Akashi lost-"

"...Never speak of this," he said, both of his red eyes narrowing.

You chuckled. "I won't," you said with a smile, as you bent down and quickly kissed his lips.

He looked at you with a smile. "Good. Now come join me."

You chuckled and you joined the red-head on the bed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OMAKE

"Why are your scissors in my laptop screen?!" you exclaimed, looking at your boyfriend.

There, on your laptop, were your boyfriend's signature red scissors, sticking out of the screen.

".....Bon-Bon jumped at me and I threw it at him."

"You're buying me a new laptop," you said with a sigh. "Go to sleep."

As Akashi brought you into his embrace, you snuggled into his chest and closed your eyes.

I'm never bringing my laptop over here again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Omake 2

A few hours later, you woke up once again and stretched. Looking over to your right, you expected to see your boyfriend sleeping next to you, only to find the bed empty. You then looked to the left. Akashi was sitting at his desk, doing work. A smile appeared on your lips as you went to lie down; however you paused and jolted back up. There was a screen in front of him and you heard the sound of clicking and rumbling.

"AKASHI SEIJURO! GET OFF OF THAT GAME!"

Incorrect Quote of the Scenario

Hanamiya: You're Furihata Kouki, correct? Furihata: Y-yes! What is it? Hanamiya: You should play Five Nights at Freddy's! I've heard it's really fun! It doesn't have jumpscares, extremely dimly lit rooms, or even animatronic dolls! Furihata: R-really? O-okay...

~Via @incorrectknb​

~~~~~~~ FOOTNOTES

(1) Info taken from the "Five Nights at Freddy's" Wiki Page

(2) "Bon-Bon" was said by Markiplier

(3) "50% Off/Thuggisa" ~ Octopimp

[ispinman-blog]

Fortune teller. Reading coffee grounds (Bahiras story). Bahira first, what a coffee cup you have! full of art and vibrant colors jumping from it, orange-yellow and red are everywhere. I am sensing you have a lot of competition, someone is competing with you, tall short hair curly hair tanned with a scar on his left arm I am sensing. It almost feels like HE is competing, but he is competing to draw your attention.

Your coffee is full of energy and very creative. Creativity pays off for you, and specially at the end of next year, around this time in November 2019. Your professional life and your personal life will come to a full circle by next year. Yes, as much as you can’t believe it, a huge project is in the works for you. Greater than you ever expect.

Bahira, a month and a half ago I sensed a person came into your life, out of nowhere, somehow this person is causing you right now some issues in which later they will develop to bigger ones. Be careful, do not commit as I see you stopping your career for this person.

If you want more details regarding this person, blonde fair hair color. This will stop you from stepping into your zone in the future as you might get comfortable. You constantly question a lot of things, I see your thoughts, somehow you are afraid to do some personal steps.

There is a great temple in your coffee, Bali or Thailand, get ready for this unexpected holiday soon. Somehow you are drawn to bananas, not sure if it’s in your diet or if you have an issue with eating bananas, but I see it as an issue. It is not very clear as I just start seeing this.

Money is all around as in you owe money (Who doesn’t these days), but with the new project I mentioned above, I see a study in something greater. This will happen the same time with the project next year.

Fortune teller

Between now and in the next 3 months I see 3 – 4 short trips, in 5 months I see a new car. You are somehow linked to a letter B, male, not from here, overseas. You will finally find love by next year, and things will be so different for you, that you won’t believe it.

This coffee reading is full of hope, love, caring, worrying for others a lot, somehow a little anxiety hits here and there, but everything will make sense when you will reach the top of the latter by next year.

You have psychic abilities, but I believe you don’t know how to control it. This has caused you judging people wrong. What I mean by that? You might think people are awesome, well not the ones who have approached you from the past. You seem to be so humble and give people your trust straight away, then people use you, and you get somewhat disappointed.

This is your turn off point in any relationship. Once you lost that sparkle and trust, you are pretty much gone. This is not negative in any way. Avoid seeing someone secretive at night, I can see that in the next few months.

I don’t want to shock you, but I might as well tell you, that I see you been wanting to have a kid, but that will come as I said with the relationship next year. You might say no right now but trust me it’s in your coffee cup. There is a minor renovation happening in the next month and a half, like a specific room getting renovated. I believe this is a project of yours you had for a while now and its coming to life.

Reading coffee grounds

Bahira you think that there won’t be any future for you, but boy oh boy, little do you know what’s around the corner for you! There is a secret superstar in your genes. I must be honest with you, this coffee is so blessed, amazing, vibrant, only your doubts are stopping you, and some particular people who don’t want you to succeed. The sky is your limit by the looks of things.

Either you or someone in your family will get fame. As I believe this is a superstar’s coffee cup. Only thing I would suggest don’t hold from the past, let it go and look ahead of you. As we all mature and learn from our life lessons, we can become better people, and trust me you are achieving this.

All you got to do is, sometimes don’t trust your gut feeling, as I believe you get to excited with people, and you don’t think clearly. I somehow hope that this reading made some sense to you. Any questions or comments please feel free to ask at the end of your coffee article.

All Readings will be published in English from now on, you can select your preferred language to translate and understand with Google Translate.

Please Note: COFFEE READINGS RULES, READ THEM PLEASE

If you are interested in a free coffee reading, simply attach 5 good quality photos and send them at admin@spin-man.com.

Due to large amounts of people sending me photos, I accept emails only Mondays. The selection is Random, and I will be emailing the person I chose to read via email with the article link.

PS: Due to respecting the privacy of everyone, I will be creating a random nickname that only the recipient will know. It is up to them, when commenting under the article to reveal their name.

Watch below how to flip a coffee cup for accurate reading

A little history of Tasseography (also known as tasseomancy or tassology) is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments.

The terms derive from the French word tasse (cup), which in turn derives from the Arabic loan-word into French tassa, and the Greek suffixes -graph (writing), -logy (study of), and -mancy (divination). Spring Pouchong tea (Chinese: 包種茶; pinyin: Bāozhòngchá) leaves that may be used for tasseography divination.

Source Wiki

Fortune teller. Reading coffee grounds (Bahiras story) Fortune teller. Reading coffee grounds (Bahiras story). Bahira first, what a coffee cup you have! full of art and vibrant colors jumping from it, orange-yellow and red are everywhere.