#a lot of them end in drafting hell until the day i finally stumble upon them when i go through my drafts again

[melverie]

To everyone that has ever tagged me in something to get my opinion, has sent me an ask, or anything else of the sort I just want to say

I am so sorry.

[moonyasnow]

Apple Skin: pulchritudomania chapter 2

super rough draft

Chapter 2 start

When she wakes up, not only is she still exhausted, she is so hungry…she hadn't had any lunch or supper the day before, and she had been running until the early hours of the morning. And now, again, she had nothing to eat. She keeps stumbling forward blindly, no idea where she's heading. Then close to dusk, she sees a light up ahead, indicating she is at the edge of the forest. She stumbles out of the forest…and sees a house. Instantly, she runs up and pounds on the door. No one answers. She tries it, and to her delight, it's unlocked. When she comes in, she sees bread, meat and a knife on the counter and immediately eats almost all of it. Finally having some food in her stomach again, she notices the kitchen is very messy, and takes it upon herself to clean everything in it, and so she does, thinking it's the least she could do to repay the people who live here for eating their bread and meat. She keeps cleaning the entire house, washing laundry and hanging it out to dry, cleaning the dishes and placing them all back in the cupboards, wiping down the table… Then she is exhausted. She remembers that there were seven different rooms she found that each had a bed. You then get a choice of which one to go sleep in.

Selection 【The room with a very big canopy bed】 Carmine 【The room with very thick curtains】 Arlie 【The room with lots of books and the unmade bed】 Damion 【The room with the lavish rug and covers】 Amber 【The room with the pile of letters】 Smith 【The room with the old stuffed animal】 Jazz 【The room with the rock collection】 Chris

Then we see the Dwarves all returning home after a long day of work. They see the lights are on inside, and there's smoke coming out of the chimney, and when they go closer, see the laundry hung up outside. They bicker back and forth about the intruder, and about all their kitchen utensils being in the cupboards. They then look around the house for the intruder. Then cut back to Snow's POV, and she wakes up to see the LI whose room she's asleep in next to the bed. This gives +1 affection and a small scene with the LI whose room you picked.

Then I'm thinking that we get a scene where Snow recognizes Carmine, and at his request Snow explains that she had run away from someone trying to kill her, and hadn't eaten in a long time so she found the door unlocked and ate some of their food, then cleaned to try to make up for it, and that she was just so exhausted that she ended up falling asleep. Then Carmine says that she can stay with them for as long as she needs. Ca - 'You can stay here for as lo- as long as you need, Princess Snowd-drop.' Most of the others seem surprised. Most of. D - 'So the Queen finally set her sights on her own daughter.' No one says anything at this, not seeming surprised by that particular piece of news, at least. Smith loudly objects to this, and Jazz tells him nicely to shut up. Sm - 'So you're just gonna ignore how she cleaned our personal spaces? She probably went through all out stuff!' D - 'Then we'll just check that nothing is missing.' Arlie says that what she's been through sounds awful, Jazz points out that they do have an empty room, Chris nods, and Amber says how it'll be nice to have a maid to clean the place up, complaining about how disgusting it otherwise gets.

Sm - 'Then why don't you just clean if you're so bothered by it? Lazy ass…' Am - 'Excuse me? I am not lazy! Here I am, breaking my back in the field—' J - 'Garden patch.' Am - '—every single day— unwillingly, but still graciously, doing so without complaint, might I add— to make the vegetables that you eat. It would be absurd to expect me to do any more than I already am!' D - 'Your tomatoes gave half of us food poisoning.' Ar - 'W-without complaint…?' J - 'Oh, go easy on him, you two. Poor little rich boy has never worked a day in his life! You can't expect it to be easy for him.' Sm - 'Then why the hell did we place him in charge of growing our food?! Ugh, just thinking about that tomato stew makes me want to hurl.' Am - 'I resent the implication that my crops are inedible! Have you considered that perhaps the cook is the guilty party? Spoiling the beautiful fruits, or rather vegetables, of my labor.' Sm - 'What— every single night?! We rotate, ya dolt!' Chris points at Amber, makes a gesture of eating food, then gives a thumbs up, all with a big smile on his face. Am - 'See? At least someone recognizes the majesty of my produce.' Ar - 'I wish I could have an iron stomach, too…'

Carmine sighs, and turns to Snow. Ca - 'I-I apo-apologize for them, your hi- your highness…' Sn - 'No, I don't mind. A-and please, there's no need to be formal; just call me Snow.' Ca - 'A-a-are you cer-certain?' He looks troubled. Sn - 'Yes. Please… If it becomes a habit for you, then you might accidentally say it to someone who could tell my mo— I mean, Her Majesty.' After a while of Carmine looking a bit uncomfortable, hemming and hawing, he relents. Ca - 'Very well… Now, I think it's b-b-best you get some sleep first, then we can discuss all the details of you s-staying here in the mo-orning.' Sn - 'Yes, thank you.' The others had kept arguing while Snow and Carmine spoke, and then Smith speaks up loud enough that it cuts into their conversation too. Sm - 'Anyway, I don't care if she's a Princess or what, the last thing we need is another mouth that can't feed itself.' Then he stalks off, giving Snow a glare as he goes. Carmine shows her to her room. It's a small room at the end of the hall with two big windows that also has two beds. He explains that any visiting patients he has who need to stay over a longer period sleep in here, though he'll move one of the beds into the room where he usually treats said patients as soon as he can, saying it was convient to move it since this room was a bit too far from the treatment room anyway, trying to make her feel less guilty.

The next morning when Snow wakes up she looks at her clothes and thinks of her uncle and of Schwartz, wondering about what everyone at the castle think might've happened She hears a knock at the door Sn - 'Oh, one moment, please!' She gets up out of bed and hurriedly throws on her oversized clothes, then rushes to open the door, cautiously peeking out J - 'Good morning, princess!' Jazz greets her cheerily with a big smile. He says he was coming to wake her up for breakfast, and they walk to the stairs, upon which Jazz says he has to go wake Damion up so she can go ahead. Noticing the silent question in her eyes at the name 'Damion', he answers: J - 'Oh, right! He's the quiet one with the braid, he needs help waking up now and then. He's not lazy or anything like that, just…has some sleep issues. Well! Seeya at breakfast!' Sn -'Ah, yes, see you.' Snow waves and starts to walk down the stairs. J - 'Oh, but-- it really wasn't all jokes last night; be careful around the vegetables.'

, and she says sorry for not waking up earlier to be able to help J - 'Hey now, don't sweat it! You just got here. In all honesty, I imagine Carmine's probably gonna give you the day off

Snow looks in his direction, obviously anxious Sn - 'Did…did I do something wrong?'

[seijorhi]

hello, i love your writing and was hoping if u could write a yandere kuroo x reader where he corners her in a corner and kenma is there and is getting off from it 😳 thank u !

Asdfghjkl this was supposed to be posted on Sunday I’m sorry, bby!! I hope it’s worth the wait! 💕 also, loved this request so thanks for sending it in 😊

Kuroo Tetsuro x Female Reader, Kenma Kozume x Female Reader

TW dub con, coercion (kinda?), stalking, humiliation

Helping Hand

There’s a certain peace you find in the looming stacks of the library after the sun sets. It’s quieter then, less people milling about. You don’t have to fight for space or books, and considering you have midterms soon and essays coming out of your ears, that makes it the perfect study environment.

It’s only a little after eight, the library’s still open for another two and a half hours, but on the fourth floor it’s almost a ghost town - just how you like it. There’s a professor tucked away in the back corner, piles of books built up around him, an older librarian with her trolley, slowly re-shelving books, and two other guys around your age sitting huddled at a table a few down from yours - the textbooks and highlights spread across their desk having been long since abandoned in favour of literally anything else.

Honestly, you’d wonder why they’d bother coming to the library at all if it wasn’t an almost daily occurrence. Most days you were there, so were they - usually together, although it wasn’t uncommon to see just one of them camped out between the stacks as you made your way to your desk. The duo, one tall and lean with a shock of messy dark hair that always looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, and the other smaller, more reserved, with bleached hair and dark roots in serious need of a touch up, seemed to prefer this time to study too - not that they ever seemed to actually do all that much studying.

Usually the blonde ends up absorbed in his switch while the other casually thumbs through whichever book is closest.

So long as they were quiet and didn’t disturb you, who were you to judge?

You don’t really remember when they’d started to appear, only that they’d quickly become a fixture in your refuge - distantly familiar presences like strangers travelling on the same bus to work each day. They smile (well, the dark haired one does) and nod whenever you happen to look up from your notes and catch their eye, and while you’ve only spoken a handful of words to the both of them, they always seemed nice. 

Nicer than the clearly overworked professor muttering away in the corner at any rate, which makes them the logical choice to approach when you find your bladder uncomfortably full halfway through your self imposed study session. Realistically, you know at this time of the night nobody else is likely to make their way up to the fourth floor, much less have any interest in your shitty, old laptop or the five whole dollars in your wallet - yet you find you making your way over to the twosome’s table anyway, a faint blush dusting across your cheeks.

“… don’t want to,” you overhear the blonde mutter, his attention wholly focused upon the game in his hands. “Things are fine, why change that?”

His friend sighs, “Because you can deny it all you want, but I know you better than that. I know I’m not the only one who wants more. You can’t just sit back and…” he trails off suddenly, hazel eyes flickering over to you in surprise. 

Confused by his friend’s sudden silence, the blonde lowers his game and glances up - only to still at the sight of you.

You swallow down your nerves, plastering what you hope is a friendly enough smile across your face, “Hi, uh… sorry to interrupt you guys, but would you mind watching my stuff for a few minutes while I go to the bathroom? I won’t be long or anything, I just don’t like leaving my stuff out in the open,” you say with a sheepish laugh, well aware that you’re rambling like an idiot. 

It’s the dark haired one who answers, a wide grin breaking across his face as he nods, “Yeah, no worries. We’d be glad to.”

You smile back, ignoring the faint fluttering in your stomach (he does look kind of cute grinning like that), thanking him again before rushing away in the direction of the bathroom.

It doesn’t take long for your thoughts to drift away from the duo back to the essay you’re mid-way through drafting. You have a sinking feeling that the argument you’re trying to use in the fourth paragraph is essentially a just rehash of the point you made in the first. By the time you unlock the stall door and make your way over to the sink to wash your hands, you’re starting to debate the merits of scrapping the whole thing and starting fresh with new ideas.

You still technically have time, it’s not due until the end of the month, but you just kind of want it done so you don’t have to think about it anymore. Then again, that’s kind of your feelings towards the semester as a whole. 

Who are you kidding? University’s kicking your ass this year.

The ancient hand dryer’s almost deafening as it clicks on - it masks the sound door swinging open and the footsteps that echo out from the tile floors.

It’s only when your eyes flicker up to mirror that you see that you’re no longer alone-

Standing right behind you is the guy from before; the tall, dark haired one. 

- and jerk in surprise, stumbling backwards with a choked yelp.

It doesn’t hit you right away - no, that’s relief that has you drawing a hand over your chest and letting out a shaking laugh. “You scared the hell out of me!” you say, bracing yourself over the sink to try and calm your breathing.

No, it doesn’t hit you quickly. Realisation is slow - creeping through your veins like ice as your eyes flicker back up the mirror. 

He hasn’t moved. 

He’s smiling, grinning really, but there’s something… something off about it. It doesn’t quite meet his eyes… Why isn’t he saying anything?

W-why isn’t he moving away?

Your heart, still hammering from his shock of his sudden appearance, squeezes uncomfortably and your eyes slowly widen.

“Wh-”

A rough, calloused palm slaps across your mouth, smothering whatever words you’d been about to speak. “Ah, ah. Gotta keep it down, sweetheart.”

He winks at you in the mirror, taking a tiny step towards you and you squeak, breathing in sharp, shallow pants through your nose as a warm, muscled chest presses against your back. “You’re a nervous little thing, aren’tcha?” he chuckles. “Relax a little - promise I don’t bite.”

With one hand wrapped around your lips the other creeping across your waist, his words don’t exactly bring you a lot of comfort. 

It makes no difference either way - you’re paralysed, shaking and trembling, but utterly unable to move as he noses at the column of your throat, his warm breath tickling your skin.

You could scream, but there’s no guarantee anybody would hear you. You could try and fight him off, but he’s taller than you, and you’re willing to bet stronger as well.

Will he hurt you if you try and resist?

Is he gonna hurt you anyway?

You’ve heard the stories before about men who follow women into empty bathrooms and the awful things they do, but you never...

Those things don’t happen in places like this. The library is supposed to be safe, he- he’s been-

Your stomach drops.

Weeks. 

He’s been visiting the library with his friend, sitting across from you for weeks.

His eyes bore into your reflection in the mirror like he can hear every terrified thought that passes through your head, and with excruciating slowness you’re forced to watch as his lips brush a kiss against your cheek, lingering and sweet - a mockery of tenderness. 

A scared little whimper is all you can manage, and even that is swallowed up by the sound of the bathroom door squeaking open once more. 

Your heart skips a beat, eyes widening.

A faint burst of hope flickers to life.

You might not be a fighter, but this might be the only chance you have. You shriek again, the sound woefully muffled, and writhe against your captor’s tightening grip as slow footsteps round the corner.

Please, you think as tears stream silently down your face. Please help me.

What little hope you have is quickly - brutally - extinguished as your would be saviour steps into view.

Your legs shake and you’re almost positive that if it wasn’t for the strong arms wrapped around you, you would have crumpled to the floor.

It’s his friend, the blonde, hands shoved into the pockets of his hoodie, watching the scene before him - you struggling against an iron grip, gagged and terrified - like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. 

Your captor chuckles, relaxing his grip as his hand drifts upwards to palm at your breast and you want to die. “Glad you finally decided to grace us with your presence.”

“Shut up, Kuroo,” the blonde groans as he makes his way over, but he barely glances at his friend before his catlike eyes come to rest on you.

Your cheeks are burning, a potent mix of shame, nausea and dread churning in your stomach as you’re crudely felt up, but under the blonde’s attention you freeze.

While his face is a blank mask of apathetic disinterest, those golden irises are piercing in their intensity as they study you.

The glint in his eyes is as unmistakable as it is stark; anticipation - like a house cat watching a golden canary flit restlessly in its cage.

The hiccuping sob comes unbidden, choking at your throat as you wail against the palm at your lips. You’ve never wanted to disappear so badly in your entire life, to slap yourself awake and realise that it’s nothing but a stress induced nightmare because this can’t be happening.

Why you?

What could you possibly have done to deserve this?

“Relax,” Kuroo repeats, leaning down over you again, “we’re not gonna hurt you. Just wanna have some fun, that’s all.” You think he’s going to try and kiss you again, but instead his tongue darts out and he licks at the silvery tear tracks, groaning softly.

You shoot the quiet blonde a desperate, pleading look. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop what’s happening, hasn’t done anything other than stare at you, but even as his lips twitch into the faintest hint of a smile you hold out on the shadow of a prayer that maybe, just maybe-

Kuroo follows your wide, panicked gaze and almost snorts. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, baby. Kenma’s not gonna help you. He wants this just as badly as I do.” His thumb slides across your cheek, brushing away more tears, “C’mon, on your knees.”

He doesn’t give you a choice - the hand on your shoulder forces your shaking knees to buckle and you fall down to the bathroom floor.

The tiles are cold against your bare legs, but the shivers that wrack through you have little to do with the temperature. It’s far too late to regret the short skirt you’d thrown on that morning.

Kuroo hums appreciatively, lifting his palm to tap it a few times against your cheek like you’re an adorable little puppy who’s just learned its first trick, “It’s a good look for you, baby, but I think it’d be even better without this-” his fingers tug at the collar of your top and his grin widens, “- in the way.” 

Yet he makes no move to take it off for you. One look into his eyes, the glittering amusement darkened with lewd desire and you know that he won’t.

He wants you to do it, to play along in their fun - to be an active participant in your own humiliation.

And really, what other choice do you have?

It’s impossible to ignore the bulge straining against his jeans as your trembling fingers grip the hem of your top and reluctantly yank it upwards. There’s a sharp inhale - Kuroo you think - and a whistle as it comes off, baring your lacy bra and the soft skin underneath to their hungry gazes. 

Only for a moment. 

Staring resolutely at the floor you’re quick to try and cover what little modesty you have left, bringing your arms up to wrap around your chest-

Except a hand catches at your wrist and tugs it back, and when you glance up you find it’s Kenma’s. 

“… Don’t,” he murmurs. “I want to see you.”

You let your arms drop, hands clenching into shaking fists in your lap, fingernails biting into your palm.

The sound of a zipper being pulled undone is almost deafening in the quiet bathroom. Fresh tears sting at your eyes, but you can’t bear to look at either of them as Kuroo reaches inside his pants and frees his cock.

The hand that cups your cheek is surprisingly gentle as he coaxes your face back towards him and the achingly hard member in his grip. “See Kenma, I told you - change ain’t always a bad thing.”

His dark eyes flicker back to you and he grins, “Open up, sweetheart.”

[twdbegins]

A Place to Stay

__

Simon x Nonbinary Reader

Warnings: Language.

Requested by: @the-schizotypal-cryptid

A/N: ALL MY DRAFTS ARE POSTEDDDDD EXCEPT FOR ONE COMING ON DEC. 2

Prompt: Could you consider doing a small story where Simon has to show the “newcomer” around the saviors camp? Only thing is, the newcomer isn’t staying.they own and manage their own self-sufficent camp and are only looking to provide for the Saviors so Simon has to be on best behavior. The .....reader? Is very, very quiet and Dark Academia like, yet for some reason likes Simon’s personality (and offers him a home on their camp- to keep him from getting in Trouble with negan.) basically Simon turns big- fanboy for this intimidating intelligent character. Could you use gender neutral terms? Like (they/them.) thank you for considering!! Have a great day! :) 

Word Count: 2,176

“Okay. So, what do you do around here that gave you the honor of giving this tour?”

__

They had immediately caught his attention. The moment he was tasked with showing them around the Sanctuary and getting them acquainted with the place, he knew something was special about them. He couldn’t quite place it yet, but he knew the question would be nagging at him until he figured it out. They were much more quiet than the people he was accustomed to. They weren’t like the loud, rowdy saviors that always had something to say at every moment of every day.

They were reserved and typically only spoke when spoken to. He knew right off the bat that they were also much more intelligent than the people he identified himself with. They weren’t much of a fighter, but they could persuade and talk themselves out of almost anything. They were mentally sharp and extremely quick when it came to verbal interaction.

They stumbled upon the Sanctuary by accident. They were curious to see what exactly was going on, because it had been awhile since they had seen such a large establishment. Who in the world had the nerve to attempt to run a place like this? Their question was quickly answered when they were caught by none other than the leader himself. Negan was an intimidating guy. They wouldn’t deny it in any way. Negan was intrigued by this mysterious person that had wandered to his precious camp. Their quietness and reservation from speaking was refreshing to him, because it seemed like everyone was always wanting to talk back to him. 

Before they could protest, he had ordered Simon to show them around the Sanctuary to get them situated. It was Negan’s official “grand tour” of the Sanctuary where they would be able to see most of the ins and outs of how things operated. Truth was, they wouldn’t be staying long. They had their own camp not too far away. As a matter of fact, their camp was a bit more satisfactory and successful than the Sanctuary. Although, they had no intention of telling Negan this. 

They were instantly attracted to Simon. Which was strange considering that they typically weren’t into the loud, strong men who were bursting with boisterous personality. They couldn’t explain it, but they were so drawn to his charisma and the way he interacted with them. They immediately had the intentions of providing these so called “Saviors” when needed. Negan surely needed more allies, so they couldn’t imagine him saying no. Their heart began to flutter at the thought of being able to see Simon on a regular basis. 

“So, here’s the main kitchen. There’s another one on the other side, but between you and me; this one is always cleaner and much more preferred.” He explained, leaning against the doorway as he watched them take a gander around the room.

They hadn’t seen a full and functional kitchen in God knows how long. They definitely needed to get Negan on their side. Simon watched as they shuffled around the room, running their hand on the countertops and gazing at all the appliances. 

“This might be a redundant question, but where are you from? You never said.” He questioned. 

They turned their attention back to him. This was the first time they had fully looked at him. He really was handsome now that they were actually looking at him. He himself took a moment to take in their features. They had such a beautifully soft look to them. They looked so comfortably kind and straight out of an ancient library or something. Not many people like that were walking around anymore. He found it reanimating to see someone so...natural.

“Well, I suppose now is a good time to tell you that I don’t plan on staying.” They said honestly.

Simon shrugged, his eyebrows darting upwards;

“I figured as much. You don’t quite seem like the type to stick around with a group like this.” He stated astutely.

They took that as a compliment, considering that they didn’t want to be considered a Savior. They followed Simon’s lead out of the kitchen as they continued their meander around the Sanctuary. 

“It was a bit of an accident. I sort of just ended up here.” They claimed.

“That doesn’t happen very often. The Sanctuary tends to only be found if someone is looking for it,” He replied; “And you still haven’t answered my question.” He grinned at them.

Their cheeks went hot at the way he smiled down at them. Damn, he wasn’t just the strong, loud type. He had a hell of a lot of charm in him too. 

“Right. Well, honestly, I’m from a little camp not too far from here. As a matter of fact, I was beginning to toy with the idea of some sort of...agreement.” They admitted.

Now this caught his ears. As vague as they were being, he knew exactly what they were saying. It had been awhile since the Sanctuary had a decent supplier to make deals and trades with. Oddly enough, Negan was rather picky when it came to things like that. He didn’t want to side with just anybody. He had to take a liking to the group as a whole and that didn’t always happen. If they were seriously offering some kind of agreement, then Simon needed to be on his best behavior. Not that he wouldn’t have been otherwise, but now the stakes were high. Simon always kept himself on the lookout for opportunities like this. He never knew when it could change the future for the Saviors. 

“You mean like a trade/supply deal?” Simon asked to clarify. 

They were surprised by his attentiveness. This man was full of all kinds of surprises. 

“Observant, aren’t you? And yes, that’s what I was referring to.” They answered simply. 

The wheels in his head were turning. He knew better than to jump at the shot before consulting with Negan. Although, Simon feared that he wouldn’t get this offer again. There had been one too many times where a good chance passed him by because he had to wait and consult with Negan. He didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity...but not exactly for the reasons he normally would.

“If you’re asking me for an answer now, then I definitely accept,” He confirmed; “Negan might be another story. He has the final word.” 

They nodded in understanding. They weren’t shocked at this. Negan surely came off as the type to always have the final say. They would deal with Negan on their own terms. 

“For now, consider the two of us allies, I’ll worry about him,” They declared; “Speaking of...”

Oh, boy. Here it comes. He knew it was only a matter of time before the 20 questions game all about Negan came rolling in. Negan always seemed to spark curiosity in everybody. They turned a corner to continue walking into another hallway;

“This Negan guy...what’s up with him?” They asked.

Simon hummed in uncertainty;

“What do you mean?” He asked; “What do you want to know about him?”

They pondered on how to phrase the next question. They could tell that Simon had a respect for Negan, but there was something about their relationship that struck them as odd.

“What’s his story? He seems rather forward.” They noted.

Simon had to be careful here. Despite how fascinated he was with them, he still wasn’t quite trusting of them. He never liked talking about his thoughts on Negan with someone he didn’t know well enough yet. However, they had been kind and patient, so they deserved an answer.

“Everything you see; the way the Sanctuary is now is all because of him. He...replaced the last guy who was head of this place.” He said beating around the truth.

Now he was the one who was being vague. Although, he expected nothing less than them to see right through his bullshit.

“You mean you? You were the one running this place.” They said.

He chuckled at himself for trying to pull a fast one on them. He stopped their trek and leaned his back against the wall;

“In a manner of speaking. It’s better off that way. I’d rather not get into it.” He abruptly ended the conversation. 

They weren’t pushy. They knew when someone was uncomfortable. So, they posed another question;

“Okay. So, what do you do around here that gave you the honor of giving this tour?” They asked cheekily.

They were feeling a sense of boldness that was unfamiliar. It was strange, but exciting.

“I’ve been called many things. Negan’s assistant, second in command, the vice president,” He rattled off; “But most refer to me as Negan’s right hand.” 

They were intrigued. A right-hand man typically did more than the person who they were the right hand to. 

“Impressive. If you can’t be the guy on top, then be his best man.” They said, continuing their walk.

Simon paused. He was a bit floored. No one ever looked at him that way. He had never thought of it that way. He was really starting to like them. 

“That’s one way to put it, yeah.” He recanted with a smile.

They were getting the notion that Simon didn’t really care for Negan. They could tell he wanted something different, or at least wanted to be under someone else’s rule. On top of this, the boldness that they were feeling was bubbling up fast and suddenly they were saying things before even processing it. 

“You know, we could always use an extra hand.” They said suggesting that Simon leave the Sanctuary.

They felt their heart skip a beat. Well, that sounded desperate. Simon looked to them with an amused look;

“It’s only been an hour and you’re already offering me a place to live? Sweetheart, you just might be the forward one here.” He laughed.

They were a little embarrassed at the outburst. What a weird thing to suggest so early on. Still, they committed and went on;

“It’s up to you. My offer stands.” 

This was when Simon realized just how influential they were starting to be on him. Normally, he’d deny it without a second thought. But just for a split second, he had considered it. He really did like the Sanctuary. He was overall content with his life, but even he had to wonder if there was something better waiting for him. It was something for him to think about. He would never abandon ship that quickly, no matter how attracted to them he was. 

“I appreciate it, but I don’t think Negan would take kindly to me leaving. I’m good where I am for now.” He kindly declined. 

He concluded the tour shortly after. Allowing them to give their final thoughts and impressions. They were interested in this place. Again, it had been a while since they had seen anything like it. A supply/trade deal would prove beneficial. They were able to have a private conversation with Negan after it was all done to discuss a possible meeting to go over the fine details. They spoke very highly of Simon and his work ethic, just in an attempt to score him some brownie points. 

Negan was pretty stoked to have this kind of offer on his table. It had been a long time since this had happened. Simon stood outside the door, arms crossed and feet crossed as he tried to listen in. The walls were just so damn thick. He was curious to see how this was going to play out. He definitely wanted to see them again. 

“Are you crushing on Simon?” Negan asked suddenly, noticing the way that they looked away when mentioning him.

“What? No.” They lied quickly.

Negan smirked;

“Oh, you so are. I’ll be fucking damned. I get a supplier and he gets someone who has an eye for him.” 

They blushed for what felt like the millionth time that day. It wasn’t really Negan’s business, but they couldn’t deny it if they made it so obvious. Negan eventually let it go, but he (for once) wasn’t thinking of just himself when accepting your offer. Despite all of Simon’s past mistakes, Negan was fond of his right-hand man. If he could score him a lover, then it was worth it. 

They exited the room in a scurry, not expecting to see Simon standing there. 

“What’s the verdict?” Simon asked with no knowledge of the other conversation that had just been had.

They felt themselves relax at the sight of him. Shit, did they really have it that bad?

“You can now consider me a part-time Savior.” They smiled proudly.

Simon’s heart did a little victory leap;

“Sweet. I look forward to seeing you around.” He charmed.

They nodded;

“Yeah, you too.” 

It had been an interesting day to say the least. Negan earned an ally, Simon found someone he wanted to be romantically involved with, and they just might have fallen in love.

This was only the beginning for the right-hand man’s newly found lover.

[writing-is-my-guilty-pleasure]

Patient || Kylo Ren/Ben Solo x Reader ~ Part 2

A/N: Part 2 in the series! Wasn’t expecting such a positive response from everyone! It’s the first fic I’ve written in nearly a year that I didn’t delete or lose motivation for halfway through! The other fics I’m putting out are old drafts that I’ve re-edited to make them decent! This isn't the last part by the way - Part 3 is being written!

Part 1 || Part 3 || Part 4

Main Masterlist

Star Wars Masterlist

You yawned as you entered in the code for the med-wing door, and entered the med-wing feeling exhausted, and very ready to go to sleep. You’d just begun to clean out and replace the medical equipment that you’d used on Kylo when you heard the sound of someone clearing their throat coming from behind you. You whipped around, clutching an empty syringe in your hand, only to see the majority of the medical staff watching you, almost eagerly.

“What the hell are you all doing here?” You exclaimed, half exasperation, half in relief that it hadn’t been anyone dangerous. You put the syringe down, and leaned back on the sink, folding your arms over your chest. “Shouldn’t you all be asleep? Our shifts are over.” 

“We wanted to know what happened!” Yasmyn piped up, admiration and slight awe in her eyes. “You’ve been gone for so long we started to think something had happened to you-” You raised your eyebrows in surprise. “But I kept telling everyone that you had to be doing something right, and you’d actually managed to knock some sense into him!” She grinned at you, practically bouncing on the spot in excitement. 

“Well I did finally get him to accept my help.” You admitted proudly, grinning back at her. “I used some choice words that I did think were going to get me fired, or worse..” You grimaced, and a few members of the team winced at your expense. “But he actually sat down without any complaints and let me help him.” You finished, and staying aware of the time, turned back around and continued to clean and put away equipment as fast as you could.

The rest of the team spent a few minutes congratulating you and discussing the events of the day amongst themselves, before they all began to clock out and heads to bed, and get ready for another day of work. Once Yasmyn had closed the door behind her, you were left alone, tidying up the last few pieces of equipment

“It was pretty cool what you did today.” You gasped in surprise, nearly dropping what you were holding, and turned around to see Tyro leaning against the wall next to the door. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” 

“Oh! It’s okay, I was just startled.” You chuckled nervously. “And thanks, I guess I was just tired and fed up with him refusing help so I just told him what he needed to hear but didn’t want to.” He laughed slightly at your words, and instead of smiling along with him, you felt unease stirring within you. There was something about Tyro that just didn’t feel right.

He pushed himself off the wall and strolled towards you, and you tightened your grip on the side of the counter you were leaning on so you didn’t make a beeline for the door, punch in the code and get the hell out of there. It was probably just because you were tired and  it was all in your head.

“You know, I always thought you were talented, and one of the more advanced medics onboard this ship.” He drawled, running a hand through his hair. “Aside from me, of course.” He said, looking rather smug. “I mean, if you were able to tame the great Kylo Ren, I can only imagine what else you’d be capable of.”

You felt your skin crawl as he spoke, but you hated being rude for no real apparent reason, and as much as you and Yasmyn made fun of Tyro on a regular basis, you didn’t want to get on his bad side - three weeks ago Tyro had beaten up one of the other medics so badly that they had to be excused from their duties for a week. 

“Oh, I don't know,” You said vaguely, avoiding eye contact. “I think it was a heat of the moment thing. I’d never normally snap at a patient like that, or anyone for that matter.” You said honestly, pretending to be very interested in your fingernails now.

“Hey, I wouldn’t either,” He replied. Liar. “And I like your honesty. In fact,” He was standing right in front of you now, and you swore you stopped breathing as he reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. “I think that I really like you.” That was it. You ran, practically punching in the code to the door, and as soon as it was open you ran back to your room, not looking back to see if Tyro was following you.

Once you reached your room, you made sure that the door was locked behind you, and you leaned back on the door for a few minutes, breathing deeply and allowing your heart to stop beating so loudly. You checked that the door was locked again, before heading into your bathroom, and turning on the shower. You could still feel Tyro’s hand on your cheek, and you felt itchy and uncomfortable as a result of Tyro being so close to you, so you spent a good 30 minutes in the shower scrubbing your skin with soap, trying to get rid of any traces of him.

The next day at your shift, Tyro acted as if the night before never happened, and if anyone noticed that you were quieter than usual, they didn’t say anything.

                                         ───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

The next encounter with Tyro was about a week later. It was the end of your shift and you were already back in your room, messaging Yasmyn on your pad, discussing the patients you’d had that day. 

It’s our day off tomorrow, you should come to my room so we can chat in person! We haven’t caught up in so long! - Yas

You considered her offer. On the one hand, you know you wouldn’t get to sleep until very late if you stayed in her room and you’d be tired tomorrow, but on the other hand, as Yasmyn said, it was your day off tomorrow and you hadn’t been able to catch up with Yasmyn in ages.

You win! I’ll be there in a bit x 

You signed off, and headed to your wardrobe to slip on a jumper, as it could get quite cold at night on the ship. You slipped your shoes on too, and you were just about to unlock your bedroom door when you heard what sounded like shuffling footsteps right outside your door. You swiped across the pad screen that doubled as a keypad, pulled up a camera feed of the hallway outside your room, and stopped your actions immediately when you saw who was outside your quarters. 

Tyro was standing with his hands in his pockets outside your room, every so often glancing down the corridor to check if anyone was coming, and a couple of times his eyes would flicker up to the camera and he’d smirk, as if he knew you would be watching. You felt sick to your stomach, as you knew there was no way you could leave your room without having to speak and interact with him - and who knows what he’d do if he locked himself in his room with you.

The only thing you could do was walk back to your bed, and comm Yasmyn to tell her that you ‘didn't feel well’ , and wouldn't be able to come over tonight, but you promised to make it up to her at some point in the future. After you did, you sat down on your bed heavily, trying to ignore how fast your heart was beating, and the flashes of fear that would sear through your body every few seconds. The fact that he was lurking outside your room made everything seem far too real - you’d thought the incident a week ago had just been a one time thing, and that he’d leave you alone once you had very clearly expressed you weren’t into him. 

You didn't sleep that night, getting up every hour or so to check your pad by the door, and even when Tyro finally left, you found that you were unable to relax and sleep, so you simply lay awake, staring at the ceiling until your clock told you that it was time for another day to start.

                                            ───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

When it was finally time for you to go back to work, you decided to take a different route to work. Even though the route would be a lot longer and would quite possibly make you late for your shift, you weren't going to risk being confronted by Tyro today, especially when you were alone.

This route makes a nice change, you thought absentmindedly, as you walked along various winding corridors. Well, as nice of a change as it could be - everything began to look the same after a while. You passed a few Stormtroopers in the corridors as you walked, and even caught a glimpse of General Hux entering a room to the left of you, probably for some important meeting. 

“What are you doing here?” You whipped around, stumbling slightly as you looked to see who had spoken to you. Who else could it be? No-one else had such a distorted voice upon the ship, and sure enough, it was Kylo Ren who had addressed you.

“Sir! My apologies, I didn't see you!” You weren't wrong - he seemed to have appeared out of nowhere; you could have sworn a few moments earlier there was nothing but shadows where he was currently stood. “And I’m just on my way to work, Sir.” You hastened to answer his question.

“And yet I see that this is particular route to your job takes you almost half an hour longer than the route that most medical officers take.” He stepped closer. “You do realise that your quarters were built with the purpose of being close to the med-wing incase there is an emergency? They were not built so that officers could take the longer, less efficient way to work.” 

“I-I understand, Sir.” You flushed in embarrassment. “I just-” You hesitated, not wanting to tell him about Tyro; he probably wouldn't care. “Fancied a change of scenery.” You finished rather lamely, avoiding the holes in his helmet where you knew his eyes were.

“Liar.” He replied almost instantly. You didn't think you were that bad of a liar, but you supposed that would be incredibly easy for him to slip into your mind and see the truth. "Tell the truth." His voice, so different to the one you'd heard a week ago, crackled throughout the corridor. You bit your lip nervously. You didn't want to get Tyro in trouble, no matter what he'd done: he was a valuable member of your team, and he could lose his job over this, and if Kylo found out and was in a particularly bad mood, Tyro might possibly end up injured, or worse. 

"Fine. I'm trying to avoid someone at work who has been... making me feel uncomfortable in our working environment and also outside our regular shifts." You fiddled with the hem of your shirt. "So I'm taking the longer route to work, as this person will already be busy by the time l get there, and hopefully most of my other colleagues will also have arrived." There was silence for a moment, before Kylo shrugged his massive shoulders.

"Conveniently, my business for today is located relatively close to where you need to be." He turned his head so that he was looking down at you. "It is only logical for us to walk there together."

You stared in slight surprise, but refrained from protesting as you realised that it the two of you stood around talking for much longer you'd be very noticeably late for your shift. "Well, if you're already headed that way then it would be rude of me to decline such an offer." You refrained from grinning outright, (it would have damaged Kylo's reputation if someone were to see that he was capable of showing human emotion) and instead sufficed for a small smile. "Lead the way, Sir."

The two of you set off down the corridor in silence for a while, and you found that you enjoyed Kylo's company more than you thought you would - you were never one for small talk, (something that wasn't really encouraged, especially amongst people of different statuses, such as Kylo and yourself) so you enjoyed the silence while it lasted.

"Who is it?" Kylo eventually broke the silence, but didn't cease his footsteps. "The person who is causing you such distress that you have to be late for work?" It was slightly unsettling how he could ask such a caring question, and still sound like he didn't really care at all.

"I'm afraid that information is classified, Sir." You said teasingly. "And yes, their behaviour has been unprofessional, but I have to acknowledge that they are an asset to our team, and we would be noticeably affected without them." You admitted reluctantly. "And please don't go into my head to see who it is - I'd rather tell you who it is when I'm ready." 

There was along pause after you spoke, and you could tell he was debating whether or not to order you to give him answer, use the Force to read your mind, or to respect your request. "Fine." He spoke eventually. You smiled in thanks, and the two of you continued on your way. “If I ordered it, would you tell me what action they have committed that has affected you this much?” 

You shook your head, your smile turning rueful. “This ordeal... it’s quite personal...I don’t think I’m ready to share such details, even if you commanded it, Sir.” You could see the med-wing at the end of the hallway now, and you felt slightly sad that your conversation, no matter how strange or short, would be coming to a close. “Thank you for walking me here, Sir.” You addressed him once you both had reached the doors of the med-wing. He only nodded in acknowledgment, before turning right and continuing down another corridor. “Have a good day!” You called out, before hurriedly punching in the code to the door, and slipped inside, not wanting to be any later. 

                                               ───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

It had been a couple of days since your walk with Kylo, and while events with Tyro had been relatively quiet, you’d still been taking the longer route to work just to feel safer. You’d actually begun to enjoy the walk - sure, you had to wake up earlier, but the longer walk allowed you to stretch your legs more and gave you more time to wake up so that you were fully aware and ready by the time you got to work. 

It had been another long and tiring shift, and this time you’d made sure not to be the last one in the med-wing, as you really didn't want to repeat the events that had happened previously. You bade goodbye to Yasmyn and a few other officers that were finishing up reports, and upon realising just how tired you were, you decided that it would be far easier to take the shorter route back. You didn't even register the risks of taking that usual route until you were halfway back to your room.

“You’ve been avoiding me.” You turned to see who the voice belonged to, but just as you had fully turned around you were pushed backwards, and hit the wall hard, causing you to gasp out both in shock and pain. 

“What the-” Your eyes widened in fear as Tyro loomed over you, leering at you. “Tyro, what are you doing?” You exclaimed, trying to pry his hands off you - one was pressed firmly on your shoulder, effectively pinning you against the wall, and the other braced against the wall behind you, caging you in. 

“I was trying to be nice, approaching you and complimenting you in the med-bay last week, and I tried to be polite, waiting outside your room instead of banging on the door and demanding entry, but you’re still being difficult.” Tyro’s teeth were gritted in frustration. “You could at least have told me you weren't interested instead of leading me on.”

“Leading you on??” You gaped at him. “You stalked me to my room, and stood outside it for hours! I was scared for my life, you creep!” You raised your voice slightly, hoping that somebody would be able to hear you. 

The air around you was filled with a loud ‘SMACK’ as Tyro slapped you, your head jerking painfully to the side, and you yelled in pain. “Bitch.” He snarled. “You talk far too much for anyone to truly tolerate you. Just because you tamed Kylo Ren, doesn't mean you’re superior to the rest of us.”

“I will always talk back if it means that people like you will leave me alone.” You glared stubbornly. “You have no right to put your hands on me!” You struggled to get free, attempting to tear his hands off you. “Mark my words, I’ll be bringing this up with the head medic-” You were cut off halfway through your sentence, as the hand that was previously braced on the wall moved to squeeze your throat hard, and you choked, hands now moving up to grasp the one at your throat.

“I said, shut. up!” Tyro’s teeth were gritted in anger, and he pressed harder on your throat. “And if you won’t, I’ll make you.” Your eyes widened in fear, and tried to kick him in protest, trying to prevent him from hurting you even more than he had, but nothing else happened.

What did happen, was that Tyro emitted a strangled cry, like he was being choked as you were. He let you go, and you slid down the wall to the floor, gasping for air, as Tyro staggered backwards, hands clutching at his own throat. You sat, staring at him in confusion and slight horror, your eyes darting up and down the hallway, trying to see what could have caused this - it was hard to try and help someone who was choking from an unseen force - but a part of you just felt relieved that he’d stopped touching you. 

‘Is this the one?’ Your eyes snapped up, brows furrowed in confusion, but eventually settled on your saviour. Kylo had his arm outstretched in Tyro’s direction, and your expression cleared slightly as you realised what the source of Tyro’s discomfort was. ‘The one who’ been causing you such stress?’ Kylo’s head was turned in your direction, and even though he had his helmet on, you could feel his gaze boring into you. 

‘I don't want him dead’, you thought, your heart pounding in your chest as you watched Tyro’s face grow redder and redder, and his eyes grew wide in fear and panic as Kylo drew nearer. No doubt Tyro had realised what was happening to him - there was only one person onboard the ship who would be able to do such a thing. 

There was a pause, and Tyro was released. He drew in big, gulping breaths, falling to his hands and knees as he coughed, massaging his throat with one hand.

“If I had my way, I would throw you out into space immediately for your actions.” Kylo stepped forwards, reached down and gripped the front of Tyro’s shirt, and lifted him off the ground so they were eye-level. “If it wasn't for your fellow officer, you would be dead. By the lack of oxygen in space or by my direct hand - it doesn't matter. If I hear that you have been treating any other crew members in this manner, I assure you, I will personally dispose of you.” Kylo’s voice echoed down the corridor, and even the helmet he wore could not conceal the evident disgust in his tone as he spoke to Tyro. “Do I make myself clear?” Tyro nodded, seemingly petrified. With that, he dropped Tyro, who immediately staggered to his feet, and sprinted down the corridor to where his room was stationed, tripping several times along the way. 

You finally stood up, feeling slightly shaky as you tried to process what the hell had just happened in the space of about ten minutes. Kylo turned to face you, raising his hands to his helmet and removing it while he did. 

“Thank you.” You breathed, leaning back against the wall, gently pressing your fingers against your throat, trying to assess if Tyro had done any damage without necessary medical equipment. “I don't know how far he would have gone if you hadn't saved me.” You met his gaze.

“He could have killed you. And yet you decide to spare his life, when he is not deserving of it.” He brushed aside your thanks, his eyes stormy. “He deserved more punishment than you gave him.” You looked away.

“My whole job is making sure that people don't die - it’s my job to save them.” You whispered. “Ordering Tyro’s death would go against my whole principal, even if this is the First Order.” 

Kylo stared at you, eyes calculating and unrevealing. “If not death, demotion will have to suffice.” He stated, clasping his hands behind his back, clasping his helmet in his left. You didn't dare protest - not that you wanted to; in any case, Tyro really deserved worse. 

“Yes, I suppose it will.” You smiled half-heartedly, still not being able to shake the feeling of Tyro’s hand around your neck, and the fact that if Kylo had taken a few more minutes to walk by, you’d probably be dead. 

“He won’t bother you any more.” Kylo’s voice filled you with a surprising sense of calm. It was quite a soothing voice when it wasn't giving out death sentences or uttering life threats. “He knows what will be done to him if he does.” You nodded, rocking back and forth on your heels.

“I should probably head back to my room.” You sighed, rubbing a hand over your face. “I need a hot shower and to go to bed. And proceed to lock my door behind me when I get to my room.” 

“I will accompany you there.” His tone suggested that it would be futile to argue with him. You let out a short laugh, and shrugged, the two of you starting to walk.

“Suit yourself. I’m not the best company - I thought that I spoke enough to not be too invasive but obviously Tyro thinks I talk too much, so I’m apparently just confusing.” 

“Nonsense. Nobody wants company who talks constantly - it’s annoying. He was obviously not used to being rejected, although I can’t see why he has been anything but. Force knows why he was appointed here.” Kylo dismissed your doubts instantly, never taking his eyes off your destination. 

“Thanks. Again.” Your smile was noticeably brighter now - having Kylo Ren’s approval was no easy feat to gain. The two of you walked in a somewhat peaceful silence until you reached the door to your room. “This is me.” You gestured rather lamely to your door. “Really, Sir, thank you for everything. If you hadn't appeared when you did, I probably wouldn't be here right now.” 

As expected, Kylo didn't give you much of a reply, except an abrupt nod of his head, and an impassive, “Think nothing of it.”.  He turned on his heel, slotting his helmet back over his head. “You look terrible. I expect your day will be as busy as usual tomorrow - rest is essential to a job such as yours.”

You shook your head in amusement, unlocking your door and locking it again as soon as you slipped inside and the door had closed. A strange coincidence that he found me, you thought absentmindedly as you stood under the warm jets of water in your shower. Almost too strange, you frowned slightly as you turned off the shower and wrapped a towel around you, grabbing your pyjamas as you got ready for bed. You mulled over the idea that Kylo Ren might possibly have been following you around the base as you drifted off to sleep, following his advice to rest in preparation for another day.

[kayteewritessteve]

Fated - 2/8

Description: You’re a rogue werewolf, a bounty hunter. It’s not the most glamourous life, but it keeps you paid well and highly entertained. But when a long time acquaintance resurfaces with a mission and a lot of money to throw around, you finally relent and take a job from him. And then things get crazy when you stumble upon your Fated Mate along the way.

Catch up HERE.

Word Count: 6,000 ish.

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Werewolf!Reader

Rating: PG.

Warnings: Curse words. Sassy comments. Depictions of fight scenes and fighting, the same as canon stuffs.

A/N: I sadly don’t own any of these characters. And no beta reader, so I do proudly own all the errors and this story, so there’s that.

Sorry lovelies! I know you probably all thought this was the L&W update. Which is almost done and should be up in the next day or two. But I just haven’t had much time to write the last few days. And happened to have this part basically done in my drafts, so figured I’d just post it as my blog has been dead the last few days! And I don’t like it! Hahaha anywho, hope you guys like this part!

The large blonde instantly halts his steps, giving you a once over and then his face morphs into one of curiosity, one of intrigue, as he tips his head slightly, just assessing you. Everyone else in the room is deathly quiet, just looking between the two of you. You assume they are all just studying this whole weird interaction as it unfolds.

But not like you are actually paying much attention to anyone but the large man before you.

‘Mark him! We need to Mark him now!’ She excitedly commands but you shush her, needing a moment to just take this all in.

You’d began to assume you didn’t actually have a True Mate, as you’d yet to find them. And most wolves found them young, somewhere between the ages of 16-20. And you’d even travelled around with your Alpha to all the nearby packs often, whenever he needed to seek out alliances or reform territory treaties. And yet nothing. No Fated Mate in sight.

You’d met so many different wolves in your life, and yet not one turned out to be your Mate. But this, this human is. You never would have seen that coming. Yes, he was fucking hot as hell, and much larger than yourself, but WHAT THE HELL WAS THE MOON GODDESS THINKING?!? Pairing you with a fucking human.

‘He’s perfect,’ your wolf sighs out dreamily in your head. Whelp, looks like she’s already on board with this all.

A movement beside him causes your eyes to instantly snap in that direction. And what they land on makes your heart break, instantly. And your instincts to protect your Mate, kick into high gear. And before you can stop it, a deep menacing growl unleashes from deep within your chest.

All eyes snap instantly to you, but yours are locked on the small brunette who now has her hands on your Mate. Her hands clasping his forearm, possessively.

“Babe, who’s the new girl?” She whispers, glancing up at your Mate. And you instantly want to rip her eyes out for just looking at him. And you aren’t even going to acknowledge, or put to words, the bloody thought you just had about what you’d do to her, just for calling him ‘Babe’.

‘I’m going to kill her,’ your wolf growls out and you can feel her trying to take control. And so much for not acknowledging your bloody thought, as it definitely ended with that outcome. You watch as the nails on your fingers begin to elongate, starting to change into claws. You quickly shove your hands in your pockets to hide them.

‘Stop! Stop it!’ You command your wolf but she doesn’t appear to give one shit about that. ‘I’m willing to bet that none of these people even know werewolves exist! and you not only want to shift in front of them, but also rip their friend apart! Are you insane?!’ You yell at her in your head, but she is still trying to push through. And it is taking everything in you to maintain control here, but her need to not only protect, but CLAIM, your True Mate is making that fucking difficult. To say the least. So time to bring out the big guns, time to hit her where it hurts. ‘And on top of all of that, think of Steve, he will NEVER forgive us for that. And you know it. You hurt her, and we can kiss our chances with him, goodbye. And I mean forever!’

She halts instantly at your words, and you feel as the claws retract back and are replaced by your human nails. You release a deep sigh, relieved that she relented. If the Steve line hadn’t worked, that woman would have been dead within seconds. And you’d never stand a chance at winning him over after that. You’d never stand a chance at even having him in your life at all, after that.

He snaps his eyes down to her, a frown on his face, and you get the distinct feeling that he hadn’t even noticed she was in the room, let alone now hanging off his arm. He quickly corrects his expression, and smiles at her, though you can tell it’s forced.

“Y/N!” You hear Fury yell and you cringe. Of course he’d find you right freaking now. Of all times. Damnit!

He enters the room and glances around at everyone just standing there, silent. Then his eyes lock on you, “where the hell did you go?”

“Been here the whole time, Kakashi,” you shrug, hearing Tony snort to himself at your Naruto reference. “I’m honestly surprised it took you so long to find me. You, more than anyone, should know that I’m highly food motivated and would obviously end up in a kitchen.”

He shakes his head but ignores everything you’ve just said. “Let’s go,” he orders, “you need to be briefed on the mission, so you are on the same page as the rest of the team.”

“Can I at least eat first?” You cross your arms.

“No, briefing first, then food,” he sternly says and then promptly exits the room. He sure does like to just order people around and then walk away before they can reply. Which is just still so fucking rude.

‘Now follow me here,’ your wolf starts, getting your attention. ‘What if we eat him, then it can be a briefing AND food. Win, win.’

You snort at that. And notice as Buck leans towards you slightly, whispering, “I’ll bring the steak in when it’s done, Doll.”

You groan happily, and glance at him, “now you’re my new favourite person in the whole of New York. Name anyone you don’t like or want dead, and I’ll happily take them out, just for you,” you wink at him. And receive a chuckle in response as he shakes his head and goes back to cooking.

Your eyes drift to Steve once again. Noticing the small chick on his arm is now blabbering on and on, probably about absolutely nothing. But he isn’t paying much attention to her, his eyes are locked on you, that curious look no longer on his face. But still very much in his eyes, as they glance between you and Bucky. Probably trying to figure out if you two know each other, or have some sort of deeper relationship.

You smile at him as you walk towards him, he quickly moves out of the way, pulling the ridiculous brunette along with him as he does. You nod as a thanks to him and then exit the room, glancing over your shoulder at him as you do, and seeing that his eyes don’t leave you once. Watching you as you go, until you both can’t see each other anymore.

He isn’t a werewolf, so there is no one to inform him that you are his True Mate. But the Mate Bond is an intense thing. Even humans feel the effects of it, instantly, upon setting eyes in their werewolf Mate. Though it isn’t anywhere near as intense to them and it is to your kind.

To them it just feels like this need to know you, to befriend you, to just keep you close. Which, yes, those are all feelings your kind have as well, just in a much, much grander scale and also accompanied with the need to love, protect and Mark and Mate them, instantly. To make them yours and only yours, forever. To show every other wolf that they belong to you, just as you belong to them. It’s like marking your territory, if that territory was a living being instead of land.

Wolf on wolf Mates will usually Mark and Mate within hours of meeting each other, the pull being so strong that they can’t, and don’t want to fight it. But with a human Mate, it’s a lot more difficult, more delicate. You have to tread lightly, build up to that. First you’ll most likely need to open their eyes to the fact that Werewolves actually do exist, which doesn’t usually go too well.

And then you have to slowly build up to the whole Marking thing. First explaining Fated Mates and the Moon Goddess, and then informing them that they are yours. Which also usually doesn’t go well.

And then they have to slowly become used to the idea, to you being ‘it’ for them. And there is this little law—sort of—amongst your kind which states that you can’t Mark a human without their verbal permission. But it’s also the same for Wolf Mates. They have to consent to the Marking or it won’t take, it will just fester and rot, and hurt like a bitch. It can get infected without proper care, but if it is taken care of, it will eventually heal naturally, and there will be nothing left on the skin. No mark, no scar, no signs at all that there had even been a bite there once. That there had even been an attempt at a Mark.

So yeah, him being a human wasn’t going to be easy for you in the first place. But then add the fact he clearly already has a girlfriend, into the mix. Yeah, no, this would be damn near impossible. You sigh deeply as you continue to follow your nose to Fury, following his scent in the air to wherever he stomped off to. Completely and utterly disheartened by this insane turn of events. And honestly, why you?!

‘Us,’ your wolf corrects, sounding just as forlorn as you. But you knew she would be, wolves take Mates waaaay more seriously than their human counterparts. Mates are sacred to them, just as they are to the human side, but on a completely different level.

The human side can deal with the rejection or death of a Fated Mate, they can live on passed it. The human side has to build up to loving their Mate, the feelings are similar to regular human on human love. Though they do feel instantly protective and possessive, but the love takes time to form.

However wolves, they bond instantly. With wolf on wolf pairings, the two wolves instantly love each other. But with a human Mate, there is no Wolf to bond with, so that feeling is passed to the humans themselves. It’s instantaneous, so much so that a wolf basically dies without their Mate. Not literally, but spiritually. They usually become recluses, receding deep within the human’s mind. They don’t talk much, if ever. They refuse to allow you to shift into them. And they basically just cease to exist altogether. Still there, but not present. It’s really not a fun thing to go through for either party involved.

The human loses that constant companion, the creature they have always been able to talk to��well, at least since the moment the wolf first appeared in their mind, on their 16th birthday. 16 being the age a werewolf shifts for the first time. But ever since that moment, they become your closest friend, your strongest ally, your fiercest protector. They become everything to you.

So to one day wake up and no longer have them around, is usually almost more heartbreaking to the human side, then actually losing their Mate is. Almost.

You finally find the boardroom Fury is occupying and slowly trudge in, heading for a chair. You flop yourself down into it with a sigh, you know you need to focus on what Fury is about to tell you. But your mind is entirely preoccupied with your current Mate dilemma. If he rejects you, your life as you know it is over. But if you reject him first, you may stand a shot at your wolf getting through this unscathed. Even if just slightly. But it’s still a much better option than losing her completely.

‘We are not, and will not be doing that,’ she growls. ‘He is ours and we will make it so.’

‘You don’t get it,’ you sigh, ‘he isn’t ours. Yes, he is our Mate, but he belongs to someone else. Humans don’t usually take to these things the same as us. Not at first, at least. But if we reject him formally, maybe we stand a chance of not getting so hurt.’

‘No! I won’t let you do that!’ She stomps her foot.

Fury begins to start talking and you quickly attempt to shelf this conversation. ‘We will talk more about this later,” you sternly say. Much like a parent scolding their child.

She huffs angrily but doesn’t say anything more. You sigh relieved and try to focus your attention on the briefing now. You really need to know exactly why you’re here, and just what you’ll be walking into on this mission.

You walk out of the large glass encased boardroom, the dirty plate and utensils in your hand. Bucky had shown up about 15 minutes after Fury started talking, a plate with a glorious smelling and looking steak in his hand. Your mouth watered instantly and you quickly thanked him. Fury didn’t look too pleased by all of this, but he didn’t say a word, probably just happy that maybe now you’d be able to actually focus.

Which you sort of did. Your mind was still overthinking everything, but you’d managed to catch all the important parts. Basically some high up Hydra goon, named Heinrich, was set on world domination and destruction. You didn’t even realize Hydra was still around, but turns out they were. The American government was just covering it up all this time, and using the Avengers to handle the situation both efficiently and quietly. However, this goon was posing to be a bit more of an issue.

He was a little too good at avoiding the heroes. At hiding from them. He’d gone underground but was still very much calling the shots and moving the plans forward from wherever he was. Nat had managed to track him down a few times already, but just as they’d move in to take him down, he’d escape. He’d get away every time as if he’d been tipped off of their imminent arrival.

So that’s where you come in, not only did they need you to track him down. As all of Nat’s leads and intel kept coming up short or were going stale, and fast. But then when they did actually pan out, he was always a step ahead. Always outsmarting them.

So you were to track, hunt and capture him, with the help of the Avengers, and as fast as you could. Since they had intel that he was going to enact his plans in 2 weeks time. So you had until then to not only find and stop him, but to save the whole fucking world as well. Goddess, what the hell did you just sign yourself up for!?

You shake your head as you enter back into the living space, heading towards the sink to clean your dirty dishes. Mind still all over the damn place with everything that’s happened in the last 24 hours.

You reach the sink, turning on the water and a smell hits your nose, instantly making you perk up. And your wolf, who had been giving you the silent treatment since your little argument earlier, finally reappears.

‘He’s here,’ she says in a happy, sing song voice. And you groan inwardly. Perfect, that’s just what you need right now. Ha! Not.

“Ah hey,” comes his soft, sexy voice from behind you, and a pleasant shiver runs down your spin. His voice quiet, as if he was worried about startling you. If only he knew what you were. That you could smell him in the room, could damn near sense his presence.

You glance over your shoulder, continuing to wash the dirty plate in the sink. “H-hey, Capsical,” you stutter out, instantly wanting to smack yourself upside the damn head. Smooth move, exlax!

Your eyes snap back to the sink, needing to focus on something other than the incessant need to jump him, right here, right now.

‘I vote we do exactly that,’ she offers, being her super helpful self, as always—Note the sarcasm.

You go to sigh frustratedly but the deep chuckle behind you halts that action. You flick your eyes back to him, and the sight makes your heart sore. He looks ridiculously handsome when he laughs, but of course he would. This is just your luck.

He takes a few large strides towards you. “It’s just Steve,” he says as he offers his hand out to you.

You furrow your brows, “oh, but the Stark guy said,” you trail off, confused.

“Yeah, Tony,” his free hand rubs the back of his neck. “He always likes to mess with me,” he gives you a small smile, but his eyes are down, looking at his still outstretched hand. That you’d completely forgotten that he’d offered you! Fuck!

‘Get it together woman! You are ruining this for us!’ Your wolf scolds you.

You quickly place the plate down in the sink, whipping your hands on your jeans, and then taking his large offered hand in your own. “It’s nice to um, to meet you, Steve,” you nod, shaking his hand as sparks shoot up your arm. “I’m Y/N.”

He continues to just stare at your joined hands, and your curious what it feels like to him. What touching you, his Mate, is like. You know the feelings coursing through your own body in this moment, the warmth, the sparks, the tingles. They all feel so amazing to you, but your senses are more heightened than his.

You quickly remove your hand from his, taking a step back. His smell is intoxicating, his nearness is driving you wild, and his touch is warming you in places no creature should be warmed, by just a mere handshake alone. Goddess, it is not going to be easy to stay away from this man. Not one freaking bit.

You turn back to the sink, just before he softly says your name, “Y/N.” As if tasting it on his lips, and his voice saying it makes your knees feel weak. Makes your heart race. Makes your skin heat up. “That’s a beautiful name.”

‘I say we just kill the girl and keep him forever.’

‘Shhh, you aren’t helping. At all,’ you say back to her, needing her to just zip it for right now. Just till you can get a handle on your stupid body.

“Thanks, my mom picked it out,” you shrug one shoulder, hoping it looks nonchalant. But who are you kidding, you know it probably didn’t.

You begin to wash the plate again, even though it is already clean, but you just need the damn distraction. Even more now.

You hear a barstool being pulled out, and almost groan loudly in discontent. Almost. Can’t he just leave already?! Why does he insist on staying here, flustering the hell out of you. You’re a strong woman, but you have your limits. And this, this is bordering on those damn limits.

“Can I ask you something?” He starts, unsurely, and you just hum, nodding for him to ‘go ahead’. All while still washing this stupid, now super clean, plate. “Why um,” he clears his throat awkwardly, “where did Fury find you?”

You glance back at him, quirking a brow, knowing full well that that was not what he was about to ask. What he was really wanting to ask. But you let it slide, knowing he’d ask you in his own time. So you just shrug and turn back to the sink, “known Fury for years. First bumped into him on a job a while back, we were hunting the same guy. He liked my,” you pause, scrunching up your nose as you aren’t entirely ready to drop the werewolf bomb just yet, “skills, I guess. He offered me a job with the little team you got here, I declined. And he has just sort of popped up here and there over the years. Offering me new missions every time, each with larger incentives, probably in the hopes I’d finally say yes.”

“Really?” He questions.

“Mhmm,” you nod.

“What made you say yes this time?”

You take a second to think about that. “Um, honestly,” you place the plate in the sink and turn to face him. Resting against the countertop and crossing your arms, “the money. I won’t lie and say I’m on this mission for honourable reasons. I don’t pretend to be the good guy.” You shrug, “I agreed to do this entirely for the payday at the end. Then when it’s all done, I’ll take my money and go back to my normal life.” You finish, and though your words came out confident sounding, your heart aches immensely at the thought of leaving Steve behind. At going back to your normal life, where he won’t be. You just met him, but already you feel like you can’t live without him. Fuck, you’re doomed. So utterly doomed.

‘We can’t leave now, and you know it,’ your wolf rolls her eyes at you. ‘Plus look at him, how could we walk away from that face!’

He nods slowly, a small frown on his face. One that breaks your heart, and makes you instantly want to cheer him up. Just to get that frown off his lovely lips. “You wouldn’t want to stay after? To join the team, I mean?” He asks quietly, hesitantly.

You sigh, looking down at the floor. Of course you’d want to stay. Fuck, you’d be okay with just moving directly into his room right now. If, if it wasn’t for that brunette. You aren’t a home wrecker. As much as you desperately want to be, you just aren’t. You wouldn’t want whatever beautiful love story you both were destined for, to start out like, like that.

“I honestly don’t know. I like my job,” you shake your head, “I love it actually. It gives me freedom, excitement, something to accomplish entirely on me own. I don’t have to rely on anyone. I just,” you shrug, “I work better on my own now. I’m better off alone now.”

And no matter how many times you say those words aloud, you still don’t really, truly believe them. You are a pack animal by nature, your kind strive to have that connection, the sense of a family. Being a rogue isn’t natural for you, it’s not the way you are wired.

But you can’t go back to your old pack, and most others wouldn’t even hear you out, if you approached them asking to join. Know one cares that you were the toughest warrior in your pack, no one cares that your loyalty track record was perfectly intact. That you’d never once wavered on orders or respect for you true Alpha. No one cares that you were a model pack member before the take over.

They just don’t care. All they care about is that when the new Alpha took over, you refused to accept him, to swear allegiance to him. To that monster. You may not like being a rogue, being packless, but even if you had to go back and relive that horrible moment over and over again, you’d still make the same decision every time. Without question.

“No one truly likes being alone,” Steve says softly, almost knowingly, like he could read your thoughts at this exact moment. But you know he can’t, it’s more likely that he is reading your current body language. Which you know is probably as easy to read as a dang book right now. You’re willing to bet that you’re currently giving off apprehensive, closed off, wary, and maybe even a little disheartened vibes at the moment.

“But being on this team,” he starts, “it’s like a family. We are all misfits in our on ways, we all have dark backgrounds. Or moments from our pasts that we aren’t proud of. But I believe that’s why we are all so happy here, that’s why this team works so well.” He shrugs, “because we all had nowhere else to go, and nothing to lose by being here,” he finishes, giving you a small, sweet smile, that makes you inwardly swoon.

‘Well, we’re sold. Where do we sign up?’

“And here Mike Wazowski said y’all weren’t trying to recruit me,” you playfully scoff, shaking your head. But you can’t stop the smile from forming on your lips, not one bit. And so much for having a poker face with this man.

‘Good. Now someone else can see through your bullshit,’ your wolf snarks, and you almost gasp in feigned and/or slightly real offence. You can’t really be too sure which.

He throws his hands up in mock surrender and chuckles lightly. And yup, that’s your new favourite sound. Hands down. “Not recruiting. Just saying ya don’t gotta go it alone,” he shrugs one shoulder, “if ya don’t want to, that is.”

You nod slowly, and honestly you don’t really want to be alone anymore. You miss having people to watch out for, people watching out for you. You miss having that feeling of family, of support, of love. You force a smirk, and you’re 100% sure he can tell it’s fake, “I’ll take it under advisement.”

He just nods, a knowing smile playing on his lips, but he doesn’t push the conversation any further. “So, Y/N, tell me about yourself?”

You glance down at your feet, arms still crossed over your chest as you shrug. “Not much to tell.”

“Now I don’t believe that,” he chuckles softly again. And damnit, if he could just stop doing that, it’s really fucking with you. “There is obviously a story here,” he gestures to your form. “Fury doesn’t just hound people for years, for nothing,” he shakes his head, quirking a brow at you. “Ex-military? Ex-cop? I’m just curious what you did to end up on Fury’s radar, is all.”

‘That Mate pull though,’ your wolf giggles out excitedly. ‘He wants to get to know us. Give him something, anything. I beg you!’

You sigh at your wolf’s over eagerness to spill all your dirty deeds to this man, without really even knowing a thing about him. Besides the odd stuff you’d heard about him over the years. But you have to tread lightly here, you can’t overstep. You need to remember he is taken, he isn’t truly yours.

“None of the above. It’s a long story, I was ah,” you falter, trying to figure out how to word this without giving too much away. “I was part of a team, I guess you could say. We had an amazing leader, he’d have done anything for us, given his life to protect us. But ah,” you shake your head at the horrible memories of that day. “He was killed. During a mission. And the guy that took over just,” you sigh, “it just wasn’t the same. I couldn’t devotedly follow him, or his orders, like I should have. Like I was supposed to, so I left,” you shrug, dropping your arms to your sides. “Decided to branch out on my own and became a bounty hunter. And a few years later, here I am,” you raise your hands to gesture around the room. “And that’s the whole story, in a nutshell.”

“I’m sorry about your leader, Y/N,” Steve says softly, and you know if anyone can understand the true feelings behind losing someone you care for, it’s him. The man out of time. “It’s never easy to lose someone we care deeply for, but we just keep pushing forward for them. To make them proud,” he smiles, but it isn’t a pitying one. It’s more reassuring. As if to tell you that you are strong, that you can live on past tragedy, and not only that, but that you can rebuild your life. Make it better, or at least just as good as it was before.

You nod, “thanks, Steve.” You can feel the tears pricking your eyes, but you refuse to let them fall. Not here. Not now. You need a distraction, someway to get off this heavy topic and back to lighter conversation. “So, tell me about yourself? What truly interests the great Captain Rogers?” You pause, then snap your fingers, “oh! I know! You collect stamps, don’t you?” You grin widely, pointing a finger at his, “don’t lie!”

He laughs, like truly laughs. The sounds stemming from deep within him, from deep within his belly. And you are instantly proud of yourself for being the cause of such a beautiful sound. Such a spellbinding reaction from this wall of a man. He glances down at the countertop for a moment, shaking his head almost fondly. And then his eyes flick up to you, from under his ridiculously long lashes. “No, I don’t collect stamps,” he grins widely. “I’m actually more into drawing.”

“Huh,” you hum, giving him a once over, appraisingly. “I never would have guessed that. You any good?”

‘Of course he is,’ your wolf rolls her eyes. ‘What a stupid thing to ask. You still suck a flirting, FYI.’

‘Shhhh!’ You hiss back at her in your head. ‘And I’m not trying to flirt with him!’

‘Bull. Shit.’ She calls you out. ‘I swear you forget sometimes that I’m literally in your head.’

‘Like I could forget that,’ you scoff. ‘Now zip it, I can’t focus with your constant narrating.’

He shrugs, “I dunno. I just draw for fun, a way to unwind. I don’t really show many people, so I have no idea how good I actually am.”

You get the distinct feeling that he is so full of shit right now. That he is just being modest, being humble. And now you’re so curious how good he actually is. “Well, if you ever decide to share, I’d love to see some of your work some time.”

He nods, smiling, “of course.”

You nod and then turn around, realizing you never put your plate away. You pick it up and glance at Steve over your shoulder. “Which cupboard?” You ask lifting the plate up for effect. Steve points to it and you quickly put it away, then open a few drawers until you find the utensils one, and put those away as well. Making mental notes of where they went for future food endeavours.

But now as a silence hangs over you both, only one question bounces around in your mind. And even though it’s slightly morbid, your curiosity is getting the better of you. That’s a lie, it’s more than just a curiosity, you need to know what you’re up against here. “So, ah, was that,” you turn back to face him, and you’re positive you look sheepish as hell—Which is a pretty odd descriptive word to refer to a wolf as, but you’ll ignore that currently.

‘We don’t act like sheep,’ your wolf scoffs, ‘we hunt them,’ she shakes her head, a toothly grin on her lips. ‘Now I know I’ve said this once already, but seriously, get it together, woman.’

And she’s clearly still being her extra sassy self. ‘And once again, not helping!’

He nods, urging you to continue. So you do, “that woman earlier, is she like,” you clear your throat, awkwardly. “Like your girlfriend or something?” You glance up at him, trying to gauge his reaction and then quickly add lamely, “she ah, she seemed nice.” Wow, could you be any more obvious?!

‘The answer is no,’ she shakes her head at you again, this time in disappointment.

‘Still not helping!’ You huff.

“Who?” He furrows his brows, looking utterly confused. It’s actually kinda cute. But of course it is. Damnit. “Kelly?”

“I don’t know,” you laugh awkwardly, and shrug, “I guess?”

He shakes his head and is about to speak when you smell two people close by. You tense up but instantly recognize Bucky’s scent, though the second one is new. Your eyes snap up just as Bucky and another guy enter the room.

They come towards you, and once they reach you Bucky gives you a handsome smile, “hey Doll.”

You grin at him, “oh hey, bestie. Thought of anyone for me to take out yet?”

“Take out?” Steve quietly murmurs under his breath, sounding both confused and slightly irked. It’s so quiet that you almost didn’t catch it, but thanks to your enhanced hearing, you had. Making a mental note to thank the Moon Goddess for that enhancement later.

Bucky just chuckles, side eyeing the man beside him, “maybe just one.”

You pick up on his meaning and wink, “consider it done.” He just nods, grinning in response.

“Do I even want to know?” The new guy says as he looks between you and Buck sceptically, his eyes slightly narrowed.

“I honestly think it’s best if you don’t see it coming,” you smirk wickedly at him, and he just stares back at you, looking almost nervous now.

This all earns a hearty laugh from the large brunette. “I can already tell that I’m really gonna enjoy having you around, Doll.”

The new guy looks at Steve, sighing deeply, “damn man, looks like we got two of them now.”

You glance at Steve and see the same curious look in his eyes, just like when he’d first witnessed you and Buck interacting. His eyes just shifting between you both as he assesses the situation. “Yeah, looks like it,” he says quietly, nodding.

You have to fight to not grin like an idiot when you realize it isn’t actually a curious look at all, it’s a jealous look. The last thing you want is to upset him, or make him jealous, in any way. Not a good base for a long term relationship. But at the same time, you will most likely be subjected to witnessing that woman all over him, and often. So maybe a little jealousy on his end isn’t such a bad thing.

You turn to the new guy, offering him a smile and your right hand, “I’m Y/N, by the way.”

“Sam,” he smiles back, shaking your hand, all jokes aside now. “Welcome to the team, Y/N.”

“Thanks,” you nod, “though I’m not actually on the team for good. Just here for the mission then I head home.”

Bucky frowns, “wait, just for the one mission?” He glances around at the other guys, “you aren’t sticking around after?”

You shrug, “not sure, honestly. But that wasn’t the original plan when I agreed to help.”

“Damn,” he sighs, “I was really looking forward to the permanent backup against Bird-Brain over here,” he nods to Sam.

The aforementioned just rolls his eyes, “I’m going to ignore that comment this time. Mainly because now I’m super curious why Fury would bring an outside agent in on this mission. You ex-special ops or something?”

“No,” you shake your head. “Nothing like that.”

“Ex-shield?” Bucky asks next.

“No, definitely not,” you chuckle.

“Okay,” Sam nods slowly, “so you’re enhanced then?”

‘More than you could ever know, Bird-Brain,’ your wolf snickers. Clearly liking the nickname.

“Sort of?” You scrunch up your face. And it’s not technically a lie.

Sam glances at the other guys quickly, then shifts his eyes back to you. “Okay, consider us intrigued.”

“Would you be interested in showing us some of your skills?” Steve asks, drawing your full attention back to him now.

‘We’d gladly show you any ‘skills’ you’d like, big boy,’ your wolf purrs in your head. ‘Just say the word and we’re yours.’

And you straight up almost choke on nothing, but quickly compose yourself before you cause a scene. “Sure ah, yeah,” you nod quickly, “yeah, I can do that.”

“Alright, let’s head down to the training room then,” Sam says excitedly as everyone heads towards the elevators.

Now you aren’t sure exactly what they are all hoping for here, but what you do know is that even the two super soldiers won’t even be able to keep up with you. Not a hope in hell.

They don’t stand a chance against you. Yes, they may be enhanced, but nowhere near as much as you are. And you honestly can’t wait to show them this fact, first hand. You can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when you show them all up.

Because as for your ‘skills’—Well, in the famous words of Tony the Tiger, ‘They’re greeeeeat!’

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

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[theofficialstereklibrary]

Top 18 Sterek Fics 2017

Hello, our lovely followers!

For the past two years, we’ve been giving you guys a list of our favorite fics that we read and we are back at it again! These are the fics that really stood out to us in 2017. (here are our faves from 2016 and 2015)

Like always, this fandom came through with so many good fics this past year and we hope to see more and more sterek fics posted even with the show done.

We wish you all the best in 2018 <3

Kass’:

There Are No Wolves In California by kitsunequeen (1/1 | 7,579 | G)

Hunter!Stiles accidentally hits a wolf with his car and can't bear to leave him in the road to die. It's not till he gets the wolf home that he sees its eyes glow red... ------- Even everyday roadkill is upsetting, but this thing… Moments ago it was probably a majestic beast, and now it’s a mangled pile of soon-to-be rotting flesh. He presses a shaking hand to the only part of its chest left intact, not even thinking about whether it'll give him rabies or some other awful disease.

He’s about to pull back when something even crazier happens.

He realizes the wolf is breathing.

We Have Potential by dragon_temeraire (2/2 | 10,196 | PG13)

Derek has finally been invited to the annual North American Werewolf Convention. The only problem? They’re expecting him to bring a significant other. He doesn’t actually have one, but everyone volunteers Stiles for the job.

A Royal Christmas Engagement by skoosiepants (1/1 | 25,865 | NC17)

Young omega Warden Lord Mieczysław Stilinski, given the royal request of marrying Crown Prince Derek Hale of Triskelion, predictably messes the whole entire thing up.

Or –

An arranged marriage, mistaken identity, a/b/o, accidental heat fic

Hale’s Modern Encyclopedia of Playing Cards (and Dating Humans) by thepsychicclam (1/1 | 49,698 | R)

Wolves don't date humans. And Derek's okay with that. He's got his Pack, his friends in the Pack network, and lacrosse. Plus, he plays cards with his grandma all the time. Stiles Stilinski definitely doesn't factor into his life - no matter how much of a crush Derek has on him.

But when bird creatures attack Derek, Stiles, and their friends in the Preserve, Stiles finds out about werewolves and things get pretty complicated. For Derek at least. And he thought school was his only problem, but now he's grounded and Stiles is hanging around way too much for Derek to ignore him any longer.

Slow Hands by aussiebee (1/1 | 8,489 | NC17)

Derek is suddenly made aware of Stiles in an entirely new and uncomfortable way; specifically, his hands. His wide, strong, clever and dextrous hands.

Derek is kinda screwed.

The Start of Our Forever by Cobrilee (1/1 | 20,546 | NC17)

Stiles is ready to get out of Beacon Hills and start his new life, free of the supernatural. A random discovery in an antique store in Denver proves you can never leave it all behind... and encourages him to find it again. What ensues is four and a half years of pining, self-discovery, personal growth, a whole hell of a lot of love, and a realization that nightmares can still become fairy tales (happily-ever-afters included).

In Which Laura Is Never Going To Let Derek Live This Down by Omimouse (1/1 | 1,587 | PG13)

Prompt: A soulmate fic where you’ve got “Help! Save me!” on your wrist. So you do the martial arts classes, and ROTC, and get a concealed carry permit, you are READY, you are SO up for this… and then one day you’re at a friend’s house, and someone comes pounding down the stairs laughing and ducks behind you and goes “Help! Save me!” and that’s how you find out your soulmate was escaping a tickle fight.

“Laura, for the love of god, stop laughing and get him off of me.”

Gnashing Teeth and Criminal Tongues (conspire against the odds) by LadySlytherin (1/1 | 14,269 | R)

When Stiles mouths off to the wrong set of witches, he finds himself unable to control his tongue around a certain alpha werewolf. As Stiles struggles with the lesson the witches want him to learn, he knows it's only a matter of time until the truth comes out. It always does.

This is Not (In Fact) Okay by rileywrites (1/1 | 3,062 | PG13)

Derek and Stiles end up partnered for a project, and Derek contents himself with being a part of Stiles' life. For a while. ... Derek meets Stiles in his political science class. It's a 200-level class, so he doesn't expect any seniors to be involved. He definitely doesn't expect the hotshot senior midfielder from the lacrosse team to be in the class, let alone sitting beside him.

Tine's:

pick it up if we're moving too slow by standinginanicedress (12/12 | 139,856 | NC17)

“…I want a dude who’s going to take me out on dates. And I want him to meet my dad in, like, a sweater vest and khakis and shake his hand and talk about sports with the guy. And I want him to have a car and an apartment – not like, nice ones? But ones, you know? He’s got a dog, too. He drives me around and buys me stuff and is nice to my dad and my friends but then, like,” he squeezes the basketball extra hard and is sure he feels some air being let out of it, “…he ties me up sometimes, too. Is that too much to ask for? Am I reaching for the stars?”

Scott shakes his head, shuffling the cards and making piles out of them, likely by category. “There are no kinksters in Beacon Hills. We’ve been over this.”

To Make It Right by kitsunequeen (41/? | 121,147 | R)

In a society where the werewolves have been enslaved by the humans, Derek has had enough owners to know who the real monsters are. He's also had enough to know not to trust a word out of Stiles' mouth, no matter how nice an act he puts on.

The only thing that's kept Derek going for all these years is guilt. Now, though, he has a mission that might just allow him to set some of this right...

If only he can get away from Stiles.

-----

In which Derek's been abused all his life, Stiles just wants to show him he's not like his past owners, and they've both got a plan. The only question is, whose is more flawed?

And the Cold Pulls You Down by blacktofade (1/1 | 12,967 | NC17)

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Stiles asks Derek one night after he’s settled into bed, listening to the sound of Derek brushing his teeth in the bathroom.

“Ghosts?” Derek asks, voice muffled by toothbrush and paste as he stands in the doorway to stare at Stiles.

Or, the one where Stiles is 99.9% sure their house is haunted and no one believes him.

Seat Belts & Gravity by calrissian18 (1/1 | 22,411 | NC17)

People leave in Beacon Hills, give up on the town, the people, on life itself. And he and Derek are still here, six years later, still able to drink a beer and share space. It’s kind of remarkable in a really understated way.

Constantly on the Cusp by alisvolatpropiis (13/13 | 40,884 | NC17)

Stiles is gay, out and proud, and a Beacon Hills deputy. Derek is a firefighter and war veteran who thinks he's straight; or, Derek and Stiles have lots of semi-public hatesex on the road to Love.

Bruises and Hickies, Stitches and Scars by ElisAttack (12/12 | 89,808 | NC17)

“You’re my lawyer, Derek. What are you going to do, draft up a contract for yourself?”

Or the one where Stiles is a professional dominant, Derek is his lawyer, and their professional relationship suddenly becomes not so professional.

Also, faeries.

Start Small, Like Oak Trees by SmallBirds (1/1 | 24,234 | R)

The months following Allison's death have passed Stiles by in a haze of monotony. He sleepwalks through days that seem to lose their color, an unwilling passenger in a body he no longer trusts. Eventually, he thinks, he'll just fade away. He isn't sure anyone would notice. Then, during a spur of the moment grocery run, he stumbles upon Derek Hale attempting to console a lost child, and for the first time in recent memory the world doesn't seem so awful. He's not sure what he'd been expecting when he eventually convinces Derek to move into the Stilinski's spare bedroom, but a newfound passion for weeding and topsoil certainly isn't it.

Can't Take the Heat? by Ilovesocks_24 (15/15 | 55,425 | PG13)

“Hi, I’m Stiles, and what I have for you today is…”

“Stop, just stop.” Grumpy Eyebrows interrupted. “That is honestly the worst looking Pasta Primavera I have ever seen. I don’t even want to eat it, it looks so bad.”

Stiles narrowed his eyes. No one insulted his creamy bacon carbonara without even trying it. And no one insulted his creamy bacon carbonara after they tried it either.

“It’s actually a Creamy Bacon Carbonara, asshole,” Stiles snapped. “And for the record, it’s supposed to look like that.” Or the one where Stiles is a new sous chef at Full Moon Steakhouse and Derek is the Gordon Ramsay of all head chefs. So of course they fall in love.

Written in the Stars by Quixoticity (6/6 | 26,596 | R)

Derek Hale is a lucky guy. He's got a great family, good friends, and a fulfilling job as a tattoo artist.

He's also one of the twenty-five per cent of the population born with a soul mark.

He likes his life, but he's waiting for his soul-match. The odds of meeting them aren't great but hey, Derek's a lucky guy. He has faith.

He can't believe how good his luck really is when one day his soul-match wanders right into his studio, all long limbs and copper eyes. There's just one problem: Stiles is there to get his soul mark covered up. Permanently.

[lobsters-on-their-heads]

Continuing Travels of Cophine, Chap. 9

This is not a Christmas fic.  Christmas will happen, though.  Most of this chapter has been sitting on my computer for several weeks now, but the semester was ending, and I’m trying to sell my novel, and the bipolar goblins in my head don’t always play nicely, so it sort of sat there for a while.  Then it needed clean up and restructuring, which the time off actually helps with quite a lot.  

If you want to start from the beginning, the entire work can be found here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/12116799/chapters/27477684

Her throat woke her up on Wednesday morning, tickling and flaring until she coughed and floundered out of the blankets for her water bottle. After a few gulps, her throat calmed down, and she fell back onto the pillow.

Gray light snuck into the room, looking like it was filtered through an iceberg, illuminating the lamps and the old stereo along the wall. Even without her glasses, Cosima knew exactly where everything was, which lampshades were stained or torn, the marbling on the walls, the dimensions of the weird little doors that opened into more wall. She coughed again, and looked to see how much blood there was this time.

No blood. Not on her hands, and not on her pillow or her lips. And then she remembered. She was well now. Her cough was just a cough.

“Are you okay?”

Delphine's face was tucked into the blankets and the pillow so that only her hair and her closed eyes were visible. Half of her hair had come loose from its binding to snake around her head. Cosima smiled, remembering the joy of once again finding Delphine's hairs on her bedding the morning after her arrival from Geneva.

“Yeah, I'm okay. Did you sleep alright?”

“Mmm. Hnn?”

Cosima tucked a few strands behind Delphine's ear and followed the line of her jaw to her chin. “It's okay. Just keep resting.”

An hour later, when Delphine finally stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, Cosima was finishing her first cup of chai and setting up some more vials for inoculations. The lab had been clean and well-stocked upon their arrival three days ago, meaning that the guys really had been keeping up with it, or they had done some last-minute magic to make it look like they had. The primary absence was Cosima pot crop, acquired with Felix's help when they moved in, and now distributed among various members and acquaintances of clone club. The Hendrix's even had one of the plants tucked into their garden.

After checking that all of their carefully acquired gear was in proper condition, she checked her email. There was one from her mother telling her the weather report in Toronto, as though Cosima didn't already know it was freezing. After that was another email from her advisor, asking to push back the date of their meeting in Minnesota by a week.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

She already had the plane tickets for her and Delphine, and a non-refundable hotel reservation for five days, which now her advisor said he could not do. Cosima swore again and pulled on her own face. She would have to deal with that later. For now, she forwarded the entire email chain to Alison with a note that said “Problems.”

She was getting her second cup of chai ready when the upstairs door knocked. “Hello.....?”

“Come on down!” she cried, grinning as Scott bounded down the wooden steps into the lab. When he got to the bottom, she tackled him with a hug that forced him back a few steps.

“Gosh it's good to see you!” he laughed. “This place is weird without any clones hanging around.”

“You mean Krystal wasn't dropping by every other day?” Cosima pulled back and gave him a good look. “By the way, what the hell is that on your face?”

Scott's exuberance faltered, and he touched his face, where patchy brown hair erupted in some asymmetrical places. “What? You don't like it?”

“Uh... Well, you know, I, uh.... It's different! It's just different, that's all.”

He squared his shoulders and stuck his jaw out. “Cora likes it.”

Cosima blinked and stood back. This was a new development. “Cora???”

The grin crept back onto Scott's face and he blushed. “Yeah, she's this girl who works at the university with me. She's super smart. You'd like her.”

“Cora...” Cosima sat on a laboratory stool and spun around once, her eyebrows raised. “Is she cute? Don't answer, actually. She's obviously cute, or you wouldn't have that look on your face. The question is, when do I get to meet her? You know I have to do a little, uh, quality assurance check before you're allowed to go out with her.”

He giggled and nodded. “Okay. I dunno when she can come by, though. She has kind of a long commute into town, and it's hard to find times when we can even hang out outside of work...”

Cosima rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay, whatever. I see how this is gonna be.”

He spluttered, and Delphine crept out of the bathroom, arms crossed over her chest. “Oh, hey, Delphine!” he said, waving to her.

“Hello, Scott.” Delphine kept her arms tucked over her breasts as she gathered her clothes for the day. Meanwhile, Scott just grinned at both of them.

“It's just like old times, isn't it! Only, you're not dying, and Delphine's not breathing down my neck all the time to get you to come to work on time.”

Cosima groaned. “Or to give you another fucking fluid sample. I really don't miss that.”

If Delphine had any thoughts about Scott's comment, she didn't say so, instead shuffling back into the bathroom to change clothes. Only then did Cosima notice that Delphine was wearing the puppy dog socks she'd bought for her in Mexico City, and she grinned. While Delphine got ready, she chatted more with Scott, catching up about his work at the University of Toronto, his cat, and his opinion on the newest Star Wars movie.

“No spoilers, though!” she said, holding up a finger. “I haven't seen it yet, and I'm taking Delphine to see it on Monday for her birthday. If you spoil it for me, Scott...”

“I know, I know, you'll cut off my manhood and feed it to some goats.”

“Correct.”

* * * *

Driving to her parents' hotel, Cosima tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and chewed on a finger nail. She hated driving, but had left the Rabbit Hole later than Delphine wanted to, and now Delphine was doing her makeup in the passenger's seat. They'd spent the night talking over yesterday's meeting with Cosima's parents, about how much more to tell them and how to tell it, and about the extended family that Delphine would eventually get to meet. Cosima thought about her mother's parting words the night before.

“And we look forward to learning a lot more about Delphine!” She'd leaned heavily on the last syllable of her name, in the same way that she'd exclaimed earlier, “oh, you're from Paris! How wonderful!”

The light turned green, but the delivery van ahead wanted to make a left turn, so they all had to wait. Cosima tapped her fingers some more.

“Are you worried?” Delphine asked.

“About what?”

“Anything. You're fidgeting.”

“Oh. Yeah.” The delivery van turned left, and she accelerated onwards, through downtown streets with wreaths on the light poles and Christmas displays in the windows. Delphine wasn't wrong, and they might not get to talk privately for the rest of the day. “Can I ask you something?”

Delphine smiled. “Of course, mon amour. Anything.”

“Do you parents know? About me, I mean?”

There was a pause from the passenger's seat, and then, “no. But they don't know very much about me at all, anymore. I told them when I moved to Canada, but not much more than that.”

“Hm.”

They turned right and drove several blocks to a more residential section, and Cosima chewed on her lip. She'd always known that Delphine wasn't close to her parents, and she was in no position to criticize her for not telling her parents anything, considering the clone bomb she'd only just yesterday dropped on her own parents. With everything they'd been through together, though, it was only now occurring to her that Delphine was not even out to her parents.

“Do want them to come to the wedding?” she asked. “Your parents, I mean.”

Delphine paused again and propped her face on her fingertips. “Maybe. It's not that important to me, you know. I haven't even thought about it.”

“You have some time, I guess. You don't have to know right now.”

* * * *

They got to the hotel's restaurant just before ten. A quick glance around told them they'd probably have it mostly to themselves, which was a relief. Talking about clone business in any public place could be tricky. They seated themselves in a booth near the window, looking out at the stone courtyard and smoker's area, far enough from the door to avoid a draft. Watching a man in a business suit suck on his cigarette and pace in the frozen air, Cosima took Delphine's hand in hers.

“I'm glad you quit.”

“What, smoking?”

“Yeah. You're not ducking outside all the time to light up, and it means I get to keep you around a little longer.”

Delphine snorted. “Says the woman who's been bemoaning the absence of her marijuana plants.”

“Hey, cannabis is way safer than tobacco; I've been telling you that for years now. It's the only thing that kept me eating when I was sick and living in the Rabbit Hole without you.”

They ordered coffee from Todd, a bored, pimple-faced young man in an ill-fitting silk vest, and looked over the menu. After months of travelling and eating their way through Latin America, it was both comforting and disappointing to find the same predictable items on this menu that Cosima could find at any hotel restaurant anywhere in North America. Delphine might've been thinking the same, because she said, “No rice and beans.”

“You miss `em?”

“Almost.”

“We can get some at the store for you. They can't be that hard to cook. Not compared to hollandaise sauce.”

At 10:15, after they'd turned away the waiter twice, saying they weren't ready, Delphine checked her phone and sighed. “Your parents gave you their sense of punctuality, I think. Do they know the restaurant stops serving breakfast at 10:30?”

“Yeah, they know. And it's all my mom. My dad's probably been ready to go for an hour, and he's just sitting on the couch waiting for her to do her hair or put her makeup on or whatever. Hey, how much you wanna bet these 'mixed fruit cups' are just pale honeydew melon and cantaloupe?”

Sally and Gene came in five minutes later, wearing sweaters and jeans. Even after spending several hours with them the day before, it was still a small shock for Cosima to see them again after so long away. They had aged more than she expected, but maybe that was the lack of contact making them seem that way. Maybe they'd always had so many wrinkles, and maybe her father had always shuffled that way when he walked, and had always had that wattle of skin below his chin. They were in their late sixties, after all, and her father would turn seventy in just a few months.

“Hey, kiddo,” Gene said, clapping Cosima on the shoulder as she stood to greet them.

“So sorry we're late,” Sally said with a smile. “Have you been waiting long?”

“No,” they both answered. “Not long.”

The Niehauses slid into the booth across from Cosima and Delphine and ordered coffees for themselves when Todd reappeared. They exchanged morning pleasantries – yes, everyone had slept well; yes, they liked their room, and thank you for reserving it. They offered to pay Cosima back for the room, and she refused. Then they all ordered, and once Todd had gone again, Sally sat back in her seat with her hands folded over her stomach, and gave Cosima a measured look.

“You gave us a lot to think about yesterday, Sweetie.”

Cosima took a deep breath. “I know. It's a lot to take in, but you do get used to it. I did; we all did.”

“Two hundred.... how many did you say there are?”

“274,” Cosima said. “That's, I mean, those are the ones that are still living. There were more originally.”

“How many more?” Gene asked.

“We're not exactly sure. It was just this past summer that we learned the 274 number, after the organization behind the cloning was destroyed; before that we had no idea.”

Sally's breath shook, and she turned to stare out the window. Gene, on the other hand, nodded and tapped his fingers on the table. “That must've been hard for you to come to terms with. Having 274 genetic identicals, I mean, that's...”

“It was, a little. But, it's also fascinating. I mean, you saw last night, we're all completely different people, even though our DNA is identical. Well, I mean, almost entirely identical.”

Sally turned back at the last sentence. “What do you mean, almost entirely? I thought the point was that you were entirely identical, not almost?”

“In every way that anyone else would notice, we are completely identical, but each of us has a tag number encoded in our DNA that's used for identification purposes. Or, that was used for identification purposes. Nobody's identifying us like that anymore.”

“A tag number?”

At her mother's shock, Cosima remembered learning about her own tag number from Delphine, who now rubbed her finger against the side of Cosima's jeans in a silent show to support. “Yeah. The, um, Dyad, the group that ran the study, they put it there so they could tell us apart.”

“But... why not use your names, or your social security numbers, or....”

“Because we can change our names, and not all of us live in the US or Canada. It's like, you'd tag mice or rats for an experiment. It removes the personality and lets researchers focus on the science.”

“You're not a mouse, Cosima,” Gene said.

“No, but as far as they were concerned, I might as well have been.”

Beside her, Delphine stepped in. “The experiments are all finished. No one is tracking the clones now, or running tests of any kind. All of that ended when Neolution collapsed earlier this year.”

“Neolution.” Sally and Gene looked at each other. “That does sound familiar,” Sally said.

“Yeah, they were doing all kinds of unethical stuff. Human cloning was just one part of it. You might've seen them on the news back in the spring.”

Todd returned with their plates, and there was the usual fuss of remembering who'd ordered what and exclaiming over how tasty it all looked. Cosima got the falafel salad – the most exotic item on the menu – and the fruit cup, which met her expectations except for two little blueberries tucked in with all the pale melon chunks. They ate quietly for a while, listening to the faint chatter from the restaurant staff across the room and the pop song playing in the lobby. The wall television, thankfully, was on mute, so the American politician's passionate words stayed silent.

Gene had finished all of his breakfast sides and gotten a refill on coffee when he leaned over his plate towards Delphine. “This whole cloning business must've hard for you to come to terms with, too, huh, Delphine?”

Delphine had just put a large forkful of omelet in her mouth, and froze, eyes wide. She and Cosima had discussed what to tell them about how they'd met, settling on “we met in Minnesota doing research.” They had not, however, prepared an answer for how Delphine had learned about clones. Whatever they said, though, Cosima did not want her parents to know about Delphine's role as monitor. Not yet. She wanted them to love Delphine first, and then learn about their complicated history.

“She took it pretty well in stride, I'd say.”

Delphine nodded while she chewed her food and swallowed. “Yes. It's fascinating, actually. I mean, obviously much of the research was unethical, but the science behind it is... fascinating.”

Cosima nodded in agreement, but saw an internal struggle in her parents' faces.

“Do you have a background in science, Delphine?” Sally asked.

Delphine's eyebrows twitched as she smiled. In all of the hullabaloo the day before, somehow they had neglected to say anything about that. “Yes, I have a doctorate in immunology.”

“Oh!” Both Drs. Niehaus sat up a little straighter at that, and Cosima knew they were ninety percent of the way to loving Delphine already. She knew they would. After all, Cosima loved her, and she spoke French, her mother's college minor. Having a doctorate in a biological field was the extra cream cheese icing on the cake. The conversation slid away from Dyad and Neolution and into Delphine's research and medical background, which impressed Sally and Gene just as much as Cosima had expected.

They were finishing up brunch and arguing over the check when Cosima's phone buzzed. It distracted her enough to let Sally grab the check and slap Cosima's hand away when she went for it again.

“Did you just slap me?” Cosima asked.

“Yes.” Sally tucked her credit card into the flap and gave to it Todd. “You might not be genetically related to me like I thought you were, but I am still your mother, Cosima, so you should listen to me and let me pay the bill.”

While Delphine laughed about that and Gene picked at his teeth, Cosima checked the new message on her phone. It was from Sarah.

Slight emergency situation today. I need your help.

Sure thing, Cosima replied. What do you need?

My final exam is at 3, and Charlotte has a parent teacher conference at 2:45.

For a moment Cosima wondered how she could help with that, when it hit her. “Oh no.”

Which one exactly are you asking me to do for you?

The conference.

“Is everything okay?” Delphine asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, Sarah just needs some help with Charlotte.”

Delphine checked her phone, which read 11:37. “It's Wednesday. Shouldn't she be in school right now?”

“Yeah, I think she is.” Delphine and both of her parents watched her, waiting for more of an explanation, but Cosima hesitated. Delphine knew about clone swaps; in fact, she'd organized an impressive triple-clone swap in her early days as Dyad director. Her parents, on the other hand... “There's a teacher conference for Charlotte this afternoon, and Sarah's not sure if she can make it.”

Delphine's eyebrows shot up, immediately comprehending the nature of Sarah's request, but Sally and Gene barely reacted. “Oh, that happens all the time,” Sally said. “Teachers understand parents are busy. She can probably reschedule.”

Cosima texted to see if she could. Meanwhile, Gene gnawed on the remains of his pork chop and looked confused. “Charlotte's another, uh.... another one like you, right?”

“She's a clone, yeah. They tried to restart the whole experiment several years back, but Charlotte was the only successful one.” She tried to keep her tone light, despite the horror of the situation.

“So, does she have, uh....” Gene waved his hands around in the air. “I mean, you have parents. You have us. And, and, the other lady yesterday, the one with the purple hair, she talked about her mother, so I assume she has parents, too.”

Cosima figured out his point and smiled, remembering how awkward he'd been after she came out of the closet, calling her a “homosexual” until she gave him permission to use the words “lesbian” and “queer.”

“It's a little more complicated with Charlotte,” she told him. “She had a adoptive mother, legally, but she didn't spend much time with her, and she's presumed dead now.”

Not until she saw her parents' faces did Cosima realize how those last words came across. Until now, the only other people she'd ever talked to about Marion Bowles were other members of Clone Club, who had long since ceased being shocked by the words “presumed dead.”

“Sarah's her legal guardian now,” Delphine explained. “She's been living with her for a few months now.”

“Ah.” Gene fidgeted with his lower lip, the way he did when was working out a problem in his head.

“The poor little thing,” Sally said. “What do you mean, presumed dead though? Is her mother missing?”

Delphine stepped in again. “Her mother had a position of some authority in Neolution's hierarchy, and before they went down for good, they, euh, restructured many of those top-level positions. Considering the illegal and sensitive nature of their work, they didn't want to just release former leadership into the world to share their secrets, so they, um... they often had them eliminated. To protect the research and the organization. Since no one has heard from Miss Bowles in almost two years, and all attempts to find her have failed, we think it's safe to assume that she's been killed.”

Todd came back to the table with the receipt for Sally to sign, but Sally and Gene were gaping too much to notice him.

“Are you serious?” Gene asked.

“Unfortunately,” Cosima said, “yes. We are. Like I said yesterday, there are reasons why I didn't want you to know any of this before now. It just wasn't safe.”

“But were you safe?” Sally asked. “You and.... and the others like you?”

Cosima wanted to ask what time period, exactly, she was referring to, but decided that her mother mostly just needed reassurance right now. Details could come later. “Yes,” she said. “I was safe.”

[nowgoforth]

2017: Drowning, treading, making waves

It’s enlightening to read all of the drafts that I never published on this blog; some were too personal, some too rambling. Apparently, one of them was my replay of last year. Pretty sure I ran out of time last year and felt it was too late to share. But I’m going to post one this year, in spite of my worsening memory, and highlight some of my learnings and experiences.

This year…

...I lost my team and gained a new one.

Over the course of a month, both of my peers quit. They had different reasons, but it was still a blow. Although one stayed on for an extra month and worked remotely, he was moving back home and didn’t take on too much of the load. I spent March in a daze, doing my best to answer ALL the tickets alone. Everyone who works in support has some hellish moment that they can point to — I think of my year as “before March” and “after March”.

Luckily, my boss at the time quickly brought in two candidates she had sourced, and they changed the game when they started. They took Product Ops to the next level, as my boss planned, and quickly blended into the seams of Lever’s culture. They gave me hope that we could still hire A players.

...I struggled a lot with supporting our support team.

At the same time that I lost my team, we were *finally* hiring for our Tier 1 Support team. The timing couldn’t have been worse. There was no one to build materials, documentation, structure, and a feedback loop. Product Ops spent the year answering the Support team’s questions every day, and still answering the many tickets that were escalated to our queue. It was frustrating and unsustainable. My biggest regret this year is not planning for the day when we’d hire support reps, and then not sounding the alarm immediately after the first cohort was hired.

We eventually hired a Support Manager who just couldn’t be better. He listened to me and my team from day one, built a feedback process, and relieved some of the stress we were experiencing. We still have a long way to go in terms of documenting tribal knowledge, but it WILL happen and our teams will continue to evolve!

...I moved back to SF and into our own studio.

Yes, I just moved to Berkeley last August…our roommates decided to move to Oakland, and I just didn’t love the place they picked. Plus, if you’re going to move, you might as well move closer to work ;) Our space may be small and overpriced, but we haven’t killed each other and yeah, I’m 10x happier being a city girl a bus ride away from anywhere I wanna go.

...I traveled to Joshua Tree and Paris.

My family and my brother’s friend road tripped to Palm Springs, so my dad could use the National Parks pass we bought for him last Christmas. I wasn’t that amazed by the trees, but loved the rock structures and it was a fun little trip. I genuinely like hanging out with my family.

Paris…oh, Paris…I was not physically prepared for how much walking we’d do. Paris was the first international trip for my boyfriend and I, and we realized how different we were in our traveling styles. I love packing in popular sights, whereas he wants to relax and do nothing. It was a trial, but we got through it. I didn’t fall in love with Paris, but I do think I’d like to give it another try someday.

...I gave yoga a chance.

On our trip to Palm Springs, I found out that my brother’s friend was a yoga fanatic. He talked soooo much about yoga that I felt moved to try out a class. I had never liked yoga for various reasons, but I finally understood why so many people practice it. I attribute this turnaround to finding Jenna, a beautifully in-touch and soulful instructor at Wheel House, which was already one of my favorite studios in the city. The first few times I went, she played just the best song during the end of the class when you lay on your mat, and it spoke directly to my heart. I felt open, receptive, like everyone could see everything in me.

I then discovered two amazing instructors on YouTube, and I haven’t found anyone better than them: Yoga with Kassandra and Allie at The Journey Junkie. I became totally dedicated to Allie in particular and joined her online Facebook group and her 21-day program. (Yeah, was I the last one to find out that there are veritable communities in online Facebook groups?? It’s an entire selling point of online wellness businesses!)

For many months, I had a love affair with yoga. At the time that it started in May, I had been feeling stifled, adrift, without purpose. Regularly practicing yoga gave me a sense of peace, allowed me to tune into my body and mind in different ways, and gradually gave me the kick in the pants to get on with my life.

...I flirted with becoming a health coach and yoga teacher.

In October, I volunteered at the soft opening of a women’s clubhouse called The Assembly. There is so much potential in this fitness/coworking/hangout space, and women so need a way to find our community in this city. I’m excited to keep volunteering and supporting their growth when they officially launch in January!

After checking out The Assembly, I came across the concept of a “health coach”. I thought it might be a stepping stone to opening my own wellness space in the future, and I enrolled in an online institute to become one. During the first month, I realized that I had just been searching for a way to progress towards *something*, anything. The program wasn’t for me. I was a bit ashamed of “quitting”, but my boyfriend reminded me that the act of enrolling in and leaving the program was a learning experience that I could fold into my plans for my future. (And I became good friends with my lab partner, who lives across the country!)

Of course, I fluttered onto the next thing and without much direction, I put a deposit into a yoga teacher training program. I loved yoga, so why wouldn’t I want to deepen my practice? I was also really interested in learning more than the physical poses — the philosophy and anatomy aspects are often overlooked.

A couple weeks after, I stumbled upon the Instagram accounts of teachers who proclaimed that the yoga profession needed to adapt, there were more ways to do the poses everyone teaches. Smarter ways to move our bodies. I started to question what I had been practicing. I knew I hadn’t been hurting my body, but was I doing everything that I could to support its future? 

Annnnnd then I did hurt myself, trying to better my chatarunga pose at home. Now, that isn’t all yoga’s fault, it was also my ego thinking that I didn’t need modifications. But I didn’t feel the pain until afterwards, which scared me into realizing I wasn’t very strong at all. I’ve been doing strength training and “boring” but so-needed mobility workouts ever since. I’ve been feeling powerful and happy, and yes, now yoga feels too slow to me again. I’m sure I’ll find the balance someday.

GEEZ, this is one hell of a long post. I’m exhausted! There’s actually more I could write, which shows that I should probably blog more often. If I missed anything important, well…I’m sure they were documented in some way somewhere else. I guess a lot happened this year after all. Funny how the memory works.

Now, for next year…

My word for the year is “movement”. It could also be “progress”, but I am not married to any particular goal, I just don’t wanna sit around on my ass all year again.

I want new challenges and new responsibilities in my career. I want to feel like I’m experimenting, growing, and learning more about what satisfies me. I legit considered leaving tech this year, but all of the changes I’d been seeking? Well, turns out they just didn’t want to be rushed. They’re coming together right now, and some cool things are in the works. More to come next month ;)

I want to keep moving my body in different ways and progressively getting stronger and more mobile. I need to put more care into my health because hello, I’m getting older. In the same vein, I’d like to cook a little more often and try new ways to make my gut happier. I don’t talk about my IBS a lot, but for the first time in years, I’ve had a breakthrough, thanks to a probiotic. So fingers crossed I stay less bloated and more regular!

I want to seriously practice meditation and let go of a lotttttt of shit. I think I’d be a lot happier and more pleasant to work with, if my emotions didn’t control my reactions.

Goals will change and evolve, but my general intention for 2018 is to actively pursue life. I think that’s enough for one year :P

[zayafeli]

Tips for self-publishing (ebooks) on a budget!

I totally understand how overwhelming self-publishing for the first time can be, especially when you're on a tight budget, so here's some tips based on my own experiences with self-publishing. I happened to be lucky enough that I didn't need to spend much getting my first series out into the world, but please keep in mind that everyone's experiences are different and not everyone will be able to do what I do. Still, I hope this post can at least help people out and make the process a bit easier to handle!

Disclaimer: Since this is tips for self-publishing on a budget, that means my suggestions will centre around shaving down the cost of publishing as much as possible while still trying to keep your novel as high-quality as possible. That means skipping professional help that could be very useful. I'm not encouraging people to disregard professionals, I'm simply trying to help people out who can't afford them.

I'm going to jump right into this and assume you've written your book, given it a good read-trough, self-edited (potentially multiple times) and read it through again. This is essential for the next step. The more you self-edit and polish your draft, the easier it's going to be on your editor(s).

Beta reading and editing: Beta readers are not essential, but highly recommended. It's generally not a service you need to pay for. Beta readers can be anyone. You can ask your online friends to beta read for you, or find people on social media or writing forums who'd like to help you out. You can't expect professional help from beta readers, but you can definitely ask them to help point out where your story is weak or slow or if there's an unresolved plot hole that makes no sense. My suggestion would be to find at least 2 or 3 beta readers, but the more the merrier!

Once you've fixed the errors your beta readers have pointed out, it's time to find an editor. There are several kinds of editors, but the ones who will be most useful to you now that you've already had your story beta read are line editors and copy editors. Sometimes, an editor will do both, but if you're forced to choose, my suggestion would be to go for a line editor. A line editor will polish and tighten your language, fix awkward sentences and in general make the reading experience much smoother. Copy editors focus more on grammar and spelling, fixing your typos and getting your commas under control. Since you're on a budget, you could potentially find a very grammar-savvy family member willing to copy edit your story for free, but a line editor's expertise will be harder to come by and truly invaluable. It's my belief that you should absolutely not skip finding an editor for your book. Before I published my first novel, I questioned just how important proper editing really was, but as it turned out, the magic my sweet editor Sarah was able to work into my manuscript heightened the quality of my writing a staggering amount.

So how do you go about finding an editor when you're on a budget? First, you should figure out how much money you're willing to/able to spend. You could potentially start saving up for an editor already when you start planning your novel. That'll give you months (or years) to gather funds. If your attempts at saving up fail completely and you find you really can't spend anything, there's still hope. All is not lost.

If you're an artist or a photo-manipulator or any other kind of creative soul, you're in luck. Your chance of finding an editor is already doubled. Search on social media, Goodreads, the Nanowrimo forums, or any other writing forum you know, and offer up your artistic skills in exchange for editing work. Be fair – the quality and quantity of the work you're offering has to match the kind of editing you're looking to get. Professional editing can easily cost a $1000 or more, depending on how long your manuscript is, so perhaps consider a less experienced editor if what you're offering to trade can't match the price. If you're really super duper lucky, you can find an editor who takes mercy on you and is interested in your project and is willing to give you a discount or even donate their skills. But you really can't count on that happening. If you're a completely lost cause when it comes to artistic ability, you might not be able to get around cashing out, but I promise you, if you spend money at all during this process, this would be where to spend it. If you have other useful skills, perhaps try offering those up for trade and see how far it'll get you!

Formatting: Formatting is another one of those nice things you don't need to spend money on. It takes a bit of trial and error, especially if you've never formatted before (my first time was pure hell), but it's perfectly doable on your own. Smashwords.com is a self-publishing platform that offers a formatting style guide that you have to follow in order to publish on their website, but you can use it even if you're not publishing with them. You can find the formatting guide here: Click. Good formatting will make the reading experience smooth and your readers happy.

Cover art: Again, if you possess artistic ability, you're in luck. I illustrate all my own covers, so I can easily get around having to pay for cover art. That doesn't mean you can't still get a nice cover if you've got no artistic skill. Take to google! Check out Goodreads, Nanowrimo and other writing forums. Sometimes, people will offer up free, pre-made cover illustrations. Even if you can't find any, a simple google search for 'Make a free book cover' led me to a bunch of websites that'll let me put together a simple, nice looking cover for free. (I haven't tested any of these sites, so proceed with caution). If you prefer to have a little more control of your cover, you can go on Adobe's website and download a trial version of Photoshop. Find a nice, free stock photo online (remember to make sure it's free for commercial use), find a nice font in PS (or on a font site. Again, remember commercial use) and you're more or less good to go. Now, if you're lacking an eye for good composition and design, here are a few easy tips when making your cover art:

Make your cover on a high resolution canvas, 300 DPI

Make sure your text is aligned, doesn't fade into the background/images and is easy to read.

Don't crowd your cover with too much text. Have your book title be the main focus, include your author name and possibly a short sentence to specify if your book is part of a series.

Try to create a focal point. A simpler cover is often more eye-catching.

Make sure that your cover is still easily readable when scaled down. Most online book stores will display your cover as a thumbnail, which is what people will judge your book by before clicking on it.

Publishing: Now that you have a fully edited and formatted manuscript and a cover for your book, it's time to send it out into the world! The first option is Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program. Amazon is the biggest platform, so most of your sales will likely come from here. You can sign up at kdp.amazon.com and publish for free, simply follow their guidelines. You can also publish on Smashwords.com. They will help you distribute to other online stores, but keep in mind Smashwords let people download your book's file to their own devices, so there's nothing stopping them from sharing it freely with others.

Promotion: Publishing by yourself may be cheaper than traditional publishing, but it also means you have to do everything yourself – including promotion. Chances are, once your novel is out on Amazon, it'll quickly disappear into the void of thousands of books in its category,, to be stumbled upon only by people filtering by 'newest releases'. To combat this, you gotta do your own promotion. My suggestion is to start this already before your book is published. Talk about it everywhere, and don't worry about being obnoxious about it. Promote yourself!! Spread the word on social media, on your website, hand out flyers, whatever you wanna do. People who like to read books in your genre will want to hear about your story. Make art and graphics, talk about your cool story and awesome characters on your Twitter or Tumblr. Get people excited! Let them know what they can expect! You can even post a few chapters for free to hook readers. Amazon also gives you 5 days a month where you can offer up your novel for free to really increase the amount of downloads and spread the word. And don't forget to put it on Goodreads! Lots of people search for new reading material only on there.

The final words: If after everything, your book still ends up getting just a few downloads and a single review who happens to be from your grandmother, try not to get too discouraged. Your first novel likely won't be your best, and hopefully won't be your last. Building reputation and a following takes a long time and involves a lot of hard work. Sometimes when I'm feeling discouraged, I think about all the publishers who turned down Harry Potter because they didn't think it was a good book. Some books go unnoticed for years until they suddenly explode into popularity. Don't lose hope! You've worked hard and you've learned so much. It can only get easier.

[xstarsinthedarknessx]

Kimber

Chapter 2; I know that this needs a lot of work - it’s literally first base first draft. Rip it apart all you like. Please be nice, though. This is a shifter/fantasy/romance novel. (YC)

In ten minutes, Nikolay would begin his two-a.m. round. On the dot. They had one round in the night, as most maids were awake not long before and the rest were to be awake not long after. Nik was particularly ruthless and intolerant of bad behavior. If you weren’t in your bed when he came into your room, there was hell to pay.

Kimber reached the doorknob, desperate to flee before the next day began. Her delicate hand rested against the doorknob. She had one ally in this place and Kimber would have to leave her behind. She pulled the door gently, ensuring it didn’t make a noise and made her way down the darkened hallway. 3 doors down, she grabbed another handle and entered the room.

Gliding across the room, she leaned down and placed her lips gently against her friend’s forehead. Her eyes closed briefly, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I promise, with all my heart, I will come back for you.”

Kimber left the room as fast as possible. Eight minutes, forty-six seconds before she was discovered. If another guard didn’t find her first. She made her way down the hallway in the opposite direction and paused at the top of the stairs, listening for the sounds of guards breathing, picking their fingernails, anything that could give them away.

When she couldn’t hear anything, she made her way down the elegant staircase and across the landing. She leaned towards the second-floor French doors and gently pulled them open, making as little noise a possible. She wasn’t the only creature with heightened senses. A thrill shot through Kimber as she tiptoed out through the door onto the balcony.

Five minutes and two seconds until room check.

Reaching for the rail that enclosed the marble balcony, she gripped the ledge and pulled herself to straddle it. Kicking her foot over the edge she used all her strength to hold onto the outside of the balcony. She wrapped her thighs around one of the columns that held the balcony, ready to slide down. It would be a fast decent, the heavy rain making the marble slick.

As she reached the ground, Kimber drew a breath and rushed into the cool wind and heavy rain that battered against the ground. She darted left into a line of bushes and stayed under their cover as she made her way into the trees surrounding the compound.

The goal was simple. Escape or die trying.

Kimber still nursed wounds from a recent beating for fighting against a guard who wanted to use her body. She wrapped her arms around her cracked ribs, hoping to ease the pain if only a little. Her legs throbbed from her decent and her feet could still feel the vibrations of landing against the hardened floor. Tears, mixed with rain, poured down her face from the searing pain.

Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds remained.

Time to get moving. Through the darkness, she maneuvered around thick tree trunks and over raised roots. Lightning crackled and fingered through the dark sky.  Frustration bubbled within Kimber. She couldn’t change into her true form and it was slowing her down. If she could change, she would be so much faster, see so much clearer and it would be easier to ignore the pain. She wasn’t a runner in this form. Especially with her reduced diet over the last few years.

She gulped a deep breath; listened for shouts, boots slapping against wet ground, any sound of being hunted.

Her heart hammered with terrified beats. She had to calm down.

Kimber’s ears pricked at a howl in the distance. There were no natural wolves in England. They had found her empty bed. Jumping up, she lunged into the blackness, running hard, fighting the panic exploding in her chest. Every survival instinct she had screamed at her to tear through the wood like a madwoman. But hitting a tree might knock her out or daze her. Instant capture. Thick underbrush clawed at her arms. Pain from the cuts burning her skin demanded attention.

She pushed harder.

Sheets of rain blasted through breaks in the trees. Thunder boomed overhead. A jagged branched snagged the edge of her thin shorts and ripped a searing gash across her thigh. An adrenaline spike masked the pain, but her lungs begged for oxygen.

Distant barking and howls broke through the deluge. Wolves were expert trackers. They were on her trail.

 Kimber burst through a break in the trees and slowed while her eyes adjusted, but moved forward steadily. The ground fell away and she stumbled down a short drop into a ditch, landing on her knees. She lay on the cold ground and stared up at the stars. Mother nature kissed her skin as her breath became a cloud in the sky.

The bays of wolves pierced the night. They were closing in.

There was a dim glow against the horizon, enough for Kimber to raise her head. There were flat stretches of tarmac and a small building across the clearing.

Pushing her arms into the ground, Kimber raised herself to her knees, and then her feet before stumbling in that direction. Her adrenaline was seeping away, leaving her bones aching and shaking. Her thigh throbbed, her ribs burned and her head felt foggy. She /had/ to make it. Forcing her heart to pump harder only made her wounds bleed more but she pushed herself into a jog.

The bright glow ahead kept her going. It appeared to be some sort of hangar, the tail of a plane peeking out the end.

She softened her steps as she neared the hangar then crept to the edge of the building. There was a plane sat in the building, the door open with boxes upon boxes of who-know-what cargo but that didn’t matter. Kimber couldn’t outrun Nikolay and the house on her feet. No matter where this plane was going, she had to go with it.

When she couldn’t sense anyone else near the plane, she dashed across the concrete floor and jumped through the door, landing harshly on her hands and knees.

Kimber crawled across the plane floor and hid in a crook between boxes. It was right near the wall she could only assume was behind the cockpit. It was the most hidden she could be in such a small space. She just hoped the pilot didn’t need to re-check his cargo before he took off.

She made herself as small as she possibly could. There was an overpowering smell coming from the cargo on this plane. Kimber was sure some of the crates must contain animals, or animal produce, or some pungent vegetation. She hoped it would cover her scent.

When the doors were shut and the plane began to move towards its runway, Kimber let her eyes close and she fell into a heavy sleep.

 #

 How was she going to get out of this plane without the pilot or someone else realizing she had been there? She could feel the plane moving across the tarmac, she assumed to its hangar in this airport. The touchdown had been rather gentle in comparison to what she though a touchdown would feel like.

The plane came to a halt and she could hear the pilot making his way out of the plane and across the area they were in. The cargo door was opened and Kimber had to squint to protect her eyes from the bright sunlight. It had been so dark in the plane that even with heightened senses, Kimber could hardly see. This sunlight felt truly blinding, burning against her irises.

Kimber closed her eye briefly, the strongest sense of relief passing through her as who she could only assume was the pilot, had opened the door and then left the plane, perhaps to get someone else to collect the cargo. She darted out and away from the plane, her muscles protesting but her mind screaming for her to move while she had the chance.

She darted across the tarmac and behind a small building. New-Mexico airfield was written on a nearby road sign. Kimber gasped as she realized she was in America. She was so far from home and the auction house but she didn’t want to take any chances.

Following the closest road, Kimber walked for hours. All she needed now, was somewhere she could change into her true form, her Lioness. She would travel much farther, much quicker if she could change.

 After walking for nearly the whole day, Kimber started seeing signs for Gila National Forest. She changed her direction and continued walking long into the night, finally reaching the edges of the forest as the sun began to rise. The golden light speared through the trees and warmed against Kimber’s face.

Once Kimber felt she was far enough into the forest, she near collapsed to the ground. She needed to hunt and then she needed to sleep. The day was almost over. She could feel her joints crack and twist as her bones moved beneath her skin, changing shape to fit her new feline form. Some bones elongated while others shrank, creating a _highness_ throughout her whole body. Her shoulders scrunched into her neck, she fell to her knees and her back arched. She stretched her fingers and toes outward as they became more feline in shape and claws began to protrude.

Her Lioness raised its hackles as it stretched and settled into it’s form. She twisted her ears in every direction, listening intently for the sound of anything she could hunt. Hooves scraped against the ground nearby.

Kimber crouched against the ground, skimming her belly against the ground as she got closer to her target. She ensured she was hidden behind the thick underbrush and narrowed her eyes on her target. Some sort of sheep. She thanked the stars that it was a female and not a ram. She had enough wounds as it was.

She leaped forward, pouncing through the air and latching her extended claws into the sheep’s flank. It made a loud noise and tried to run but Kimber couldn’t afford to let this go. She reached her neck as far forward as she could and wrapped her teeth around the sheep’s jugular, pressing down hard until the sheep stopped moving.

Kimber hated hunting, having a love for every animal but sometimes it just couldn’t be helped. It was different when her mum collected meat with the groceries. She didn’t see the animal alive, with a life or a family. This sheep could have kids somewhere in this forest. She tried to not think about it.

The Lioness in her urged her to start eating her kill, never knowing when the next meal would be. Kimber ate through it at a record speed.

With her stomach full, Kimber lay against a particularly large tree and curled into herself. It would be easier to keep herself warm throughout the night in this form. It didn’t take very long for her body to give into her fatigue and fall into a slumber, although a part of her would always have to be on alert.

[rachello344]

I totally forgot I was going to post it, but if anyone is interested, here’s the short story I worked on last semester, called The House on Maple Drive.  I’m still putting it through revision, but this was the final version my classmates read.  If you like it at all, I’d like to know!  ^_^  Lemme know what you think~

Madeline sighed, exasperated.  Running a hand through her hair, she made a list of the places she or her brother would have packed the throw pillows for the couch.  They should have been in the box with the other living room stuff, but of course that would have been too logical.  It would just figure that their first time moving away from home (and not into a dorm) would involve multiple trips back home, even with her truck.

“Henry, where are the pillows for the couch?” she yelled into the kitchen. It was still weird having to yell to be heard from the living room, but then it was a lot bigger and older than their family’s house.

Her brother peeked around the corner, squinting at her.  He had a smudge of dust on the bridge of his nose, extending under his eye.  “You’re kidding, right?  They’re in the box marked ‘Living Room.’  Or are you having trouble reading now?”

She scowled.  “Look, smart ass, I checked all of those boxes, and they weren’t there.  If you forgot them, just admit it already.”

“What?  You packed that box!”

“Children, please,” their best friend, Victor, said from around a large box, walking in from the garage.  “If you can’t get along, one of you is going to have to share a room with me instead.” He winked, his smile teasing and warm.

“You snore,” Madeline and Henry said, voices overlapping.

Victor gave an exaggerated shudder.  “Twins,” he muttered under his breath.  “Anyway, what are you guys fighting about this time?  I came in at the end.”  He sat the box down next to one of the antique end tables the house’s previous owner left behind.

“The couch pillows went missing.”

“I’m sure they’ll turn up,” he said, smiling at them both.  Madeline wasn’t sure his smile was ever going to change. Going on fourteen years and it was the same goofy, lopsided grin as the day they met him in second grade.  When his gaze settled on Henry, he laughed a little. “You have,” he gestured along his face.

Henry shot Madeline a dirty look, scrubbing viciously at his cheek.  She smirked.

The little old lady from across the street stopped Madeline at her gate.  She looked like she had been waiting there. The woman’s brow was furrowed, wrinkles upon wrinkles.  “Miss, you don’t live here, do you?”

Madeline nodded.  “I do, why?”

The woman crossed herself.  “This house isn’t right,” she muttered, shaking her head again and again.  “It’s unholy.”  Message delivered, she hurried away.  Madeline watched her go, tilting her head to one side.

Resettling the grocery bags in her arms, she opened the gate and continued up the front walk.

She glanced over her shoulder, watching the woman slam her door.  Her foot caught on the step, and her heart caught in her throat as she flew forward, clutching the groceries as she stumbled several steps, hitting her head on the front door.

Head pounding, she set the groceries on the porch, gripping her head, and breathing through the throbbing pain of it.  The door opened in front of her.

“What the hell happened to you?” Victor asked.

“The house is trying to kill me,” she complained, poking the tender spot until she saw stars.  “We need to get some stuff from the hardware store so I can fix the steps.  They’re loose or something.”

“Really?”  Victor stepped around her, peering down at the old steps.  “They look fine to me.”

“Not possible.  What else tripped me?”  She frowned down at the steps, but she couldn’t find anything wrong with them. Even when she checked under the porch, there was nothing that she could have tripped over.  She felt a chill.  “Maybe there is something wrong with the house…”

“What, just because we got it for cheap?”  Victor rolled his eyes.  “You’re being ridiculous.”

Madeline rubbed her head, still searching for a loose nail or even a scuff mark from her shoe.  Nothing looked out of place.  “I think our neighbor thinks the house is haunted, too.  She crossed herself when she found out I live here.”

“The woman across the street?”  He laughed. “That woman definitely thinks it’s haunted.  She told me and Henry that she heard all sorts of weird things from the house before we moved in.  Plus, I guess lights were on when no one was living here?”  He shrugged, still smiling.  “I think she’s got a few loose floorboards, if you know what I mean.”

Madeline shivered.  She glanced back across the street.  The woman was in her kitchen window, watching them.  When their eyes met, she closed the curtains.  Madeline bit her lip, touching her forehead again.

“Come on, let’s get the groceries put away.”  Victor scooped up the bags, leading the way inside.  “Maybe if we’re lucky, Henry will make cookies tonight.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she said, but she couldn’t seem to relax, eyes trailing over everything as she iced her forehead.  Nothing was out of place, but something was off.

She felt like they were being watched.

Henry and Victor were yelling when Madeline got home from work.  She couldn’t quite make out what they were yelling about, but she felt unsettled either way.  Henry and Victor never fought.

“Guys?”  She peeked around the corner warily.

“Did you take the couch blanket?” Victor asked her, eyes hard and arms crossed.  “Henry insists I took it, and I told him I hadn’t seen it all day.”

“Well, I didn’t take it, so it must have been you!”

“Guys, guys, hang on.  The blanket is missing?”  Madeline walked around the couch—wincing as she banged her hip against it—to the little basket they held extra pillows and an extra blanket in.  Sure enough, the blanket was missing, along with one of the pillows.

It didn’t seem to be anywhere else in the room either.  She bit her lip.  “Why would a pillow be missing, if it was one of us?”

They both glanced at her.  “What?”

She gestured to the basket.  “The blanket isn’t here, but we’re also missing a pillow.”  She felt like she was being watched again, but tried to ignore it, walking back toward the hallway.  She hip-checked an end table as she went.  Weird.  “Did one of you move the furniture?”

“No?  Why would we?” Henry asked.

She shrugged.  “I don’t know, but it feels like all the furniture in here moved an inch or two, doesn’t it?” She shivered, shaking her head again.

It was nothing.  It was nothing.

Henry was staring at the wall in the upstairs hallway, lost in thought.

“I hope you’re thinking of a color to paint over that wallpaper,” Madeline said. “I hate that color.”

Henry jumped, glancing back at her in surprise.  “Sorry, what?”

“I was saying we should paint over it.  It’s such an ugly shade of yellow.”

He blanched, looking vaguely ill as he spun back around.  “That’s it!  The Yellow Wallpaper,” he hissed.  Her shoulders drew up around her ears as she recoiled.

“No,” she moaned, “don’t say that.  I’d actually managed to forget that horrible story.  Do you remember when we visited Grandma?  The wallpaper in her bathroom?”

He shuddered.  “That’s what it is, though.  This is exactly how I imagined that wallpaper looked.  Inexplicable swirly but barred pattern, hideous yellow…  This is the wallpaper that drove that woman crazy.”

The pattern did look like it could be trapping something, someone, behind it.  Her eyes dropped to the floor.  No sign that anyone had crawled back and forth and back and forth enough to leave a groove, thank God.  As if the house didn’t scare her enough already.

“We definitely need to pick up paint later.”

The evening was quiet and peaceful.  They didn’t have a TV yet—Emily was going to bring it when she moved in after she got back from vacation—so they were listening to the radio on Victor’s old stereo.  Madeline was reading.  Victor and Henry were playing a card game on the floor by the fireplace.

She jolted at a sharp beep interrupting whatever top-40 song had been playing.  This is a child abduction emergency—Madeline sat up, frowning.  The boys stopped their game.  Eleven-year-old Cody Hawkins… Last seen riding his bike on Fourth and Maple…  Suspect is a white man in his forties, brown hair, a little over six feet tall…

“We’ll have to keep an eye out,” Victor muttered.  Henry and Madeline both mumbled their assent.  The music returned, but the peaceful mood took longer to settle around them again.  Madeline didn’t feel like she was being watched.  She didn’t.

When the noises started, Madeline couldn’t find it in herself to be surprised. The house had been creaking since they moved in—the usual old house aches and pains—but this was new. Thumping behind the walls, noises that didn’t sound natural, the sound of creaking floorboards…

She squeezed her eyes closed.  It was normal.  It was perfectly normal.

“Maddy?”  When she opened her eyes, Henry was watching her, blankets pulled up to his chin. “You’re hearing this, too, right?”

“Yeah.”  Her brother only called her Maddy when he was scared.

“Do you think Victor’s hearing them, or just us?”

“I don’t know.  I hope it’s not just us.”

Someone knocked on their bedroom door.  They both sat up, wide-eyes fixed on the knob.  It didn’t turn.  “Are you guys awake?”  They both slumped against their headboards in unified relief.

Madeline got up and opened the door.  “You hear it, too?”

“You may have a point about the house being haunted.”  Victor glanced over his shoulder, shivering as if he felt a draft.  “Do you think—I mean, I know we’re all adults, but—”

Henry got out of bed, grabbing his rabbit.  “I thought you’d never ask.  Your bed’s a King, right?”

Madeline doubled back for her cat and followed her brother out the door. “Plenty of room for three,” she agreed.

Victor laughed, but he sounded relieved, following them down the hall. “It’ll be just like old times.”

A loud thump sounded from within the wall.  All three of them shrieked, ran to the bedroom, slammed the door, and buried themselves under the covers.  Shaking, Madeline tucked herself in close to her brother’s back.

This wasn’t normal.

“Okay, so I’ve been researching all day—”

“Nerd,” Henry interjected.

“Yes, thank you, moving on.”  Madeline rolled her eyes.  “Are you home?  We’re definitely dealing with something evil and malevolent.”

“Yeah, I’m home, but what makes you say malevolent?  I mean, we’ve only been hearing noises and losing some things. That doesn’t seem that bad.”  She could hear knocking through the phone and his muttered knock on wood.

“The previous owner, he moved because his wife was murdered.  And it looks an awful lot like it was the ghost that did it.”  Madeline shivered.  “You need to get out of there, Henry.  It’s not safe.”

“Yeah, hang on,” he said, voice distant, like he wasn’t listening.

“Henry,” she tried, but he just made a noncommittal noise.  She closed her eyes, pausing on her walk home.  He never listened.

“Okay, so I just noticed something about that ugly wallpaper, so I’m gonna have to call you back.  Love you.”

“What—Henry,” but she was already talking to a dead line.  She pressed her phone against her forehead.  She didn’t want to go back to the house.  She wanted to call their parents and move away immediately.

Madeline kept walking, faster than before.  She just wanted to go home, but she couldn’t leave without Henry and Victor.

“Henry?” she called, voice shaking.  Madeline couldn’t quite bring herself to go in, hesitating at the threshold. She clenched her fists at her side. She couldn’t just leave him there.

Biting her lip, she pulled out her phone.

“Hello?” Victor answered.

“Oh, thank God.”  Madeline took a deep breath.  “Henry is alone in the house, and it’s definitely haunted, so I’m going in after him. Please tell me you’re on your way home.”

“I’m leaving now.”  Victor’s voice was low, more serious than she was used to.  “Five minutes out, so be careful.”

“I will.  I’ll see you soon.”

She took another deep breath, tucking her phone back in her pocket. Steeling herself, she took one step and then another, feigning confidence as she entered the house.  She walked immediately to the stairs, not bothering to waste her time in any of the other rooms.

When she got to the second floor, she flinched back a step, nearly falling.

There were scratches in the wallpaper, long gouges like someone had been trying to peel it off with their bare hands, digging their nails in and dragging.  She shivered, making an aborted motion to touch the marks.  Her brother was here, but now…  He might not even be in the house.

She bit her lip, frowning.  The places where the wallpaper had been peeled away looked a little odd.  It was like there was a seam of some kind. Maybe a door?  He mentioned noticing something...

She rubbed her thumb along her lip.  There was really only one way to find out, she decided.

Madeline stepped into their bedroom, plucking one of her favorite tools out of her belt.  Returning to the hallway, she considered the best point of entry.  She knocked on the wall a few times, listening for a difference in sound.

There was some kind of opening behind the scratches; the knock rang hollow.

Shifting her stance, with one clean blow, she knocked a hole in the wall, letting her mallet settle back at her side.  There was definitely a small room behind the wall.  Shivering, she raised her hammer again.  And again.  And again.

When the hole was big enough, she finally let herself look inside, keeping a careful distance from it.  There were blankets on the ground.  Pillows. A few magazines.  A bag of chips.  And all of them things that had gone missing in the last few days.

Cold dread rushed through her veins.  There wasn’t a ghost.

There was someone living in their walls.

A hand landed on her shoulder.  She screamed. She was about to hit the person behind her with the mallet when she finally registered who it was.

“Victor,” she gasped, tears pricking at her eyes.  “Victor, call the police, it isn’t a ghost.”

He pulled out his phone, but frowned at her.  “What are you talking about?”

Unable to say anything, she pointed a shaking finger at the hole.  When he glanced in, his face lost all color.  His hand was shaking where it held the phone up.

If it wasn’t a ghost, where was Henry?

“Hello, I have an emergency.”  Victor’s voice was shaking, too.  “Someone has been living in the walls of our house.”  After a pause, he rattled off their address, his eyes darting about. She watched over his shoulder. The mallet made her feel slightly more secure.

“Please hurry.  My friend is missing, and he was in the house before we got home.”  He nodded, murmuring a good bye before pocketing the phone.  “Ten minutes.”

Madeline shook her head.  “That’s too long.  We don’t even know where he could be.” She shivered with the sudden feeling she was being watched and looked around, heart pounding behind her ribs. Her palms were sweating.

Madeline’s eyes slanted toward the hole.  Eyes.  There were dark eyes in a pale face, staring at them both. She lifted the mallet, her scream caught in her throat, but the man turned and disappeared into the walls.

She could hear him moving, steps falling, floor creaking, occasionally hitting the walls as he made sharp turns.  Victor followed the noises, running down the hall, but Madeline couldn’t bring herself to move, her feet frozen with her fear.  She gripped the mallet tighter.

“He’s outside,” Victor called.  “He’s running.”

She jolted at the sound of approaching sirens.  Victor gripped her shoulders; she wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d left her side.  Henry was still missing.  He was missing, and a madman had been living in their walls.

“Hey, hey, it’s going to be fine now.”  He forced a smile.  “All that’s left is finding Henry.”

“He could be anywhere,” she whispered.  His grip on her shoulders tightened.  He looked as scared as she felt.  “We don’t know if there are any secret rooms, or more passages than this one… He could be anywhere.”

“He’s fine,” Victor said, forcefully.  “I’m sure he’s fine.”  Madeline wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince.

There was a loud thump from above them; she jolted.  They both looked up as if expecting to see something there. “Does this house have an attic?”

Victor shrugged.  “Why don’t we check the master closet?”

It was boarded over, but the entrance was there, easy to reach with a chair. With the back of one of her other hammers, she pried the nails loose one by one until the boards came off.  With Victor’s help, they managed to get the entrance opened up and heaved themselves into it.

The first thing she saw was an impressive amount of weird-looking furniture. Tables, chairs, a bed frame. Among them, tied up and gagged, was her brother.  He was crying.  She dropped the hammer and rushed over to Henry, Victor hard on her heels.  She pulled out the gag; Victor untied him.

As soon as his arms were free, she and Victor wrapped him up in a tight hug. Madeline’s chest clenched with her silent sobs.

“I was worried you wouldn’t—I didn’t know we had an attic—I thought—” Henry cut himself off, burying his face in Victor’s chest.  Victor was stroking his hair.  “Get me out of this horrible place.”

While Victor helped him to his feet, Madeline took another look around. There really was a lot of unfinished furniture, the wood carved into strange shapes and painted a ghastly white. They were well-constructed, clearly, although…

She gagged, her throat burning with bile.  She clamped a hand over her mouth, doubling over.  “It’s not wood,” Henry confirmed.

Bones, she thought.  There are so many bones.

Madeline gripped Victor’s other arm, letting him lead the way out, her legs shaking with every step.  She wasn’t sure how Victor could keep so calm.  The door downstairs crashed open, and she stumbled in her alarm.

“This is the police!”

Madeline sat down hard, her brother following suit.  “We’re up here!” they yelled together.

Victor knelt in front of Henry, looking him over for any signs of injury. His fingers lingered on the back of his head, on his shoulders, his wrists, his cheeks…

Madeline looked away, trying to give them what privacy she could.

She couldn’t help but hear Victor’s quiet, “I thought I’d lost you,” and, “Never do something like that again.”  She couldn’t help but hear the way his voice cracked on, “I love you.”

Henry buried his face in Victor’s neck, clinging koala-tight.  When the police found them, Henry was forced to let go; Victor wrapped an arm around his shoulders.  The police officers guided them out of the room, leading them to the front porch, and draping blankets over their shoulders.  One of them offered to call their parents for them.

“He ran north,” Victor said.  “He was cutting through yards.”  The officer nodded once, hurrying off and shouting orders.

Henry and Victor shared their blanket, arms around each other.  Eyes focused on the bush in front of their house, Henry took Madeline’s hand in his, squeezing once.  She scooted closer, knees against her chest.

While Henry and Victor whispered to each other, Madeline watched the cops filter in and out of the house.  One of them saw her staring and came over.  “You didn’t happen to see the man in question, did you?” the woman asked.

“Only once,” she said.  The face was burned into her memory.  “Dark eyes, pale skin, older than us, but not older than my dad—probably between 35 and 50. Sharp cheekbones, like he didn’t get much to eat.”

“He had brown hair,” Victor added.

“I think he was my height or a little shorter.”  Henry looked unsure.  “The angle he hit me at was a little low, I think.”

The woman wrote everything down, biting her lip.  “How tall are you?”

“6’2.”

“Hernandez,” she called, “I think we just got a lead on our big case.”  She smiled at them, trying to look reassuring. “You kids might just be our big break. This man has been killing for a long time.  You’re lucky to all be sitting here.”

Madeline thought about the previous owner’s wife, about the little boy who’d gone missing, about the bones.  She gripped Henry’s hand tighter, forcing herself to breathe, trying not to vomit. In, out.  In, out.

“I have a Mrs. Monroe on the line,” one of the officers said.  Madeline grabbed the phone, holding it between her ear and Henry’s.

“Mom,” they breathed in unison.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: Displaced in Denver: A Discussion With the Artists Kicked-Out of Rhinoceropolis and Glob

This is the first discussion in our new series Tales From The Artist-Run, which will focus on stories from the artist-run fringe. As DIY spaces must contend with a shifting political and economic climate, we’re curious to see how they adapt to (and influence) the new world around them.

Warren Beddel (L) and John Golter (center) performing in Rhinoceropolis as Spellcaster’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Time Travel Committee in 2009. (All photos by Tom Murphy).

On December 8th of last year a dozen artists in Denver were forced from their homes unexpectedly. The warehouse building at 3551-3553 Brighton Boulevard had for over a decade illegally housed artists and musicians in two roughly 2,000-square-foot units that doubled as venues at the epicenter of Denver’s DIY scene: Rhinoceropolis and Glob. Just days before, 36 people had been killed by a fire at Ghost Ship, a warehouse live/work venue in Oakland, California. That tragedy has since inspired a series of raids on artist-run spaces nationwide—often leading to displacements.

For months, the landlord and tenants have been trying to get the spaces brought up to code and reopened. The outpouring of support from the art community has since inspired Denver City Council to draft legislation aimed at dealing with issues of illegal live/work spaces, and turned a local zoning violation into a national discussion. I sat down with Warren Bedell and John Golter, two of the displaced artists, to talk about the displacement, the process of reopening the venues, and the politics surrounding the current war on DIY spaces.

Warren: In 2005 myself and three other people got the lease for Rhinoceropolis and about four month later John started Glob, which was right next door to our warehouse. Since then we had continued doing art shows, music, and whatever else. There’s been a rotating cast of people living there. John and I had been there more or less for most of the time. At the point we were finally shut down I think we had twelve people total living between the two spaces.

John: And on top of the twelve people who lived there, we had anywhere from five to twenty volunteers helping with events between the two spaces. Then about five years ago Club Scum opened, which is the house that’s adjacent to the south of our building, and they also started doing shows. So really there were three venues, all with different programing, sharing this semi-enclosed space with a little fenced-in yard in the back. So on most nights you had three places with different shows and different crowds but everyone kind of ending up at the same space, which to me was what was really fun.

Warren: Likeminded people but different genres…

John: Right! We would kind of say “Rhinoceropolis is going to do this kind of stuff. Club Scum is going to do this kind of stuff. And Glob is going to do this kind of stuff.” It would be totally different programming—an art show or a punk show or a dance party—but the volunteers and promoters and bands were all friends. It’s a small enough city that anyone in the art scene is only a few degrees away from someone who might only go to metal shows.

The exterior of the building. Image by Tom Murphy for Westword, 2015.

Michael: How did you guys find the space?

Warren: For the Rhinoceropolis site we had been looking every time we had to renew our leases in more regular living situations– we really wanted a warehouse situation. We were literally just driving around calling the numbers on the sides of buildings. It was 2005, so we were even looking in the physical newspaper!

John: Did Craigslist exist?

Warren: It was definitely the MySpace era. But we stumbled upon it because we had good friends who’d had the space for about a year, and they left it about a year before we moved in. So we knew there was a friendly landlord. That landlord is definitely into helping artists.

John: I had a hundred-something-year-old house up in this neighborhood called The Highlands. At that point it wasn’t gentrified or uber-developed. I had lived there for five years and we were basically a punk house where we had a lot of bands play and a lot of bands practice. When the girl I was dating moved out I decided I wanted something bigger and easier to deal with—for recording, rehearsal, shows, and everything else. I had been booking shows at a place called The Zine Library down the street, and they were all kind of looking for a new location. It took me about a year and a half to find the right situation. I just happened to drive by, see a sign, and call up the landlord. After about a year and a half of looking for a space and getting rejected ALL THE TIME I was just really straightforward with the landlord: “Hey look, we’re gonna have a bunch of bands here. We’ll be having shows and rehearsals and recording.” And he just replied “I have the perfect space for you!” and it happened to be right next door to Warren, Betty, Harry, and Jeremiah.

Our very first night, September 1st 2005, there was nothing there. It was just totally stripped bare and we were running around really excited and gunfire erupted outside. There was a makeshift club that these guys were running around the corner, and I guess there was some kind of fight, and suddenly gunfire broke out busted out our front window. And busted out the front window on these guys’s space. It started ricocheting down the alley, and we ran out saying “Oh my God! What the hell did I just sign up for?” By the time the cops showed up all the people at the “club” had split, and one of the bullets that had gone through your [Warren’s] window lodge in a keyboard.

Warren: Yeah, it broke a toy keyboard.

Michael: Whoa. Do you still have it?

Warren: No… I think Jeremiah does?

John: Anyway it was pretty terrifying. I had just signed a three year lease and was thinking “this neighborhood is crazy!”

Michael: Was it a residential lease?

Warren: It was a commercial lease.

John: I think mine was a live/work lease.

Warren: It was definitely a commercial lease at Rhinoceropolis. The zoning was industrial, which is at the root of so many of the issues we’ve had—more surrounding that than issues of “our safety”.

John: The reason we were rolled out is because we didn’t have a residential certificate. We weren’t permitted to actually live there, and our landlord didn’t pull permits for any construction. When you walk around and looked at Glob, it looked like an apartment. You would never question it because it looked like someone’s home. Rhinoceropolis was a little bit different. It was more of an open shell of a space with apartments constructed in.

Michael: Did you guys have to do a lot of that construction yourselves?

John: Well, they [Rhinoceropolis]  did. I didn’t really have to do anything. My space just looked like an apartment with a twelve-car garage attached to it.

Warren: Yeah, Rhinoceropolis was different—the rear of the building is a big empty box, and the front was like a showroom scenario. We would use that as the showspace and we built four bedrooms in the back. And later a loft was added above the bathroom space. They were built safely for the most part, just not with permits.

Michael: It sounds like you guys put a lot of your own money and sweat equity into the space. Did you have some kind of agreement with the landlord to have that reflected in your rent?

Warren: Oh no. It was all on us. At that point I was 21 and we were just stoked that someone was going to let us do whatever we wanted in there. So we definitely did all the building on our own. A few years later he did add a kitchen for us—until then we were a hotplate kinda house—but he helped us put in an actual stove.

Michael: It always sucks when you’re renting in warehouse spaces where you do all this work and then the landlord says “Oh, I could raise the rent here!” Did that happen with you guys?

Warren: He didn’t do that, not in any malicious sense. He did raise our rent though.

John: I think he only did that once though. Since the spaces were triple-Net [a lease agreement on a property where the tenant or lessee agrees to pay all real estate taxes, building insurance, and maintenance on the property] we paid certain things that were itemized. One of those was property taxes, so once the neighborhood started getting nicer the city did an assessment every three years or so. And the property taxes just kept going up and up and up. So the overall bill, I think, from when it started to what it is now was $450 more. They just kept reassessing and saying “Oh! This neighborhood is actually nice now. I guess your property taxes are going way up!” That’s the problem with triple-Net. But I think Larry only raised the rent once.

Michael: Speaking of property taxes, can you talk about the RiNo Arts District? Was that something that grew out of the scene in the area that had formed organically or was that something else?

Warren: We had nothing to do with it. I think it started a few years after we moved in?

John: Or before?

Michael: I just looked it up, it was formed in 2005, the same year as Rhinoceropolis.

John: But it wasn’t really anything when it started—just a few businesses.

Warren: It’s totally separate from what we were doing. We have never been members.  It’s an “arts district” but its general goal is a business improvement district so they can get more money to add things like bike paths and have everybody pay for the same little corrugated signs with their logo on it.

Michael: I have to say, I haven’t seen a lot of arts-related things in the arts district in my admittedly short time here.

Warren: Yep. Many have moved away or been kicked out. It’s basically a brewery district now.

John: Yeah, as of two weeks ago another brewery opened up. Basically the one-mile area around the center of RiNo has become the most concentrated area of breweries in North America. So the RiNo district is being marketed as an “arts district” but really it’s just a place where people come to eat and drink craft beers.

Warren: Yeah, there’s a handful of people [in the arts] left but there really aren’t any galleries anymore.

Michael: Can you talk about what it was like the day you were told “you can’t live here anymore”?

Warren: It was bananas. I was at work when shit hit the fan. We had actually been planning a benefit show for Ghost Ship that was scheduled for two days after the raid ended up happening. Two days before that John and I had been going down and getting our fire extinguishers checked and refilled and had just bought another one. Texts started coming in while I was at work and I was just like, “Shit. I gotta dip out.”

John: Yeah, I think I texted you.

Warren: So I left work a little early and…. yeah. Our house was surrounded by news trucks. I was able to get in there and pull out maybe a suitcase or two of essentials and figure it out from there.

Michael: Do you want to talk about how the eviction came about?

Warren: Well, there was Ghost Ship of course…

John: Technically it wasn’t “an eviction” it was “a displacement”. Like a kicking-out. Eviction happens when your landlord wants you out, but that hasn’t happened. Is there a more accurate word than just saying we were “displaced”?

Warren: Yeah we were just told we weren’t allowed to live in the space.

Michael: By the Fire Marshall?

Warren: It was actually city zoning that still has the red tag on the door.  

John: Paul Schaffer, the inspector from Denver Community Planning and Development. The fire division—of the planning department—came in and looked at both buildings and had a list of things we needed to fix and my landlord fixed those within four weeks. It was really minor and didn’t take that long. It cost him a little bit, but he upgraded everything and that’s been signed-off. Our electrical and fire code violations were signed-off in January. The problem is really getting everything permitted to live there in Glob and throw shows in Rhino. Basically you have to get an architect. And he has to go there with his codebook and say “we have to do this, this and this”. We had an architect working with us for two-and-a-half months who, for whatever reason, just decided he couldn’t do it any more so we had to start over. It took a couple weeks for me to find another architect who was sympathetic and willing to work with us. He’s been on the case now for about 3 months. We’re coming to an end here this week.

Michael: So at the end of this three-month process you guys can move back in?

John: That’s the idea. On my end I have to add a window that has to be large enough for egress—an exit window. And we had to build two walls.

Michael: Why would you have to build two walls?

John: To make a designated “bedroom”. So we’ll have one bedroom downstairs and another bedroom upstairs. So that will be where we’re legit allowed to live. That’s all it comes down to. Rhino is a little bit different. We have to change a few walls.

Warren: We need a separate “office”, we need wheelchair ramps, we need panic doors on the back gates.

John: Well, that’s federal. We don’t really have to do that, but Larry [our landlord] wants to because otherwise we’re at risk for a federal lawsuit on account of the ADA. And it’s just a good thing to do. Basically Rhino has to adjust, add a few walls, add another bathroom that’s ADA accessible, make the existing bathroom ADA accessible. So we’re going from one bathroom to two, making them bigger, getting rid of the kitchen, and moving some walls around. We’re talking a day’s worth of work at my place and maybe five day’s worth of work at Rhino but it’s taken seven-and-something months to do that.

Michael: That’s crazy. But it seems like all three groups of tenants have been working together to resolve this situation?

Warren: Yep!

Michael: So would you say you all are bearing the brunt of the responsibilities (financially, legally, etc…) or the landlord? Or sharing that responsibility?

John: The arrangement we have with our landlord is that we’ll pay rent and he’ll take care of the construction. There wasn’t anything legally—no fines assessed—but he wanted the leaseholders, myself and this other guy John, to be really involved in the process because, you know, he’s older. We tell him what needs to be done and he takes care of it.

I have had maybe four meetings with the city, I’ve gone to other arts organizations’ meetings around this issue, gone to town halls, I’ve had phone call after phone call after phone call. I can’t count how many things I have had to do around this. It’s nuts—especially the meetings with the city engineer, the fire department, the zoning department. Right off the bat we had two meetings with the fire and electrical inspectors and zoning people. We kept meeting with them and we kept passing inspections with the fire department. That was all in the first six weeks. After that, I’ve had maybe 20 meetings with this architect, measuring everything and seeing where things should go. I drafted my version of what I think should happen and he altered them to meet code. And he’s been going back-and-forth with the city. I’ve been included in those email chains and it’s just a different language. The international residential code books are like a foot thick. And the commercial code books are just as thick. We had to get a consultant to help. And we’ve had meetings with Meow Wolf. And we have a GoFundMe for this. But the way GoFundMe is set up, if you take the money directly, you’re immediately taxed a 1099 which takes 33% of the funds. But if you have a fiscal sponsor non-profit, they’ll take the money and dole it out for you without having to worry about taxes.

Warren: Like, our money is there, it’s just impossible to get to right now.

John: It’s really, really difficult.

Michael: It seems like you got a lot of support from the community though. Which nonprofits or other groups really helped you out?

John: Meow Wolf has been the big one. That was simple. The CEO, Vince, speaks our language. You know, he may be the CEO of a massively-monied nonprofit but he went through this. Well, not exactly this, but he was in the warehouse scene back in the day. He was probably the first person I met through dealing with this situation where I sighed “Oh, this guy knows what’s going on! Thank God!” He was amazing. He and his crew come up here a lot because they’re expanding into Denver and Austin out of Santa Fe.

Michael: Meow Wolf is the art space with the Game of Thrones money, right?

Warren: Yep!

John: Yeah, George R.R. Martin gave them a lot of money. And a philanthropist in Denver just gave them a ton of money so they’re expanding up here. They do have a vested interest in keeping us going, in keeping DIY culture going. This past year has been a big hit. All the crackdowns in Baltimore, in Denver, everywhere. This was huge for them, because they are still a part of that community.

Warren: We met them before Meow Wolf existed, when they would just come play shows at Rhino and they’re just my homies from our community who have been around a long time.

John: They just got some serious donations. And once you get that one big check, you can start getting others. What they do is amazing, and they were able to get a philanthropist to fund them bringing a semblance of what they do down in Santa Fe up here to Denver. They kinda needed people who were like-minded to still be here, because they needed a scene to keep it running. They can’t just take all the people from Santa Fe and move them here. They want Denver people, so they need us to keep the DIY scene going in the meantime. It’s going to be about 3 years before they expand into Denver. And Redline Contemporary Art Center was our other fiscal sponsor.

Warren: And most of the support has been through our GoFundMe. A friend of ours set it up right after the raid—for us to get the space started again. Another friend set one up for us personally, just so we could get security deposits or whatever related costs to suddenly having to relocate. And that happened pretty quickly. That was really nice. The Meow Wolf funds have also been super helpful.

John: And the alternative press, Westword, retroactively gave us a Mastermind Award, which was $2,000. And we had two or three shows that were benefit fundraisers. I didn’t want to take the money from those. I think I did from one? But all the money from the Westword award and other benefits I just wanted to go to the other guys and girls. All the Meow Wolf money is just going to paying the rent on the spaces until we can move back in. Same with the GoFundMe money.

Michael: But you’re still waiting to get access to that money through a fiscal sponsor?

John: Yeah, through sponsorship from Redline. That should work out. As of right now we’re trying to work out the details and figure that out. But the Meow Wolf funds have been so helpful. We just got that through PayPal and it was so easy. Without that, I would have abandoned this. There was just no way to do this, our arrangement with our landlord would’ve had to be totally different. I mean, he wants to help, he wants to do all of this, but he also has to make ends meet on our end too. We wouldn’t have been able to make Rhino a legit venue. He would’ve had to get other tenants like a yoga studio or whatever. It would’ve been the end. We already knew we had incredible support from the community who really wanted it, but Meow Wolf really came to the rescue. I honestly thought this process would take three months. But just this current attempt with this architect and consultant is taking over three months. Unfortunately we didn’t meet them in the beginning.

Warren: But I think that level of support has also been essential to making us all take what we do a little more seriously. Even with a lot of the talks we had with fire and zoning officials would end up with them being surprised by how things came through. Like largely attended meetings concerning affordable arts spaces in Denver—I don’t think they realize how many people were impacted by this. Just from losing the spot that they used to go to. And as frustrating as it has been, the city doing as the city does, they kind of have been holding our hands through this process. And I think that’s due to the support that’s surrounded us. It’s so important.

John: They [city officials] had no idea that they had tripped across something. They were going by the letter of their rules and codes, just like they always do, and if we didn’t have that support [from the community] I wouldn’t be granted meetings with each department head every time I go in there. They’re in suits and ties and watching everything they say. When they get a project in it usually takes months, but they’ve tried to cut that down to weeks or days in some instances. I walked in with the architects and they were like “What? I have never met any of these people. These are the department heads! I have never had a meeting like this it’s crazy!” When he first called in and left the message that he’d be the architect working with us, he got a call back the next day from the department head, on a Saturday, to set up a meeting on Monday and get the ball rolling right away because they mayor and city council were on his case. He just said “Who are you people? What is going on?” There were so many people calling in, writing in…that made a big difference. For an architect who does this professionally day in and day out on just regular projects he’s never seen anything like this [level of political attention].

Warren: Having people in the media who know who we are and are sympathetic has also been huge.

John: I mean, for two weeks we had live news trucks camped across the street! They were doing news broadcasts like “We’re live at Rhinocergobalopolis and following the unfolding situation… as you can see they’re moving stuff out” it was so weird to be moving out my personal possessions and just see cameramen cut to me across the street.

Warren: One time I was just rolling up on my bike and had to be like “no comment!” I felt real cool.

John: I was at work and they have TVs in the cafeteria, where I would just see live broadcasts from my house on the local news. My coworkers would be like, “That looks like your car, man!” That was so odd. I tried to keep my work life separated, but it didn’t take long.

Warren: The media was also funny because at first my parents and Lauren’s parents were both like, “I understand it was really unsafe in there…” and we had to be like, “no, no, it’s not a rave dungeon.” That was the initial TV media response until smarter independent media people started reporting more ….responsibly.

John: It lasted a lot longer than I thought. It was weeks and weeks and weeks of it.

Vampire Pussy performing at Rhinoceropolis in September, 2008. Photo by Tom Murphy.

Michael: This is sort of a loaded question, but have you noticed a change in the arts scene city-wide since the post-Ghost-Ship crackdown?

Warren: In a lot of ways, yeah. You definitely notice that for punk shows, for example, no one is putting addresses on flyers. If this crackdown is really about safety, that’s problematic. Half the time I don’t even know where to find shows now! Things have definitely slowed down. Culture has been pushed way farther underground. I have far fewer people contacting me to try to book shows or events in Denver. Everyone knows it’s hard right now. As far as the visual art scene goes, I don’t know that this round of raids is necessarily the biggest factor. Denver in general is just changing. Some of the longest-standing galleries are just picking up and moving on. At an alarming rate.

John: At a very, very alarming rate. But like you were saying, I don’t know if that’s because some of them were raided and shut down…

Warren: …or just priced-out.

John: Or if their landlord or whatever is just like “I sold the building to developers. You all have to leave.” I don’t know what the landscape will look like in five years. Like you said, it’s a loaded topic, and I can’t really be objective about it because we were always in the middle of the storm! To me it feels dead.

Warren: Yeah I really hate having to go outside of my house to see a show! It’s so difficult!

John: But it actually is. Having to search around. But I think it’s kinda cool what people have done with Facebook events now. They just say “ask a punk” for directions. So if you know the person organizing it you literally have to message them to get the address. I knew this was coming. All the organizers have been like “we cannot make this public anymore because the cops are going to figure it out.”

Warren: More than cops, it’s the trolls.

John: Trolls!

Warren: All the emboldened Trump fans who just want to mess with people.

Michael: Do you think it was an “alt-right” person who tipped off the city about your spot?

John: Who knows?

Warren: Well, we have the email.

John: Does it say who specifically did it?

Warren: It was a police marshall who emailed “hey we should go check out this space and this space too. Bring the police along.”

John: But we don’t know who tipped them off. It’s all anonymous. It could’ve been a phone call and they’re not going to record that. It’s the 311 system you can call if your neighbor is dumping trash or doing something stupid. Or safety concerns or whatever. The intentions of things like that are great, like if a business isn’t clearing a sidewalk or something, but it’s something else when someone can call and say “I think people are living in this building and they shouldn’t be.” That’s really what happens now.

Warren: Well I do have a screencap of a 4chan discussion about us, where they have this little slogan like “Save lives! Shut down these socialist hives!” or whatever.

John: The right-wing trolls have definitely have been doing it after this. I just don’t think they had it in their heads to do it before it happened to us. Because it was literally less than a week after the Ghost Ship fire that they came for us. I think we were the second or third of the major venues that were raided nationwide.

Michael: Denver’s Safe Occupancy Program sort of came out of this, right? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Warren: Some. It’s a bandaid. Their whole idea is that you can get two years to fix your building if you volunteer to have them inspect you. But the inspectors could still find something and say it’s completely life-threatening, in their eyes.

John: What they deem life-threatening. I wrote something for a journalist at Westword about this [law]. For some reason, this law—which is actually a law being passed by city council—managed to be inspired by us but has nothing to do with us. They managed to target “not us” and not help us or anyone like us. They are managing to push everything so far underground it’s counterproductive and more unsafe than ever.

Warren: And there are no standards for the city deems life-threatening. You can still get booted immediately. Otherwise you might get two years. And your landlord isn’t actually responsible for doing anything. You get two years, and theoretically help from the city, to bring things up to code for mixed-use purposes. You don’t have to slice too deep with Occam’s razor to realize that nobody is going to voluntarily do that. And if they did, your landlord could still just boot you for no reason after two years and move on to the next tenants. I’m struggling to see what this law addresses.

John: There are so many things that they could deem as “Serious life-threatening problems.” It could be too many extension cords plugged in or an outlet without a cover. That could be a life safety issue, you know? There’s a litany of things they could say were life-threatening if they wanted to. And that’s probably what’s going to happen. A lot of these artists don’t get press, they don’t have mountains of people who will call in on their behalf. They could just get booted, if there’s any motivated artists still left in this city. And there’s no new places left for them anyway. It’s so difficult! I’ve looked, Warren’s looked, we’ve all looked for another space. There’s nothing. All of this was our “Plan B”. Plan A was to take Meow Wolf’s money and just find another space and bring it up to code. But there’s nothing on the market right now. And what there is is extremely overpriced. The property we had was by far the best option. And any other artist group coming up like we did when we were 21, you know, doesn’t have those options. 12 years ago it was a lot easier to find something.

Warren: And that’s why, on some level, it’s nice to see legislation attempting to address this issue. But there’s a lot of things being discussed at the table and we’re not included in the discussion…about us.

John: Yeah, they made a law about us and didn’t ask for our input.

Warren: I’m more worried for the smaller spaces. The spaces where you have to tell someone to “ask a punk” where it is. They don’t have a Meow Wolf or GoFundMe to deal with this. And they’re just going to move away. It’s happening all over the country. There’s just not policy in place. Everyone’s trying to put these bandaid policies in place so they don’t look like they’re just booting poor artists, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.

John: And the part that gets me, apart from the grey area for the “life-threatening” issues, is that if you do not voluntarily offer up an inspection you’re not guaranteed those two years. If you get a report and a surprise inspection like they did with us, you don’t get that two-year option. You just are told “You have to go, now.” They give you 45 minutes to grab your stuff and leave. I still think people will say “fuck it. I’m not going to volunteer for this. I’m just going to play it cool. And hopefully they won’t be coming through my door.” People with money, with a nice space, who are in the process of getting permits anyway—I could see them doing this. This just gives them more time. So the intention is to have artists do that, but there’s no possible way they will.

Michael: I feel like all of the brick and concrete warehouses we all used to live in illegally are probably more safe than any of the shitty stick-built condos going up everywhere.

Warren: Yeah. A huge portion of their issues, which we fixed immediately, were things that were made from construction-grade wood but hadn’t been wrapped in drywall. But we’re sitting in a “nice” loft right now looking at a wooden stairway and we just passed inspections! It’s not wrapped in drywall. Wood wrapped in drywall is apparently better? It’s all so arbitrary.

Entrancer performing at Rhinoceropolis in June 2014. Photo by Tom Murphy.

Michael: I worry a lot about this crackdown on DIY spaces nationally, coupled with gentrification, coupled with the rise of alt-right trolling, deportations. What is the future of the type of art scenes we grew up in? I feel like urban America used to be this much more open place where you could just show up in a new city and always find friends-of-friends with a warehouse space where you could crash on the couch and do a show or something. We could do our own events and live in these sort of high-density places that still had space to experiment and actually do things. It feels like a whole part of our culture is disappearing.

John: Oh, overnight. This hasn’t been a long-term trend. It happened so fast.  

Warren: Definitely in the past six months. I do agree it’s a different landscape, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Some of the best art and culture to come out of this country was during the Nixon administration, which was no less ridicul…oh. Well, maybe nothing is as ridiculous as what we have right now. But artists still managed [to build communities] without the internet!

John: I don’t know that we can compare it.

Michael: But that was when gentrification was just a glimmer in the eyes of policymakers. Artists even had giant lofts in Manhattan!

Warren: Maybe Denver won’t be this rad hub for art anymore because all the poor people moved away. Economic structures are a huge reason that Baltimore has so much coming out of it. It’s not just from the schools. I know that Rhinoceropolis and Glob would not have happened if we couldn’t find a space that close enough to central Denver and cheap as fuck to live in.

John: That was the only reason I stuck around Denver. I mean, no offense to Denver, but if I’m going to be paying rents like people are paying now I’d be moving to LA or Brooklyn or SF. It was so attractive to me to stick around because the price point was so low. I could take risks.

Michael: What was your rent?

John: Around $1,500, split between four people. Plus bands would chip in… so it usually worked out to be less than $400 a month per person. In another building it was a 5 bedroom for $1,000. And I was touring all the time.

Warren: Yeah, when you don’t have to always worry about rent you can tour. You can build a network.

John: Or buy equipment. Now, rent is like triple the cost. No one even with a good paying job would take on an endeavor [like Rhinoceropolis or Glob] today.

Warren: The first three years of Rhino we were all paying $300 each and there were four of us. I think at the time of the raid we were nine people.

Michael: And this is something symptomatic of gentrification. Spaces like Ghost Ship became dangerously overcrowded because you can only afford to make ends meet if you’re living with twenty other people. It’s important for cities to realize that—keeping things affordable makes it easier for artists to live responsibly, and I know you have always tried to keep your spaces as safe as possible. Speaking of which, what does your timeline look like moving forward?

John: Anytime I give anyone an estimate it’s been wrong. When we started this process in December we were hoping anywhere from two weeks to two months. Seven months later we’re still filling out paperwork. It’s never ending. In theory, I should get another email this week saying “one more thing you need to fix” or “we’re done”. Maybe this week?

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[the-goat-writer-blog]

Segment of Novel for Y2 University Seminar (Draft for Assessment) (2015) #2

I hate my job. I really don’t think I’m cut out for this. Only two minutes ago I was introducing myself to a homely old lady at her doorstep. Now I was bounding and leaping for cover behind living room furniture, from a volley of various hurtling ornaments, all the while looking like a tremendous fool, I’m sure. Somewhere between here and there I had rather typically misplaced my wand; lost to the sea of scattered objects at my knees. To add to the lunacy of the situation, one of the improvised missiles had struck the overhead light, damaging the wiring. I know what you’re thinking; so the light went off and now it was a little dark, so what? But that’s not what happened. The cable now hung by a single wire thread, causing an infrequent and terribly disorientating strobe effect; this resulted in the room alternating between brilliant light and total darkness. If you’ve ever tried to find a lost, dark coloured item on a disco dancefloor then you may understand my increasingly hopeless frustration.

Books, CDs, miniature busts came one by one over me as I made a dash for the safety of the sofa. Candlesticks, cups, a bulky telephone (which of course caught me around the head, ouch), and a couple lamps came next. What more was there for my devious adversary to throw?

‘Dr. Percival!’ cried Mrs Hennessey from behind (or perhaps beneath) a pile of mostly broken crockery. ‘Isn’t there something you should do?!’

‘I’m working on it,’ I called, over the ruckus of the scene. It had gone on long enough now, I thought, there was no sense blindly stumbling around the room in search of a wand I was sure to never find – in fact, if I continued like this I might find myself a hospital bed before long – after all, the average size of the objects soaring over my head had been steadily increasing. I quickly formulated a plan.

Preparing myself for the onslaught which I was about to face, I stole a cushion from over the sofa and braced it before me like a shield. Then, standing fast, I vaulted the sofa in a single step and hopped onto the coffee table before it. I raised the cushion shield to protect my head from above. I still felt the force of a dozen objects bashing the shield face; it was almost enough to throw me from my perch, but I now had a clear view of the entire room and I wouldn’t need it long.

‘Cartha shvest!’ I exclaimed. Kindle, Flame, in the modern tongue. My head swivelled and scanned the room.

On my first complete spin I saw nothing. Not a flicker. A picture frame whizzed by my ear. I scanned again, slower this time.

There. I could see a soft glow escaping from a pile of something below the fireplace. Seizing my chance I hurled my trusty shield in the most likely direction of my foe and made a quick dive for the glow. The cushion had missed, and for that mistake I took a painful pummelling as I fished into the pile. My finger met what I knew to be wood and I grasped at the dark. A moment later, I unleashed from the pile my flaming wand and turned it toward the source of the oncoming projectiles.

‘Percux!’ I bellowed. Propel.

Bang!

The fire I had conjured at the end of my wand had launched like a rocket toward my enemy, and in a fortunate turn had struck him too. The soft thud of the creature’s small body hitting the rug signalled the end of the duel.

‘Ho! You’ve done it! You’ve got the bugger!’ cried Mrs Hennessey gleefully, finally poking her head up from the small mountain of crockery. ‘Is it… dead?’ she then asked, after a moment.

Still panting I struggled to my sore feet, clutching my wand still tightly in my right. There came no sounds from the corner where the creature had fallen. I took this to mean it was safe to get closer. First, however:

‘Restora afina.’ I pointed at the still flickering light above. A silent thread of pure blue light left my wand and circled the wire; it wove between the frayed copper strings and began to re-entwine them. Restore, Fine. The light settled to a dimmer, more pleasing gold; the same, I recalled, from when I had arrived.

‘Oh, tha-’ Mrs Hennessey had begun but halted, the room was now illuminated and she had seen the extent of the awful mess in her once very neat living room. ‘Bloody hell.’

I paid her no mind; I had come to expect a degree of mess. And that degree was: “a lot”. Instead, I had made my way, cautiously, to the site of my now motionless foe.

Lying on a clear portion of the mint green rug, (by the way, ew), was a small blue creature. The body would’ve been that of a man scaled down to around the size of a watermelon, if not for its oversized head, hands, and feet – and of course the bat wings, fangs, pointed elfish ears, and tattoo-like markings which ran from its forehead to its toes. But apart from those things I’d say it was quite like a man. A man-thing. Although it might have been a woman-thing. The blue was close to sapphire and, upon closer inspection, I noticed the skin was quite strange a texture; almost scaled, though much smoother and flexible.

Despite my inarticulate way of describing the blue man-thing, (to which I have my own momentarily shaken disposition and your lack of familiarity to blame, reader), I was actually quite knowledgeable about the creature which lay before me. Its name I definitely knew. It was a Mystlethwayt harpy.

Surprisingly dangerous creatures, harpies. They have no predators, and no real prey, since they don’t eat or kill for any other reason. This results in a great deal of free time for a short-lived yet powerful being; free time which is most commonly spent with their families. However, occasionally a harpy becomes separated and, like in the instance of poor Mrs Hennessey, can bind itself to a witch or wizard for its own protection and enjoyment. A binding such as this cannot be undone, it is the promise of magic: the harpy will protect its bound-mate, though will also make their life hell. Not maliciously, harpies are by no means cruel or evil creatures; it’s just in their nature. Dizziness, fatigue, and drowsiness can all be symptoms of a harpy’s unwanted affection – the bond is oddly physical and almost parasitic in its affect, draining the host’s energy to ensure the host cannot attack or escape the harpy. The easiest way to break this binding is to kill the harpy. This happens often, and has contributed to the slow decline of harpy sightings in Britain over the last century. What are the other ways to break it? Well, killing the bound-mate would also suffice technically. And thinking about it, it definitely would have been much easier. But lastly: a bond can be broken by a very long and complicated casting of a very old and wordy spell. Unfortunately the spell only works if the harpy is in the presence of another harpy during the time of the incantation. Fortunately, this is my fifth harpy case this week.

You may be wondering why I didn’t just kill it. Because I didn’t. Fire is no serious threat to a magical creature, unless it’s a magic chicken or something specifically weak to going up in flames. No there aren’t actually magic chickens. The force of the spell had simply knocked it unconscious. And a good thing it did, since harpies are a nuisance and bloody tricky to catch in a net. Anyway, in answer to the question: it’s because it’s my job. I may despise being a doctor but a doctor I am. I treat the sick; loneliness is just another ailment. Truthfully, the harpy is as much my patient as Mrs Hennessey; it’s not a crime to be lonely. It is however an ailment as potent as any disease, bewitching, enchantment or infection.

I drew from my bag a clean jam jar, and with a quick wave of my wand, engorged it to a more reasonable size to accommodate the harpy. Then, as the creature had only just begun to stir, I scooped it gently into the jar and firmly closed the lid. Next I took to cutting small holes in the lid for breath with my wand pressed to the metal. Egrosa and Fini, Punctas, Ashta; meaning: Grow, and, Finite, Puncture, Metal.

‘Who’s going to pay for all this?’ Mrs Hennessey whined. The old woman had been grumpily muttering to herself until now; still surveying the recoverability of her possessions, one at a time placing the survivors on the coffee table. It was so far a thin collection.

I shrugged. Mrs Hennessey’s contract with the WICA (Wizarding Insurance Co. Albion) would cover any damages to her health or the health of any others in the home as a result of my visit and subsequent actions. I did not however, account for property damage.

‘It’s likely the harpy was the cause of your tiredness lately, Mrs Hennessey,’ I said, hoping to change the subject. Each time the old woman inspected another broken item I felt a compelling desire to wrap up and make haste for the door. ‘The creature will be accompanying me to my office. Once I’ve broken the magic binding it to you I will send word. Your symptoms should cease soon after that.’

‘How long will that be?’ she asked, apprehensively eyeing the jar I had tucked under my arm. ‘And what’ll you do with it after?’

‘A day or so. And I’ll make arrangements for the harpy to be taken into Lowely tomorrow. The keepers there will no doubt be able to reintegrate it to a community of its own kind.’

I could tell this wasn’t the answer Mrs Hennessey had been looking for; her brow and lips had tightened slowly as I had spoken.

‘Bloody pest it is. Just kill it and be done with it. Look at what it’s done to my poor old living room!’ she spat angrily, gesturing incredulously to the destruction around her.

  You might be wondering at this point why I’d become involved in all this at all. After all, in what sense does a harpy problem constitute a medical issue such that a doctor is required? I’ll explain.

In the wizarding world the number of issues associated with medicine are greatly increased. While I do deal with simple ailments such as a broken bone or a breakout of rabies, my duties also include: breaking hexes, enchantments etc., the symptoms of which often present as medical issues; resolving possessions and hauntings; and lastly of course, repelling, controlling or exterminating magical creatures which the presence of might cause declining health. Why all this under one umbrella profession? Because the WICA are lazy. And greedy. Training and hiring more doctors to treat everything works out cheaper than training, specialising, and then hiring a smaller number of workers for each a much smaller range of duties. If you’re ever confused as to the reason behind something government run, take my word for it that it always comes down to money. And I do mean government, not the private sector. The wizarding government is funded, and therefore run, almost exclusively by the WICA.

What’s to stop doctor’s from specialising on their own? Well, nothing. But do so at your peril; breaching the WICA medical officer contract would invalidate your medical license. And if that wasn’t bad enough, since the WICA write the paycheques, you’re only source of income would be your patients. Good luck making a living off of that.

(Another attempt at a piece for my Y2 assessment. I think I wrote this after a Harry Potter movie marathon and just wanted something wizard themed. I feel like it went okay, although I’m not sure about the bizarrely political last couple paragraphs... I have no intention of moving forward with this, though there is a lot of planning attached: something to do with Arthurian Legend...

P.S: I hope these titles aren’t getting confusing.)