#accessible not meaning cheap I think part of that is everyone getting paid more

[h0neyfreak]

the relationship between fast fashion (in the literal sense of brands turning over stock incredibly quickly) and “buy now, pay later” financing schemes is so so icky and I think about it all the time. Like you simply cannot see something you like and then take a bit to save up for it because it’ll be gone!!! Enter into this risky unregulated credit transaction instead!!!!!!! And brands that do have decent to excellent quality mainstay pieces are either for a very specific style of person or inaccessible luxury brands. We need L. L. Bean for goths is what I’m saying.

[thxrnking]

Sign Me Up - A Night Children AU One Shot

Tag List: @sparklingdiva678 @libralelia @punsandquips @phoenixriaartemis @sunsetpixels @anja-the-sane-sibling @caitlynnrosespn @anonymous-gremlin @aaamethyst-topazzz

Shoutout to @mightnightmooon for being my injury consultant making sure I don't accidentally kill Pat :3

Summary - When Swan Soldiers attack his apartment building, Pat Quinn doesn't have much time to get as many people out as he can. If he makes it out himself, what kind of life is waiting for him?

Pat Quinn Profile | Nell Quinn Profile | Night Children AU

Everyday there was a new story about an attack somewhere and about twenty more people gone missing. I remember when Cygnus shut its borders. The whole district was in a frenzy and some rich guy paid for increased patrols around Dancity to ‘discourage the rabble’ as they put it.

Sure, I knew about the Swan Empire but I really didn’t like thinking about it. I’m just some guy who sells books in the nice part of Pivet to pay for my crappy apartment in the bad part of Pivet. I didn’t like what was going on elsewhere but what good would I do worrying over it day in and day out?

It was my day off so I was in my apartment. A simple bedsit in the Pointe apartment block, south of Maneater Alley. It’s got a bit of a rough reputation but it’s affordable.

I don’t remember what I was doing but I know there were screams coming in through the window. Like I said, the area’s rough and screams aren’t exactly rare around here so I thought nothing of it. Nothing until there was this massive BWOOM that made the whole building shake.

The walls shook, the ground shook, pictures dropped from the wall, the mirror in my shower room fell. Hell, I even dropped to the floor from the force. Now that isn’t normal and after I scrambled to my feet, I ran for the door.

Several of my neighbours were out there too. Everyone felt it, not just me, and most of them were thinking we’d just had an earthquake. That didn’t sit right with me. I mean sure they can happen but in this part of Dancity? That’s when the shouting and screaming started again, but this time it was muffled. Like it was coming from downstairs; inside the building.

The lower floors of the Pointe are where you’ll find the larger rooms with better accessibility. Designed for the families and those with mobility restrictions. I think there might even be a few flatshares down there. Up on our floor, the fourth floor, you’ll find the single occupants. People who like their own space and a cheap place to stay without caring too much about loads of neighbours. Management told us this was so if we ever had to evacuate the whole building it would be quicker and safer for everyone. When we heard kids screaming, we figured evacuation was probably a good idea.

Obviously the main way in wasn’t an option. Whatever danger was coming for us would be coming that way. Lucky for us the fire exit is at the other end of our corridor, at the opposite end of the building. If we could be quick enough, we would probably get everyone out before they even got to us.

“Out! Everyone out!” I didn’t really bother being quiet, shouting as loud as I could.

No one needed telling twice, everyone heading straight for the door. Meanwhile I went the opposite direction, heading towards the entryway staircase. Someone needed to see how much time we had and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get someone else to risk it.

I hate our Gods-damned entryway staircase. It’s a multi-floor echo-chamber because they laid down that awful awful tile that reverberates every single sound that so much brushes over it. Walking up it on your own on a good day is bad enough, each step bouncing up and down and back and forth, coming at you from every angle and making you question your sanity. I jammed my hands against my ears as I shouldered open the door, knowing it would be so much worse.

The shouting and screams were so much louder and the reverb was Hell, I could feel it in my teeth. Even then, over it all was the steady thrum of multiple people marching as one. 

Marching meant one thing; Swan Soldiers. Our building was under attack from Night Swan, her Soldiers here to take prisoners or to recruit. Neither option sounded good. So an invading force was coming up the stairs, several people were still in the corridor, and thanks to the reverb, there was no way to figure out how long we had until they got here.

As I came back into the corridor, I saw that most people had made it out the exit while some stragglers were still on their way out after having finally given up banging on the still closed doors. Fuck.

On my way to the exit, I banged on each closed door myself. I didn’t want to waste time, banging only two or three times and shouting to get out before moving on. There was no answer at any of them and I really hoped it was because they weren’t home.

Finally, I made it to the end. The Soldiers hadn’t reached us yet, everyone else was out, and I’d just finished banging on the last door. I was thinking we’d made it when it happened. Two thirds of the way down the corridor a door opened and out of the apartment stepped a woman I didn’t know. Couldn’t tell you her name even now but I had a few choice names for her at that moment I can tell you.

Her hair was dishevelled and she was in her pyjamas. She looked rough, exhausted, and pissed. She started shouting about night shifts and irregular schedules but at that point I wasn’t listening. We didn’t have time and I was sprinting right at her.

Seeing me barrelling at her seemed to scare her out of her rant. The building shaking and her neighbours shouting and screaming as they ran for their lives didn’t ruffle her, but a strange young man running at her as fast as he could? Apparently that’s terrifying.

I screeched to a halt on the other side of her and just started physically herding her towards the exit. She tried and failed to argue with me because I just kept pushing her. Whether or not she liked it I was going to get her out that door. When I finally got her to the exit, I pushed her out, told her to run and slammed the door behind her.

This wasn’t the plan. I’d fully intended to be on the other side of that door when I closed it for the last time but I’d realised something while getting that woman out. The original plan wasn’t going to work.

We were running with seconds on our side here, not minutes. The Swan Soldiers would get up here, find our floor empty, and take all of 0.2 seconds to realise where we went. They’d immediately follow us, chase us down and all we would have done would be give them a little extra cardio. Ultimately, it would only delay the inevitable.

If anyone was going to have any hope of getting to true safety, someone needed to stay behind. To keep their focus on the floor for just a minute or two so the others could find somewhere safe. So that was my plan; distract them.

When they finally got to me I was nowhere near the exit, waiting for them halfway down the corridor. I’d seen Swan Soldiers on TV before but this was my first time in person. It was haunting, like looking at a picture of someone who died 20 years ago. Unnatural. Hollow.

As they marched in, I raised my hands in surrender. I figured they’d march straight up to me and take me into custody, after all I was an easy target. Probably their easiest take-down all night, but they kept their distance, merely stepping to the side and watching me with their formless faces.

They were waiting. For her.

I’d heard about the Night Children, everybody had. Still I didn’t want to believe it. All those powerful dancers, defeated by the Night Swan and now fighting by her side. It was unthinkable. Especially Brezziana.

I’ve known Brezz for years. I first saw her during a flash mob she did in Luz Solar Mall years ago. She was energetic, encouraging, exuding warmth and kindness that just made you want to join in. So I did. I made sure someone introduced us and I was right there with her at her next five flash mobs.

I wouldn’t say we were friends. I don’t have her number, couldn’t tell you where she lives, but we would always talk whenever we ran into each other. She’d ask about my family, I’d check in about her friends. We were close enough.

From between the Soldiers, Brezziana strode forward coming to a stop in front of them. What had been bright calming blue, and energetic orange was intertwined with toxic vine-like black feathers tracing up and down her body. Her hair puffs were gone, her purple curly hair half-pulled back and drawn into a messy singular bun. The pink heart, her signature motif, was broken in two.

Her eyes were aflame, burning with glee on top of a wide, emotionless smile that held no warmth. The Soldiers all looked to her, watching and waiting. She was their leader.

“Hello Pat. Mind if we come in?”

She remembered me. Her voice was ice cold, dripping with malice and my hands dropped as I stepped back. My heart sank, my chest felt hollow, and my whole body was numb.

It was true. The truth of the Night Children was stood right in front of me, ready to take me in or take me down. I knew I couldn’t let her, but I had no plan, I had no way out, and I had maybe five seconds before she came for me with no hope of outrunning her or her Soldiers.

My mind raced as I stepped back, desperately trying to think of something, anything. I glanced to the side peeking into a nearby apartment and saw something that gave me an idea. Not smart, not great, but if I did this right it’d leave me better off than I was three minutes before.

“Go ahead,” I said, mostly to distract her. The only thing I had on my side was the element of surprise and if it had any hope of working I needed them not to realise I was going to try something, “I was thinking of moving out anyway.”

Pausing only to give them a two-finger salute, I dashed into the apartment slamming the door shut behind me. Seconds was all I had but it was all I needed as I ran to the window, unbolted it, tore it open, and-

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

“Wait!” Blake interrupts from the doorway.

The room is tiny, more of a converted storage closet. With the increasing raids occurring across Dancity in recent months, the Resistance outpost has had to make space for the countless people who barely made it out somehow. There’s just enough space in here for the cot Pat’s laid on, and the small stool on which Liv is sitting.

“You were toe-to-toe with one of the Night Children, essentially at her mercy, and the best idea you could come up with was to jump out of a fourth storey window?!”

“No. My idea was to jump to the second storey roof of the building next door, then keep running. I didn’t count on breaking my leg.” Pat chuckles gesturing to his left leg that was tightly bound to a splint. It had been in a cast up until last week, but the medic had confined Pat to remain on bedrest a little while longer, just to make sure the bone was fully healed.

Liv gently smiles at him, “Thank the gods we found you before the Soldiers did.”

“Shame you’re pretty much useless.” Blake mutters, not quite under their breath. They’re leant back against the doorframe, arms crossed and scowling. A common occurrence when they came to visit Pat.

As outpost leaders, it was a vital duty of both theirs and Liv’s to check in with those in their custody. Check on their care and make sure they’re safe. Still, Blake wished that Pat wasn’t on the list. There’s nothing wrong with him, though he is annoyingly upbeat, but the dumbass tends to talk. A lot.

“So you’ve said,” Pat snarks back, “many times. Yet I still managed to get those people to relative safety. So maybe I’m not completely useless.”

“Enough.” Liv stands, purposefully placing herself between them. There's a firm glare in her eye as she looks between the two, daring either of them to challenge her interruption.

“I’m just saying-” Pat tries but Liv silences him with a finger in his face as she pins her glare on him.

“You’re supposed to be resting, not picking fights. And Blake,” she turns on her partner, pinning him with the glare now, “Pat is here to recover not be recruited. So back off of him.”

Blake doesn’t meet her eye, his slipping off to the side as they wait for her to stop. She’s right of course, but it’s been a long while since things have Flowed in their favour. Resistance numbers are dropping everywhere. Members are constantly getting captured or scared away. If they’re going to have any chance of surviving in this war, never mind standing a chance at winning, something needs to change and soon.

Liv doesn’t stop staring and Blake gives up.

“Whatever,” they mutter, turning to head out the door. Liv gives a satisfied smile, turning to wave at Pat before she moves to follow after Blake.

“I know you lost your intel guy!” Pat blurts.

So this wasn’t how he’d intended to bring it up. He’d hoped he could ease into it but they were already leaving and he panicked. It works though, both Liv and Blake turning to stare at him in confusion.

“How the hell do you know that?” Blake demands, confusion quickly giving way to anger.

“Well, your secret meetings are maybe not quite as private as you think they are.” Pat can’t help but chuckle nervously.

Blake scowls and waves for Liv to follow them, making a mental note to increase the security around their meetings. Annoyed, Pat pushes himself up on the cot. Sitting up is impossible with his leg as it is but he still tries, holding himself up with his arms behind him as he yells after them.

“I want to help!” He can’t keep the anger from his voice at being so easily dismissed.

Weeks he’s been stuck here, completely alone apart from the occasional visit from Blake and Liv, and whoever brings him food each day. Healing may be important but the isolation has been driving Pat out of his mind. Forced to wait and see when he knows the war is still going on out there; that it’s getting worse.

“I know I’m less than useless in a fight, thanks for the constant reminders!” he calls after Blake bitterly, “But I’m fast, I can think on my feet, and I’ll blend in better than a couple of Eternians!”

He’d thought telling them about the day they found him, how he helped people, how he survived, his semi-connection to one of the freaking Night Children, would convince them he could be an asset but Blake’s already out of sight. They could be halfway down the corridor by now.

Blake refuses to listen. They don’t have time to listen to a Gloveless dumbass with no sense of self-preservation begging to join a fight he has no place in. It’s out of habit that he glances to the side expecting to see Liv walking beside him, only to realise she’s not there.

Blake stops, turning back to see Liv frozen in the doorway, a familiar look in her eye. They cautiously approach her.

“Tell me you’re not considering putting an inexperienced, unGloved citizen into the fight?”

Liv glances to them, her eyes sparkling as they often do when she’s figuring out a solution, “Not into the fight.”

“Liv,” Blake grits through his teeth, but Liv cuts him off.

“We need someone on intel.”

They do. The last three people had gone missing in action, presumed captured. No one honestly knows but it's not hard to make an educated guess. It’s almost impossible to find anyone dumb enough to be willing to take the risk but without intelligence on the Swan Army coming in, they were basically fighting blind.

Blake looks to the cot. Pat’s brow is furrowed in determination as he glares fiercely at them in the doorway.

“He won’t last two minutes if it comes to a fight.” Their voice is barely above a mutter, not wanting Pat to hear.

“Maybe we don’t need a fighter.” Liv quietly offers, “Maybe we need someone who can survive.”

Whatever else happened that day, Pat had survived. He’s reckless, impulsive, untrained, and unGloved but he knew when to run from a fight. He is fast, he can think on his feet, and especially without a Glove, he would draw a lot less attention than most.

Moments drag on until finally Blake gives a sigh of resignation.

“Fine,” he agrees reluctantly, “but only after the medic clears you.”

Pat’s lips draw wide in a bright smile as he fist-pumps in his excitement.

“You won’t regret this.”

Rolling their eyes, and shaking their head Blake turns to leave again.

“I already do.”

[a-froger-epic]

Interview with a Queen “groupie”

Cross-posted to AO3. I encourage you to leave any comments you have there.

---

I compiled this interview following a long email exchange with J, a very sweet lady who went to Ealing Art School between 1972 and 1974. She knew all four members of Queen personally and was part of their larger circle of friends.

First off, you may find this hard to believe. I don’t blame you. But I assure you I’m not pulling your leg. As well as the pictures I share in this post, I have seen current pictures of J (which I will not share to protect her privacy). There is no indication as far as I am aware that she isn’t who she says she is.

Nastally, hold up. How exactly did you find this lady?

She found me. It turns out that she has been following my story Dawn of Aquarius for quite some time. The story is set in 1969. A lot of research about the era went into it, because I wanted to portray that time period - and Freddie’s and Roger’s surroundings - as accurately and realistically as I possibly could. That was what drew J in. She tells me it brought back a lot of memories for her. One of the reasons I love DoA so much is the nostalgia, she says, which genuinely means the world to me. Eventually, she talked to me in the comment section. Of course, I freaked out!

And then, I asked her for an interview, to which she replied: I will give it a go, but you must remember that I am 65 and there were great drugs in the 70s, and at 16, away from home, I had a lot!

And so...

Here’s what is IMPORTANT TO KEEP IN MIND when you read this interview.

These are one woman’s 50-year-old memories and subjective impressions. J has been incredibly kind to let me pick her brain, trying to recall everything as best as she can. In her own words:

Just remember that when I answer the questions, it is from a 16-year-old who is 9 years younger than Freddie and a little girl with no family and friends in a strange country trying to fit in. The only reason I was there, was because some hippie thought I had a unique art style.

---

J as a teenager.

[I have edited the interview together from our long, and somewhat messy at times, email exchange. Typos have been fixed and some punctuation added for clarity, but I have not changed anything J has written to me. Again, bear in mind these are personal opinions and impressions.]

So, J, how did you end up at Ealing Art School in 1972 and what was it like?

This was the painting done for the Australian school-leaving certificate.

It placed first and gave me a scholarship. I could pick France, the USA or England. As a dual citizen of the UK, the choice was easy. The scholarship paid for board and fees, so had to be and sell whatever for spending money.

This picture is from the dorm. We all had a 10pm curfew and a very thick rule book that, I am proud to say, I broke every one of them, one by one. The rooms were on the 1st and 2nd floor. We were on the first floor, rooms one side and admin staff the other end. We had two bathrooms for 18 girls. One of them had two baths. The walls were your standard half wall, so it was a given that if you had a bath you run the risk of having a bucket of cold water dropped on you. Downstairs was the kitchen and lounge room.

I want to ask you a few things about life in London in the early 70s, to get a picture of what it was really like. For example, was there alcohol at the music gigs you went to?

If it was a school, church or community hall, no. If it was a pub, yes.

Did you and your friends drink as much then as young people tend to drink now when you all went out?

No, we didn't. I think it had a lot to do with money. We didn't have the disposable income, and it was unheard of to still be living at home with the parents after the age of 20.

Was weed and LSD as big and easily accessible as depictions of the 60s and 70s would have us believe?

The drugs! Got to have drugs. Pot (weed) was easy to grow, very cheap. Used to smoke it in bongs rather than joints, more bang for your buck. Trips [LSD] were cheap, I think. About 2 pounds and you were on the high for over 24 hours with no sleep. My drug of choice was hash. Either the oil or the block. It was a nice high, but you could not function well. But if you listen to the music of the time it really does reflect what it was like, to have a group of friends over for a session. Having said all that the most outlandish and shocking drug I ever saw anyone use was the birth control pill. Didn't you have to hide that stuff away?!

Can you tell us some 70s slang that isn’t really in use anymore? What in the world does “ultra-blagging” mean? (As written in a letter penned by Freddie to his friend Celine in 1969.)

Abso-bloody-lootely!

Man, I thought I was the bees knees to be on a scholarship in London. But that didn't stop me from jigging or having a skive day. They were the days that I blagged my way into a pub, had too many lagers and ended up chundering in the gutter. That was how you knew your night was ace. I would get a right bollocking if anyone found out. It would be a bugger when all that you could find at a car boot sale was chavtastic, but sometimes you could be Jammy Dodger and tickety-boo you find something brilliant. Bob's your uncle. Anyways, I need to see a man about a dog.

[It seems to me that J uses a bit of Australian slang here, like chundering, which makes sense because she is, after all, Australian. She also provided the translation:]

Cheers

J

It would be my honour.

I felt very privileged to be given a scholarship that let me study in England. But being so young and having no family to guide me, it was often tempting to not turn up or give a false excuse for being sick. (I had a lot of food poisoning). These would often happen if the night before I had been drinking beer and ended up vomiting outside the pub. But in my young mind that was a good night. If any of the teachers found me drinking I would be in a lot of trouble. Often I would have to say I was holding it for someone else. Not having much clothes with me, I would buy them second hand from church jumble sales or other students and, yes, Kensington market (the market). Some of the stuff would not be very tasteful or in good condition. But sometimes you would find something that was cheap and in good condition. I will stop this text now as I must go to the toilet.

PS: Ultrablagging sounds very Freddie. Blagging was used, but not ultra, meaning to persuade someone to do something or act better than you are. They were always rock stars.

Sincerely

J

[It was at this point that I realised I was talking to an absolute legend. She also told me then that the majority of her old photographs had sadly been lost when her house was flooded in 1988, including most of the photographs from her stay in London. Noooo! :(]

When you went out to dance, did you have only live music? Were there DJs yet?

You know, that is hard. We did not have a DJ. Sometimes there would be a band. Often we looked for places with a band or the jukebox. I think pubs closed at 10pm and some stayed open to 12 or 1, but public transport stopped at 9. So if you had not arranged a lift then you had to make the last bus. Most of the time we would be heading back to someone's place to get stoned and then crash there. In the morning you would have to work out where you were. When I got back to Australia, the discos were all the rage. They could have been in London too but it was not cool to like disco.

How many people would show up to Queen’s gigs when they played in pubs or at, for example, the Imperial College?

Depending on the location and the night: 10 to 1000!

So how did you first meet the Queen boys?

I was at the pub talking about a band we saw last week when Brian stuck his head into our booth telling us he knew a better one. Thinking about seeing them at the stall... Roger not often, Freddie quite a lot. Often on different stalls, I think that is why I can't remember the name. [The name of the stall. Other sources confirm that Freddie also worked at Alan Muir’s stall, for example, selling shoes.]

How well did you know them?

Just looking at your tumblr account. [she has had a look at my blog, where somebody asked if ‘groupie’ meant she had slept with the band] No, I never slept with the boys. I would not say I was a close friend, but I started at Ealing Art College in ‘72 and moved in the same circles. I loved the music and could be called one of the first groupies. I had to sneak into the pubs because I was 16. Roger always teased me for being so young. They all did seem to be one very large family, not just the band. It was a group of about twenty regulars, both male and female. Everyone knew that Fred was too gay to function. We were all at the gay rights march in London in 1972, had to run after the march. Lots of sharpies [Australian slang: youth gang, thugs] wanting to bash us. Back then I was in every protest that was going, student union rights, even the secretary protest. Just part of the times, stick it to Man or Woman. I left London in ‘74 for Australia, been here ever since and lost track of the boys but have never stopped being a fan.

What do you remember about them? How would you describe their personalities?

Don’t let the trolls hate me, but I did not like Brian. I found him to be rather full of himself. Space was a subject you never brought up around Brian or you would die of old age before he stopped talking. He was always the first to speak and start a conversation and then quickly passed you off to John, who was always tired and shy. Roger was also quite shy at times. He was very self-conscious of his looks, as he felt being pretty, nobody would take him seriously. Fred, well, he was not yet the big star, so I think he was working on his stage persona. When talking to groups at parties, he had the best stories of things that had happened to him or close friends. They were very funny and very descriptive. He was the life of the party. When he had a few to drink or was the centre of attention, he would take a cigarette out of the closest person’s hand and start smoking. Now remember this is the point of view of a 16-year-old girl that was a fish out of water, trying to fit in and not having much worldly experience.

It is said that Freddie and Roger were very stylish. How did they dress in everyday life?

Fred would do his hair and makeup to check the mail. Yes, he was always turned out, but so were a lot of people. Freddie did go over the top with hats, scarfs and jewellery. With Roger, it is a surprise he was able to have kids his jeans were that tight. And his shirts were always open unless he was in a jumper. I think it could have been so that you knew he was male, as it was the start of the unisex clothing. When I travelled out of London I realised it was a London thing. When I got back to Australia everyone thought I was a show-off.

There are some disagreements about how tall especially Freddie was. I know this is a difficult thing to try and remember accurately. But do you remember?

Freddie was taller than me but everyone was. Roger was shorter than Fred, but I never saw Roger in platform shoes. I did meet up with the band by chance at Sydney airport in 1984, said ‘hello’ but they did not remember me, or if they did then they did not say anything and I did not want to be a dork. At that time Fred was the same height as me (5ft 8in/1.72m), Roger was taller than me. It made me think at the time that he had a growth spurt! John was shorter than me and Brian has always been tall. [I have a feeling the platform shoes - or lack thereof - played a vital role here! Although 172cm for Freddie seems likely.]

You said everyone knew Freddie was “too gay to function”. Attitudes towards homosexuality have changed so much that it can be hard for us, now, to fathom what exactly people must have thought of him. Was it more of a joke that he was so camp? Was it something he would have been teased for? Also, he had a girlfriend. Did you ever meet Mary or the other girlfriends?

In 1972 a whole group of us - and I am pretty sure that Fred, Roger, Brian and Tim were there - were in a gay pride march. [Since then, J has found and showed me a picture of a boy she thought was Tim Staffel, and it wasn't, so Tim was most definitely not there. Whether Freddie, Roger and Brian really were there or if J is misremembering, who knows?] Us youth believed you could not choose who you fell in love with and if it was same sex, so what? However, if it was two girls then it was every guy’s duty to change her!

It was also a time that the gayer the guy was, the more the girls were interested. Also, if a guy was gay then you did not have to worry about him and he was a good person to take with you if you were going out drinking. However, the police, parents, teachers and anyone of authority were horrified and treated them badly. I did meet Mary a couple of times at pubs and once after a gig. This is just my opinion, but I found her a bitch. It could be that I was so young. It could be that I was very Australian. It could be that she felt threatened as my accent was a magnet to people around. And the boys (Queen) were no exception. Brian had a cousin in OZ and was always asking questions. I remember that my close group of friends thought that Mary made the perfect girlfriend for Fred as they were as fake as each other. Having said that about them, I often wonder if I would think the same now and if my perceptions were just because she would not give me the time of Day. Chrissy and Jo were a lot of fun.

This was before your time, but I read that Freddie's nickname at Ealing Art School was ‘Freddie Baby’. Any ideas how this came about? His showmanship or maybe personality traits?

I don't think so. There were an older crowd that would talk like that. I think the slang ‘baby’ was a 60’s thing, like groovy baby.

How long, roughly, did Roger and Freddie have their stall? I can't find anywhere when it closed down. What did it actually look like? Was it a sort of wooden stall type of thing? Or an actual room? What were some of the other things people sold at Kensington Market? Mostly clothes or all sorts?

The markets were little divided shops. The back was brick and the walls wood. I have been trying all day to remember the name. [Of the stall.] I think it was something hard to say. More often than not it would be Freddie's dad in the store. It was still open when I left. Roger and Freddie were both in the store on Saturdays and some Sundays. There was a girl, I think Jill, who was in the store more. And during the week it could be anyone. You name it and you could get it at the markets. Second hand or designer clothes, shoes, jewellery, pot and assortments. Hair cuts, food, bric-a-brac.

Wait, wait. What? Freddie’s dad? Really now?

Yeah, it was an older Indian man. so we just assumed it was his father. It was my understanding that he started the stall then the boys would work it as the whole markets were set up for younger people, but if needed he would work there. I don't think the boys would be able to pay the rent on their own. [I have since found out that the stall closed in late 1971, and Freddie continued to work at the Market until '74, for Alan Mair and possibly others. So the stall J witnessed wasn't their original stall - explaining all the different people she saw there - but she had no way of knowing that it wasn't.] They always had incense burning that was very big in the 70s. I still occasionally bring out the sticks, but it does not last like the candles and diffusers of today. If you could get in touch with Robert Daniels, he ran ChaChaDumDum it was the stall across from Freddie. He would know the dates.

[J says it’s this look, in a picture she happened across while looking at my tumblr] Yep, that is the one. It usually means that he does not believe or agree with something that was said and is working out how to respond, or he has lost the plot.

You mentioned Roger seemed shy to you at times. Was he also quite charming? We read a lot about what a chick magnet he was. Was this the impression you had?

My favorite subject! I had a thing for Roger. Everyone has a type and mine is the blue-eyed blond. Now, before you ask, was he brunet? No, he was a mouse/dirty blond. If it was summer he would have blond streaks mostly at the ends. He knew he was pretty and was always dressed in the latest fashion and had the current hairstyle. So, being my type I was constantly watching him. Everyone slept around during that time. I did not notice Roger doing it more or less. 80% of the time he was with Jo. Yes, he was a chick magnet, but he did not do the chasing. He was always very polite to everyone. If it ever looked like there would be any conflict he would be the first to leave it. It was not that he was a coward, just not into conflict. If he saw anyone that needed help he was right there, and often had to have Freddie's back. I never saw him in a fight. He could always talk his way out of things. He was also very patient and would listen for hours to other people talk. However, he would get this vacant look in his eyes at times.

And Freddie would either click his fingers, change the subject or just give up. I don’t think that Brian noticed, and it would be fair game for John, he would see how far he could push it. Roger liked to drink a fair bit and when drunk he would be hanging all over Jo. If she was not there then he missed Jo. If, however, he thought that he or his friends were not being respected, then look out! It was a verbal volcano heading your way. That is what happened to me one time. I was trying to talk with my friends close to where a drunken Roger was and I yelled at him to shut the hell up, you wannabe blond. We/I coped a mouthful back, all in the same sentence, that finished with: Sorry, I didn't realise you were on your rags (period)! I have to have the last word, so I told him the truth: I don’t get them yet! (I was a late starter.) He went so red in the face and called me JB [jail bait] from then.

You also mentioned Roger’s cat Ziggy having kittens. I read about this but never when exactly it was. Do you remember?

I think it was winter ‘73. I remember being cold when he was asking around the pub. [To find homes for the kittens, I gather.]

Is it quite strange reading fictional interpretations of real people you knew? When did you first find out there was Queen fanfic?

No, we used to make up stories about people all the time, a verbal fanfic. Was looking up Adam Lambert and came across the fanfics. Some had me in stitches! Others, like DoA, had me hooked.

Please, allow me to be a little self-indulgent at the end. What's one thing I got totally RIGHT in DoA?

All the Ibex stuff.

What's one thing I got totally WRONG in DoA?

Roger did not have a temper, and I don’t know what the go with his father was, but he would talk about him quite a bit and was always visiting his mum. [Absolutely fair, not only did I change the timeline of Roger’s parents divorce in DoA - for lack of information at the time - but also created a completely fictional narrative around it for the sake of storytelling.]

J, thank you so much for all this, sincerely. Can you tell me a little more about yourself? Are you still an artist?

I don't paint or draw any more. At the age of a 50 the doctors operated on an aneurysm or three, and now my eyesight is very bad, I have no fine motor skills and a tremor. I was married in January 1984 and have just celebrated our 37 year anniversary. I have one daughter who is 30 and two great, although tiring grandkids. A girl, 11, and one boy, 5. I have lived my life as the average middle class Australian with great memories. Talking with you has helped me a lot to remember a time when the world was mine for the taking. When I returned to OZ I started nursing, met my best friend, and we planned that once we graduated we would go back to London to study midwifery. But I fell in love instead.

J's wedding in 1984. As you can see, she found her own blue-eyed blond.

---

Upon request, J has shared some of her past and present artwork with me.

These are from her time at Ealing Art School:

These were done later, back in Australia:

J: Did this just before Christmas as you had inspired me. It did not require fine motor skills!

So there you have it! I hope you found this little glimpse through a 16-year-old girl’s eyes as much of a fascinating read as I did. I urge everybody one more time to remember that J did not have to share any of this, and I think we all owe her a big thank you for delving into her memories. She is likely to see the responses on AO3, so I have comment moderation enabled there as I will not let anybody harass this lovely lady. The tumblr she created is @since72, but she isn’t really an active user and also very new to it all. Again, I can only urge everybody to be respectful.

If you have other burning question for J, feel free to leave them in the comments on AO3. I will either pass them on, or she may want to reply to them herself directly.

[traincat]

I know the comic piracy debate is a never-ending cycle, but in India where I live, you can't get western comics (or manga for that matter). There aren't comic book stores. Sometimes on Amazon you can find collected editions worth more than INR 1000 at least, for the paperbacks. Most older collections, even from the early 2000s, will be upwards of INR 6000. And sure, it's because the exchange value is so low for Indian rupees, but that's still a LOT of money to Indian citizens. You can get digital editions of random odd issues for approx. INR 150, so that's there. But overall it's really a huge investment to buy a physical comic. So yes, I pirate. But I get so guilty when this debate rolls around, every time. I just don't see any other alternative.

I debated whether or not to answer this considering I haven't really addressed the comics piracy issue before so I'm not sure I'm the right account to talk about it, and also because my askbox is not a confessional and I am not a priest, but then some Spider-Man news broke that I feels ties into it this so whatever, we're going for it. The comics piracy debate comes up every couple of months and will probably continue to come up every couple of months until forever and all of these points have been stated before by others because nothing in this debate is new. First things first, you shouldn't feel guilty. I'm going to suggest actually that nobody should feel guilty, unless you are like, a millionaire and you're exclusively pirating indie books. The prices you're quoting are prohibitively expensive but I have some unfortunate news for everyone involved: the prices are really bad in the US, too. If you want good collected editions, especially in hardcover, they're going to run at similar if not quite equal prices. Comics have gone from a cheap hobby to an overwhelmingly expensive hobby.

This is a good article comparing to the cover costs of American comics since the 1960s adjusted for inflation which I think puts some things in perspective. Comics currently cost roughly $5 USD per issue, which doesn't sound that bad, even though most of my monthly streaming services are roughly that price for a whole month's access to a library of content. But it only doesn't sound that bad if you're not buying special issues (the Marvel Pride book retailed for $10), and if you're only reading one or two books a month. The problem is, American superhero comics are specifically designed so you're not reading just one or two books per month -- this is why we have events! And crossovers! Not for the story potential but because it forces the consumer to purchase more product. This is why there's constantly an event running with a checklist of tie-in issues in the back. So now you're spending probably at least $20 a month. If you're a fan with a lot of interest in different titles, and in different publishers, this can easily hit triple USD digits. It's a money pit. It's not affordable to most people. And this is where that new Spider-Man news comes in, because it was announced today that Amazing Spider-Man is going back to a thrice monthly schedule like it used to operate on during Brand New Day. Which sounds good at first -- more comics, yay -- until you realize that's probably going to be $15 USD a month for a one title. That's $180 a year for one title, not including annuals or special issues. That's not feasible for a lot of fans -- young fans, poor fans, fans with other financial obligations etc. And most people aren't reading just one title. I don't know how the X-Men fans are currently financing their Krakoa habit and I'm afraid to ask. There are services like Marvel Unlimited, which make things slightly more affordable, but I imagine the wait for newer issues to hit the service can be alienating for some fans who want to join in current discussions, the library has some incredibly massive holes in it which is unacceptable when it's coming from inside the mouse house, and I believe, although I could be wrong, that it is not available in all countries. Comics are no longer an easily accessible hobby, if you're paying for everything you read.

"But the creatives deserve to get paid" is the common argument and yeah, they do, I'm not arguing that point. They should absolutely get paid and they should get well. I'm a writer, I'm a published writer even, and I want to be a published novelist, and I definitely want to get paid, and I'm reserving the right to be a complete hypocrite about this, as I do with everything in my life, but this is where the difference between indie publications and Marvel publications comes in: Marvel is owned by Disney. There is absolutely no excuse for Disney not to pay their creatives. If they are not getting paid fairly, it's not because you pirated a book -- it's because Disney has a vested interest in not paying their creators, as evidenced by Alan Dean Foster's lawsuit claiming that they are withholding royalties from him. Fans pirating these books are not the reason the creatives are not getting paid fairly -- the creatives are not getting paid fairly for the same reason that Disney park employees experience homelessness, and it's because Disney would rather put that money into the pockets of their executives. There is no debate on that subject. It's easier and perhaps more convenient to blame fans for pirating comics rather than putting all of their money into what has been for years now a prohibitively expensive hobby to keep up with, but the fact of the matter is Disney could pay all of their creatives what they're worth without hurting their bottom line and instead chooses not to. That is not on you, as an individual reader. You have no reason to feel guilty about that, no matter what your circumstances are, and you do not have to justify your actions to either me or the House of the Mouse. I'm with you, and Disney ultimately doesn't care. They're making that money up elsewhere and then not distributing it fairly to the people who create the properties their media empire is built off of. But especially if you're buying older books, you should know that your money is not going to the creative team -- once it's out of publication, they're not going to get any of the money you spent on it. The argument then becomes that you should be supporting local comics stores which yes, is true, but also doesn't apply to everyone, like anon who doesn't have access to local comic book stores. And again, this can become prohibitively expensive -- collections are expensive. Older, hard to find collections can be very expensive. Once something is out of print, all bets are off on what it might be selling for. Buying single issues is only affordable if the single issue isn't desirable or sometimes if it's in exceedingly bad condition. For the sake of transparency, I have a fairly big single issue collection because it's my preferred format, but I had the time to bargain hunt, access to local comic book stores and large comic conventions, and I'm very good at sniping eBay auctions. The most I have ever dropped on a single issue was expensive for me -- and still under three digits USD -- and it's for an issue from the '60s that is not in great condition.

The problem with this debate is that it is generally a nuanced issue that always gets boiled down to "piracy bad" in a way that makes a lot of well meaning and well intentioned fans, especially the ones with extenuating circumstances, feel bad. It's not your fault. You shouldn't feel guilty. There are a huge amount of reasons why someone might pirate something that are not bad reasons and do not make you a bad person who is personally withholding money from the creators -- because you're not. I don't publicly tell people where to pirate comics, mostly because I really don't think it's that hard to find out for yourselves especially because several creators involved with Marvel themselves have, I suspect accidentally, posted pages of their work to social media WITH THE BANNER OF A WELL KNOWN COMICS PIRACY SITE STILL IN THE IMAGE please learn how to crop, so maybe my standpoint on the issue wasn't well known, but there it is. I think readers should, if they are able to financially and otherwise, support the creators they like, but that it should be acknowledged that this is a more complicated issue than it's commonly made out to be on Twitter and that the largest part of the blame needs to be put on the companies making these comics inaccessible to many and who refuse to pay their creators fairly, not on individual fans. Don't feel guilty, anon.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The music monopolists

Writing in Wired, Institute for Local Self Reliance researcher and anti-monopolist Ron Knox gives a thorough, important account of how music industry monoplization resulted declining revenue for artists, even as the industry itself has reaped greater profits.

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-big-music-needs-to-be-broken-up-to-save-the-industry/

Importantly, Knox describes how concentration has come to every link in music’s supply chain, from radio to recording, streaming to live performance. The monopolists who dominate these sectors fight fiercely between each other, but no matter who wins, artists lose.

Let’s go segment by segment. Two thirds of all North American music comes from three labels. The labels grew through anticompetitive mergers: giant companies, awash in investor cash, bought out mid-sized, successful labels, turning them into subdivisions of the Big Three.

The more concentrated the labels got, the worse they were for everyone. They spent the nineties and naughties price-gouging record companies, pocketing hundreds of millions from an illegal price-fixing conspiracy. The fines they paid were smaller than the profits they reaped.

But at least they distributed music. Today, the struggling physical record store industry — a network of passionate music sellers who serve the most intense music fans — find themselves getting “record shipments” that turn out to be boxes of random stuff like cough syrup (!).

That happened when the Big Three all piled their distribution into a single company, the monopolist Direct Shot Distributing. As Direct Shot started to fail, its operations descended into chaos, and record stores started to receive boxes of random consumer packaged goods.

It was bad news for the non-monopolized, music-first record stores, but it barely registered for the Big Three labels — today, they buy an average of two new acts every day.

The labels don’t make money from selling records, of course. They get their money from streaming.

Streaming is also massively concentrated, gathered into the hands of just a few companies: Spotify, Apple, Youtube, Amazon — with the notable exception of Spotify, the industry is dominated by companies that also monopolize other sectors.

Monopolies are good to these companies. Spotify’s market-cap doubled during the pandemic — the market values its 150m subs (twice as many as subscribe with Apple) at $50b. The major labels get $1m/hour from streaming. 99% of their artists see $25/year in streaming royalties.

Spotify may be the biggest streaming service, but it’s not the lowest-paying. Youtube — a Google division, whose unsuccessful attempt to launch an in-house video service convinced it that it had to buy someone else’s success — drives the worst bargain.

Spotify uses its industry dominance to extract heavy fees from the labels — creaming 30% of the total revenue generated by a typical track. Big Three monopolists with fat margins can absorb this. Indies? Not so much.

Spotify’s market cap growth is in part due to the new ways it’s come up with to shake down the labels — a variety of tactics that all boil down to one thing: payola. Spotify will sell labels pop-up ads, placement in “radio” algorithms, and access to “Discovery mode.”

Like all forms of payola, Spotify’s rate-card is a way for monopolists to edge out indies, buying their way into your ear-holes. I’m sure that the Big Three would rather keep the bribes they pay to Spotiify, but the consolation prize is pretty sweet.

If the Big Three are the only ones who can afford to buy access to Spotify’s audience, then creators are driven to sign with them, and have less bargaining leverage when they negotiate their deals.

Spotify, meanwhile, can consolidate its gains by driving up those fees, pitting labels against each other in a bidding war for access to listeners. This effectively drives down the royalty rate Spotify pays, because every new track will have to buy in to get any reach.

Spotify talks a good game about how it uses big data and machine learning to pick the songs you hear, but increasingly, the algorithm is getting far less compute-intensive, a simple sort-by-highest-bidder system you could operate from a laptop running Windows 3.1 and Excel.

In theory, streaming losses can be made up with touring. Acts who attain digital popularity can charge access at the door to clubs and other venues. The only problem is that live performance is also a monopoly business.

The 800lb gorilla there is Livenation, a division of the ticket monopolist and notorious arm-breakers Ticketmaster — spun out of Clear Channel, the monopolist that we now know as Iheartradio.

Livenation parlayed its access to the capital markets to buy out $1b worth of venues and promoters, before being acquired by Clear Channel for $4.4b in 2005. Today, it’s a division of Liberty Media, consolidated with Ticketmaster, Pandora, and Siriusxm.

What goes around, comes around: Liberty’s private equity owners are in the process of buying up Iheartradio, re-merging all of Clear Channel’s spinouts into one giga-monopolist.

The conglomerate already coerces artists to book exclusively in its clubs and using its ticketing, starving independent venues. Add 850 terrestrial radio stations to the mix and it will choke off all the oxygen that independent venues, promoters and ticketers rely on.

Liberty didn’t buy all these companies because it’s passionate about music and wanted to ensure artists got a fair shake. By rolling up the entire live music/radio supply-chain, it bought the power to extract vast sums from musicians, and to keep rivals out of the market.

Well, not all competitors. Lollapalooza co-founder Marc Geiger raised tens of millions for “Savelive,” a new would-be monopolist that offered to “rescue” live music venues in exchange for a 51% stake in them.

Savelive illustrates an important point about the nature of monopolies: they beget more monopolies. Consolidation in the labels meant that only the largest streaming companies could negotiate a sustainable rate.

But consolidation in radio drives consolidation in labels — and many of the indie radio stations that survived the first wave of consolidation were picked up cheap by Iheartradio once monopolistic streamers ate their lunch.

This is a pattern across the whole entertainment industry: bookstore mergers and big box retailers drove consolidation in publishing; that was accelerated by consolidation in online ebook and physical book retail.

It’s not limited to the entertainment sector either. As David Dayen describes in his essential book MONOPOLIZED, hospitals didn’t start consolidating until the pharma industry underwent a wave of brutal mergers and started gouging for drugs.

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

Hospital consolidation led to gouging insurers, leading to a wave of insurance consolidation. Today, nearly every part of the health industry is monopolized, from pharmacy benefit managers to medical labs.

The only parts of the supply chain that doesn’t monopolize — that can’t monopolize — are the ends of the chain: the people who work in the system, and the people who use it.

Monopoly punishes doctors and nurses and other health workers — and it punishes patients.

It punishes writers and publishing workers, and it punishes readers.

It punishes musicians and independent venue owners, and it punishes listeners.

When every part of the supply chain gets so monopolized that it can’t easily be squeezed by any other part of the supply chain, these giants turn on us — the workers and users of the system. We, the atomized and fragmented, cannot resist the squeeze.

But as Knox writes, the tide is turning. After 40 years of waving through anticompetitive mergers in the name of “efficiency,” the DoJ and FTC are under new management, with two-fisted trustbusters like Lina M Khan at the helm.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

This new cohort of monopoly fighters reject the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust (the idea that monopolies drive prices down and are therefore good for society), going to war against the hegemonic orthodoxy that began with Ronald Reagan.

https://doctorow.medium.com/epic-v-apple-d3e59893b4f3

The new antitrust is surging, with bills in the House and Senate, executive orders from the White House, regulatory proceedings at the DoJ and FTC, and an interagency-cabinet coordination committee that ties it all together.

This new antitrust promises workers and users of monopolized industries a better alternative than rooting for one giant to beat another in hopes that they will drop a few crumbs for the rest of us to enjoy.

Creative workers don’t have to choose between Big Tech and Big Content based on their assessment of which monopolist will abuse them the least. Instead, we can root for antimonopoly, for giant-slaying, and the right to self-determination.

The most important immediate step towards that future is blocking new anticompetitive mergers, like Sony’s bid for AWAL, or Liberty Media’s use of a $500m SPAC to go on a vertical monopoly shopping spree.

The agencies have the power to stop these. They should. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

But ending anticompetitive mergers won’t get us out of that hole: most industries (from beer to cheerleader uniforms to wresting to eyeglasses) are already monopolized.

The new trustbusters — and the ILSR — want to use antitrust law to break up these conglomerates. I think that’s right: vertical monopolies will always engage in self-dealing to the detriment of independents, workers and customers. Break. Them. Up.

But breaking up is hard to do. When the DoJ tried to break up IBM, the company’s lawyers outspent the entire DoJ antitrust division, every single year, for twelve consecutive years, and in the end, it escaped breakup.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. IBM escaped justice because Reagan was elected and neutered antitrust. And even though it remained intact, it was never the same — for one thing, it decided that it was too risky to make its own PC OS.

IBM knew that antitrust enforcers were very suspicious of tying software to hardware — so it tapped a couple of hacker kids, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to sell it DOS, from their new company “Micro-Soft.”

Unfortunately for all of us, antitrust enforcement only declined after that, so IBM was able to return to its monopolistic ways, and Microsoft escaped from antitrust scrutiny after a mere seven years in regulatory hell.

Antitrust enforcement can sap monopolists of the will to power, as they become increasingly concerned that their actions will attract aggressive legal reprisals.

Think of how Apple “lost” the Epic lawsuit but still “voluntarily” rescinded its heretofore hard rule against apps providing links to web-pages where you can use third-party payment processors to make purchases.

As monopolists lose their nerve, space opens up for all kinds of pro-worker, pro-user interventions, far beyond those afforded by traditional antitrust.

Next year, Beacon Press will publish THE SHAKEDOWN, a book I co-wrote with Rebecca Giblin about the monopolistic corruption of creative labor markets and how creative workers, regulators and fans can resist it.

The Shakedown catalogs the ways that monopolization of investment, distribution and sale of creative works allows entertainment companies, Big Tech, and major retailers to shift an ever-larger share of the creative industry’s revenues from workers to themselves.

More importantly, we identify tools beyond breakups that we can use to de-monopolize the industry — things we can do right now, without having to wait for the conclusion of an antitrust suit that might run for decades.

Take reversion rights: many copyright systems allow creators to take back their rights after a set period (35 years in the US). This lets artists who signed bad deals — before they were proven successes — to resell their catalog or extract reparations by threatening to.

But reversion is really hard to do, and 35 years is way too long. Only an handful of creators — even those with valuable catalogs that could be renewed through reversion — ever manage it.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/06/backsies/#take-backs

Congress (and other legislatures around the world, including Canada, where this is likely to come up in the new Parliament) could fix reversion: make it easier to do, and make it available after a shorter period — say, 14 years.

And what about those bad contracts? The “freedom to contract” has always been subject to limits, where some clauses are deemed unenforceable “as against public policy” or because they are “unconscionable.”

With the entertainment sector consolidated into just a couple of states, state legislatures could act to void the most abusive clauses — for example, clauses that allow labels to claw back royalties indefinitely to recoup (often inflated or fictitious) “expenses.”

Our book explores dozens of these kinds of ideas, from co-operatives to trade unions; better accounting practices and direct arts subsidies; radical interoperability and collective licensing; minimum wages for creative labor and collective bargaining.

None of these are replacement for reducing the size and power of conglomerates throughout the supply chain, but all of them are interventions we can make as the power and nerve of conglomerates declines, changes that will hasten that decline and open more space for breakups.

And all of them are applicable, to a greater or lesser extent, to helping workers and users of all the other consolidated industries, from health care to cheerleading.

For example, expanding California’s ban on noncompete clauses would help fast-food workers nationwide — because today, fast food employers are the most aggressive abusers of noncompetes.

That means that a fried chicken cashier earning the tipped minimum wage can’t quit to work at a burger joint across the street for a $0.25/hour raise. Creative workers aren’t the only ones suffering from monopolization — we’re not even the worst off.

But by definition, creative workers have a platform. We reach people. We have the potential to help form the kind of unstoppable coalition that we’ll need to reverse the generations of oligarchic, post-Reagan consolidation.

You may have heard about how Danish McDonald’s workers earn $22/hour and get six weeks’ paid vacation and sick leave. That didn’t come about because McDonald’s was required by law to pay it.

It was worker solidarity that did it. As Matt Bruenig writes, McDonald’s initially refused to sign the voluntary “hotel and restaurant” collective agreement. So its workers went on strike.

https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/

Now, if McD’s workers had struck alone, they’d probably have lost. But Danish law allows for sympathy strikes — that is, it allows workers in other parts of the supply chain to take industrial action to support their sisters and brothers who are striking.

When the McD’s workers walked out in 1989, sixteen other sectoral unions joined them. They didn’t just help picket at leaflet in front of McD’s restaurants!

Dockworkers wouldn’t unload McD’s shipments. Printers wouldn’t print their cups and placemats.

Builders downed tools on McDonald’s construction projects. Typesetters wouldn’t set the McD’s ads in the daily papers. Truckers wouldn’t deliver to McD’s restaurants. Food industry workers wouldn’t produce the drink syrups, fries and other inputs to the McDonald’s kitchens.

McD’s caved.

Now, as Bruenig points out, these kinds of sympathy strikes are illegal in the US, but it’s a mistake to think that workers don’t have power because sympathy strikes are illegal — rather, sympathy strikes are illegal because workers don’t have power.

Workers across all sectors face the same kinds of monopolistic exploitation. Workers across all sectors have a common enemy (literally, thanks to “common ownership” where companies like Vanguard and Berkshire Hathaway hold significant stakes in almost every major company).

With a shared cause, shared tactics, solidarity and a renewed sense that we can do more than root for the giant we think will mistreat us the least, creative workers and their sisters and brothers in every sector can reverse generations of losses.

That’s why the new antitrust matters — because it is an assault on the consolidation that gives all industries the power to shift money and other forms of value from workers and users to a small elite of investors.

[chocoholicannanymous]

If the Spit Hits the Fan (Glee) Pt XVIII

This is the last part of this. Of a story that I was pretty certain I wouldn’t finish and just posted the bit I had in my scraps and snippets tag for a lark. You read that, and you liked it, and your response made me want to try and finish it. And so here we are, ~29k finished fic. 

Thank you for the support.

Follows pt I, pt II, pt III, pt IV, pt V, pt VI, pt VII, pt VIII, pt IX, pt X, pt XI, pt XII, pt XIII, pt XIV, pt XV, pt XVI and pt XVII.

New York is big and loud and filthy and expensive.

Kurt's first apartment had been an absolute rathole. He'd shared it with four others, and his “room” had been a repurposed coatroom. There had been just enough place for a bed and a tiny table instead of a desk. He'd only brought the most necessary in way of clothing, and with the exception of two shirts hanging from a nail in the wall he'd been forced to keep everything in a suitcase under the bed.

He'd moved out after a month, tired of never being able to keep food in the kitchen, weary of the nicks surrounding the lock on his door – he'd replaced the old one day 1, but even the best of locks only went so far – and fed up with having to carry all his valuables with him at all times.

Luckily the Warbler network had activated and Trent's older brother had offered up his guest room (and if that wasn't a sign of wealth, a student in New York with a guest room, then Kurt didn't know what was) for the rest of the year provided Kurt find someplace else to spend the night on those occasions it was needed. During the fall it'd mostly been solved by Sebastian coming to visit and the two sharing a cheap hotel room, and during the fall by Kurt spending the night at Sebastian's apartment. It had been tempting to move in with Sebastian then, but Kurt had resisted and they both agreed they'd become stronger for it.

Living together had been tough, especially since Sebastian had a lot more money available than Kurt. They'd managed to find a balance though and looking back Kurt feels proud of the work they'd put in to make it work. Three years (and counting) together and these days Kurt is willing to proclaim that Sebastian is as much of a perfect boyfriend as it's possible to be.

Yes, New York is still loud and filthy and big, but it's also full of light and laughter and love. Kurt's learned to find his way around both city and school, and he's on track for graduation with excellent prospects. Life is good.

Of course, that kind of means he's overdue for a cold shower and unfortunately it comes as cold and icy as is possible.

“Blaine. I guess I should have known you'd turn up.”

Like a bad penny, Kurt thinks. His ex-boyfriend just smiles wider at the words, clearly not picking up on the undertones.

“Yes! I'll always come back to you, Kurt. We're meant to be – you're my soulmate.”

Kurt shudders. All these years, and he still haven't gotten over his negative reaction to those words.

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure you and I have different interpretations of what those things mean. Personally I can't see how someone who walked out of my life without a word years ago could be considered my 'soulmate', but that's me.”

“That's not fair! I never wanted to leave you, but my parents made me.”

Blaine does this thing with his face that resembles what Kurt remembers of Blaine's “I've apologized, sort of, and you should forgive me now” expression and Kurt thinks that if Blaine could see himself he'd never ever do it again. It's not pretty. It kind of looks like he's about to shit his pants, frankly.

“Right. Your parents. And why, exactly, were they so determined to get you out of Lima without saying goodbye?”

Blaine flinches, and Kurt can see the realization hit him. Strange. It's as if he never even thought about the possibility that Kurt would know about the lies Blaine had told. Emotions run across Blaine's eyes and face, one after the other, and Kurt just waits without even trying to figure out what's going through his ex's mind. He's beyond caring.

“Kurt, I... I, I have a confession to make. When I got home that last night, my parents, they were waiting up for me. They made assumptions, and I, I let them.”

Blaine's face twists, and a couple of tears start falling. Kurt would be touched, really he would, except he happens to know that Blaine can cry on command.

“I know I shouldn't have, I know it was wrong, I was just so afraid! I thought they'd throw me out, and so I kept quiet and did what they wanted. I'm so sorry I did that to you.

“I love you, Kurt!”

The thing is, he can remember when those words from Blaine's lips would make him melt. That's no longer true. Now he listens to them like he would a performance, and he finds them lacking. He should have gone for soft instead of intense, a hint of tears maybe, not volume and anger.

This isn't school though, even though it very much is a performance, nor is it worth critiquing. It's not worth anything, really. Kurt sighs a little, just wanting all of it to be over and Blaine to be gone.

“Here's the thing. I understand, I guess. In your shoes I would have been worried to tell my dad the truth too. I think just about every teenager out there would be at least a little afraid to tell their parents they got drunk and stupid.

“But I also think that just about every teenager out there knows that there's some kind of middle-ground between 'I got drunk and tried to rape my boyfriend' and 'my boyfriend drugged me and tried to rape me'. Except apparently you didn't. You just went with what would get you of the hook the fastest and easiest.”

“Hey! That's not fair!”

“Oh, it isn't? You doing what you did is okay, but me calling it what it was is unfair? Now, why am I not the least bit surprised that that's how you feel?

“You know, at first I didn't understand how you could do it. How you could say you loved me and then not just leave me, but let your parents believe that I would do something like that to you. Well, that you could let anyone think I'd do that to anyone.

“But as I said, I understand why you did it.”

A triumphant look flash up in Blaine's eyes. Oh, he's doing a pretty good job at hiding it – much better than he would have been able to as a teenager – but Kurt knows him, and he's looking for it.

“You threw me under the bus because you knew it'd be an easy out. You could have told your parents something else, anything else, but you chose the worst possible lie – one you had to have known would get me in trouble. You did it because it was easy, and it would get you of the hook – maybe even get you some sympathy instead of the punishment you deserved – and you did it because that was all you cared about. You.

“I always knew you were a bit self-involved, but I told myself it was just part of you being a performer. A healthy ego's pretty much a must, and I used to think that was it. Except it turned out you were so focused on you, and your needs and wants, that nothing else mattered. Certainly not me.

“It took me a while to accept, but I know now that regardless of what you said you didn't love me. Not really. You might have thought you did, but Blaine? Love means that the other person's just as important to you as you yourself are. And I never was that to you.”

He ignores Blaine's protests and just continues, projecting his voice to be heard over the barely restrained excuses and lies.

“The truth is that your lack of empathy and care for other people borders on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and quite frankly I am better off for not having you remain in my life. Just don't expect me to thank you for it though.

“No one else will either. Do you realize how many people you worried with your little disappearing act? There was quite a few at Dalton who were convinced that your parents had shipped you off to conversion camp. They were counting down until your 18th birthday and from what I heard there was even the beginning of a fund to pay your way at Dalton if you escaped and were disowned.”

There's a triumphant gleam in Blaine's eyes. Clearly he's pleased about his friends being so worried about him and so ready to help him out. Kurt just wants to stomp that light out. Violently.

“Then when you didn't resurface after your birthday a few started worrying that your parents had you in a mental hospital, and there was talk of trying to stage some kind of rescue. That only lasted so long, of course.

“You see, somehow it's hard to convince anyone that their friend is practically jailed and in need of a rescue when they're seen out and about clubbing in L.A.. After all, these days everyone carries a phone, so the idea that you were unable to contact someone – anyone – and ask for help went up in flames pretty quick after that.”

Thad had been so angry that he'd made sure every single Dalton student that had ever know Blaine found out, and even the boy's most die-hard supporters had given up then and there.

They'd all understood not wanting to getting into a conflict with your family, especially when said family usually paid for college and any possible trust funds tended to be under the family's control for a while longer. What they hadn't understood was Blaine's total lack of communication. Email telling them that Blaine was okay but under orders not to contact anyone from Ohio would have gone a long way to ease worries, and was, they felt, the very least he owed them.

“Funny thing about you showing up here now? I can't help but remember that you turned 21 a couple of weeks ago. You didn't happen to get access to a trust fund then did you? Not that I actually care, but there are some old bets to settle.”

There wasn't, not really, but enough Warbler had warned Kurt about this very scenario with an added “I bet he shows up afterwards, thinking you'll take him back” for it to not quite be a lie.

Blaine splutters before launching into a long row of “explanations”, one more shitty than the other. It's obvious that he didn't expect Kurt to be angry with him, but instead to be welcomed with open arms. It's even sounding as if Blaine expected Kurt to take him back and just let him slide back into his life as if nothing had happened. Kurt isn't quite sure if Blaine intended for him to move in with Kurt and start a new life in New York, or if the idea was for Kurt to give up everything and follow Blaine back to L.A., but both options are equally ridiculous.

“Stop. Just, stop. I told you, I don't care. If you want to get in touch with any of your old friends from Dalton and McKinley and explain all of it to them, do so. But you don't need to explain anything to me. I don't want to hear it. Your window for explaining yourself to me closed years ago. It closed after you let your parents walk into a police station ready to have me charged with rape.

“Nothing you can say will ever make that okay. Nothing you say can make me forgive you.”

Kurt stops himself and takes a deep breath. There's so much he could say, so many accusations that could be made, so much hatred to be poured out.

Blaine's actions had gotten Kurt into trouble, and could have landed him in jails. They'd been what had stopped Burt Hummel from running from reelection after being asked – while nothing had come from the Andersons' accusations there had still been enough people who had known about it for it to leak and ruin a political career. After all, who cared if it was true when it made for a good weapon? And “local congressman buries son's rape charge” made for a great weapon.

Kurt had been willing to risk it, but his dad hadn't wanted to. Had it leaked the only way to prove Kurt's innocence would have been to make the video of Blaine trying to assault Kurt public. No good parent does that to their kid had been Burt's position, and Kurt had been grateful.

That didn't mean he wasn't aware of exactly how much that had cost not just his dad but the whole state. The man who'd replaced his dad had been the kind of bigot that wasn't good for anyone, not even his followers.

Kurt still blames Blaine for that, and even if he'd been insane enough to consider forgiving everything else he's never forgiving that. The chance of making Blaine understand any of that is minuscule though. The chance of him caring is even less.

There is, simply put, no point in spending even another second on trying to get through to him.

“You're not welcome here. Please leave. Goodbye Blaine.”

Once the door is closed and locked behind Blaine Kurt finally relaxes. He's closing the door on Blaine in more than one way, finally able to truly do that – because regardless of what he's hoped he's always known that one day his former boyfriend would pop up again.

“If he comes back you're filing for a restraining order.”

“He won't come back, Sebastian.”

“You don't know that. He did today, didn't he?”

It's obvious that Sebastian is coming from a place of care and worry, and Kurt feels himself soften. Blaine hasn't just been the monster under Kurt's bed during all of these years.

“Yes, he did, and no, I guess I can't really know. But honey, I really don't think he will. Blaine was reminded today that actions have consequences, and he found out I have the means to ensure said consequences. Coming after me and trying to change my mind is more work than he's ever shown himself willing to put in.

“After all, he's not the kind to stick around when the spit hits the fan.”

Luckily Sebastian is.

~ The end ~

[gallavictorious]

Would you be able to write a lil fic from Kev's POV of Yev's christening party? I just know Kev would find Mickey's "guess what we've been doing, daddy" monologue hilarious. And maybe Kev notices Ian and Mickey being super soft after and realizes they're actually really good for each other?

An incensed roar; a table tossed aside; the sound of glass smashing, and of fists against flesh. Kevin Ball takes a deep breath and closes his eyes and reaches for nirvana. Or for enlightment. Or whatever. He isn't really clear on that whole bit. But he's calm, he's cool, breathing slowly, this is all good, shit was the noise of someone's neck snapping, no, no, he didn't hear that, it's peace, love, all that crap, he's so relaxed –

Shit, this is hard.

Fortunately, someone must have called the police and the police must have been nearby because it's just minutes before the cops storm in to haul off both Terry and Mick. The amount of damage done to the bar is still pretty impressive, Kev sees when he finally opens his eyes with a sigh of relief, but that's okay; the Milkoviches are usually surprisingly good about actually paying for that stuff. It's one of the reasons Kev doesn't mind them hosting their parties here, in spite of said parties ending in brawls as often as they don't.

The other reason is that they'd probably burn the bar down if he tried to refuse them.

Kev looks up from the sad remaints of a chair to catch sight of Ian slipping out the door, after the cops and their captives. There's this look on his bloodied face, something fierce and determined and grimly triumphant, and Kev can't help but frown, suddenly a little uneasy.

Thing is, maybe he should have seen it earlier. He knows he's not the brightest tool in the shed; he's okay with that. He's got V to do the sharp thinking, and besides, Kevin Ball ain't stupid about people. He notices things, and looking back, there's been all these little hints, shit Mickey's said and done in the past few months, and there's that thing he heard from a grumpy Lip about Mickey staying over at the Gallagher house ever since Ian came home. And okay, maybe he'd found that a bit weird, but Kev's been little busy lately by small things like becoming a father, so maybe he hasn't had too much time to worry about where his business partner might be putting his head down, okay. A man can only have so many things on his mind at once. Three maybe. He thinks he's read that somewhere. Or V told him.

But yeah, maybe he should have seen it earlier, but he hadn't. Doesn't get it until he sees them having a clearly heated but quiet conversation over by the side of the bar just before Terry shows up; then something finally clicks. Not quite into a certainty, but into enough of one that he's compelled to slide Ian a shot when Mickey runs off to greet his dad, and isn't exactly shocked when Mickey turns the music off to make his declaration.

Good for you, Mickey, Kev has just enough time to think before Terry charges at his son like a deranged bull and all hell breaks loose. Not that Kev paid any attention to that, because he's a conscienctious objector now; he doesn't only not do violence, he doesn't even see violence.

Now that calm's been restored to the bar, everyone but the most persistent drunks has gone outside to watch the arrest unfold, so Kev follows suit. It's freezing cold, the way only Chicago in winter can be, but he doubts either Terry or Mickey can feel the chill; they're still straining to get at each other, struggling against the police holding them down, and screaming blue murder.

”Get out of my house, you pole-smoking queer!” Terry bellows, but whatever hold he once had over his son must have broken because Mickey doesn't even hesitate, and there's a wild sort of glee in his voice as he calls: ”Fuck you, don't worry about it! I've been staying at Ian's since you've been in the can, bitch! Guess what we've been doin', daddy! We've been fuckin'! And I take it! He gives it to me good and hard and I fuckin' like it.”

That's more than Kev ever wanted to know about Mickey's sex life, really, but he still can't help but grin as Mickey humps the car, giving emphasis to his words. ”Fuck you, I suck his dick and I fuckin' love it.”

Mickey's always been an expressive bastard, unafraid to speak his mind. Kev finds it both hilarious and worthy of respect, though upon reflection maybe there's a few things Mickey has actually been afraid to speak of, after all. Until now, at least.

Good for you, Mickey, he thinks, again.

The cops take Terry away; the guests filter back inside. The place is a mess and the object of the celebration has long since been whisked away by his mother but that's no reason to break up a party on the South Side, so Kev alternates wiping up blood with serving beer after beer after shot of cheap liquor. Everyone seems to be in high spirits; nothing like a good old-fashioned brawl to get the blood pumping on a cold winter's night, and the story of Mickey Milkovich coming out to the whole bar at his own son's baptism party is a good enough story to last a few retellings.

Ian and Mickey are nowhere to be seen, Kev notes, and again there's that sense of unexpected unease, of worry.  He remembers Ian's face covered in blood, the hard look there transforming him from the earnest kid Kev's known since he was in elementary school and into someone he's not sure he knows at all. Ian's scrappy, like all the Gallaghers; bit of a punk at times, and way into that Army crap of course, but at heart he's always been gentle. Hardworking, and caring, and soft in the way none of his siblings were; a good kid, for all that he's gotten himself in a bit of trouble lately, though Kev's not entirely caught up on that.

And now Ian's gone and gotten himself involved with Mickey Milkovich, who is about as far from a good kid as it's possible to get.

That's not to say that Kev doesn't like Mickey. The guy's funny, he has some good ideas and great initiative; he makes things happen, like that whole rub-and-tug business (okay, so maybe there's been a few misunderstandings about how they're to split the money and whatever, but apart from that, Kev's got no complaints about having Mickey for a partner). He also pays for his beer and isn't a bad drunk, both things a bartender knows how to appreciate. So yeah, Kev likes Mickey just fine... but he's not sure he likes him just fine as Ian's boyfriend.

Truth is, while Kev's not scared of Mickey – c'mon – he's not not scared of him either. Sure Mickey's about half his size, but he's ruthless and kind of crazy and has access to fuck know how many guns (that he actually knows how to use, unlike Kev), not to mention a whole bunch of brothers and cousins and whatever he can call upon. He's a criminal, the real kind, and it's probably only a matter of time before he follows his father and his brothers into big boy jail. Kev doesn't judge – you do what you need to get by, and it's bad practise for a barkeep to look down at his patrons anyway – but he can't help but wonder what it'll mean for a kid like Ian to get caught up in all that hardcore Milkovich madness.

For one, he's not sure gentleness can survive it very long, and he'd hate to see Ian lose that kind heart of his; hate to see him freeze and harden. He'd hate to see him give up on his dreams too, though maybe it's too late for that already, 'cause of what happened with the Army and that helicopter...

It occurs to Kev that Ian ran away just after Mickey married Svetlana.

Oh, shit. This must have been going on for years. Gallaghers have always been attracted to trouble, Kev supposes. He tries to stay out of it, for the most part. Live and let live – and let V be the one to make the off-hand judgemental comments or give it to someone straight if need be. Sure, Kev's been there to throw some advice Lip's way when Lip's been particularly stubborn about something or someone, but there's no way he's getting involved in this. Word got back to Mickey that Kev had tried to meddle in his love life, no talk of peace and love and overflowing plates of cabbage would save him from a bullet to the head, and his kids are not gonna grow up without a father.

It'll probably be fine anyway. Not like he begrudges Mickey a bit of happiness, and Ian's a tough kid. He can take care of himself.

It'll be fine.

Kev keeps telling himself that as he starts shooing the last remaining guests out.

---

He catches sight of them just a little later, when he's finally done getting the priest – half a bottle of vodka and two hookers in on his road to heaven on Earth – out the door, and is taking out the trash.

They're laughing. Through the blood and broken teeth, they're laughing. Ian winces with it, clearly in pain, and Kev considers heading over to ask if they're okay, if they need, well he's not sure, an ice pack or someone to walk them home or something.

He imagines Mickey reacting to that latter suggestion and reminds himself of his decision not to leave his daughters fatherless.

Ian and Mickey has stopped laughing, stopped talking, now (and if Kev had been an introspective kind of guy he might have paused to wonder at how easy it is to think of them like that, as one unit, as a couple, Ian and Mickey). Mickey's head is sagging slightly; Ian's looking at him with an intensity Kev can pretty much feel, even from twenty feet away and with Ian's back turned toward him. He knows he should go inside and leave them to whatever it is they've got going here, but he can't quite look away, his concern mingling with curiosity.

As he watches, Ian rises. He walks over to Mickey and slings an arm around his shoulder in half a hug, before softly running his fingers through the other boy's hair and bending down to press a brief kiss to the top of his head. There's nothing sexual about it; it's affection and comfort, offered easily.

Offered gently.

Mickey doesn't shy away from the touch. He leans into the hug; there's a faint smile on his lips as Ian pulls away, and it comes to Kev then that maybe it won't be Mickey's ruthlessness that tempers Ian's gentleness, but the other way around. Maybe Ian saw something underneath all that sneer and swagger that no one else could see, but was always there.

Maybe it really will be fine. Kev thinks maybe he believes it now.

---

A/N: Thank you for the prompt, nonnie! <3

I'm very happy you clearly specified 'lil' because yes, this I can do! Tiny little things I can mostly make happen! Might take me a while, but still. :) It was very interesting and rather more challenging that I had expected to try to get into Kev's head during these moments (though it gave me an excuse to rewatch all of Kev and Mickey's scenes in season 4, which was a delight!). I hope it's somewhere in the vincinity of what you envisioned, even if it didn't really get into why Ian and Mickey would be really good for each other; I think that's a realization that comes to Kev bit by bit over the years. Would love to see some scenes with him and Mickey in season 11.

This ficlet incidentally got me thinking about how the people of the South Side would distinguish between 'regular' people who don't mind breaking the law when given the opportunity and 'real' criminals who makes a living by actively doing so. Seems like it'd be a fine line at times...

Oh, and I do know that tools in the shed tend to be sharp rather than bright, but think that Kev is the sort to mix up expressions (and I feel the need to point this out since I'm not confident enough in my English to trust that this kind of thing will come across as intentional :p).

[prorevenge]

I recorded a coworker loving himself at work for eating my chocolate

Before you get to that part I need to clarify that yes, I have a video but I would never post it or anything because I would get in trouble for it and because is a ridiculous story it’s up to you to believe it or not.

Let’s name everyone involved in this:

John: my boyfriend. The designer

Jennie: me. I did mostly video

Sahra: another coworker. She was the best photographer there

Mario: To say that he was useless is an understatement. The reason why I’m writing this.

Donna: the director’s assistant.

Amy: the accountant.

Years ago, I worked in a government institution where I live; it wasn’t a good “job” (it was basically volunteer paid work that was an excuse to not give employees any security a “real” job would offer but I accepted because I needed the money and I had just finished college.

I used to work in the Communication department with other four coworkers, one of them was my boyfriend (still together to this day) and the youngest one (Mario) was a guy who was still in High school and got his girlfriend pregnant, his mom worked in other government institution y she got him that job. That’s one of the reasons the boss couldn’t fire him.

We had to make designs, take pictures, do video, post on social media, check on the press when they wanted an interview with one of our bosses and many, many other things. Mario was supposed to know some about photography and design because he told us that’s what he was studying at school but we knew later that he didn’t attend school often, so he was very, very bad at almost everything and we tried to show him how to do his work but he was really stubborn and lazy. He never learned completely how to do the basic work.

He always had problems with many people, not with us at the beginning because he acted polite (that changed later). He was disrespectful when taking pictures, he was late almost every day and he used to post in social media about government and fight to other people who didn’t agree with him. Sahra and John would talk to him about how working in a government institution you couldn’t do that, it’s simply not okay. However, he never changed and told his mom we were against him.

Mario went to work around two to four hours a day. Usually John and Sahra would be the only ones to see him because they worked more hours than the rest of us but he would stay in the office around one or two hours alone or they would send him to take pictures for the same time.

One day he had to take pictures of some event practice, everyone else was off the clock, it wasn’t a big event and he had been working there around a year by that time, so we thought that he could go by himself . The accountant had to go there and decided to take him with her and one coworker of hers in her car (he was late again and that’s why he couldn’t go in one of the work cars).

The accountant left her purse open in that space that’s in the middle of the driver and the co-driver’s seats. When they went back to the office she noticed her wallet disappeared. She instantly knew that had to be Mario the one who took it. They began to search him and our office and found nothing. Somebody found the wallet under the vending machine.

At first, we took his side because they admitted that never found anything and because it wasn’t right to search in our office without anybody else there, mostly because we had photography equipment that wasn’t exactly cheap. However, when we knew how the wallet was found and when we talked to him, we knew it was him.

More money and stuff disappeared when he was there but nobody could prove he took them. The bosses didn’t want to create a scandal so they let it happen.

Our office used to be the conference room so it was attached to the kitchen. And the director had beverages there for visits, we could use the kitchen but not touch those beverages, but Mario couldn’t even get in there. Anyway, the sodas began to disappear and the director’s assistant complained to us. We said we didn’t take them and she wouldn’t believe us. One day John noticed that our door to the kitchen was broken and that you could take the lock easily. With a pencil (we used to find pencils without tips) he took it inside the mechanism and then the door opened. It took it’s time but he proved that Mario was getting in the kitchen when nobody else was there. However, that didn’t make a difference and nothing was done, not even talking to him.

One day, John and me were on our way to work but I didn’t have breakfast so we stopped at a store, I bought something to eat and a chocolate. I put it inside the fridge and forgot about it. The next day I remembered about it and went to check… It wasn’t there and I got mad. John and I checked the trash can (it was clean and empty and we just watched) and we found just little pieces of that chocolate. So we asked for a video camera that someone offered us before. It could record for long hours.

I want to clarify at this point that we didn’t take the decision of everything you are about to read just because of a chocolate. The chocolate was the last straw. For like a year we had to put up with our bosses scolding us because of him, he never wanted to learn how to do his job and things were always disappearing, including personal things.

The first day. Donna left money in one of her drawers and left it slightly open so he could see the money. We put the camera in other building that was in front of ours. We had big windows (floor to ceiling) and you could watch Donna’s desk and the hallway. Some lady’s office, our door and the director’s office. The other building just had empty offices then but had big curtains, that’s why Mario couldn’t see the camera.

We went home that day and left the camera recording. The next day there was the money, maybe because we left one billet equivalent to five dollars and he knew we would know he took it. I checked the camera and watched him getting in the lady’s office (I don’t know what she did there) and he took some cookies from her office but he looked suspicious.

Again, with this we couldn’t do much so that night John found an old cellphone that could record for two hours…

The next day, Donna left the five dollars again but now she left one dollar bills and the same drawer slightly open. We placed the camera in the other building and John disguised his old cellphone with a binder and some sticky tape.

That day he got alone for two a little less than two hours and left. John and me had a car so we were in mall close there, just killing time and then we went back. For the cellphone.

OMG! John watched a little bit of the video before the battery died he said the he saw something weird but wasn’t sure because the screen was very damaged and we were in the car (I was driving).

When we got in John’s house, we could watch everything he had done inside our office. Not the other camera because the building was closed and we didn’t have access to it until the next day.

First, we saw him getting in the office, watching some Youtube… Everything normal… Then he went out and when he came back we saw him putting something in his pocket but it wasn’t clear what. Then we saw how easily he took a pencil, opened the kitchen’s door, and took something like a yoghurt, then he closed the door. The we could hear that he was watching something like a channel that’s very famous in our country. But then… We heard noises, yeah, that kind of noises… We were supposed to have blocked that kind of videos and websites. I mean, those were government offices and the IT team had checked recently everything. But someway he was watching porn on the computer I used to work. And if you are thinking if he did what you are thinking the answer is YES. Thanks god the cellphone didn’t record his hands but you could see his shoulder moving and him licking his finger… (I know very disgusting) Well, he ended and didn’t even washed his hands.

I was so shocked and disgusted when I saw that that I wanted to cry.

The next day, the fir thing I did was to call the IT department to clean the computer (we didn’t say why because of obvious reasons). John took the camera and we could watch him when he went out of the office and checked carefully if somebody was around. Then he went to Donna’s desk and took one dollar, he went inside the woman’s office and took something but we couldn’t see what. Then he went into our office.

We called Donna to our office and she was shocked, then Sahra watched the video as soon as she got there… Then the director arrived and we asked him and Amy to go to our office. We showed them the video. The director was very young and trusted us a lot so he didn’t hold his laughter when the “self love” pat began. Amy was a young and delicate woman so she just turned around and covered her eyes while letting a small scream out.

We finally get the proves needed to fire him.

When he got to work they didn’t let him in. I don’t know how the conversations went but I know some of the words exchanged

Amy: You stole again and we told you and last time we told you it was your last chance

Mario: (raising his voice) I didn’t do anything. You’re always blaming me

Amy: We have prove

Mario: You don’t have anything! All of you hate me

Amy: Don’t make me show you

Mario: Well, show me

Amy called our office: John, could you bring the videos?

John: the first one (the videocamera one) or the second (the cellphone one)?

Amy: The second one

When he heard that he was defeated and very nervous.

John took his time downloading the video into his computer because it was in mine and went to the office Amy was talking to Mario.

John told me he was about to show him the video and then he asked Mario

John: Mario, do you really want to watch this video?

Mario: (he couldn’t even watch John in the eyes) No, I don’t want

Amy: Play at least the first video for him

John: I don’t have that one, let me go for it

I admit that I just wanted to see Mario’s face so I went to that office to give them an USB but he didn’t really watch me.

Amy: (to John and me) Okay, thank you that’s gonna be all.

And we left the office.

We know she said something like:

Amy: (after playing the video) you always said it was us and even told your mom that we wanted to get you in trouble all the time. You even told really bad things about this place. You are fired and we don’t ever want to hear about you complaining to anybody else in the central or we’re going to show these two videos to your mom.

And he just left…

Then we heard that he actually told lies to her mom like:

Mario: They hated me and told lies to make them fire me

But no one ever told his mom (not that I know)…

Well, this story made me realize that someone could be recording me anywhere I go... I mean, even I did it to someone…

(source) story by (/u/CindirellaCookie)

[joshslater]

So long, schlong

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He was good looking, black hair, hazel eyes, nicely toned body, and he was charming. Sure, he got paid to look pretty and act nice, but if he faked it, he did a damn good job of it. He came off as genuinely attractive and attracted. It confirmed what I had been thinking for several days, that I needed a break from the party-fuck-party loop I was stuck in. To me he was perfect, and yet I felt no desire to go home with him tonight, if that had been an option. My shorts didn’t show any more bulge now than when I entered the club.

The bartender psychiatrist had quickly moved from fast and fake to more frank topics. It was Wednesday, so it wasn’t as packed, and there were two of them, but I was happily surprised with the time he devoted to actually talk to me. I guess he was experienced enough to sense when someone needed a non-alcoholic pick-me-up.

- So, given all that I’m not really looking for anyone tonight. I wasn’t sure, but, you know, I think I am now. - That bad huh? Perhaps if you couldn’t it would be different? - What do you mean? - Everyone is always looking at what they can’t have. I should know. I could go home with almost anyone in this room tonight, if I asked the right way. That came off too much like a brag, but you get what I’m saying. So to me the most irresistible ones are the ones that would say no.

Was he talking about me? That would be flattering, but I suspect he was talking in general terms. He was on the clock, and making the patrons feel good was part of the job description.

- Really? Well, there are one or two here that would say yes to me also. - Don’t sell yourself short. Besides, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I’m saying that perhaps you are tired of sex just because it is so easy for you to get what you want, and when you want it. - What do you suggest? Break my nose to look uglier.

He grabbed something from below the bar and plonked it down in front of me on the bar desk. A big, shiny chromed chastity device in full view. Not a big reaction from anyone though, if they even looked. This kind of transaction wouldn’t be that big of a deal in a place like this.

- You want to lock me up? - No. I want you to lock yourself up. It’s just what you need. Something to stop yourself from cumming whenever you want. Then perhaps you value it more.

I stared at the metal cage on the table. A well crafted but not overly complicated design with a handcuff like mechanism that locks around the base. Another piece that you put your dick in and that locks with the first piece. Some sort of integrated lock mechanism that looked like a brass button with a keyhole locked everything in place. Clearly the deluxe version, with a small, blunt hook that separates the balls, and a short tube on the inside that goes into the hole of the dick.

- Never used before, and you can keep it until you see me again. Go try it!

I’ve never tried one on. To go straight to such a serious design is really a plunge in the deep end, but why not? I’m not going to do anything else tonight, by my own admission. Worst case scenario, I take a bolt cutter to it tomorrow and pay him the $100 or whatever this monstrosity costs.

- I’ll try it on, and then decide if I want to keep it on. - Sure. All yours.

I took the device and headed towards the men’s room, if such a term held any meaning at a place like this. The restroom was spacious, with several, individual toilet rooms. No cheap stalls here. They knew what their patrons wanted, and that included the thumping of fucking that clearly was going on behind the second door. I opened the first door, entered and locked it.

I stepped out of my shorts, to have better access. No underwear tonight. A habit on party nights. I held all my junk together with one hand, and put the first piece around the base of my cock and sack with the other. I forced it close with the same hand. It made a few clicks as the handcuff mechanism ratchet locked. How snug should it fit? I noticed a small button on the side, pressed it and the device sprung open, and I almost dropped it. Well, I needn’t worry about fitting at least. I closed it again, as tight as I dared. It wasn’t a cock ring, reminded myself, but it should probably be pretty tight still. This was intended for a flaccid penis after all.

I hesitated a bit with the other part. Sticking something into the eye of my dick wasn’t something I ever planned on doing. It was a small, hollow metal ball connected to a thin, transparent rubber tube that was connected to the inside of the front of the second piece. Well, I usually try everything once. I spat on the metal ball and started to attempt to insert it. It was tricky for many reasons. Awkward position of everything made it hard to see, hard to manipulate, and to complicate everything I started to have an erection. That would make it impossible to secure the different parts, and now the first part was becoming a cock ring.

I removed it, put my junk in the sink and washed it with cold water until it was small again, and rinsed the metal parts in cold water. I would have to work faster.

I did everything again, but now got the first part on real quick, then pushed the tube up my dick, ignoring the strange sensation, and put the metal prongs of the second part into the first part with a click.

It felt super weird.

It felt like I was having and not having an erection at the same time. My body found the hole experience really exciting, while the device was doing its best to deny my body to express that feeling. I understood now what my handsome bartender was telling me. There was also something about the extra weight. I took a few steps, feeling how it all bounced in new ways. It could be interesting to try this for a few days. I pressed the brass button with the keyhole on. It made a click.

The change was immediate. With nothing to hold it up, my dick fell and made a tug. I gasped at the sensation. It took me seconds to realize what had happened. The chastity device was no where to be seen. Technically my dick and balls where no where to be seen either. Instead between my legs was a monster of a cock hanging half way down to my knees, with balls to match. It was thick, uncut and free from all hair. It probably weighed as much as the chastity device did. It wouldn’t surprise me if it weighed exactly as much.

It took me a while to even touch it. It sent a shiver through me when I did. It was mine alright, but way more sensitive than what I had before. I still had the same feeling as before locking the device. Horny without being able to physically express it. The dick, although thick, wasn’t erect. A small bead of precum did form at the end. How would I even masturbate such large dick. I grabbed it somewhere near the head with my right hand and started to move it back and forth. It just made the base part of the dick buckle and waved thin tendrils of precum around on the toilet floor.

I grabbed the base of the dick with my left hand and repeated the motion with my right hand. It was incredible. With all my frequent and varied dick play, I’ve never before come close to something feeling as good as this did. I probably spent a good five minutes doing this, but it only left me more horny and still with no erection.

So that was how it worked.

I washed my hands, grabbed my shorts, and paused. I picked these shorts to showcase my goods. My former goods. This dick would be noticed through sweat pants. How the fuck was I going to walk from this without being busted for indecent behavior? I pulled up the shorts, and as expected it showed my golf balls of testicles front and center, and the dick made its way down the shorts leg, and continued down the thigh. I grabbed the dick and pulled it up into the leg, and then arranged it horizontally towards my right. I made a few test steps. If I just readjusted the dick every few steps, this could work.

I stepped out of the restroom and walked towards the bar. I could see several eyes my shorts, and my constant adjusting only accentuated it. The friction and grabbing did nothing to calm my sexual feelings. Perhaps he was right that you fancy what you can’t have, but the opposite can also be true. Now that I was rapidly getting hornier than I have been in months, I was desperate to release it somehow, and none of the usual options were available to me.

I slowly sat down on the bar stool next to my almost empty beer glass, taking care to not spill out my dick. There was a small note under the beer glass.

- Where is the other bartender? - Which one? It’s only me working today. Wednesdays are a bit slow here.

I unfolded the note.

“Go fuck yourself =)”

[neomikey]

For June 2021's #ryukoprompt!  Time to go swimming!

I don't have a favorite “summer memory,” exactly.  However, I do remember growing up that summers were always a proper season book-ended by the end and start of the school years.  The weather grew warmer, I was relieved for three months of the obligation of going to school, and that time was spent hanging out with friends any day of the week, playing video games, and sometimes my parents would take us all somewhere for vacation.

Some place that was a staple of the summer, though, was the Hobart Community Pool, though we all just said “the Hobart Pool.”  As of this writing, it's 59 years old and is still in operation today, though they've added more from when I was a child.  Growing up through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, it was a basic pool – technically two – and we all loved it.

It was a meeting place, where you and everyone you knew were likely to bump into each other at some point in the summer.  All manner of people grouped there, from the young to the old.  We would spend hours there at the pool and the time always went by quicker than expected.

You passed through a wooden gate house, where you would show your membership or pay them.  The main area where the staff was had two large windows – one facing out to incoming customers and one facing in towards the main pools.  They had music playing there, pool supplies on the wall, and were generally easygoing.  All the staff were that I encountered.  You then passed through a gendered show area, where you could clean up and change, and then you were put out in front of the kiddie pool.

Almost no adults ever hung out in there.  The shallowest end of the pool was two feet deep, where the absolute beginners – regardless of age – could literally get their feet wet.  The pool deepened as you went further in, until you stood at one end where it just reached three feet.  There was no paint on that end to mark how deep it was, but I remembered as a kid being absolutely sure it was three feet, since the water went up to me the same amount when I was in the other pool.  I felt like a genius.

The other pool was the main pool, which is in the shape of a large L. The main rectangle went from three feet gradually down to five feet. Of course, this also meant that as you went deeper, the people swimming generally were older as well.  This pool was mainly where I and everyone else did our swimming.  In the middle was a huge water slide, and at the end deep in the five-foot section was a basketball hoop.  I remember my dad frequently playing over there.

The smaller rectangle of the L was the deep end – 12 feet – and was separated by a rope which no one was allowed to cross.  This was where the diving boards were.  Normally, the deep end was only for people using the diving boards, but oftentimes they would allow open swimming as well.  I remember being older and being able to get to the bottom, where I would stand and walk, simply because I could.   There were three diving boards.  Two of them were on the outside and were short, and the high-dive was in the middle.  I think it was two stories tall at the top.

Every hour they would blow a whistle, announcing that “adult swim” had started, meaning that the kids needed to get out, rest, and let the “old people” enjoy the whole pool to themselves.  I still remember the whistle blows they would do.  If I recall correctly, there would be three bursts, which were echoed by all the other lifeguards who heard it.  When it was time to go back in, they would do one long blow that would shift its intensity, mimicking how we would say “alley-oop!” when hoisting something heavy.

Adult swim was also when people would take the time to visit their cafe...though I use the word lightly. It was there to sell cheap food like candy, hotdogs, and soft drinks. It was also the place where I was introduced to banana Laffy Taffy, and to this day, I still love the stuff.  Park benches were set up in a lightly protected area, and I remember occasionally seeing curious wasps in that area.

The pool used to have a line of trees protecting it.  They were tall evergreen trees planted side by side, and did fantastic work blocking out the wind when it came from that direction.  However, eventually Hobart's hospital was built and they built a road right through what used to be a prairie to give it better access.  Part of the road's installation involved taking down those trees.  I didn't think they “needed” to, I thought there was plenty of room, but I'm sure there was some proper reason.  My friend Tim joked this was going to cause a lot of accidents.  He said guys were gonna be driving, see a hot lady in a bikini, and get distracted.

I have many memories from there.  Most good, some bad.  I loved being underwater and would frequently be under there.  My eyes would eventually hurt from the chlorine, but that was the price I willingly paid.  I would sometimes be underwater and swim through crowds of people.  I'm told I surprised a few of them, as they weren't expecting to suddenly see a child going past their feet.

My friends and I would frequently play there.  There would be light roughhousing, but it was mostly just swimming, playing, and laughing.  We would talk about or mimic stuff we had seen in video games.  I remember squirting a line of water out through my teeth and calling it a laser.  When we were allowed to swim in the deep end, I jumped off the side and brought my limbs close to my body, mimicking Iron Man in the Captain America and the Avengers arcade game. This always got me pretty deep pretty quickly.  Other times we would try out stuff, such as someone lying on the bottom, then someone else standing on their back to keep them there.  When the person on the bottom had to come up for breath, he would stand and topple the person on top over.  I remember back skin feeling really weird on my feet.

There was a way to swim during adult swim if you were a kid, and that was to pass the “Dolphin” exam.  You had to get from one end of the main pool, down the length, and to the other side.  You had to do it while swimming properly – freestyle – and had to go straight.  It was difficult for me to pass and I remember once skewing to the side and hitting the side of the pool near the water slide.  I failed that one.  I know I did pass it at least once and wore the Dolphin badge on my swim trunks with pride that summer.  

There was one incident where I thought I was older, mature, and brave enough to tackle the high dive.  I stood in line, ascended, and then once at the top, looked over the edge.  It was so, so far down and I couldn't bring myself to jump.  I remember some people calling up to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to climb down and I had to jump.  I appreciate them trying to motivate me to get over my fears, but it only made me more scared. Eventually, I climbed down and broke into tears.  My dad was there to comfort me as I came down and I told him I would never swim again. That turned out to be wrong.

When I was old enough to drive, I started going to the Hobart Pool on my own.  My whole life up to that point I had always gone there with someone and getting to be there on my own felt like another step into adulthood.  It was a nice feeling that if it was hot out and my parents were busy, I could hop in my vehicle and just go.

As time went on, my time wasn't as structured.  I was no longer in school, I had jobs, and held different interests where the pool didn't interest me as much.  Summers were no longer an event, but something in the background that meant we had to roll down the car windows.  I didn't have a need for membership to the Hobart Pool anymore, and it wasn't until years later after I was married that I realized how long it had truly been since I had gone swimming.

Once the pandemic is over, my wife and I agree – we're hitting the pools hard.

[audio-luddite]

Basics 1.1 Brand Names.

I would like to point out that publications of all types generally do not describe reality. Car magazines discuss Ferraris as if everyone drove them to work or shopping. A very few people do, but they have a huge amount of money and arguably bad judgement as driving around the city in one is just out and out bragging and bad for a vehicle designed to go fast and that is all.

Audiophile magazines and pod casts and YouTube things that portray six figure turntables as even approaching a reasonable solution are full of it too. There is a lot of Ferrari level audio equipment out there.

I stopped reading that stuff a long time ago as it is not part of the real world. It often seems that audiophile stuff is ranked on the internet on price, rarity, and if it has USB connectivity. If you do a Google or Bing Search they will vomit up ads that questionable sources paid for.

I guess I am saying there is damn little useful information out there easy to access to guide you in this hobby. You will have a hard time finding out if there is just GOOD stuff out there. There is but it is behind big clouds of a dense smoke of exaggeration and simple lies.

There is gold, but you gotta dig. You have to know the difference between the gold and pyrite. Most companies making good stuff are relatively small. A few have been taken over by big companies and if left mostly alone can be depended upon. Others are really good at business, but the products are only popular as opposed to good. It helps to know some names.

Many have gone away. Some have come back or never left. There are fans and collectors that drive the prices up, but actually do not use the stuff. The most expensive car out there is too precious to drive and sits in a climate controlled shed. I saw a website for a collector of classic SAE equipment who just cannot use all that stuff. Very impressive, but it should be used, not photographed.

Some have a reputation better than they deserve. Some deserve a better reputation. Here is a trip down my memory lane. I was there.

In the early 70s there was a company called Acoustic Research. To its friends and fans it is just AR. It started out in Cambridge Mass in the 50s. It based its business on a revolutionary speaker design that allowed much better and smoother bass response. The AR-3 is a deserved classic. They kept making good stuff until the 80s and eventually petered out in buy outs and corporate BS. Another product they developed was the AR turntable. Simple, basic, well designed and good. Examples still change hands and can be modified to be pretty damn good by high end standards. A deserved good reputation and worth pursuing.

A descendant of that vision was KLH speakers and eventually ADVENT. Good names for things up to the early 80s.

Another company from Framingham Mass. was BOSE. Started by an MIT professor he developed a speaker that used the walls of your room to reflect sound. The classic 901 had 9 small drivers per channel with one shooting forward and the rest aimed backward. It needed an inline equalizer to correct its poor frequency response. I think it is a poor design. Reviewers were careful to not offend but people who like it like it. Later they made strange and exotic small units that are best considered as equal to a nice clock radio. ( then also made a clock radio.)

They moved into automotive sound, low end consumer audio and public address systems. They are still in business now owned by MIT but nothing they make is high end. Nothing they ever made is high end or really even good by my standards.

Dynaco started in the late 50s and had a good run right through the 80s. They evolved into Halfer and then disappeared into bigger firms ESS and then Panor. Either of those first two brand names can be depended upon for good stuff. Recently both brands have been resuscitated and make a few good, but expensive things.

My big amplifier is a Dynaco.

Harman Kardon also started in the 50s. Mr Harman and Mr Kardon worked for a company called Bogen that made fairly respected electronics and speakers in the Eastern US. The HK Citation line of products was a sophisticated attempt at selling really good stuff for reasonable cost. Both HK and Dynaco sold their products as kits for a time to make it more accessible.

HK still exists as a division of Samsung. They had a weird journey through corporate buying and selling, but still kept a sense of purpose. Any HK product is worthy of respect if taken care of. The Citation 11 preamp and the Citation 12 amp were once SOTA. I have a Harman Kardon Citation 12 amplifier and an HK ST5 Rabco turntable.

Marantz is another firm from the East founded by a Saul Marantz in New York. They made a good reputation on high end stuff and quickly went through several new owners including Philips Corp from the Netherlands. The old stuff up to mid 70s is considered pretty good.

SAE was a California Company started in the 70s with an avowed purpose to make good solid stuff. The designs were from a James Bongiorno who became one of the audio engineering saints. His early SAE amplifiers and preamplifiers made the golden ears sit up and take notice. I have an SAE mk XXX preamp. It is a good solid unit and frankly under priced on the used market right now.

SAE went away, and are now back as a brand selling really big stuff. Amplifiers you could weld with. Not cheap by any means.

Insert angelic choir here.

Audio Research Corporation. Started in the 70s, still going strong but owned by Mcintosh since 2016. Founding visionary was William Zane Johnson another audio saint. A defender and promoter of vacuum tube electronics. I will safely say they never made anything less that great, and most things were SOTA when they came out. They were never inexpensive. There is a decent selection of good stuff for under two grand on the used market, but it gets crazy for the new stuff. My main preamp is an Audio Research SP-12.

There are two things about their stuff you have to be aware of. The first is they voiced the phono preamps to sound good with moving coil pickups starting around the SP9. The input capacitance is too high for most moving magnet or moving iron types. Easy to fix with solder. The second thing is they flirted with all solid state designs for a time. They used fabricated Operational Amplifier units in potted blocks. These units cannot be fixed if they fail. They failed in the market as the fans liked the warm glow of glass and felt betrayed. Eventually there was a compromise with "hybrid" designs. I lust after an SP-9 mk2/3 which is a hybrid.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are other brands and names. These are ones I have personal experience with and can vouch for the value of my opinion.

It is fun to hunt for stuff.

Don't forget to listen!

[radramblog]

Every Mono-Black Commander, Part 4: Designed for the Format

In what will be the penultimate edition of this weekly word stream, the cards steadily on average get better, as WoTC realises commander is the most popular format and starts designing specifically for the format. On the other hand, people don’t play lots of these cool and interesting cards because everyone’s obsessed with “multicolour”, the cowards.

Moving on.

Sidis, Undead Vizier (245 decks, 25th most played)

Sidisi is one of those cards I’m surprised sees as much play as it does. Not because it’s bad, but because it seems to belong a lot better in the 99 than in the zone- they’re pretty much just a tutor with a body attached, after all. For a while, though, it was the only commander you could run that was a pure tutor, so if you were into just comboing people out it’s probably not a bad idea.

I think part of the reason I underrate this card is that I always assume it’s 6 mana. And it’s a lot better at 5 than it is at 6. And you can always just sacrifice itself if you really want your commander to just be an overpriced Diabolic Tutor.

 Kothophed, Soul Hoarder (29 decks, 73rd most played)

I actually rate Kothophed a bit higher than I think most do. While as the 2nd of Lilliana’s demons he was obviously a fair bit weaker than the extremely banned Griselbrand, and the only one of the 4 not to be mythic, he does do a couple things really well.

For one, he draws a lot of cards. Things are going to the graveyard all the time, especially in multiplayer, and he makes the artifact/aristocrat decks think twice about popping off. The other is that he’s super cheap, at like 40 cents a pop. And I appreciate that, especially considering some of the cards surrounding him.

 Liliana, Heretical Healer//Liliana, Defiant Necromancer (645 decks, 9th most played)

Baby Lilli herself looks a lot better than Ob Nixilis of the Black Oath as far as Planeswalker commanders goes, and it’s therefore unsurprising that she breaks the top 10. Everybody loves Planeswalkers, lots of people like Lilliana both as a card and a character, and the card that puts her in the zone is quite solid.

What does she do, though? Well, of the 6 Creature->Planeswalker transform cards, she’s one of the three that can theoretically flip the turn you play her without a haste effect (and Nicol Bolas is only on that list by technicality, because that’s a loooot of mana), and it’s not particularly hard to do so considering the colour she’s in. She then protects herself a little with a Zombie token and acts as basically a multiplayer-tuned Lilliana of the Veil, with a bigger number on her plus and minuses that better suit commander. This lets her work quite well for discard decks, reanimator decks, aristocrats decks, zombie decks, and of course, Lilliana decks. She’s just really solid overall, making up somewhat for the fragility of walkers in the format by being cheap and making herself a blocker.

 Drana, Liberator of Malakir (82 decks, 49th most played)

Drana I guess could be used as a tribal or Voltron commander of some description, but to be frank, she’s here for one thing- aggro. Anthem effects are uncommon in black, and Drana just piles on so many counters in such an efficient manner that she kinda makes up for that on her own. I’ve actually never seen anyone piloting a Drana deck (of any of the three Dranas, actually), so I don’t know exactly how effective it is, but putting her at the helm of a stack of tokens or efficient threats just sounds scary. I’m pretty sure she’s only liberating Malakir from its remaining life points.

 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet (124 decks, 38th most played)

Kalitas seeing this much play…actually frustrates me, seeing as he’s basically just a hate piece. Like yeah, he has another ability, and he makes tokens, but come on. You’re just playing this for the exile clause, and it’s never going to make you any friends. Headcrab Vampire over here doesn’t do anything much if your opponents just wait til he’s off the field to do anything spicy, and in that case, what are you doing with him? Very inefficiently voltronning up? Gaining 3 life? It’s a bit sad. I don’t really like him.

 Gonti, Lord of Luxury (550 decks, 11th most played)

Aww man, they’re not in the top 10 anymore? Fucking Tergrid.

Gonti is another card advantage commander, but everything on them lines up to make both a fun and a powerful effect. They’re not too expensive, and in addition to effectively drawing a card, deathtouch makes them a great way to dissuade attacks from other players. Their ETB not only acts as card selection, but it also gives you access to effects mono-black lacks, silver bullets you don’t play, or just surprise threats that vastly open up your options. They can whiff, sure, but that doesn’t happen especially often.

I’m biased, because my Gonti deck is among my favourite of my 100-card children, but Gonti is just such a fun commander that I don’t even mind the lack of direction they hand you. I run them as grindy valuey control, but they work great as the helm of flicker, theft, and even Aetherborn tribal decks as well. Just a stellar little commander.

 Yahenni, Undying Partisan (306 decks, 21st most played)

Speaking of Aetherborn, Yahenni is also here, and I really appreciate that the two Aetherborn commanders we got are both really cool both in game and in the lore. Shame about most of the rest of the tribe being draft trash. Also, WoTC brought all sorts of old tribes back into the limelight for Commander Legends and the Modern Horizons sets, so where are the new Aetherborn at? Wizards pls.

Yahenni themselves is a pretty interesting commander. Their effects combine into a powerful package more subtle than their flavour text suggests- they not only are a threatening body, as a hasty commander that grows significantly as the game progresses, but they’re also incredibly sticky- a free sacrifice outlet that protects itself from most removal. They’re just a card where all the pieces come together just right, and I appreciate that a lot. One job and that’s aristocrats, but they’re good at it!

 Bontu, the Glorified (59 decks, 57th most played)

When we finally got eyes on the Amonkhet gods, I think Bontu was my least favourite. Like, she’s hard to turn on, and has to be done repeatedly? A 3 mana 4/6 menace is a lot, but not enough to justify that in my opinion. And that activated ability is painfully mediocre.

At this point I like Kefnet less, but that’s just because I’ve cast him a bunch of times and I’m pretty sure he’s done nothing most of those times. Both of them are just kind of shithouse though. I expected more from the Magic equivalent of Set.

 Razaketh, the Foulblooded (74 decks, 54th most played)

The only thing foul about Razaketh is that mana cost. 8 mana, holy shit. But you get paid off for it, don’t ya? A free-ish sac outlet that, oh, also just demonic tutors. If you have an infinite combo in your deck, this’ll get it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Razaketh decks therefore get focussed pretty hard once people recognize the power in the zone. Like, running him as a commander is basically saying “sup once I get to 8 mana y’all are fucked”, and in that case people are going to do all they can to stop you getting to 8 mana, whether by blowing up your rocks or just killing your face and dudes. Perhaps consider an alternate route if you don’t like getting beaten up.

 Spike, Tournament Grinder (N/A)

Aight, this is kinda cheating, but shshshsh it’s fine. Now, I’m not sure exactly how this works in the zone, but I’m just assuming it can get any “spikey” card that fits within your colour identity? Or maybe it’s just anything. Either way, this gets some bonkers shit.

Even if we assume it’s only legal commander cards in identity, Spike can still draw you some funny things. Dark Ritual, Crucible of Worlds, Bitterblossom, Demonic Tutor, Ancient Tomb, and that’s just the first page. If we do include commander-banned cards, then you can also use them as a spicy secret commander for such hits as Griselbrand, Emrakul, or Braids. Overall, they’re definitely fair and balanced. Un-Commanders when.

 Tetzimoc, Primal Death (15 decks, 86th most played)

Oh, Tetzy. I love this stupid stupid card, one that seems to get worse the bigger the decks get. And by that I mean, it’s completely stupid broken in its original draft format, fringe playable in Standard at the time (and by that I mean… I mean I played it), and thoroughly mediocre in Commander. And that’s in the 99, because much like Haakon and Phage he doesn’t work in the zone. He’s a fair bit easier to enable than they are, but it’s for much, much less payoff. Alas poor Tetzimoc.

 Demonlord Belzenlok (110 decks, 41st most played)

The last Lilliana contract demon, and the first Dominaria card of the 6 we got to talk about. Belzenlok’s ability is frustratingly awkward, however- while it will never draw you land, in my experience you’re rarely drawing more than two cards off it, and one is very common. Because the thing is, in order to support the dummy thick cards Belzenlok likes to see, you need a lot of cheap ramp and draw, which he does not like to see. And said ability takes up all the space on his textbox that could be used on other things. He’s basically okay, but I don’t see running this over basically any other demon.

I mean, he’s in my Gonti deck, but that’s besides the point, making a fatty and drawing cards is what that deck’s about.

 Josu Vess, Lich Knight (69 decks, 55th most played)

Lilliana’s dead brother is an army in a can that packs a mean punch- 20 menace power is absolutely nothing to sneeze at- but 10 mana is monstrous. And casting him for 4 is just not worth it, especially since it makes that 10 into 12 next time. With that said, I recall once a Dominaria draft on arena where I used Muldrotha to cast this guy kicked twice in a row, and while this might just be magical Christmas land, getting to reroll this guy repeatedly with Disentomb effects might be spicy. You can just bury people in Zombies, ain’t that fun? I mean, it’s still 10 mana, so that’s a lot, but yknow

I guess you can also sac the tokens to some variety of altar, but that’s boooooring.

 Torgaar, Famine Incarnate (99 decks, 44th most played)

Wait, if it’s Famine Incarnate, why is it an Avatar instead of an Incarnation?

I’m woefully unfamiliar with Torgaar, but it seems like a relatively effective general. It hits that 7 mark for a three-hit commander damage kill, while being able to cost as little as two mana, which is enough on its own- but  that chunky power also helps with that second ability, setting someone to 20, assuming other people are willing to help pick up the slack. Fuck your infinite life combo, back down to the ground with the rest of us.

Honestly, this guy just looks really fun. It’s nice that in a pinch you can just have them gain you up to 19 life (or more I guess if you’re Platinum Angel-ing), and they don’t seem broken enough to garner hate. Not bad, potentially underrated.

 Urguros, the Empty One (29 decks, 73rd most played)

On the other hand, I’m not sure why you’d pick this of all cards to head your deck. Looking at it, though, it’s mostly just Spectre tribal, which makes sense to me. Don’t think there’s another Legendary Spectre outside of changelings, though that would at least get you Blazing Spectre.

Shoutouts for Spectre being one of the words with different spelling in America that people don’t know about as well.

Urguros is not a powerful commander. They’re slow and their effect is weak. But if you’re running them, you don’t care about power, you care about creature type, and that’s fine too.

 Whisper, Blood Liturgist (150 decks, 33rd most played)

Oh, ok. blood liturgist.

Jokes aside, Whisper is more popular than I would have expected. Considering they’re basically reverse Victimize, I’m surprised that people are so into them when that card exists.

Ohh, wait, there’s probably a bunch of infinites with this and Thornbite Staff, huh. Yeahhh, that scans. Though even outside of combo bullshit, I bet they get a bunch of fun value stuff with army-in-a-can-type creatures like Abhorrent Overlord and Sengir Autocrat. Shame about the stats.

 Yargle, Glutton of Urborg (208 decks, 27th most played)

A literal vanilla creature, Yargle has overcome the odds to bargle into the hearts of many. The undeniable Best Frog Commander (Gitrog players do not interact), Yargle has clearly captured as many hearts as he’s eaten, considering he got his own Secret Lair filled with cards he can’t really play. His bit in the lore was also kind of hilarious, nearly killing all the protagonists until Muldrotha deus-ex-mythic rare-d him out of there.

The thing is, Yargle is not even that bad aside from the meme. He might be literally vanilla, butt he has 9 fucking power for 5 mana. He’s probably one of the cheapest creatures that breaches the 3-hit rule, and only needs 2 more to get down to 2. And 2 power isn’t super hard. Strap this bad boy with a sword or two and you can just gettem. Let alone the fact that he one-shots things with Tainted Strike. Or Grafted Exoskeleton. Or just about anything plus Fireshrieker. Unironically one of Mono-Black’s best Voltron options.

 Isareth the Awakener (30 decks, 70th most played)

Skipping the Battlebond cards because…who plays Virtus or Regna solo… brings us to the painfully mediocre Isareth. A 3 mana 3/3 that lets you cast one thing from your yard, and only if she risks her own life. And you still have to pay for the reanimate. And it gets the exile clause as well. Man, this was the same cycle as Goreclaw and Sai, too. Hell, I even like Lena more after I designed a deck around her. This just sucks. Like, I cannot imagine playing this over Chainer or something.

 The Haunt of Hightower (168 decks, 31st most played)

Speaking of Voltron, this Buy-a-Box exclusive is basically a self-sufficient beast of a flyer. Cards go into opponent’s graveyards all the time, and one mass mill effect makes this thing get huge fast as fuck. Add in lifelink so it keeps you going and all it’s really missing is the ability to protect itself, and there’re equipment for that.

On the other hand, it’s 6 mana and a 3/3 base, so if you aren’t able to get things in bins (or if a Rest in Peace/Leyline of the Void is out) it basically isn’t doing anything. And Flying is a much worse keyword in commander than one would think, being probably the most common Evasion mechanic. But I think this haunty boy is still solid.

 God-Eternal Bontu (81 decks, 48th most played)

If only the rest of us could age so gracefully. Er, die so gracefully, I guess. Zombie Set is kind of a beating, turning all sorts of useless shash into pure cash. And she can go to your deck if the zone is getting too costly, and she’s a cool crocodile zombie god.

Unfortunately, she does suffer from being an ETB-effect commander, which always feels a bit more mid than I’d like- they do their thing and then just…sit there… and unlike Gonti she doesn’t deter attacks that well. She does attack pretty alright herself, but it’s only 5 power and can’t even trade with two 3/3s. And it’s harder to fuel this all-or-nothing kind of ability repeatedly. There are a few (crocodile?) rocks to use, as well as chump creatures that crave death, but fill your deck with those and that’s all you’ll draw. It’s…fine. She’s fine.

 Massacre Girl (285 decks, 22nd most played)

The final card under the magnifying glass today, and probably still the best boardwipe/commander combo. Massacre Girl basically just kills everything, provided things aren’t too massive and there’s fodder around to bite the dust first. If anyone played Hearthstone back when I did, she’s basically a way, way better Defile.

Wait, that’s also a Magic name now isn’t it, shit.

I still think the notorious M.G. goes better in the deck than the zone, but I suppose control decks would appreciate having one of the things they crave most- board clears- available at a moment’s notice. And if you’re building around her, then you can fill your deck with the fodder that fuels her best. But I’m not sure where you win from there.

Ehhh, probably just Revel in Riches.

This brings us to the end of this edition of Black Commanders, and to the start of 2019. Which means the remaining 21 cards all came out in the last 2.5 years, which speaks a lot to how much they were designing cards for commander, and how many sets they’ve been coming out with. Until then.

[tae-cup]

Perfectum | Aeternae Luvenis (1)

Pairing: Jimin x Yoongi

Summary: You can’t be young forever...right?

Genre: Wellness!au, Angst, Fluff, slow burn FtL

Warnings: Medical nonsense, drug use, disturbing themes, a touch of internalized homophobia

Rating: PG-13

Word Count: 9.2k

A/N: I’ve been working for a while on this and am currently writing the final arc. I have a little ways to go, but thank you for reading and giving this a shot :) I put a lot of my soul into writing this, trying to perfect the characters (pun intended) and their personalities. I’ve written a bit of mxm before, but this is my first shot for long form! In future, this is helping me get some practice for a poly!BTS x reader story, so be on the look out for that!

Other:

Series Masterlist

 Masterlist 

Previous | Next (coming soon)

       Jimin and Yoongi had always believed Taehyung to be... odd, but Jimin was kind, perhaps too much so, and he had reached out to the younger man. Jimin was a man of gentle caresses and softly spoken words in the dead of night. Yoongi was of piano and the quietest of melodies. His cold demeanor was overshadowed by his ego. It always showed itself in topics of art and music. Jimin didn’t mind this, not really. 

       The black haired boy was always patient with his musical counterpart. Yoongi had blonde hair and these brown eyes that felt like they could uncover any part of your being. Jimin on the other hand, had a softer presence. It was a delicate balance, often upset by Taehyung. 

        Taehyung was not a normal boy. They had known him for about a year and he was handsome, someone that girls would fawn over, but there was something in the way he spoke, the way he acted, the little quirks, that had always thrown off Jimin. 

       He had always assumed it was because of Taehyung’s upbringing, perhaps some schooling, but there was something so formal about Taehyung. The gorgeous man would always leave before any important events, he never took part of class, in fact, Jimin had glanced over once in class only to see his notes blank. 

       It was little things like this that meant Jimin, nor Yoongi for that matter, batted an eye at Taehyung’s question. The man stood in front of them after accosting them outside the apartment they shared. Jimin had always been a little nervous about living alone and this only worsened when college came around, so Yoongi had suggested they move in together. Now, Jimin stood, keys in hand, as Yoongi quirked an eyebrow. 

“Young forever? Who wouldn’t want to be young forever?” The older man laughed dryly. 

“What if I told you...you could.” Taehyung said, his deep voice rumbling in the hallway. Jimin was quiet. Yoongi brushed past the man. 

“Ridiculous, it’s impossible.” He scoffed. Taehyung turned back to Jimin, who was still frozen in the doorway. His grip tightened on the keys. “Come on, Jimin, this guy’s a joker or something.” 

“Young forever, hm?” Jimin mused to himself.

        Then he glanced over his face for any tell tale signs of joking around. None were to be found.

“He’s probably just messing with us, let’s go.” Yoongi rolled his eyes.  

“What does this entail?” Jimin finally asked, his voice unsteady.

     Youth had...slipped away from him. Dancing, singing, studying. He never really had any time. A break would be nice and what could they do anyway? If it worked, great, if it didn’t, then there was no harm done, right? 

“Oh my god, seriously?” Yoongi groaned, but was cut off when Taehyung’s eyes lit up, a boxy grin pulling onto his face. 

     It would be unnerving if it weren’t Taehyung. Again, the boy had always been...a little off. Yoongi rolled his eyes, turning back to retrieve his stubborn housemate. 

“It’s a workshop, of sorts. They help to retrain your brain and body to keep you healthy and...compliant in your ways. It’s a six month...experience.” 

“Compliant?” 

“Shut up, we have to get to class.” Yoongi hissed, dragging Jimin towards the elevator. 

     Taehyung began to laugh a little. The hollow sound sent shivers down Jimin’s spine and Yoongi looked unnerved as well. 

“I told you not to interact with weird people!” Yoongi whispered furiously. 

“He’s not that weird, stop being mean.” Jimin complained, twisting around to look at him. 

        Jimin had always felt himself less than perfect, a flawed human being. He supposed that was human nature, but he always felt more flawed than everyone else; always too nice, too shy, too kind. Someone just begging to be stepped on. Did he not stand for himself? Taking a backseat was the usual, letting Yoongi take the more outgoing and outspoken roles in the friendship. 

“What if you’d be paid?” Taehyung shouted over their hushed whispers. 

        Yoongi’s ears caught onto that. He’d been working several jobs, trying to pay for his tuition. Jimin tried to persuade him to let him take some of the workload, but Yoongi had been adamant on paying it off of his own volition. It’s a matter of pride. He had explained. Since then, Jimin had left him alone about it, though the stress had made Yoongi rather cross lately. 

         Jimin watched as his old friend slowly turned to the taller man. He stood, looming eerily in the hallway still. He hadn’t moved a muscle. Jimin thought, in this moment, that his movements were another odd thing to add to the checklist of odd things Taehyung did. 

        He moved with a certain stiltedness, something not quite natural, as if trying to mimic nature. Jimin was like a sea diver who saw the slightest changes to an environment in order to uncover the hidden octopus. 

“How much?” Yoongi demanded. 

“Enough to pay your tuition. I know you’ve been struggling.” Taehyung smiled wolfishly. 

“When does the program start?” The other man inquired, taking a step closer to Taehyung’s figure. 

“In a week’s time. All you have to do is sign up, we take care of the rest.” 

“And you’ve been through this process?” 

       Taehyung fell silent, his gaze suddenly lacking a spark. He looked hollowed out. Then, almost robotically, he nodded his head. His fingers were interlocked, knuckles slowly turning white. 

“Yes, it’s painless.” 

“That’s not ominous at all.” Yoongi huffed, crossing his arms. Jimin remained silent. He was always silent. 

“Trust me, it’s a good experience.” Taehyung assured, but it felt practiced and rehearsed to Jimin’s well trained ears. 

“A break would be nice, Yoongi.” Jimin finally caved. 

“But what about my piano recitals, your performances?” Yoongi protested, his voice raising slightly. 

     Jimin sighed. He always knew his friend would be hard to persuade, especially if the trip wasn’t ‘necessary’. 

“Let’s talk more about this later, okay?” Jimin squeezed his hand twice. 

       Yoongi tried to ignore the soft pounding of his heart at the other man’s touch. He had known him all his life, was it not normal to feel an affection towards the people you grew up with?

       He shook off any...abnormal thoughts towards his friend and decided to just agree to what he said. But Jimin could make Yoongi agree to anything, as long as he held his hand, as long as he looked at him with his glassy brown eyes. Yoongi would give him...the world. 

“Just think about it, okay?” Taehyung took a step forward, drawing a card from his pocket. Jimin took the card and held it carefully between his fingers. 

“It’s called Perfectum.” He pointed out. The other man simply nodded and watched as he strode away.

       It was at dinner a few nights later that Jimin brought it up again. The proposition had been plaguing his mind all week, and despite Yoongi’s denial, it had been plaguing him as well. Yoongi, as per usual, bustled around the kitchen. 

    The clatter of pots and pans filled the apartment. The aroma of roasted tomatoes and freshly cut basil wafted through the kitchen and into the living room, where Jimin sat. 

       Yoongi may be cheap, but if there was one thing he didn’t skimp out on, it was food. To be a musician of his caliber, it was necessary to keep his body in good health, much like a trained athlete. Healthy eating and good food was important to both of their lifestyles. 

        Both Jimin and Yoongi had always been the quiet ones. They rarely needed to talk to each other and had known each other long enough to read when the other needed space. It was a perfect balance. The apartment itself was far from perfect, however. 

        The old place was falling apart. A leak was running down from the crack in the ceiling and the sound of drops of water collecting in a bucket was to the left corner. The wallpaper was faded and half of it was torn down as Yoongi claimed it would save money to just make an exposed brick wall. The problem? There was no brick and Yoongi was far from a carpentry prodigy. 

         Jimin sat, humming to himself, as he flipped through a magazine. His eyes glanced over the male model on the cover. The man was showing off a six pack with a slim waist and well toned arms.

       He averted his eyes. The dark haired male continued to idly flip through the pages. He wasn’t really reading, however, he was mostly thinking about Taehyung. He hadn’t seen the man around since that first inquiry. 

       The younger man heard a crash and several curses from the kitchen. He chuckled a little and then stood, deciding to help set the table. He closed the magazine, careful not to crease it, and went into the small kitchen. 

        The old tiles were cracking and the oven needed to be fiddled with a few times in order to work, but Yoongi had said the apartment was passable and Jimin had enjoyed the balcony. Together, they both got a little of what they wanted.

       Now, Yoongi was cursing to having agreed to this exact kitchen two years ago. Both men were equally on the shorter end. Jimin always held his centimeter of difference over Yoongi’s head, figuratively and literally. 

       The younger man reached over the other to access the plates. Then he set about making the waters. It was a great balancing act to bring all four items at once, but he managed it. He set the table, taking extra care to make things just right. He blinked a few times, tilting his head at the fork on the right. It didn’t look the same as the other one. 

        Frustrated, he moved the fork a smidge and that resulted in it looking even worse. He frowned and decided to leave it as it was, even if it felt a bit off kilter. Jimin then settled onto a dining chair. 

       His mind still running wild with the idea of eternal youth and perfection, his hands reached for his pocket where he had his wallet. Inside the wallet was the care Taehyung handed him. 

      Jimin ran his fingers lightly over the silver print. The card was easy to look at; perfect. Crisp white lines met the evenly spaced letters of each word. PERFECTUM was written in all caps in the center. Underneath were the words De Imperfectum Fit Perfectum. 

        The dark haired male pulled out his phone, puzzling over the inscriptions. On the backside of the card was simply an address; James St. 14. He didn’t recall that being anywhere near where they lived, but he really hadn’t been far outside his little bubble neighborhood since moving in. He typed in the trusty google translate and wrote the words down. Latin. 

“The imperfect becomes perfect.” He whispered to himself, reading over the words like the gospel.

 “Yoongi?” He called to his counterpart. 

“What?” The other responded, shouting over the kitchen fan. The fan whirred loudly but did little to vacuum up the wisps of steam. 

“Have you given any more thought to that retreat?” 

“What?!” He asked again. 

“I SAID-” the fan shut off and Jimin immediately lowered his voice. “-I said, ‘did you give any more thought to that retreat?’” 

      Yoongi lowered his head, peering at him through the opening between the stove and shelves above. He squinted a little, confused by the man’s sudden question. 

“No, why?” 

“I just...it’s coming up and I think we should go. You can pay for your tuition too.” 

“I think it’s a scam, Jiminie.”

      The pale haired man plated the spaghetti and brought them over. He placed one hand crafted bowl in front of himself and one in front of Jimin, but the other didn’t start eating. 

“It might be a welcome break.” He offered in retaliation.

“We don’t need it.”

“I’m sick of you breaking your back to pay for everything. That’ll take years. This will only take six months!” 

“We don’t need help.” Yoongi argued back, his voice raising. 

“You never give yourself a break. Please, this might be some time to reflect and think back on your life, where you are, and who you are. Because I know...I’m pretty lost.” Jimin continued, his chest deflating. 

       Yoongi eyed him for a moment. As heartless as he seemed, he always had a soft spot for Jimin. He twirled a few strands of pasta around his fork and then lifted it to his mouth. 

“Fine, but, I’m only doing this for the money and if I sense anything off, we leave, okay?” 

“Yes, dad.” Jimin teased, but his spirits were instantly raised. Yoongi smiled a little to himself, watching the younger man chow down happily on his meal. 

“I just think…” Yoongi trailed off for a moment. Jimin paused, waiting for him to continue. The man put his fork down, wiping at his mouth. 

“I just think it’s a little sketchy that they’re paying people so much money for this experience. Don’t you think that’s odd?” Then he took up the fork and went back at the pasta once more. Jimin was quiet at that, lost in thought. But Jimin was always quiet. 

        Videtur Quod. Jimin read over the graffiti sprayed on the side of the building. The white concrete building of Perfectum was about seven stories tall and a clear cut rectangle. The only imperfection...was this splattering of graffiti. 

       Before Jimin could ask about it, Yoongi was brushing past him towards the building. The sky had been gray and overcast, but now there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was a blue that looked all too bright and clear to be real. 

     The green expanses of the lawn before it was fenced in with a perfectly straight white fence. The fence itself was without weather or wear. 

“This place gives me the creeps.” Yoongi muttered, but Jimin just stared in awe. 

     Was it possible such a perfect place existed? Where Yoongi found the crisp and neat finishes to be creepy, Jimin found himself more intrigued. He longed to be just as...perfect. 

“I think it’s beautiful.” He responded, but Yoongi had already gone ahead. The man followed after him. 

       The doors opened and slid seamlessly into the walls. The inside held a striking resemblance to the outside. The entrance was a square, the edges of the white surface fitting together neatly. Fluorescent lights flickered ever so slightly, an annoying buzz filling the room. 

“Welcome! How may I help you?” The front desk attendant asked.

         She had a rather plain and nondescript face. It was evenly proportioned, no one thing sticking out more than the other. 

“We’re here to register for your experience thing-y.” Yoongi leaned haphazardly against the white marble. Jimin trailed behind him, clasping his hands behind his back. 

       Jimin tapped his foot while admiring the scenery. White walls made of a shiny surface enclosed the room. There wasn’t a crack to be found. What was perfection? His eyes traced the flawless walls. This was perfection. Everything was in its rightful place, everything was perfectly spaced.

        The plain decor was a welcome break from the chaos of the exhausting reality of life. The messy art and uneven lines made him dizzy, but no, not here. Here, he found peace. His eyes could rest, everything was as it should be. 

        His morbid fascination with achieving perfection had been a flaw he’d known of for years now, but this place really brought it out of him.

“Jimin?” Yoongi’s gruff voice called out to him, shaking him from his thoughts. The man was done going over the money that would be paid to him. 

        Jimin blinked a few times and then went over to the desk. Two papers were placed down, evenly spaced. He took up the pen, one which fit so neatly to his hand, and glanced over the form. 

       He may be considered a pushover in their circle of friends, but he wasn’t stupid. His ears pricked to listen to Yoongi’s muttering. The older man hunched over his paper, scratching his head and looking rather displeased. 

“Is something wrong?” The woman asked. 

“Yes.” Yoongi answered immediately. The woman didn’t seem fazed. “It says here that once you sign this form, you’re dedicating yourself to six months of this.”

“Indeed it is, sir.” She dipped her head. 

“Well, I just think...what if I want to leave?” 

“You would be forfeiting all potential benefits and any money. I wouldn’t worry too much,” She smiled a bit too widely. “People are often pleased with our process and don’t feel the need to leave.”

“And for the few who do?” Jimin questioned, voice soft. 

         The woman turned to face him. If you thought of a stock photo image of a woman at a front desk, this woman was her. The attendant simply blinked a few times to his question. She behaved just a bit...stilted. It was like she was trying to be natural. 

“You don’t have to worry about them.” She answered cryptically. 

“Jimin, a word?” Yoongi eyed him. Then he grabbed his elbow and hauled him outside. “This place is crazy. There’s something wrong, all my red flags are going off and I think we need to leave now.” He hissed. 

       The younger man’s eyes shifted from his concerned friend to the smooth lines of the fence and the blank canvas of the building. He too wished to be a blank canvas, to be able to start anew. 

“Something wrong? Yoongi, you’re just brushing off your health again. Stop trying to talk me out of this break.” He huffed, crossing his arms. 

“I’ll take a break, I swear, please, this place is sketchy and I think we’re about to get murdered.” Yoongi pleaded. 

      Jimin had never seen him like this. Yoongi had always been about tough love; suck it up or deal with the issue. Running away wasn’t like him. Yoongi’s arm shot out as Jimin turned to head back inside, thoroughly entranced. 

“You promised.” Yoongi whispered. 

“I agreed and agreements are broken all the time.” Jimin retorted. 

       He furrowed his eyebrows and marched back inside. The woman was still standing there, stalk still, at the front desk. 

       The man stormed towards the desk and grabbed the pen, signing his name on the dotted line. Silence was simply not an option. He could have...all of this. This world made sense to him, however unrealistic Yoongi may see it. And Yoongi be damned.

      Yoongi raced after him and watched as his pen skated across the paper. His eyes darkened. He wasn’t about to let Jimin walk into this mess alone. He had an obligation as a friend to make sure he would be safe. The blonde haired man heaved a sigh and walked over, writing down his signature. 

“That money better be in my account after this.” He grumbled. The woman smiled and nodded. 

“Follow me, please.” A man with blue hair and, once again, a nondescript face, led them through the doors. 

       Jimin began to question if this was the right move. Perhaps he moved too quickly, made a rash decision out of anger. The hallways were wide and identical on either side to his left and right. White metal doors lined the walls and the floors held not even a scratch. 

      There were windows on the ends of each corridor, but they were frosted over, only allowing the light to come through. This place felt otherworldly, beautiful, intriguing in the best way. 

       Meanwhile, Yoongi furrowed his eyebrows and glanced in either direction. His face gave away no emotion, but his hand reached for the other’s. Jimin welcomed his touch, interlacing their fingers. The thudding of his heart became awfully loud. 

“Right this way.” The man strode ahead and to the right. 

      The younger of the two followed along quickly and Yoongi had no choice but to stumble after him. Their hands were locked together tightly. 

“You’ll be on the first floor for now. There should be a welcome gift and other useful resources that you’ll find over on the nightstand! Orientation is tomorrow for you and the other newcomers!” The man chirped, showing them to two rooms next to each other. 

“Thank you, sir.” Jimin shot him a kind smile, one to rival the other’s forced curl. 

“It’s not a problem at all, just let me know if you need anything.” 

       He nodded and slowly opened the door to his room. The door was surprisingly light. He unwove his hand from Yoongi’s, his palms had begun to sweat uncomfortably. Yoongi was like a shadow, following him silently as he explored the room. There wasn’t much to explore. The room was a square, gorgeously under decorated. 

     While Jimin went to check how comfortable the bed was, Yoongi twisted around to talk to the man. 

“Hey, where can we find you…” He trailed off, twisting to the other side, but the hallway was empty. It felt so quiet. The place was so...still. 

“Jimin, doesn’t it bother you that there isn’t another soul in sight? Doesn’t it feel too empty?” Yoongi asked, but his friend didn’t answer, enraptured by the window at the far wall. “I mean, they kept talking about other applicants. Why weren’t there other cars, then?” 

“I don’t know, Yoongi. Let’s just try it out, okay?” Jimin sighed, turning to face his friend. He walked towards his friend until he was directly in front of him. His eyes peered into his. 

“Give it a chance.” He whispered, squeezing the blonde’s arm. Yoongi’s breath hitched slightly. 

“Okay, okay.” He said in response, exasperatedly throwing up his hands. 

      The older man walked out of the room to explore his own, but it was the same set up. Honestly, what did he expect? 

     Jimin wandered around his room, the little square feeling more freeing than anything he’d known. The lawns outside were sprawling and green. They were so green it almost looked fake. 

      The vibrant hue painted the white room in a soft green color as the sun gleamed off it. He leaned against the window sill, tapping his fingers on the cool metal. 

    The bed was a single bed pushed against the far left corner. There was a side table which held a single glass of water and a desk pushed to the center of the right wall. The only splash of color was in the painting hanging right above the desk. 

     The frame was a painted white wood and inside was an image of a blue forest. A white mist was cresting the trees and the blue went from a murky navy at the bottom to a baby blue at the top. 

       He peered at the window, searching for anything off. Yeah, of course, he had his reservations as well, and so far it seemed too good to be true. Maybe this impulsive decision was right for once? Yoongi’s words from earlier floated back to him.

      This place gives me the creeps. And it should honestly give any sane person the creeps, but Jimin was enchanted. Again, his eyes searched for the imperfections, but there were none to be found.

        But then his eyes trailed lower and he crouched down, coming eye level with the window sill. At the very bottom of the glass were three white lines, much like scratches. The white lines extended past the window’s bottom and tore at the paint on the metal, dragging towards the floor. Now, as...intrigued by this place as he was, even he knew that scratch marks weren’t exactly the best signs. 

      He went to his knees, getting closer to the ground to try and follow the path. Across the smooth ground, the lines led him to his bed. He went to his stomach, ready to lift the sheets which draped over the underside, when there was a knock on the door. 

      Startled, the man stood up and dusted off his frontside. Then he went to open the door, pushing the mystery of the scratches into the back of his mind. In the doorway, stood Taehyung. 

“Hello! I hope you’re settling in well. I’ve come to show you the way to lunch.” He greeted him. 

“Sounds good.” Jimin smiled softly, following after the taller man.

        Yoongi joined them, trailing behind. The older man tugged on Jimin’s shirt, forcing him to slow down as they turned to the right and entered another hallway. There were other people slowly making their way to lunch as well. 

      They followed each other, single file, but they might as well have been replaced with plants because it was silent. Not a word was exchanged, just the shuffle of cloth and soft shoes on marble. 

“This place is weird.” Yoongi’s eyes flickered from side to side. “Seriously, everything in me is telling me to run, Jimin. I don’t understand why you’re not feeling it.” He whispered, but his voice felt like a shout in the quiet. 

“I don’t know… It’s alright, Yoongi.” He stopped, for a moment, faltering in step and making Yoongi stop. The crowd just parted around them, not even looking up in acknowledgement. “Look, if something seriously fucked up happens, I’ll be the first one to tell you to leave.” 

The other man still seemed unsure but nodded anyway. “Fine. I’ll only leave if you do.” 

       There was the sound of voices and both of them looked up, alarmed. Another boy, he didn’t look any older than Taehyung, was being escorted down the stairs by two guards. He grumbled curses at the two armed men.

     Why are there armed guards at a wellness facility? Jimin thought, watching as they passed by. The boy locked eyes with him and fell silent. He watched them until he was out of sight, his gaze staring intently at them. 

“Let’s just go to lunch.” Jimin said softly, to which Yoongi nodded and led the way this time. 

      The cafeteria was well spaced, the roof an array of skylights. Each tray was personalized with the correct portions. The boy from earlier sat at a one person table, his face darkened. Everyone else had lofty smiles on their faces, but this boy had the deepest frown Jimin had ever seen. 

        Yoongi slid across from him at a three seater table. Taehyung sat to his right. The meal looked good. A veggie sandwich and a cup of roasted potatoes sat under a glass cover. Jimin glanced around. Everyone was in unison as they ate. At first glance, it looked normal, but when he looked closer, everyone ate in intervals. 

       One person would lift a sandwich to their mouth and then a half beat later, another would. It was an odd rhythm. Taehyung followed their pattern, for once his stilted nature didn’t seem out of place. 

      The older man narrowed his eyes, watching Taehyung eat without thought. 

“So...Taehyung,” He started, picking up his sandwich. No one paid them any mind. 

“Yeah?” The other man didn’t stop his eating. 

“How did you find this place?” 

       He stopped, sitting still. Something flashed in his eyes. Taehyung seemed torn. Jimin noticed the guards standing straighter, glancing over at their table. Taehyung remained still and Jimin swore he could see the gears turning in his brain. 

“The same as you, but I came with a few others.” He answered vaguely.

        A brokenness flashed across the man’s gaze, then he glanced to see the guards watching them carefully. He composed himself, rolling his shoulders back. Then, he plastered a wide smile on his face. 

“Listen, just don’t...get on their bad side. Just do what they say and you’ll be okay.” He said, voice barely above a whisper. 

“What do you mean by that?” Yoongi prodded. 

“Well…” The stomp of boots startled Jimin. The man turned to see two guards, gripping guns slung over their shoulders, standing behind Taehyung. 

“Ah, It seems I’ve made you uncomfortable. I must apologize. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Taehyung bowed his head, standing, and following the guards out without a further word. 

“What just happened?” Yoongi tilted his head.

       Now he turned around to the left and right, confused and unnerved. Jimin turned back to his food, naturally falling back into the rhythm. 

“He was disturbing the peace, it makes sense that they’d want to take care of that.” He shrugged in response. Yoongi stared back incredulously. 

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Jimin, but snap out of it. You’re freaking me out.” Yoongi said. “Anyway,” He eyed Jimin’s almost finished sandwich. He shifted uncomfortably, watching his friend eat in time with the others as if it were second nature. 

“Did you check out the orientation pamphlet yet?” 

“No.” Jimin said. “I didn’t have a lot of time.”

“We were in our rooms for an hour at most, what was so interesting?” 

        The world spun. An hour? How much time had passed? Jimin dropped the sandwich, reality punching into his daydream. This was it, right? All he had ever wanted; a perfect, care free, calming existence, and yet how was he still losing time? 

“I don’t know.” He answered lamely, at a loss for words. 

“Anyway, I brought the pamphlet thing. It has the schedule for tomorrow and the mission statement.” Yoongi pulled out the crisply folded card and passed it across the table to him. 

     Jimin’s gaze moved around the room. Everyone was wearing white and Yoongi and he stuck out like a sore thumb.

“Where are the other newcomers?” Jimin asked idly, flipping through the three pages. 

    Patients. He counted that they used newcomers and patients interchangeably about 15 times throughout the pamphlet. 

“Who knows.” Yoongi shrugged. “This place is creepy enough. If I didn’t lo-like you so much, I would have left.” 

“Thanks for your vote of confidence.” 

“I’m telling the truth.” Yoongi slowly picked up his food, making sure to eat out of the practiced rhythm. 

       Jimin turned to the page regarding the orientation. The schedule was laid out plainly. There would be a welcome speech in the morning, a short health check, and a few videos to introduce them to their new life for the next six months.

        Then there was lunch and freetime to explore until dinner. Yoongi groaned that ‘lights out’ was at 10 P.M. Jimin argued that the other needed more sleep anyway. 

“There are some general guidelines here.” Yoongi leaned over on his elbows and pointed at the bottom text. 

“Follow all instructions without hesitation; it is the only way to perfect your imperfections.” Jimin read. “Under no circumstances may you go to floor 7.” 

“What’s up with floor 7?” Yoongi leaned back, looking skeptical. 

“Who knows. I guess we should just follow what they say.” The scratches on the window floated back to him. As he was about to bring them up, Yoongi chimed back in. 

“You know, it’s easier than I thought it would be. We just have to do what they say and my tuition is paid.” He chuckled, resting his hands on his head. 

“I think they’ll have to fix that ego of yours, Yoongi.” Jimin tsked, pushing the scratches back for another time. 

      The boy with the intense gaze was escorted out, pushed upwards by the guards. A new person waited to take his place. The two figures exchanged a nod before they changed places.

      The new man looked to be around Yoongi’s age with a sloped nose and high cheekbones. His lips were pressed into a thin line, his cupid’s bow pulled downwards ever so slightly. 

     Jimin’s eyes track the younger boy as he resists slightly, dragging his feet. Once again, no one even pays them a glance. A few people in white scratch at their necks and arms. He made eye contact with the boy. The boy, in turn, scoffed and looked away. Yoongi was watching the new man. 

      With a sigh, the older man turned back around to face Jimin. He picked up his sandwich and bit into it. 

“This place is way too weird.” He mumbled under his breath. 

 “It’s too early to be awake.” 

“Shush.” 

“I’m just saying, it would be easier to understand what is happening if I could keep my eyes open.”

“Pay attention to the speaker, Yoongi.” Jimin shot the man a glare. 

     The blonde simply turned back towards the woman speaking on stage. Her movements looked rehearsed, perfectly time with every flick of the slideshow behind her. 

“Here at Perfectum, we’ll be working on your lifestyles and being as a person. We do this with, clearly stated in our slogan, perfecting your imperfections; De imperfectum fit perfectum. Which means, the imperfect becomes perfect.” The woman smiled. 

      She was characterized only from her red lipstick that stuck out in the sea of white. It was an orientation, but the newcomers were only Jimin and Yoongi. 

“After this, we’ll take you to have an evaluation to see how we can best help you. Then, you will watch some videos regarding our philosophy and the facility. Any questions?” 

“Yes, when can we leave?” Yoongi raised his hand. Jimin slapped his arm, trying to get him to stop, but he didn’t put it down. 

“You leave whenever you want...but I suggest giving the process a try.” She said carefully, a rehearsed response. 

“She sounds exactly like Taehyung.” Yoongi whispered as she continued on the presentation. “Will we become like that?” 

“I hope so.” Jimin murmured, watching her with fascination.

      Her proportions were just right, her skin clear and almost doll like. Sure, her face wasn’t exactly special in any way, but everything was evenly spaced out and well sized. He wasn’t sure if it was natural or if she’d gone under the knife, but everyone in this facility had a perfect face. 

      Could he become like that? Sometimes, the yearning to be what he could not was suffocating, now it was within arms reach. He needed to grasp it while he could. Some could call this an obsession, he called it passion. 

“Please exit to your right.” 

       Everyone stood at the same time and turned, marching off to the right. Yoongi was forced to follow along, tripping a little on the shoes of the person in front of him. The person didn’t even turn around to face him. Jimin remained in time with everyone else. If it weren’t for his clothes, he would blend right in. 

         The woman looked like a nurse, so Jimin decided to call her so. She had on a pressed white uniform and a neatly folded cap on her head. Her back was faced away from him as he shifted uncomfortably in the chair. 

       It was the first time Yoongi and he had really been apart since they’d come to this place and he was getting antsy. They had explained they were just going to take some diagnostics and learn how to best treat them. 

        While Yoongi had scoffed at the idea, Jimin had been eager to get on with the process. Now, however, he was having his doubts. He craned his neck around to see the woman knock the air out of a syringe. Inside the syringe was a green liquid. He eyed it warily. 

“What is that?” He asked. The woman didn’t respond. 

        She bent over him, pulling a cart behind her. The plastic wheels rattled against the linoleum floor. She picked up a swab and began to wipe down his forearm. The woman had a warm smile on her face, but she looked a little vacant. 

“What is that?” He asked again. This time, she paused and slowly looked up at him. 

      For the first time, he felt a shudder roll down his spine. Her eyes were hollow and her pupils were the same color as her irises. His survival instincts kicked in, as they should have in the beginning. Not human. Not right. The little warning bells flashed in his brain. 

“It will help you see clearly while we diagnose you.” She said and then looked back down. 

        Usually, in a place like this, there would be a buzz, the hum of air conditioning or otherwise. Instead, it was completely silent. His ears began to ring. The needle sunk into his flesh. He sucked in a breath, trying not to tense up. As the liquid entered his veins, he felt a tingling sensation. 

“Hey, is it supposed to feel like this?” He wondered. Once again, no response. 

          Then his world exploded. 

       Colors he’d never seen before painted the room a bioluminescent glow. He felt his eyes widen and his body spasmed as the liquid coursed through his veins. The woman began to ask him questions and he answered in response, but he didn’t know what he was responding with. 

       His hearing had become muffled and the world spun. His lips moved, forming words that didn’t feel like him. It was like he was trapped in a car that was driving itself off a bridge. 

       The car did a nose dive. He felt his stomach flip like he was sinking and falling. The woman just continued writing down his answers and asking him more questions. Her mouth moved and her head bobbed up and down to his words, but there was no sound.

       He began to find it increasingly hard to breathe, his chest constricting. She didn’t seem bothered as he began to hyperventilate. What was he saying? Was he incriminating himself? It wasn’t like he had anything incriminating to hide, but still, the possibility was very much there. 

       After what felt like ages, the woman stood from her place and flicked at another needle. A few minutes felt like hours as she swabbed down his arm again. There was something freeing in losing complete control. 

       Something terrifying and cold, yet simultaneously the most exciting thing he had done. He barely registered the needle finding his vein once more. He only knew that he was back into control, his world zooming back into focus. 

“Thank you, we’ll get your results back to you after lunch.” The woman said, not a hint of emotion on her face. 

       She then turned on her heel, in a sharp and robotic fashion, and exited the room. He glanced around, blinking a few times to clear some fog in his mind. The door slammed shut behind her, causing the man to jump at the loud noise. 

        He slowly got up and tried to leave. The door was locked. He banged on the door a couple times. 

“Hey! I’m in here!” He called to no avail. 

         Then he turned around wildly to look for another way out. It was like slowly his perfect reality was falling apart. This place was perfect, so there must be some other reason he’s not let out, right? They all seemed like...reasonable people. He got the sense that things were not without a reason here. His eyes honed in on an object.

        On the metal cart was now a glass of orange juice. Jimin looked upwards, taking note of the camera blinking steadily. He took a breath and wrapped his hand around the cool glass. A few sips later, the door allowed him to exit. He took a deep breath, stepping out and looking from side to side. No one. Just a long, empty, white hall. 

       The door to his left opened and Yoongi’s familiar blonde hair popped out. He too looked from side to side. Then they met eyes. They both jumped a bit in surprise. 

“Oh thank god, Jimin. I was worried. Did they do what they did to me to you?” He spoke hurriedly, fully emerging and taking a hold on his shoulders. 

    Jimin was shook a couple times as he grilled him. He could only manage to nod aimlessly at the blonde. 

“Yeah, it was weird, huh?” He said in a daze. 

“Weird? A bit more than that, Jimin. I think it’s time to leave.” 

“I might have to agree with you.” He admitted, the darkness of doubt creeping at his mind. “But we don’t know what they did to us, what if there’s side effects and then we can’t get help.” 

Yoongi’s eyes darkened and he stepped away. “You’re just trying to find excuses to stay here. I know you too well, Jiminie.”

“Don’t you want to stay as well? I mean, what about the money?” 

      Yoongi bit his lip, crossing his arms and tapping his foot furiously. 

“I don’t know, Jimin.” He deflated, tilting his head back and letting out a deep sigh. “I don’t know.” 

 “I was right.” Jimin pointed to the card in Yoongi’s hand, a small smile on his face. 

“Yeah, big deal.” The man rolled his eyes. “Having an ego isn’t something awful.”

“You make it awful, Yoongs.” He replied with a chuckle. 

       Jimin chomped down on a fork full of salad. He was in time to the beat, as per the usual. He blinked a little, studying his food after tasting a bitter aftertaste. There was a fine sprinkle of white powder over the top. 

       He shrugged it off, deciding it must either be seasoning or some sort of parmesan cheese. He glanced up to see Yoongi’s sour expression. 

“Fine. Fine.” He relented. “What programs are you in?” 

“Programs?”

“In the file they gave you…” Jimin trailed off, opening his file to show Yoongi. 

     Inside his file were two classes; public speaking and How To Reach Fulfillment, a month long course. The other man flipped open his file. 

“Mine just says ‘lifestyle readjustments will take place’ and that How To Reach Fulfillment class.” He read. 

“I wonder what that means?” Jimin thought it over. Then he shrugged. “Who knows, but it’s easy money, Yoongi, you just gotta be humble.” 

“I’m already humble.”

“That’s something a not humble person would say.” 

“Shut up.”

          The moonlight streamed through the window as he lay still on the bed. Jimin was lost in thought. Many things were passing by in his mind, such as Who cleans this place? And Is perfection possible? Is their version of perfection, something I want? 

         But the most prevalent, that stood head and shoulders above the other thoughts, was Why does he make you feel this way. It wasn’t really about that either, it was more What is he making you feel? 

        His heart thudded in his chest. Was it okay to feel this way...about another man? He shook off the thought, something he did quite often. Running away from problems and ignoring them seemed to be a big thing for him. 

       As if on cue, there was a knock at the door. He already knew who it was. 

“Come in.” He looked at the clock. It was past curfew, but that hadn’t stopped Yoongi for the past two weeks. 

       The blonde trudged inside, his oversized, white, uniform brushing against the ground. He pushed back his bangs and took a seat on the floor. The door clicked softly shut behind him. There were no words for a moment. The soft breaths of the two men blended together as they sat in silence. 

      Yoongi moved to lie down on the floor. He had mellowed out a bit the past few days. His nature had become less domineering and more quiet, almost as if mimicking Jimin. In turn, Jimin had noticed his impulses and brashness showing themselves more. 

“What are you thinking about?” Yoongi asked softly. 

“You.” Then he backpedaled. “And just the changes.” 

“I see.” 

      Jimin’s heart was thumping out of his chest, the stillness of the building amplifying the sound. He rolled over to his side to face the pale man. Yoongi’s skin glowed under the harsh light of the moon. The delicate cupid’s bow of his lips were pulled down slightly. 

“I was actually thinking about the two boys we saw a few weeks ago, on our first day.” Jimin continued. “They just looked so unhappy.” 

“Can you say that you’re happy right now?” Yoongi hummed. 

“Well...no, but I’m not unhappy, there’s a difference.” He sighed. He moved to rest his hands on his chest. 

“Maybe they want to escape just as much as we do.” 

“Maybe I don’t want to escape, Yoongs.” 

     The older man shifted to sit up right. He leaned against the mattress, the fabric dipping down. Jimin craned his neck to meet eye to eye with the other. 

“What do you mean?” Yoongi questioned, his tone firm. 

“I mean, I want to be perfect, Yoongi. Like you, you’re perfect to me.” Jimin propped himself up on his elbows. “Your face is so well proportioned, you’re talented, you know how to stand up for yourself.” He moved to sit up straight and he took Yoongi’s hand in his. 

        He traced light circles around his bony fingers and into the palms of his silky skin. He gently leaned down and on a whim, pressed a light kiss to his palm. It wasn’t unlike anything they’d ever done before.

    ��    Yoongi had always been a touchier person than most would think and Jimin was an open cuddler. It was only natural that they’d share so-called ‘intimate moments’ together. But this time, it felt different. 

      When Jimin looked up and saw Yoongi’s face, he noticed how wide his eyes were. The man slowly withdrew his hand, pulling it close to his chest, like a secret. 

“Don’t you think that to others, you’re perfect in their eyes as well?” Yoongi whispered, his voice small and croaky. “You’re perfect to me, already. You don’t need to prove anything.” 

“Stop it.” Jimin’s voice quivered. He squeezed his eyes shut.

 “Stop it stop it.” He covered his eyes with his hands. “It’s like you’re trying to make me feel this way and you need to stop.” 

“What do I need to stop?” Yoongi gently pried his fingers away from his face. 

        The man drew in a shaky breath, coming face to face with Yoongi. They were mere inches apart. 

“You come to my room past curfew, you tell me things that-that you shouldn’t and then you leave like nothing happened. You make me feel things I shouldn’t.” He said, scratching at his arms as if in an attempt to take away his emotions. 

“I feel the same way.” Yoongi said, sitting back with a deflated slump. “And I wish I didn’t, but that got me thinking...if we both feel this way, then Jiminie,” He took his hands in his. “How wrong can it be?” 

“It doesn’t matter what I feel, Yoongi. It’s that I know I don’t deserve someone like you.” 

      Yoongi’s face contorted into a pained expression. His eyebrows furrowed and his lips pulled downwards. And he caused it. Jimin shivered. Yoongi ran his hands through Jimin’s hair. 

“Ah, you’re right, you don’t deserve someone like me.” Then he leaned in close and Jimin could feel his lips brush against his ear.

      His warm breath fanned across Jimin’s cheek and cascaded down his neck. Yoongi’s delicate fingers grasped his cheek with the lightest of touches. 

       He then whispered, in the softest of tones, like a warm embrace on a cold night, “You deserve the world, Jimin.”

       The dark haired man drummed his fingers on the sides of his sink. He leaned on the concrete while he stared with a morbid fascination at his neck. Little white patches of dry skin had begun to show themselves. He ran his fingertips lightly over the marks. This caused waves of itchiness to roll down his body. He resisted the urge to scratch. 

       It made no sense. The climate was far from dry and he took good care of his skin. Jimin leaned in, trying to get a better look. After searching the drawer for his moisturizer, he pulled out the small bottle and slathered it over his neck. 

      Then he found his foundation and smeared it over the patches. The lingering warmth of Yoongi’s hands on his and the gentle brush of his fingertips made him smile a little. 

      He hated the way he felt. Yoongi made him happy, so why was he not allowed to feel that? It was an unspoken barrier. It wasn’t even like he would be in danger of being kicked out or rejected if he came out about his feelings, but he didn’t really want to find out. 

      Besides, it was easier this way; ignore the problem and it won’t exist, right? Sadly, that wasn’t how it worked, and Yoongi most certainly existed. 

       Now his stomach twisted as he thought of the other man. His mind wasn’t in the right place to decide if the twist was good or not. 

      Breakfast was awkward at best, but Yoongi played it cool. In fact, he hid his emotions so well that Jimin wondered if last night was a dream. Drastic lifestyle changes had taken place for Yoongi. 

       The facility had decided the best way to mellow him out and bring down his ego, was to simply...ignore him. Well, they didn’t completely ignore the blonde, but they didn’t attempt to really listen to him. 

     Jimin didn’t understand why his heart thumped in anger at this. This is how they become perfect, but Yoongi was already as perfect as ever, to Jimin. Jimin pushed around his food halfheartedly. 

“Have you noticed any dry patches on your skin, Yoongs?” Jimin asked idly. 

“No, not really. I mean, I forgot lotion so if I do have any, it’s probably because of that.” He responded lamely. 

“Oh okay.” Jimin spooned himself a mouthful of soup. “I have some lotion if you want it.” 

“Thanks.” 

        There was a crash and both of them looked over to the one seater table in the corner. A different man sat there this time. He had a disheveled appearance and broad shoulders. He looked exhausted. His soup bowl had fallen to the ground. 

       The red substance had splattered across the white floor. That in itself seemed to draw more attention than the mess of a man. A few people exchanged worried glances while the other simply looked from the soup to the man and returned to eating in silence. 

      Yoongi’s eyes remained on the man and Jimin secretly wished he was looking at him. The broad shouldered man made eye contact with Jimin. In his eyes, he saw...pain. 

 “And how long has this been happening?” The doctor sat cross legged on a rolling chair. He had a very average face. His face had, once again, perfect proportions. 

      Jimin swung his legs on the table awkwardly. He bit at his lip, looking around the room and catching sight of a security camera in the corner. He wondered why they needed so many of those. 

“I only really noticed this morning, but I also noticed the itching a few days ago.” He explained. 

“Ah, I see.” The man scribbled a few notes. 

       Then he smiled warmly. He was the most human person Jimin had seen in a while and for some reason...it disgusted him. The unpredictable nature of being fully human had his skin crawling. At least with these...half people, he didn’t have to guess what came next. Now, he tensed as the doctor cleared his throat. 

“It’s completely normal to have dry skin at this stage, so I’m going to prescribe some high strength moisturizing lotion to make the transition easier.” The man spoke factually. 

       Jimin’s eyebrows shot up. Adrenaline coursed through his veins like a primal fight or flight instinct. 

“Woah, slow down, big guy.” He said in an uncharacteristically commanding voice.

      Even inside, he was slapping himself, wondering where this self confidence came from. Usually he would just nod and take the prescription. 

“One, what do you mean by ‘transition’ and two, what does ‘this stage’ mean?” 

“One, I can’t answer and two, I can’t answer. They should have told you.” The man furrowed his eyebrows. Jimin found himself scoffing and rolling his eyes. 

“Just give me the damn lotion. I can’t believe I went to this useless doctor’s appointment for fucking, dry skin.” He continued angrily, ripping the paper from the man’s hands and storming out. He could feel the weight of two stares at his back; the doctor and the security camera. 

        It felt like recently, everything set him off. The smallest of things had his blood boiling and he had these impulses that made him go into fits of rage. No one had mentioned it to him, in fact, all the workers had seemed very pleased every time he acted out. 

        Another issue was his paranoia. He had become even more aware of everyone, but what was worse, was that whatever was happening to him, made him disregard them completely. 

       He stormed down the hallways, having long since memorized the maze of identical corridors; it was something that Yoongi still struggled with, even after a month of being in this place. 

        Yoongi still mentioned escaping every now and then, but Jimin was adamant on staying and the facility had slowly broken down Yoongi’s will. He supposed it was a side effect of his ‘complete lifestyle change’. 

       The man ignored Yoongi, who poked his head out of his room with a questioning gaze, and moved straight into his room, slamming shut the door. He angrily tore through his room, he wasn’t even sure what he was angry about anymore, he just knew he was seeing red. 

      The dark haired male threw open his drawer in the bathroom and slathered lotion over his neck, ignoring the itching that plagued him upon contact. 

      Then, he raced to his window, eyes wildly searching for the white scratch lines as he crouched. He was like a mad man, looking for the scratches.

      They felt like a lifeline in that moment, something to remind him of just how fucked this place had become, and now they were trapped in its web. He thought back to his feelings at first, how enraptured he’d been. He still was very much invested in fixing himself, but Yoongi’s words stuck with him. 

      He pressed his cheek to the ground, watching the lines slide to the floor and veer to the right. They led him under the bed. He knocked on the concrete floor, it felt solid. Jimin lifted his covers and felt around under the metal frame. 

       His sensitive fingers found a seam in the ground. He gently pried away at it and a flat, round, piece of floor came up. The man inspected the perfectly blended piece of concrete. Then he bent to look underneath. There was a shallow hole and he didn’t hesitate to put his hand down. His heart was no longer pulsing in rage and his efforts were now dedicated to finding out the mystery of the scratches. 

       His hand grasped something plastic and bendy. He carefully pulled out the object. He tilted his head, holding it up to the light with confusion. The object was a little plastic cup with three pills inside. The label read Kim Namjoon. His curiosity piqued, he pushed his bed to the side and peered over the hole. 

       The cup fell from his hands in shock, the pills spilling over. His breath hitched. Inside the hole were an assortment of differently shaped and colored pills, all in plastic cups and filling the hole to the top. 

     He shakily pulled out a few cups. One after another, each cup read Kim Namjoon. Who was he? And why did he need to hide his medication? He subconsciously reached for his neck and scratched a few times to relieve the pain he didn’t know he had been feeling. 

      He shoved the pills back into the hole, covered it once more, and pushed his bed back into place. It wasn’t the first time, but he wanted it to be the last time pure terror shot through him in this place. 

     He collapsed against the wall of his square cage. His head thudded against the concrete. His anger had dissipated and now he was left with a hollowness inside. Was this really perfection? Was this really...being young forever?

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10 Super Useful Tips To Start Freelancing As A Beginner | Filipino Virtual Assistance

Thinking about transitioning freelancing but don’t know where to start? You probably think that freelancing is not for you since you have a misconception that you need to own a degree and competitive skills to be a freelancer. This is just a misunderstanding. What you don’t know is that you can start freelancing as a beginner.

Facts about Freelancing

The freelancing industry is considered one of the top fastest-growing industries. Assessing the viability that brands and businesses saw, the “gig” industry will continue to soar in the coming years.

Here are eight freelancing statistics that will blow your mind:

Freelancing is poised to become the U.S. majority workforce by 2027

Google’s workforce has more freelancers than permanent employees

Countries with lower domestic work opportunities are seeing a surge in freelance professionals.

Freelancers are proving to be game-changers for SMBs

Almost half of all businesses employ freelancers.

Freelancing opportunities are rising, with online freelancing platforms being the catalysts.

Freelancers do work to more than double over the next ten years

12 out of the top 20 in-demand skills for freelancers are related to development.

May you be a writer, social media manager, web developer, graphic artist, or admin assistant, freelancing can be for you. You can start freelancing as a beginner then grow from there. And if you are willing to get out of your comfort zone, you will thrive in this career.

Here are answers to some of the FAQs about freelancing. Check here: https://www.fvaconsultancy.com/how-to-start-freelancing/ for you to be guided.

What is a freelancer?

A freelancer is someone who transitions to work from home, offering services to clients globally. A freelancer can be anyone like a housewife, a mother, a high school graduate, or anybody who wants to earn a side hustle. Or someone who wants to focus on succeeding in freelancing. You can start freelancing as a beginner, cultivate your skills and mindset, and grow your career as time goes by.

As a freelancer, you will experience building your own business while having the freedom to choose your projects and how many hours you will be working with them.

How to Start Freelancing as a Beginner?

Here are ten steps to start your freelancing career as a beginner. This is an ultimate guide and tips for beginner freelancers to leverage in transitioning to this new career path.

Step 1: Get The Right Equipment

Smartphone apps are limited in features. It would be best to have a computer run the software required to do the work properly and deliver excellent results. Getting a laptop or even an old computer would do the trick. You will also need an internet connection. Depending on your tasks, you can use a prepaid internet or a wired or fiber plan. These two pieces of equipment are the two main ingredients to start a work-from-home career. And as you go along, earning more, you can invest invaluable things for your freelancing business.

Step 2: Find A Marketable Skill

Since you will be providing your skills as your services, this is an essential element to start freelancing. Whatever skills you have, the ultimate winning factor to be a competent freelancer is to equip oneself with a skill that has a high demand in the marketplace. Also, cultivating it more through enrolling in online courses, teaching others, or doing it most of the time will level up the one skill you have.

Step 3: Polish Up Your Skills

Once you find a marketable skill, learn the basics, grow your niche, and start getting paid by offering services through your skills.

There are various ways to master your ability. You can watch free tutorials on youtube or google. Yet,  taking online courses is the most effective way to learn and polish up a skill correctly. Developing a skill from scratch takes time. Thus, patience is highly needed to enhance your skillsets effectively. And since freelancing is a competitive industry, continuous learning is imperative to your competence as a freelancer.

Step 4: Build Your Reputation

Proving your skills and work will determine whether you’ll be a successful freelancer or not. This is the beauty of the “gig” industry. You don’t need to have a degree as long as you have what it takes to prove to your clients that you’re skilled at what you do. You will find clients who hire and appreciate you.

So if you are a high school graduate, don’t worry. Learn a single skill, master it and then market your services to clients around the globe. Above all, it is your competencies and the work attitude that will thrive your freelancing career. To build your reputation, emphasize providing value to your clients because, as a freelancer, you are a business partner, not an employee.

Step 5: Create A Portfolio

When marketing yourself as a freelancer, it is vital to show proof of your experiences or skills. You are going to collect the best of your samples and then collate them in a portfolio. So, your portfolio will legitimize your expertise.

A portfolio can be a website or inside a Google drive where you put together and showcase all your work. Or, it can be a simple PDF where you collect all of your samples.

To provide your portfolio conveniently to the client, give them the link for easy access on the client’s end.

Step 6: Try Freelancing Part-Time

Freelancing might be for everyone. Yet, there are instances where a certain individual has no willingness to work harder. It can be an overwhelming feeling to market yourself and deal with clients. If you’re unsure whether freelancing is the right career path for you, the best way to know is to do it part-time.

In doing part-time, you can still work with your existing day job. That’s why, when you feel ready to accept more projects, you can decide whether you should freelance full-time and leave your day job or remain to do it part-time.

Step 7: Find The Right Freelance Platform

If you’re starting with your freelance career, it can be challenging to find work. There are the best freelance websites for beginners to help get you started.

These websites are the perfect way to attract more clients to your services and gain referrals so you can grow your career even more.

Related blog: 33 Best Freelancing Websites that Every Freelancer Should Eye on This 2021

Step 8: Charge The Right Price

Knowing how to price your services is an excellent confirmation that you understand what you do. Others don’t know how to price their services the right way. So, clients never even consider hiring them. Learn to set up your price list by visiting popular freelance marketplaces and see what other freelancers in your niche or industry are charging.

As a newbie, it’s not fair to charge those same prices as experienced freelancers. Offer a price list that is just enough, not too cheap, and not so high.

Step 9: Send Your First Proposal

Now that you are ready to work as a freelancer, start sending applications to clients. It’s not like writing a regular email or writing a social media post. It is marketing your services by sending a cover letter, resume, and portfolio.

Check these blogs here for more tips and guides.

Steps To Writing An Effective Cover Letter and Appealing Resume

A Complete Guide to Help Freelancers Get Hired on Upwork

How to Work From Home as a Virtual Assistant in 2021

Landing Your First Client Even Without Training and Experience

FVA Inspiring Stories: Freelancing Tips To Change Your Life

Step 10: Deliver Beyond Expectations

Once you land a job, the next step is to ensure that you deliver the project just as the client has asked. However, this doesn’t mean that you will provide what is expected from you. One reason for this is that if you want to have premium clients, always provide value. Not only providing outputs for the sake of requirements. Nevertheless, delivering beyond what is expected from you.

Overdeliver the job by going above and beyond the client’s expectations without charging extra for it.

Find a way to do work that goes beyond expectations. And learn to stand out from the crowd. That’s the only way to build a lasting career as a freelancer.

What is stopping you from pursuing freelancing? The same with you, I was an aspiring freelancer who knows nothing about it. In my story, you’ll see how my husband and I struggle as we transition to freelancing.  How to start freelancing with no experience? First, create a freelancing goal, then start with step #1.

Now, are you ready to tackle the world of freelancing? With a lot of dedication and hard work, you’ll be able to create a profitable and prosperous career as a freelancer. That’s a guarantee.

If you want to learn more about freelancing and insights, please check out our courses here https://www.fvaconsultancy.com/. Our Freelancing (Virtual Assistant) Course is tailored to fit those newbies that aim to succeed in the freelancing industry. Or, let’s talk about it, email me at grace@filipinovirtualassistance.com.

[asphalt-cocktail]

Codebreaker- Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Girl in the Chair

Summary: Zero isn’t the absence of value, in fact, Zero is perhaps one of the most valuable people among the ghosts. Being coined their ‘guy in the chair’ meant that Zero was a ghost among ghosts and is only called from her spot in the shadows when she and Four are the only people who haven’t been caught on camera by a large criminal organization.  

A/N: What’s up cuties! AC here again, back at it with a brand new series! I’m not going to lie, not a lot happens in this chapter it is really just to establish sort of a background on the characters, get the plot rolling, and establish some tension between these two. I am trying to make this one a slow burn fic with a lot of sexual tension and pinning, maybe there will be smut, maybe there wont. It all depends what the people want! The taglist is open so please shoot me an ask if you would like to be added!

Pairing: Four x F!Reader

Word Count: 5.2k

Warnings: Violence, illegal activity, guns, kind of kidnapping, language, tension is building, very politically charged content, not proof read

Series Masterlist

Asks

Tag list is located at the bottom, please send an ASK if you would like to be tagged or if you would just like to chat about the fic/life in general and let me know if the tags do not work.

Beads of sweat trickled down the back of your neck while you sat, kneeling in front of the mess of wires and metal parts. It was so god damn hot in this stupid shed. They really couldn’t have housed you somewhere else?

Of course not, you were a grunt worker, the low man on the totem pole, a peon compared to everyone else in the organization. That was why you were stuffed in this hot dusty shed in the back of someone’s house. Mike probably didn’t even know you name, he only cared that you could make his products work.

You were a 23-year-old engineering PhD student studying materials. Your dream was to create more ecofriendly and cheap filters for water so that it could be easily accessible to those in impoverished areas of the world. Water is a basic necessity, not a right. So how the fuck did you wind up here, making bombs for what may or may not be an ecoterrorism group and hacking into large corporate databases on their behalf?

Well, you hang around the wrong crowd long enough, you’ll eventually find your way stuffed in some guy named Mike’s shed who believes Lions should be fed tofu.

You really didn’t mind it, aside from a few wacky ideologies Mike held, he and his troupe were relatively nice and stood for what you stood for: clean water, properly paid migrant workers, and sustainable living.

You wiped the sweat off your forehead with the back of your greasy and dirty hand as you tinkered away, piecing together a small pipe bomb. It was for your next target, a large family corporation that had a penchant for exploiting migrant workers by promising benefits and paths to citizenship in exchange for low, nearly inhuman pay. What they stood for make you feel sick, so you honestly didn’t feel bad knowing that this pipe bomb was going to be used to blow one of their corporate office entrances to bits in the middle of the night when no one was there.

It would serve as a warning.

After you finally finished connecting the last few bits together you carefully wiped it down and placed it inside the packaged box, then disposed of your gloves and changed your clothes, making sure to put your old ones in the burn pile. It seemed a bit excessive, but the last thing you wanted was to have anything linked back to you with bomb residue on it.

You sat in front of the computer, back slightly hunched over the keyboard while the lighting from the screen illuminated your face “Are you sure you don’t want the light on?” Mike said turning towards you

You let out a deep and irritated sigh, “What are you, a fucking idiot?” You a snapped as your eyes continued to stare at the security footage that rolled on the screen, “We’re in a van about to set off a bomb do you think turning on a light, so I don’t damage my eyesight is more important than getting caught?” Mike shrugged, you had a point.

You checked the clock 12:30am. It was time.

You grabbed the burner phone and flipped it open, dialing the number that would set off the timer. You gaze caught a small flicker of movement in the corner, a shadow that shouldn’t have been there. Your heart jumped when you saw a security guard walking to the front door, “Fuck,” You said, “Fuck, someone is in there, I have to disarm it!” You felt panic flooding through your veins and your heart rate began to increase.

“[Y/N], there isn’t enough time,” Mike snapped, his voice causing you to jump, “You won’t make it and you know it.” He pointed out, “It’s fine, what’s one less corporate pawn.”

Your breath hitched in your throat as you watched the seconds roll past on the security footage, knowing there were only minutes until it detonated, you could make it couldn’t you? You burst out the back of the van, gripping your laptop tightly to your chest and began to run as fast as you could. You tripped over your feet, stumbling in the grass and picked yourself right back up. You flipped open the burner, 1 minute 37 seconds. You could see the building coming into view and could feel your lungs burning, you honestly couldn’t remember the last time you had run that hard and that fast.

The closer you got to the building, the closer the bomb got to detonation. You clenched your jaw, ignoring the burning in your thighs and pressed on.

Your efforts were useless, you realized that when you woke up on the ground covered in rubble with your ears ringing. You coughed, your lungs felt chalky and your eyes burned from the layer of soot that had built up in them. When your vision finally cleared you could see grey and black dust settling and that the majority of the corporate office had been destroyed.

Fucking hell, your pipe bomb shouldn’t have been that strong. It should have just been enough to collapse the front entrance. You struggled to get up, the pain in your arms was excruciating and the dizziness in your head made it seem almost impossible to stand. You cried out in pain when you finally pushed yourself up, I need to get out of here, you thought. You still had that stupid burner phone on you.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” You turned to see an EMT coming towards you, his voice hammered against your ringing ears and his figure looked fuzzy, you really needed to get the fuck out of here.

“I’m fine, I don’t need help.” You barely recognized your voice from how hoarse it was.

“Ma’am, you’re bleeding, you need to sit down.” The EMT grabbed your shoulders and you shrugged them off, once again yelling in pain.

“Get off me.” You said stumbling as you thrashed against them.

It wasn’t until you felt the cold barrel of a gun nipping at your temple that you realized this wasn’t an ordinary EMT, “You’re going to come with me, got it? Or do you want the feds finding your ass.” His voice was harsh and sent a shiver down your spine.

You nodded your head, wincing at how tightly he was squeezing you before he threw you in the back of the ambulance. He drove for what seemed like ages only because you were fading in and out of consciousness. When he finally stopped, he woke you up, slapping at the sides of your face. You harshly turned your head way “What the fuck?” You croaked once more and tried to twist away only to find that you were hand cuffed to a gurney.

“How did you hack into the security system?” He was obviously done with formalities.

“You can’t prove anything.” You hissed.

“Where did you get the supplies, and how have you and your organization been able to go under the radar with these attacks for so long?”

“Bet you’re a fucking fed,” You spat, you couldn’t stand the cesspool that was more commonly known as the American government.

The guy smiled at you, flashing a perfectly aligned smile, “I’m not a cop. I just want to know how you’re so good at navigating the deep web and creating explosives.” He seemed genuinely interested, and it didn’t seem like you denying things was going to get yourself unhandcuffed anytime soon.

You let out a shaky sigh and shrugged, “I don’t know, I’m an engineering student I just wanted to buy Adderall to help me study for finals, so I bought it off the deep web, then Mike invited me to join his wanna be ELF group and I joined.” You answered honestly.

“Wanna be ELF group?” He his eyebrows arched with amusement, “You realize they have been using your explosives all over the country, did you really think that their attacks were only focused in this area?” You really hadn’t been paying attention to how many devices you would make or what Mike wanted you to order from the deep web, you would just do it with no questions asked, “There were six bombs planted in that building, you realize that don’t you?” You furrowed your brows with confusion, there was only supposed to be one at the entrance and what did he mean by all over the country?

You shrugged and let out a long sigh, you had really dug yourself into a deep hole “I don’t ask questions, I just make and order whatever he gives me on the list.”

“Why?” His question caught you off guard and he repeated himself, this time leaning in closer.

“Jesus, what are you going to do, kiss me?” You said turning your face away, “Give me some space, you smell like fucking garlic.” After he backed up you continued “I think that the American government is a cesspool on the face of society and they just stands by while people suffer. I’m sick of it.” you answered honestly.

“I’m Wade by the way.” He said finally introducing himself, “Don’t worry, I already know who you are.” He said brushing your response away, “Anyways, how would you like to join a group of people who are going over some real nasty people. I’m talking top of the line scum.” You arched your eyebrow with interest and urged him to continue, “This isn’t some small-time gig, I’m talking about taking down whole governments.”

“Do I get paid?” you quickly asked.

Wade couldn’t help but smirk, “No,” He laughed, “But don’t worry I’ll take care of your expenses.”

“What like some glorified sugar daddy?” You asked making a weird face at him.

Wade shrugged his shoulders “Something like that,” He sharply inhaled, remembering one important detail “Oh, right one more thing, if you’re going to join you have to go completely off the grid. You know like fake your death, no contact with your family, that sort of stuff.”

“No student loans?” Wade nodded his head, seeing interest sparkling in your eyes, “Fine with me, it looks like I died anyways with that fucking blast.”

After that meeting you were given the number zero.

Zero isn’t the absence of value, in fact you might have been one of the most valuable people on the team. The only problem was that the team didn’t know who you were. They didn’t know who ordered their supplies, or how One knew everything about everyone, or how their records were able to be so easily erased.

From what you saw they all seemed like nice enough people, but you preferred your ‘girl in the chair’ position and behind scenes work.

One even promised you that he would only call on you in a special occasion. Right now, seemed to be that special occasion considering he was ringing you up at 3 in the morning.

“Someone better be dying, One.” You said immediately upon answering your phone.

“No one is, not yet at least.” You could hear the stupid grin behind his voice, “I need you for a mission.”

You sat up in your bed, “Mission? No, I don’t do missions, I sit in the chair.” You said, panic arising in your voice.

One let out a sigh, “Well, you do now. Be at the base within the hour, we have a team meeting.”

So, you were thirty minutes late for good measure. There was no way you were going to be the first one to show up, it would have been hell having to sit there and explain the same story over and over again as new faces entered the room. So, you walked in the room, confidently late.

You might have been a little too confident because the sound of several guns being cocked and pointed in your direction as well as everyone being on guard caused you to freeze, “Easy, easy, guys. Christ you’re like a bunch of fucking animals.” One said quickly running in front of you with his arms up, “Put your guns down, and you” He said turning and pointing in your face, “You’re late. I told you an hour.”

You shrugged, “I didn’t want to be the first one in the room.” You said stuffing your hands in your sweatshirt pockets and walking around him, taking your seat on a stack of pallets.

One pinched his forehead and let out a deep sigh, “Well, now that everyone’s shown up you can go ahead and introduce yourself.” He said nudging your shoulder.

You gave an awkward wave “Hello, I’m Zero.” You introduced yourself and gave a short nod “Nice to meet you all.”

“Tell them what you do, it’s not fair knowing why everyone else was picked.” One sounded like a scolding mother

You sighed “What is this the first day of college?” you quickly retorted, causing a few of the team members to cover their mouths, hiding their laughter “I’m the codebreaker, the supply man, the explosives expert, the guy in the chair. Whatever you want to call me, just know I do the behind the scenes work.” You tried to not sound too prideful on your position.

“We have a supply man?” You recognized the thick British accent that came from Four.

“Where the hell do you think all your ammunition came from?” You asked him, “Did you all really think One did this all on his own?” their silence answered your question. You scoffed “Tch, One couldn’t navigate the deep web if he ever looked at it, probably would end up buying shit from some cop,” You spat on the ground when you mentioned law enforcement.

One rolled his eyes before continuing with the meeting, “So, as we know we’ll be needing to split up for the next few assignments which, is why I called in Zero to so kindly help us.” He paused for a moment to allow everyone to soak in the information, “Zero, you and Four are going to be sent to gather first hand intel on our target, Vincent Beck.” He cleared his throat “Two and Three were caught on camera sneaking around and Seven, Five, and I have our own assignment.”

You furrowed your brows “I couldn’t erase their footage?” You asked, somewhat shocked at what you were hearing.

One let out another, long sigh, “No, you tried to get into their data base, and they put that virus on your computer, remember?”

You remembered now, that stupid virus that caused endless popups to show up, once one was closed two more would show up, “Right,” You mumbled, chewing on your bottom lip.

One tossed you and Four your files, “Read up on those and come up with a plan, at noon the plane takes off, but I want to debrief at 11.”

And with that you found yourself in Four’s trailer, sitting on his lumpy couch “I’ve never done this before.” You admitted, “I only know how to gather intel through the computer.”

Four’s knee bounced, you didn’t know if it was because he was anxious or because of the constant need to keep moving, “I haven’t either,” He tried to sound reassuring, “But I think it’ll be fine, One usually knows what he’s talking about.”

You pursed your lips and gave Four a skeptical look, “Does he though?” You weren’t very convinced.

The blonde-haired man shrugged, “Yeah, he’s kind of a goon sometimes but he usually figures it out.” It sounded like Four wasn’t very convinced either.

“Well, do you have a plan for this?” You asked leaning back against the uncomfortable and cheap couch.

Four frowned “Got nothin’, you?” You could already tell this was going to be a disaster.

You paged through the file, “Vincent Beck,” You hummed, tapping your finger on your chin in thought, “Well we can’t do a guns blazing approach, we both are better suited for sneaking around, plus the fighting is going to come later.” You mused aloud.

“We just have to talk to him and build some trust, right?” He asked, building off your thoughts.

You nodded your head, still intently reading the file, “This guy is a real sicko,” You said frowning, “Human trafficking? Who the fuck even does this shit?” the details you read caused your stomach to churn, “We have to get as much dirt on this asshole as possible, really gain his trust.”

Four cleared his throat, shifting uncomfortably “What if… what if I posed as a potential client?” He swallowed thickly, you could tell that the details of Vincent Beck did not sit well with him either.

You stared at Four, a long hard gaze, “That could work, we can get a way in, gather information on his sales, inside people, so on and so forth.” You rubbed your face, exhausted from your early morning wakeup call, “What about me?” You asked.

Four gave you a cheeky grin, “You can be my assistant.”

You scoffed, dropping the file on the floor next to you “Your assistant? Absolutely not.” You said shaking your head, “I can be a business partner.” You answered, a small smile playing on your lips.

Four rolled his eyes, “You’re a computer nerd, you don’t know about business.” He retorted.

“Yeah, and you’re a thief, what do you know about running a business?”

Four clutched his chest feigning hurt feelings “I’m hurt, truly,” He responded, “Running around with a band of thieves has a lot of business tactics behind it, plus, I know how to talk with other criminals.”

You crossed your arms over your chest “Know how to talk to criminals,” You scoffed “I talk to criminals every day-”

“Yeah- through a computer” Four scoffed right back at you.

“Wow looks like you two are getting along well.” You turned to see that One had let himself into the trailer.

“We’re getting along just fine.” You snapped at One.

“That’s why the two of you are screaming at each other like that, right?” the sarcasm was dripping from his voice, “Anyways, what’s the plan?”

Four leaned forward, anxious to share the idea he came up with “Okay so hear me out, we just need to get close to this guy and gather intel, no actual fighting right? So,” He pauses for what you can only assume is for dramatic effect, “What if I pose as a client, and Zero is my assistant?”

You shook your head “No, I already said no to the assistant.” you quickly said.

One tapped his chin with his index finger, “What if you posed as his girlfriend?” he suddenly said, going along with the idea.

If you would have had a drink in your mouth, you would have spit it out right then and there “Girlfriend?” You almost couldn’t believe the words as they left your mouth, you shook your head “No, I’m not doing that either.”

One stared at you “Do you have a better idea?” He challenged, “And I don’t want to hear business partner, what are you going to buy for everyone in his company? No, Four is going to go in there and say he was referred by one of his previous clients and you are going to pose as his girlfriend.” You moved to argue him, but One put his hand up “Nope, no questions that’s it. Wheels are up in an hour.” He stood up and moved to leave the trailer but stopped “Do the two of you have anything other than sweatpants to wear? You’re going to want to pose as someone with money to make it appealing.”

You sheepishly averted your gaze and Four let out a soft ‘uhhh’ which proved that the two of you really had nothing other than athleisure in your closet, “Fucks sake,” One said shaking his head, “Buy yourself some real clothes when you land so you at least look the part. Zero, you can figure the money out, I know you’ve been sifting through my accounts.”

You scratched the back of your neck and let out a small laugh, have you been slowly taking a bit of money out from One’s bank account? Yeah. But did you care? Nah, he was literally a billionaire and constantly had money flowing in from stocks and other investments.

Your plane ride was short, but most of it was spent establishing your fake relationship with Four while Five slept and Seven and One piloted the plane, “What are our names going to be?” Four asked, “I was thinking could be Jason, or a Roger, or something like that.”

You let out a sigh, you could tell this was going to be a long mission, “Why can’t we just use our actual names, no one knows that we’re still alive and we can just make up last names.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun though-”

“No,” You sharply interjected, “I think that it would be a lot easier to remember our own names since we have a lot of other details we need to remember, like how long have we been together?”

Four ran a hand through his neatly coifed hair, “What about a year and a couple months, you know couples always track little stuff like that.”

“A year and three months?” You asked, he nodded, you checked that off your list and moved onto the next thing, “Okay what about how we met?”

“Childhood friends?” Four suggested.

You shook your head, “No, I’m too lazy to remember all that info, plus we are from two different countries.”

He nodded his head, “Right,” He said, feeling slightly stupid, “What about a business conference?”

You quirked your brow, this actually sounded like a good idea, “Okay, we can meet at a business conference, you know grabbed a few drinks then the rest is history kind of a deal?” a thought popped into your brain, “Oh!” You said, “We need to lay down some ground rules.”

“Rules?” Four asked quirking his eyebrow at you.

“Yeah, rules, you know so we don’t weird the other person out.” You tried to reason, Four’s mouth made an ‘o’ and he nodded, urging you to continue “Number one, no PDA.”

Four rolled his eyes, “We’re supposed to be fake dating, we have to at least make it convincing.”

You let out a sigh, “Fine, no graphic PDA then.” He nodded in agreement, “Number two, no parading around with other people, this has to be convincing” You paused and waited for Four to interject, when he didn’t you continued “And three, stick to the story, no changing it up or adding onto it without telling the other one.”

“That’s it? Only three rules?” Four questioned, you nodded your head “Sounds simple enough.”

The two of you sat in silence for a moment before you glanced over at Four, feeling his eyes on you and caught the surprisingly charming smile he shot in your direction, “How about what I do for work? Can I say I’m inheriting my father’s business?”

You shrugged your head “Yeah, sure, just make sure it’s something you can actually talk about. Rich assholes love talking about what made them rich.”

“Yeah, any opportunity One has to brag, he leaps at it.” Four said laughing, you couldn’t help but join in.

The plane landed and after a short drive you found yourself in LA on a ritzy road with expensive shops. You felt out of place in your stained sweatshirt and beat up shoes, but who was going to stop you from entering with a platinum credit card?

After what seemed like hours’ worth of pointless shopping you and Four finally had a sufficient enough wardrobe gathered up to pass as wealthy couple and were able to check into your ritzy hotel. You and Four made your way up to the hotel room, floor 27 out of 35, the view of the city was absolutely breath taking. You had honestly never seen anything quite like it, “Wow,” You gasped dropping your many bags onto the floor and walking towards the large window that looked over West Hollywood.

The skyline was a mix of pastel pink and orange that had the dark shadows of tall buildings cutting jagged and rectangular shapes out of it, it looked as though it was something straight out of a magazine.

You’d also never been in a nicer hotel, it was large and spacious with a kitchenette, and one large bed covered in white sheets. You felt like there was a rock in your stomach “Why is there one bed?” You asked, furrowing your brow.

Four shrugged “One made the reservation, not me.” He said throwing his duffle bag down on the left side of the right side of the bed, opposite the window, “Guess it’s to seem more realistic? If the room gets searched, they won’t have to wonder why we use separate beds.” That was a far-fetched idea and part of you knew it was just One fucking with the two of you, “Don’t worry, I don’t snore.” Four joked, shooting you a cheeky winking at you.

You looked at him, slightly taken back by his blatant flirting, it caused your stomach to clench “Right, well,” You cleared your throat “I hope you’re not a blanket hog either.”

You sat on the bed, your laptop open and on your lap. It wasn’t the most ideal position, but you had to make do with what you had. Your fingers flew across your keyboard, satisfying clacks filling the large hotel room while you gathered information on Beck’s previous clientele. You turned towards Four who was mindlessly scrolling through his phone, “So for tomorrow, Beck is going to be at a vineyard for a tasting, that is where you’re going to approach him.” You said looking at Four to make sure he was paying attention. He wasn’t. You reached over, lightly kicking him and grabbing your attention, “Did you hear me?” You chastised.

Four jumped and sheepishly looked at you, “Yeah, I did, tomorrow we’re going to a vineyard and I’m going to talk to Beck.” He repeated looking at you and setting his phone on his chest.

You nodded, relieved that he was actually listening to you, “Good,” You said exhaling lightly “So, your referral is going to be this guy,” You said turning your screen towards Four, he leaned in and nodded his head “But what Beck doesn’t know is that Mr. Harrison is in prison and unable to answer any calls he may have regarding the validity of your referral.” You paused, giving the blond haired man a moment to soak in the information before you continued, “So, what you’re going to do is you’re going to introduce yourself, make some small talk, and then Segway to talk about your business associate Mr. Harrison. Mention something along the lines of special products and how high quality and reliable Beck’s side business is, say whatever you have to say to butter him up.”

“So I just need to kiss his ass?” Four asked for clarification.

You nodded your head, “Exactly, and for good measure we’re going to bring a bag of cash that I’ll be carrying.”

Four hummed, “Clever plan,” He complimented, you felt your face heating up, “You sure this is your first time in the field?” He gave you a skeptical glance before settling beneath the sheets and reaching to turn off his bedside lamp.

You shut your laptop, “Yeah, I just sit back at base most of the time, One didn’t even take me along to Italy,” You said and leaned over, putting it on the floor.

“You’ve been with us since Italy?” Disbelief filled Four’s voice.

“Yeah, I helped One track all of you down, he might be good with magnets but gathering info isn’t really his forte.” You said and sat up, shifting your pillows around before you laid back down, pulling the blankets up to your chin and burrowing in, “We better get some sleep, big day tomorrow.”

Four rolled onto his side, “Right, well, night.” He mumbled.

----

Your sleep was restless because of you nerves, you kept tossing and turning, sighing when the sheets got tangled in your feet until Four finally said something, “Stop moving, for the love of god.” He mumbled against his pillow, not bothering to even open an eye to look at you.

“Sorry,” You whispered, “I just can’t sleep.” You said smoothing your hands over the blankets that covered your chest.

Four let out a long, deep sigh, “Well try,” He was obviously someone who valued sleep and did not take kindly to be woken up.

When you finally awoke in the morning you stretched, feeling your back cracking as you groaned “Fuck,” You sighed, sitting up and looking around at the unfamiliar surroundings, right, you were on a mission. Four walked out of the bathroom, his hair still wet and messily towel dried, and wearing a white tee-shirt and boxer briefs.

You felt heat creeping up your neck and flushing your face at the sight, he turned around, feeling your eyes staring holes into him “Morning,” He greeted.

“Morning.” You answered back.

Four rummaged through the bags of clothes you bought yesterday, frowning “What do you even wear to a vineyard party?” He asked tossing several shirts aside.

You pursed your lips “A well-tailored suit?” You suggested, pulling the blankets back and grabbing your own things before heading to the bathroom, “You done in here?” You asked poking your head out the bathroom door.

Four looked up at you, still frustrated over his outfit of choice and nodded “Yeah, ‘m finished.” He said turning his attention back to the bags.

The hot water from the shower soothed your stiff shoulders and the steam filled your nostrils, you let out a soft sigh slicking your hair from your face and scrubbed your hair and body, freeing it of the filth that had built up from your travels. Your shower seemed to put the nerves you held over the meeting today at ease even if it was only temporary.

When you walked out of the bathroom, dressed and almost ready to go your gaze caught Four, “You- you clean up nicely.” You complimented.

It was true, he did clean up nicely. His hair was neatly slicked back and the buttons on his crisp white button down were taut against his fit chest, threatening to give way if he moved just right. His collar was upturned and a tie loosely hung around his neck. He turned, drinking in your figure a ghost of a smirk playing on his face “So do you,” He said casually struggling with his tie.

“Need help?” You asked, walking towards him your hands reaching for the tie as you closed the gap. You were close to him, nearly chest to chest and could smell the cologne he had bought the other day. You fiddled with his tie, tying it properly and tightening it comfortably against his neck, “There,” you said placing a lingering touch against his chest.

The two of you stood for a moment, staring at each other before you forced yourself to be the first one to pull away, quickly grabbing your purse and slipping your shoes on. Your throat felt tight, you needed to get some fresh air quickly before you went mad.

Taglist: @lapofthemusicgods​, @chonkyhambs​, @teageowen​, @l0ve-0f-my-life​, @takemetoneverland420​

[jaxsteamblog]

Prompt Generator Series 01

I’m trying something new in order to practice my writing. I’ve found a prompt generator and I’m going to write things for them. They will probably not be complete pieces like “one-shots” and I may never give them a conclusion, but I hope you enjoy them!

Prompt: Having recently broken up, the main character is forced into an adventure they do not want when whilst drunk, another character does something unexpected at a party.

In the movies, when a couple breaks up, the woman’s friends bring wine and ice cream. They watch a movie or trash-talk the ex while getting drunk on sugar and whatever cheap bottle one of them managed to grab at the grocery store.

That was not how Toph Beifong did things.

When Katara sent out the text, Suki had been the one to suggest getting together, but Toph was the one that announced they would be going out. And Katara had enjoyed the getting ready part; trying on outfits she hadn’t worn in weeks because she and Aang hadn’t gone out, getting into Suki’s makeup, and gushing to each other about how they felt.

Actually going out was a different story.

As they were in the taxi, Katara felt like her dress was too short, her face too covered, and her body too stiff under it all. Still, she didn’t want to admit it, knowing that really, she just felt too exposed without her relationship cloaking her. 

Maybe that’s why, when Toph bought shots, she didn’t decline. Or why she continued drinking, even after the throb of the music started to be more of a feeling than a sound. 

When Katara started to feel hot and crowded, Toph finally relented. Being a Beifong, Toph had access to the exclusive rooftop and she led Katara and Suki upstairs. The music was more subdued and the conversation was quieter. Out in the open, the breeze brushed against her sweat stained skin, making her shiver. 

“I’m going to get some water.” Katara announced as Toph and Suki found a table.

“Could you grab me a tiger claw?” Toph asked and Katara nodded as she walked to the bar.

There were a lot less people there, but the bartender was off talking to a group of young women who were clearly making a list of drinks. Leaning against the bar, Katara closed her eyes as another breeze touched the back of her neck.

“Hey, can I buy you a drink?”

Katara opened her eyes and turned to see the man now standing on her left.

He was handsome. Enough so that Katara stood, feeling embarrassed. 

“Oh, no, I’m just getting water.” She said. The man smiled and angled himself more toward her. Seeing a scar on his left eye, she tilted her head and it fell heavily toward her shoulder. 

“That must’ve hurt.” Katara stated and the man chuckled. 

“It did.” He replied and she winced.

“Shit. Sorry. That was rude.” 

The man laughed and shook his head. 

“I’m used to being around rude women.” He said.

“Hey.” Katara scowled. “I’m not rude all the time. I’m just drunk.” 

Remembering, quite suddenly, all of the horror stories of meeting men at bars, Katara set her shoulders and continued. “I’m here with my friends.” 

“And I’m here with mine.” The man said. “My name is Zuko.” 

He held out his hand and Katara took it, shaking it slowly.

“I’m Katara.” 

“You’re a Waterbender right?”

“How did you know?” Katara asked with breathy curiosity. 

“Your eyes.” Zuko answered and Katara blushed.

“Why don’t you just get your own water then?” He questioned.

“That’s rude.” Katara said quickly.

“But you’re rude now.” He countered.

Katara placed her hands flat on the bar.

“I am rude now.” She whispered. Then she looked down at the bartender and frowned.

“I don’t have any glasses.” Katara stated.

“Here.” Zuko said, making her turn back just in time to see him leap over the bar.

“You can’t do that!” Katara whispered sharply. Zuko smiled before grabbing two glasses.

“I am also rude now.” He replied and jumped back over. “See? He didn’t even notice.”

Pushing the glasses toward her, Zuko winked. “Your turn.”

Katara took a step back from the bar and took in a deep breath. Moving her arms, she let the breath out slowly and pulled on the water dispenser. The hose came free of its holder and Katara coaxed the water out of it. As she poured, the bartender finally noticed what was going on.

“Hey!” He yelled, startling Katara. A burst of water exploded out of the hose, damaging the dispenser and spraying her and Zuko with water. The bartender ran down to wrestle with the hose while Katara attempted to stop the spray of water. 

When the bartender got the dispenser under control, Katara took a glass of water and darted back to her table, leaving Zuko behind. 

Dripping wet and mortified, Katara tucked herself behind Suki and Toph.

“We need to go.” She said in a low voice.

“What did you do?” Toph hissed while Suki was choking on her laughter.

“She just left him standing there!” Suki gargled out and Katara brushed the water off of her, tossing it over the railing of the balcony. 

“We really need to go!” Katara repeated.

“Did you even get my drink?” Toph asked.

“She was too busy being a coward.” Zuko interjected and Katara yelped as she tried to duck under the table.

Zuko leaned down and looked at her.

“I’ve paid for the damages but, do you think you could dry my clothes Ms. Waterbender?” He asked. 

Standing up, Katara moved around the table and sheepishly hung her head as she pulled the water from Zuko’s clothes. 

“Can you go get my drink now?” Toph asked as Katara tossed the water away.

“I don’t want to go back there.” She said.

“I’d be happy to.” Zuko offered. “If you three would consider joining me and my friends.”

“Are your friends hot?” Toph asked.

“You’re blind.” Katara said.

“I still have a type, Katara.” Toph retorted. 

“I’m spoken for.” Suki said.

“That’s fine, my friends are more looking to prove a point than actually try to pick someone up.” Zuko said and then turned to Toph. “And I don’t know what your type is, but I would argue that my friends are hot.”

Toph stood and put her foot down, hard, making Zuko jump back a bit.

“Well, you’re not too bad. I think they’ll be fine.” Toph said. “Get me a tiger claw and we’ll go over.” 

“Deal.” Zuko said and walked off.

Katara immediately turned on Toph.

“We can’t just go over there with him.” She stated.

“Why not?” Toph asked.

“Because,” Katara stopped, unable to put her feelings into words. 

“Exactly. I’m sure they’re fine.” Toph said.

“And if they’re not, we leave.” Suki added.

“Fine.” Katara muttered and picked up her water glass. It didn’t mean she had to like it.

“Ruon-Jian, Chan, this is Katara, Suki, and Toph.” Zuko said as he led them over to his table. The two other men held up their hands in greeting.

Toph made as if she had tripped and put a heavy foot down, grabbing onto Suki to steady herself. Her sly grin right before she straightened made Katara want to roll her eyes.

“I’m sorry, I’m blind and these loose floorboards are just terrible.” Toph said with fake simpering femininity dripping off her words. Chan brightened at her tone and got up, offering his hand.

“Let me help you.” He offered and Katara finally did roll her eyes.

As Ruon-Jian also got up, Suki held up her hands.

“I am very happily dating this one’s brother,” Suki said, turning her hands into finger guns and pointing them at Katara. “Just to make sure we’re clear.” 

Ruon-Jian smiled and simply gestured with open hands. “I’d just be glad to talk to someone other than these two.”

Zuko ordered another round of drinks for everyone and Katara started to relax a bit more. The men were all from the Fire Nation and had travelled into Republic City for some reason that she missed. As they got more companionable, however, Toph and Chan quickly excused themselves. Claiming to only be walking Toph down to get a taxi, Chan did not return.

Another round of drinks and they started to talk about where they came from. Suki pulled out her Kyoshi accent and Katara talked about the snow village she had grown up in. Then Suki called it a night, pointedly asking Katara if she was leaving.

Except somehow, Katara ended up pressed against Zuko’s side, his arm over her shoulders.

She remembered it had started because she was cold, in her short dress and out on the roof, and Zuko told her he was a Firebender. He was naturally warm, and Katara decided to test his claim. Leaning against him, she found that he was warm, and now she didn’t want to move.

“I’m okay.” Katara said happily.

“Are you sure?” Suki asked firmly. Ruon-Jian touched Suki’s arm and smiled.

“I’ll make sure she gets into a taxi if he doesn’t.” He said and Suki sighed.

“Text me as soon as you get home or I’m telling Sokka.” She said, pointing her finger in Katara’s face.

Katara grasped her finger and shook it up and down.

“Yes ma’am.” She said.

Suki ruffled her hair as she passed.

“Have fun.” She said.

Zuko got more drinks, but handed Katara a water, much to her disappointment. The conversation started to wind down and Ruon-Jian mentioned something about ordering pizza. Both he and Zuko got up from the table, leaving Katara swaddled in Zuko’s coat.

It smelled good, like his cologne but also like fabric softener. 

“It’s last call, miss.” A woman’s voice said from behind Katara. “Can I get you anything else?”

Katara blinked slowly.

“Actually,” She said and smiled. “Yes.”

The next morning, Katara woke up with cotton residue in her mouth.

Her head pounding, she sat up in the dull light and rubbed her eyes.

This was not her room. Her room was much smaller and had clothes still on the floor from getting ready. Her bed was also much smaller and the sheets were not this bright. Hers were the flannel ones with snowmen on them because she hadn’t packed away her winter linens yet.

Panicking, Katara looked around the room to try and get her bearings. She found on the nightstand next to her a nice alarm clock, a cup of water, and a bottle of headache medicine. Taking two pills and chugging the water, Katara then shifted under the comforter. 

She was still in her dress from last night.

Slowly slipping out of the bed, Katara avoided looking around too much, suddenly concerned with snooping.

Opening the door to the bedroom, Katara walked out into a small hallway. She passed another open door and peered in, seeing a neat little office setup. Then she came to the top of a staircase and peered down to where it opened up. She could see an open living room, but not much else.

The light was brighter down there, as the bedroom was equipped with blackout curtains for some reason. As she stepped quietly down the stairs, Katara held a gasp as she found a body sleeping on the couch. Zuko sprawled uncomfortably along its length, and Katara immediately turned her head and went hunting for her purse.

Was it the walk of shame if she hadn’t slept with him? She assumed she hadn’t slept with him, but had they done something?

Spotting her purse on a table next to the front door, with her shoes standing neatly on the floor underneath, Katara stepped quickly toward them. But as she rummaged through her purse looking for her phone, she swore under her breath when she realized it was gone.

“I’s plugged in.” Zuko slurred from the couch. Katara turned and saw one of his arms thrown over his face, the other one extended with his hand waving in the air toward his TV.

“Your battery was dying.” He added and rolled over to put his face into the cushions.

“Are you okay?” Katara asked as she walked over.

“Yuh. ‘m fine.” His voice was muffled by the couch. “I’m tired.”

“Did we…?” Katara trailed off and she could see his body stiffen. Zuko then turned, squinting up at her in the light. 

“No.” He said. “But you might want to call your friend. Like now.”

Her eyes widening, Katara froze.

“Why?” She asked.

“You kinda told her that you were coming back to my place to, well,” Zuko’s face reddened and Katara blushed at the inference. “I just think you should call her to let her know you’re okay.”

Katara turned toward the TV and found her phone sitting on the stand next to a game controller. Unplugging the cable, she winced at the number of texts and missed calls.

Most of which from her brother.

“Hey.” Katara said as she stood, tapping her phone in her hand and keeping her back to Zuko.

“Yeah?” He asked.

“Do you want to get breakfast?” She asked. As she waited for an answer, she squeezed her phone in her hands and held her breath.

“Is that what you want?” Zuko questioned.

Katara turned to him and smiled weakly.

“I know what I want. But,” Katara looked down at her phone. “I’m not rude now.” 

“So what does that mean?”

Her nerves now emboldening her, Katara met his gaze and her smile changed into a smirk.

“It means the polite thing is to get food first.” She said.

Zuko laughed and ran a hand through his hair. “You don’t even know me.”

“That’s the point of a date.” Katara replied.

Zuko stopped, his hand still in his hair, his face blank. Then a smile spread slowly over his face.

“Fine. But what are you going to wear?” He asked.