#actually i wanted to be an astronaut or a mom

[kdramaxoxo]

"My lifelong dream has been to acquire a Bank" said absolutely no one ever except for Jin Woong from Perfect Marriage Revenge

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

SO refreshing 2 talk abt weird interests <3

[itsmeluvxx]

The way the barbie movie has truly made me so happy and proud to have experienced girlhood. Like im actually crying because I got to be a little girl who got to grow up to be proud to be a woman

[r3ynah]

Danny didn't know that passing the Wayne Industry's astronomy exam and getting a scholarship was a very big deal here in gotham that the head of the Wayne Industry will come and meet your parents. . (you know cause Batman is Bruce yada yada and the watchtower) hell he just wanted to pursue his dream about working at space even though he can't be a astronaut.

What was he going to do when Bruce Wayne, The Bruce Wayne meets his parents? Run away in horror? Scream in Disgust? No. that's just tame, didn't Mr. Wayne have a reputation in adopting Black hair and blue eyed kids?

Oh shit, he had black hair and blue eyes, he didn't want to get taken away from his parents, can he say no? because he will not associate with another bilionnare over his dead cold body.

But what can he do? he actually really wants to study at Gotham and because he finally made new friends besides the amity parkers, so he just sucks it up and readied himself for the worst when the front door of his home opened.

"Ah! Mr. Wayne, please come in" His Dad Jack exclaimed, ecstatically.

"It's a pleasure to finally meet you!" His mom Maddie continued with the same joy laced in her tone

Silence

He slowly looked up, and took a peek at Mr. Wayne... Danny stared in confusion at what met him.

what??? Why the hell is Bruce Wayne staring at his parents with a flushed face? Did he get a fever??

Bruce stood frozen in place, as he stared at the two very familiar people in front of him who only smiled mischievously. he sighed as he finally regained his composure, and gave the two adults a soft smile that says: 'i missed you two'

"Jack and Maddie" Bruce acknowledged, "It's certainly nice to see you both after such a long time.."

Which made Maddie and Jack grins wider.

Danny blinked 'Mom and Dad knew Mr. Wayne? that's impossible no one in the right mind will want to befriend his parents unless..'

then it all clicked, he groaned in his hand in distress.

when his parents said they were once in a polycule he didn't think they were serious, and with Bruce Wayne of all person they can come across to.

[goggles-mcgee]

Phantom Fudge

I love the fics of Danny settling into Gotham and having some sort of business and just absolutely confusing the Batfam with how flippant he is about the crime.

My take is, instead of a coffee shop or bookstore or occult shop, Danny opens a fudge shop!

His parents taught him, and he found he actually really loved it, and besides, his dream of being an astronaut was out of reach due to his unique medical readings. In this au, his parents learned about him being Phantom and took it well after a good period of spiraling because-Holy shit they shot their son. You may be asking, Goggles, didn't you just make a post that was all about Jack and Maddie not taking the news well? Yes. Yes, I did.

I go back and forth with wanting to salt them and not. I like both.

So anyways, Danny is the heir to the Ghost Throne, but he won't actually take up the official title until his time on Earth is naturally over. After everything got better with his parents and his regular ghost fighting buddies, he actually was able to raise his grades and graduate. Many teachers were amazed at the progress but really, Danny may not have been as smart as his parents and sister (he is an unreliable narrator and is actually very smart just not as conventional as his family) but before his accident he had done pretty good in school. The GIW was still a thing, but without the Fenton technology, they weren't doing as well as they previously did. His parents broke their contract after they rescued him from the GIW labs, it was a little after he told his parents about his halfa status and they came storming in to save him and all the other ghosts that were captured. After that, life got so much better. His parents listened to him, and he got to teach them all about his people. They started publishing more papers with actually accurate information and were doing their best to overturn the anti-ecto acts. They haven't accomplished it, but Danny was sure they would.

That's actually why he moved to Gotham. Tucker had the idea of contacting the Justice League to help with the anti-ecto laws, but their calls weren't being answered. Neither were the...strongly worded emails Sam sent in. So Danny did what he did best and jumped into something not entirely thought out but hoping for the best. He moved to Gotham so he could get close to Batman and ask for help. He got accepted into Gotham University on a scholarship. But he wanted to make some money on his own without his parents sending him some kind of allowance, and he didn't want to work at Bat Burger. He started selling fudge around winter at his school, and he got permission to do so.

From there, he got enough money to actually open a small fudge cart. Then he got enough for a small shop near his apartment which was rather close to Crim Alley so he hired some working girls to help with the shop and he employed any Alley Kids looking for some cash as delivery workers. (They only delivered in Crime Alley, though, but that was fine with Danny.) Danny loved his little fudge shop that he lovingly named Phantom Fudge, and the sign had a cute little ghost eating some fudge on it. When he was in school for classes, he left the shop in his friend Ginger's hands. She had been a working girl before, but before that, she had had experience working a small mom & pop kind of shop, so Danny felt good leaving her in charge. When Ellie visited, she helped out with the shop too.

Danny was thriving. Then he started getting customers of the ecto variety because, of course, he would. Apparently, he was something of an ecto filter for the shades and ghost of Gotham, so they would visit his shop to soak up some of the pure ectoplasm in the air. Then he experimented and made some ecto-fudge, which is what he gave to any ecto beings that entered his shop. Most couldn't pay, but they would give him a heads up if they saw anything shady happening around his shop.

Like a little heads up that some robberies were happening in the area, or some rogue was getting close. It was a nice little system they had. Though some ghosts came in just to tell him their unfinished business and like...he wasn’t King yet, but these were his people, so he tried to help them out as best they could.

One particular couple showed up a lot and would ask him to help warn their son of any danger they heard was brewing. They would ask him to leave messages for the son or any of his kids but also the butler if needed. Danby thought this guy had some great parents. They didn't cross over because they needed to make sure their son was safe and taken care of. It was most likely that they wouldn't cross until their son did by the sounds of it. He got permission to call them Grandma and Grandpa, which was weird, but he didn't question it.

Martha and Thomas were nice spirits, so he had no problem helping them out. But Danny is Danny and his well-intentioned help of course caught the eye of the whole batfam.

They had been receiving letters in the Manor that appeared mysteriously. The first one they had all thought was a prank from the many people there. It was a simple, 'Don’t go to the gala. Something bad will happen.' That started it all. They were all baffled but laughed it off, and those who went to the gala didn't know how to feel when the seeming wait staff took over the event and held the guests hostage.

A coincidence surely.

Then they got another note, 'Freeze is planning to do a B&E and snatch some equipment from a Wayne lab. Idk which one since you have so many.' And just like last time, the note was speaking the truth. It continued from there, and everyone tried to capture whoever or whatever was leaving the notes, but any cameras they had glitched out before returning to normal and showing a new note had showed uo somewhere in the Manor. Bruce was going crazy trying to figure out who or what their messenger was.

Alfred once found a note that said, 'Tim has been awake and pushing himself too far. He is going to crash.' He took it to heart though and made Tim rest and take a break. He would not let the note happen. Tim had had far too many crashes the past couple of months.

The note that broke Bruce, though, was small in words, but it made him feel crazy. It was his parent's death anniversary, and when he went to visit the exact spot, he saw a sticky note on the floor. He shakily picked it up to see all it said was, 'It's okay.'

Now he is really worked up and determined to find the note messenger.

While that's going on, Danny also gets some local vigilantes visiting his shop, and he is so excited to see them and try and be their friend so he can ask for help. Plus they seem to be fans of his fudge and that just makes him happy.

The batkids thing the Phantom Fudge shop owner is suspicious, but hot damn did he make some bomb ass fudge.

[azulhood]

It all started because of a school project, technically two projects, while it wasn't a world ending threat they set of a change reaction that lead to startling discoveries.

Mr Lancer had given the class the task of looking through their pasts and finding an life changing event that helped shape them into the person that were today and writing about that event.

It was a ten page essay (they were allowed to go over that limit) the more details the better and if you had something from that event to show (such as photos or keepsakes or really anything) you were awarded extra credit.

Danny's choice of event was the school field trip to a nearby museum he went on when he was seven, the space exhibit they had was what sparked his love for the stars and kick-started his dreams of being an astronaut.

It wasn't like he had any other choice (he doubted mister Lancer would accept 'my death' as a good life changing event)

He knew that he had photos of the field trip somewhere with all the other photos taken throughout his life, he just had to find them.

And after digging through thousands of boxes and piles of discarded inventions he handled with care (in case they blew up) he found them tucked inside an old photo album covered in green stains that sat on top of a bookshelf.

Opening the book caused all the pictures to fall into his lap, it seems like his parents didn't get around to actually adding them to the book, Danny resigned himself to spending the rest of his day shifting through old photos.

It wasn't all bad though, he found pictures of when Sam still had blonde hair and wore pink and of that time Tucker wrote an 'I love you' on his parents cars with their keys and many other embarrassing photos.

A treasure trove of blackmail material.

He finally found the picture he was looking for.

All of the kids who are now students of Casper high stood in front of an old building each proudly holding up something they bought in the gift shop (Danny had bought a book on planets that had long ago fallen apart)

It was a normal photo.

And yet, something seemed off.

Sam and Tucker were there with him in between them, Dash was there too.

Along with Kwan, Mikey, Paulina, Valerie, and all the others.

And yet, something was missing.

Then it hit him.

Wes wasn't there.

Danny could've sworn that he had been on that trip, but the more he thought about it the less he was sure.

He couldn't actually remember Wes being there and Danny remembered nearly everything about that trip.

'Maybe he was sick or something?' It was the most logical thing he could think of to explain the other absence, that and his parents not wanting him to go for some reason.

Mystery solved he pushed it to the back of his mind , he had an essay to finish.

Still, it stuck with him.

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

The next school project Lencer gave them was one with assigned partners.

Danny got Wes who, despite not being Sam or Tucker, was leagues better then Dash and he'd take that as a win.

Wes had insisted on studying at his house so he could, and Danny quotes "Keep an eye on you Fenton"

Danny could practically feel the hidden cameras burning a hole into him while he stood in front of the Weston's door, waiting for him to go ghost for whatever reason.

Jokes on him though, Danny asked all the ghosts to leave him along for this month with the promise of giving them a head start the next time they caused trouble, so really Wes was just wasting his time.

"This way." Wes said already heading inside without caring if Danny followed.

Being the first time he had ever been in Wes's home Danny looked at everything and anything.

It was a fairly normal home, not like Danny's which had an anti-ghost defense system or Sam's super rich house.

But more like Tuckers

One of the things that drew his attention was the pictures that lined the walls.

There were so many.

Some with Wes and his mom, some with just him, some with just his mom, and some with people Danny didn't recognise.

But there were no baby photos.

The only pictures Danny could find of a young Wes seemed to be from when he was eight? Nine?

And nothing before.

'Maybe they were put away in storage' Danny guessed, but it still made his brain itch.

He remembered looking at old school photos and not finding any sign of a young Wes at all, he didn't even remember Wes coming to school any time before the year Danny turned eight.

And in a small town where everyone knew everyone that really wasn't possible.

'Maybe they moved here and lost a lot of stuff' Which would explain a lot, well no harm in asking. "Did you loss a lot when you moved here?"

Wes stopped walking and turned around to give him a look that asked if he was insane. "I've lived here my whole life, Fenton."

Danny froze, that couldn't be right, he'd remember that.

Something was wrong.

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

Tim Drake sat in front of the bat computer as the rest of his family patrolled.

He had one monitor displaying the other bats locations while all the other monitors were used to show him files, or rather the lack there of.

Wayne Enterprises had tournaments held for schools and the prize was an all express paid trip to Gotham and tour of WE and surrounding areas, Tim could think of way better prizes that weren't visiting the crime capital of the world but that wasn't the point.

What was the point was that every time there was a winner Tim preformed a routine background check on students and staff (and by routine he means learn their whole live story) just in case anyone happened to be trained assassins set to kill one of them, stranger things have happened.

Wes Weston was one such student whose background Tim had to check.

And he found nothing.

Sure, there were hospital and school documents from age eight and upwards, but other then that nothing.

There was no birth certificate, no evidence of him attending daycare, nothing.

It was as if Wes did not exist before he was eight years old.

And perhaps the most interesting thing.

Amy Weston was listed as Wes's biological mother, DNA even said as much, and yet Amy's medical file said that she had never been pregnant and also had no siblings that could've been Wes's parent.

And yet Wes existed, appearing one day as if he had always been there.

Was it cloning? Aliens? Magic? A changeling? Someone creating false information to hide the truth?

It was a mystery, and mysteries had always been Tim's Kryptonite.

[suguru-getos]

Kid Gojo goes to Kid!Fem-Reader's House

This is a part II to a drabble I wrote, Part I.

Satoru's footsteps matched hers, trailing towards an unknown path leading to a normal-looking house. It was beautiful though, bright colours, gardens had flower beds of roses, tulips, a ceramic pot with fresh water for the birds. Homely, the house looked and felt what the Gojo estate never did. For a ten year old, who wasn't accustomed to this new found feeling, Satoru didn't know what to say, how to react. He hums, "small, your house is small." kicking a piece of gravel from the pavement.

She was on her tippy-toes, reaching for the door-bell and ringing it. "Mean." She pouted, looking at Satoru with a disgusted face. Like he has shit his pants and she can smell it kind of disgusted.

"What is that face?" He fumbles, taken aback, eyes siren in offense. She shrugged, sticking her tongue out, "I make this face at meanie poopy people." She crossed her arms, always works. No matter who it is.

The faint echoes of footsteps carry from farther away in the kitchen to the hallway, becoming clearer as the door opens. "Oh hello Y/N! Welcome home sweetheart!" Her mother beams, bright and joyful. Her eyes scan the little kid next to her, from his clothes he definitely did not look homeless. Beautiful, all-knowing, almost frightening eyes. "Oh? You made a new friend?" Her mother inquires, looking at Satoru. Now, Satoru Gojo was used to people bending backwards for him, this bland reaction was refreshing.

"My name is Satoru Gojo." He hums, "She dragged me here." He scoffs. Of course not, but the heir of the Gojo clan can't look eager for some cookies?

"She did? Oh my" Her mother gasped a little, knowing the kid was just behaving of his age. "I just wanted him to taste your cookies mama, he protected my favourite water bottle tumbler from the poopie kids!" She grins, walking inside. For a moment, Satoru looks hesitant. What is he even doing, he has roles and responsibilities. Cookie-tasting is definitely not one of them. He can have cookies from any part of the world, Paris? Even London's bakeries- why even-

His trance is broken the moment his wrist is grabbed by her, cheerful eyes beaming and dragging him inside. The moment Satoru's footsteps get inside, and the delicious scent of cookie dough fills his nostrils, he decides to stay. Cookies are important. He could get cookies from anywhere but these are the best ones, yes. The girl herself, said so.

"Come sit," Her mother coos, "Satoru kun, Y/N." She hums, getting them both a chair in the dining table.

Satoru's eyes linger around, the house is cute, not too vast. The distance between him and Y/N is also minimal, because the dining table is not so big. It's perfect actually. He grins, he feels happy, the spacing makes him feel included.

"So? What is your job?" Satoru asked, crossing his arms, looking at the girl.

"My job? I dunno- mama's daughter? Though when I play Police with my friends I am never the thief!" She grins. Satoru is… jealous. Satoru is… enamoured.

"No like, okay leave it- what is your dream?" He asks again, surely there can be some similarity where he can link his life to hers.

"I am gonna be an Astronaut!" She grins wide, "Gonna see the pretty moon, the pretty stars!"

Satoru Gojo pouts, he's ten, and his birth shackled him to one role. He wants to be a sorcerer because he doesn't know any other thing. He thought being a sorcerer was his decision, training was his decision. An eerie bewilderment presses his soul, hollowing it like a cavity. Why couldn't he think about becoming someone like an Astronaut?

"When you come here next time- we should play together." Y/N hums, feet shaking in boredom.

Next time… why would there be a next time? Her mother comes in the room, freshly baked cookies with a glass of milk, a slice of the cake she just made.

"Oh drooling!" Y/N whines, watching her mom place them on the table.

Satoru acts, sophisticated, there is no way some cookies would make him say that, he's not a dog! But they smell so good- NO WAY!

Y/N quickly takes the first bite, happy shakes and wiggles follow with whines. "Oh my god mama this is the best!" Satoru looks flustered, hesitantly taking a bite as well. The flavours melt in his mouth, it was perfect. Wow… "This is good." He announces, watching her mother grin and leave the two alone. He gets headpats, Y/N gets headpats. Satoru doesn't get headpats, the flustered expression on his face is evidence enough.

"Y-you were saying?" He asked, taking another bite.

"Oh yeah! I was saying, when you c'mere next time, we should play House." "House?" What is that game?

"Like, house? Or we could play Police too…" She grins, so excited, so thoughtless.

"I don't play kid's games. I am ten years old." Satoru scoffed.

"Aw- okay." She looked down, taking another bite, interest and excitement killed. Satoru's eyes glare at her, stop doing that! "Maybe just once." Satoru Gojo was kind, he knew he was… just didn't want to show it to others especially in a scathing world like the Jujutsu community where he is worshipped. "Okay! Let's play House then!" She grins, perking right back up.

Ten year old Satoru Gojo had already promised a second meet to play House. Is this how you make friends, he wonders…

[musedriven]

creepazoid?! him? he was stopping the other ghosts coming through the portal! a portal that wouldn't have even been open in the first place if he hadn't have gone inside to try and see if he could fix it for them. a portal they should have probably kept a bit more guarded honestly if it was that dangerous. then again the idea of it suddenly turning on like that wasn't a possibility for any of them and he did accidentally bump the secondary on switch while trying to follow a cord...

his eyes widen as he hears his mom's voice however. that was enough to knock him out of the false sense of security his dad's antics had lured him into. his heart leaping into his throat as he realizes just what his mom had aimed at him. and how many she had fired. oh. this was so not good. " whoa! wait! mom please, can't we just talk about this?! " he cries as he tries to figure out the easiest ( and harmless ) way to get rid of them. the obvious answer would be to detransform but he'd rather die ( again ) then let his parents find out who he was!

he darted up higher into the sky. he needed to build more distance before he detransformed. or at the very least find a place where nobody would get hurt to try ectoblasting them.

"OTHER ghosts? We can handle whatever ghosts show up here. This is a peaceful town! We're raising kids here! And it's creepazoids like you that keep our neighborhood unsafe!" Jack fired off a few more shots from his ghost-fighting firearm before it fizzled out.

"Ah-- I meant to fix that. But nevermind-- EAT FENTON FOAM, GHOST BOY!" He pulled out a canister, shaking it up a few times before pointing it in the ghost's direction.

Unfortunately it was mislabeled and fired on him instead, trapping him in glowing foam.

Thankfully, his loving wife had readied her weapon, locking onto the ghost boy, ready to fire.

"Eat ghost-seeking missiles!" She called out, firing the large weapon. Several green projectiles emerged from the end of it, making a beeline for the ghost boy. They were locked onto his ecto-signature. It would be difficult to shake them off.

[mr-cha-n]

The Pen Pal Project

Pairing: Choi Seungcheol x reader

Genres: Fluff, fluff, and more fluff

Warnings: Profanities, sappiness, cheating (third party), a tinsy hint of angst

Word Count: 10.2k

Summary: Over a decade of handwritten letters later, you can happily say that the Pen Pal Project was your greatest success.

Reaching up into the top shelf of the wardrobe, toppling onto your tiptoes in order to do so, your fingertips brush against a satin, bowed box. Pulling the box down to your chest, you perch at the edge of your large, periwinkle-sheeted bed, gingerly untangling the pretty blue ribbon and lifting the lid off of the top. Leafing your fingers through the stacks of paper inside, you feel a wave of nostalgia enrapturing your body. Your head rolls back, eyes falling shut as your mind is overtaken by memory.

"Honey, the guests will be here soon!" Your husband yells out from down the stairs.

"I'll just be a few minutes! Can you take the cake out, my love?" You call back, praying you have the time to reminisce before everyone arrives.

You gently pull out the first letter from the top of the stack.

April 5th 2007

Dear pen pal,

I am writing to you because my class has signed up for the Pen Pal Project this year. Because I don't know who you are or anything about you, I am going to answer some of the questions my teacher has given us, and hopefully you can answer them too in your reply!

1. What is your name?

My mom said that I shouldn't give out any personal information, so I can't actually answer this question. My friends all call me Dusty, so you can call me that too.

2. What hobbies do you enjoy?

I am really into skating, starcraft, hockey and rocks. Yesterday, me and my friends went out to the outskirts of the city to see if we could climb the big oak trees, and I found a piece of dolomite next to the river! I really want to find a meteorite but they're very rare so I think it'll take a lot of searching. I also play in my school's field hockey team - my mom wants me to stop playing because last week I cracked one of my teeth, but I think she's going to come around when she sees our tournament next weekend.

3. What do you want to do when you grow up?

My dad is a teacher and my mom is a nurse, so my parents want me to go to university and become a doctor or a professor, but I'd quite like to be an astronaut or Indiana Jones, whichever pays better.

4. What's one thing you want to know about your pen pal?

I want to know everything about you (more than one, sorry)! What's your school like? What year were you born in (mine is 1995)? What do you do for fun? Do you like dogs? Do you have a phone?

I'm not sure if I'll get a response to this letter, but if you do want to, I hope we can keep in touch for a long time :)

Yours truly, 

Dusty

May 21st 2007

Dear Dusty,

I'm really glad I got your letter. Some of my friends got letters that didn't even have a return address, but thankfully I get to write back to you and answer some of your questions. I was also born in 1995 so we are same-age friends. I'm finding this year in school a bit harder because of all the tests we are doing, but we just started doing football again in Physical Education so it's not too bad. Sports are my biggest hobby - I do football and basketball and I want to start wrestling this year. I mostly like to go and play with my friends at the park. I'm on some of the school teams, but my friends tell me I'm too competitive to play professionally.

I also really like gaming and reading. I finished the Protoss campaign over the winter break, but I've had to stop now that school has started again. My friends are all really excited about the announcement of Starcraft II, are you too? Will you keep going with the original or switch to the new one?

When I grow up, I either want to do sports or I'll study to work a good job in business or finance. Being an astronaut would be so cool! You'd definitely be able to find a meteorite then.

About your other questions, I don't have a phone yet but I do love dogs. When I'm older I want at least one dog, if not more. Do you have any pets?

I hope that we can keep writing to each other too - it's fun to have a secret friend.

From,

Cherry

January 4th 2011

Dear Cherry,

Sorry it's been a while - I've been really busy over the winter break, but I just had my tonsils removed so I have a bit of free time in recovery to write this letter. Before you ask, no - I didn't wake up during the surgery which I was a bit disappointed about, but I did manage to swallow enough blood to make me throw up after waking up so that was kinda crazy.

I can't believe that your friend did that! One time my friend Jiwoo got suspended for unscrewing all of the lightbulbs in the science classrooms, but that was because of a dare, not her own free will! I've never been suspended before, but I came close for tardiness last year. Have you ever been suspended?

I also appreciated your inquiry into the Heiran - Hyunki situation. I can't believe I forgot to update you in my last letter, and you'll be glad to receive it! Unbelievably, they got back together. I know it's what we feared would happen, but apparently Heiran has made some of her own mistakes in the relationship, so she's willing to overlook the whole thing. Absolutely crazy - I think that she's just scared to break up with him, which I suppose is a fair concern - just not for a 16-year-old. The whole situation really made me think about the purpose of relationships and love. All of my friends keep rushing into relationships this year, and I feel like I'm being left behind. I just don't care as much as they do, but they act like I'm some alien creature for not wanting to make out with someone in the school locker rooms. Perhaps this isn't something you can relate to, but it would be nice to know if you think I'm justified in my opinion or if there really is something wrong with me.

The thought of starting school again after the break is actually making me want to run away to the mountains. My sister is leaving for university and I don't want to go to school without her. Of course, I can't tell her that, but it's going to be really lonely walking in on my own. Plus, my parents' attention is firmly on me now, so I can't mess up in exams this year. The amount of pressure is going to make my head explode. How are you feeling about the year? I guess because you have the football season to look forward to your mind is probably focused on that?

I'm thinking about rejoining hockey this year. Even though it was too much last year, I did really miss it and I think I can better manage my time now that I don't have to be in the choir anymore. I think my mom might have a fit when I tell her, but the way you talked about sports really made me miss playing. Plus, apparently, I need an outlet for all these teenage hormonal emotions seeing as I'm not getting it on in the McDonald's parking lot.

Anyways, I need to get going now so I have time to blend some fruit up before lunchtime.

Yours truly,

Dusty

A chuckle leaves your lips as you read back over your letter. You'd been so worried about who was dating who and, more importantly, who you weren't dating. You were always so grateful for someone to discuss your fears with - your friends at the time certainly didn't understand. You'd had your first kiss a few weeks after you'd sent the letter. A party at a friend of a friend's house had devolved into typical teenage party games and you'd been pressured into kissing a boy whose name you couldn't remember. In fairness, you remembered that he was cute - curly dark hair and sharp cheekbones - but you'd made a joke about not being able to engage in tonsil tennis and he hadn't laughed so you'd known he wasn't the one.

June 27th 2011

Dear Dusty,

I finally asked out Myunghee and she said yes -

Nuh uh, skip that one.

October 23rd 2013

Dear Dusty,

All the kids in the year have planned a big Halloween party to celebrate our last your of high school. It's pretty exciting - apparently, they've bought some major decorations and they're going to set out the host's house to have scary surprises in all the rooms. I wouldn't be surprised if someone dresses up and decides to chase drunk kids around all night. It's a bittersweet feeling - our last Halloween party, but perhaps our best? Do you have any plans for Halloween and the holidays? I'm thinking of doing a Superman costume, but I'm wondering if that's a bit too obvious?

I put off writing about it first because I didn't want to open the letter with bad news, but I wanted to let you know that me and Myunghee broke up. Even though it's pretty sad, I've known it was coming for a while. If you remember my last letter, I told you about the fight that we had about next year, and I think that was really the beginning of the end. I was hoping that we could make it work a bit longer, but she said that we'd just be dragging out the inevitable and I guess she's right. I think I'm still a bit annoyed about the rollercoaster of the last month seeing if she's known the whole time that we should break up but I'll get over it. It's mostly just weird not having her around all the time. Everywhere feels a lot emptier now. I'm glad I can write to you about this - it's a bit awkward talking about it with my friends because they are also friends with her, but I can actually be honest with you. 

Anyway, I hope you are doing a bit better than me. Your date sounded pretty cool - I've always wanted to go on an ice-skating date but I'd be a bit scared of falling over and making a fool of myself so I admire your confidence. If you are still seeing him, I hope he's treating you well. Chocolates and flowers at least once a month - and you can tell him I said so if he asks. If you're not seeing him, I (pre-emptively) can't believe he did that to you! What a jerk...

Are you watching the AFC Champions League final? A few friends and I are going to go down to the bar to watch it together and pray for a good result - either way, it should be fun. I suppose your dad will have it on in the house, but I'll be shocked if you tell me you're going to watch it with him after last time. Best to avoid the flying wrath of a TV remote. There's something about dads and sports, isn't there? I wonder if I'll be like that when I'm an adult. I hope not, but I already get too into it so maybe it's inevitable.

Yours,

Cherry

That date had been a good one as far as you remember, but the memory has become blurry after all the times your husband has taken you ice-skating since. You'd dated that guy for a few more weeks after this, but he made a weird comment to one of his friends when he didn't think you could hear it so you knew he wasn't the one.

Finishing high school and moving on to university had been a formative time for you. You gained a sense of identity that you'd lost as a teenager, and reconnected with your younger self. A smile crinkles your lips as you think about that time. The stupid escapades of adults let loose on their own for the first time, the lifelong friends you'd made, and the wealth of knowledge you'd gained about yourself and about the world. Your husband never attended university so he never experienced any of that, but you suppose he did have his own life-changing revelations during this time.

February 8th 2015

Dear Cherry,

I'm in crisis and I need your advice! I haven't spoken to anyone else about this yet, but I have a feeling building in me that needs to be released and you always give me the best advice. I'm thinking about dropping out of my program. 

I know this sounds super rash and stupid, but I really hate it. I find it so dull and confusing, and everyone else is much better at it than I am. And, if I'm really being honest, I only chose medicine because my mother wanted me to. I would feel so stupid revealing that to anyone else, but I think you already knew that was the case. I'm struggling to keep going with it without the passion that other students seem to have, and when I hear about my friends' courses they sound so much more interesting.

If I actually go through with it, this may be the last letter I write to you. But, given that I survived my mother's wrath, a life studying literature or archaeology sounds so much more fulfilling to my brain even if not my pockets. What do you think about all of this? Is it worth following a passion that may lead to nothing or sticking it out with a stable, reliable path to future success without enjoyment?

As you know, I make very impulsive decisions, so I need your help in deciding whether or not this would be one of those.

Yours truly,

Dusty

P.S. I got asked to the dance by this really attractive guy who works at the coffee shop on campus so not everything is going wrong.

P.S.S. I found a rock which I thought was a meteorite but it was actually a magnetite - better luck next time!

You'd dropped out of your medicine major the moment you'd received the reply. Of course, your pen pal was a lot more supportive of your decision than your parents were but they got over it in time. Your fate had been decided the moment you'd stepped out of your first archaeology class - heart beaming and mind brimming with all of your plans for the future. Despite your parents' apprehensions, it had been the right decision. It didn't take long for your burning enthusiasm and insatiable appetite for learning to be picked up by your professors, and by your second year in the major you'd been invited on an exclusive trip one of your professors was going on with a handful of other students. 

It was around this time that you'd started wondering more about your pen pal. The flutters of your heart each time the small envelope appeared in your dorm pigeonhole had been drowned out by the rush of university life. Reflecting back, your obliviousness to your own emotions makes you shake your head in disbelief. But then, you'd met Daejung. He'd taken you out dancing, brought you flowers and laughed at your jokes, and you began to wonder if he was the one.

May 16th 2017

Dear Dusty,

Officially, you may know me better than anyone else. I know I already sent you a letter this month that you probably haven't even received, but I realised that it is the tenth anniversary since I received your first letter. Not to be soppy, but it truly means the world to me that we've been able to keep up this correspondence this whole time. 

As far as I'm aware, we won the Pen Pal Project. No one else I know stayed in touch with their childhood pen pal for nearly as long as we have, and I think that we deserve some kind of reward for it.

But, beyond any records we must have broken, I'm most grateful for the friendship we have developed. In any other circumstances, I would have said that it was impossible for people who have never met to be each other's closest confidants, but I can confidently say that there is nothing I wouldn't tell you. If it turns out you've been some 60-year-old man this whole time, consider me logged off from this life. 

My wish is that we can keep doing this for as long as we are able to hold pens in our hands, and even then I'd consider getting a scribe to write the letters for me.

As a gift, I feel that it's about time that I tell you my name - my real name. If you (and your mom) still don't feel comfortable sharing yours then Dusty is still perfectly fine for me, but the fundamental disconnect between telling a person your deepest secrets and not telling them your name has gotten too overwhelming for me, so it's time to rectify that.

Yours, 

Seungcheol

P.S. If you still want to call me Cherry that's also a-okay!

The first time Seungcheol revealed his name to you, you remember you'd dropped the letter in shock. As if knowing his name changed things, as if he didn't live a completely separate life from you already. It wasn't like knowing who he was would change anything about your life - you had no connection to him other than your letters - but the intimacy of his name had you staggering a few steps backwards, eye bulging from your head at the fallen letter. It seems rather overdramatic now, but in hindsight it always does.

This letter had been a bit of a turning point in your relationship, beyond the end of the nicknames you'd used for ten years. You'd always felt close enough to Seungcheol to pour your heart out to him in writing, but the closeness you felt was compounded in this letter. You wipe a few rogue tears from your eyes as you read back over it, moved by the raw declarations Seungcheol had been brave enough to express. If you really think about it, this letter was the first time you'd truly tried to picture what your pen pal looked like. Up until this point, you'd been enflamed by his words and unloaded all of your deepest thoughts to him in return, but this was the first time that you'd realised that your pen pal was a real man your age that you were already deeply connected to. The thought had been scandalous in your mind, and the shame that overwhelmed you when you'd met up with Daejung later that day made it hard to look him in the eye. Fantasising about a man you had never seen before had felt as bad as cheating, and the various forms of him that had appeared in your dreams for the rest of the week only compounded your guilt.

August 4th 2018

Dear Seungcheol,

Happy 24th Birthday! It's actually shocking to me to think that we're this old already, but I think mid-20s is a label that suits you well these days. Jokes aside, I hope you have a really lovely day doing whatever it is you have planned. I'll assume you're off bungee jumping with Jeonghan or on an all-inclusive golfing retreat until you tell me otherwise. In all cases, I hope that you are surrounded by friends and family to remind you how special you are.

Also, congratulations on your new job! I can't believe you didn't tell me that you were interviewing for it, but I suppose you didn't want to jinx anything by putting it into writing. I always thought that coaching would suit you - you could scare me into coming to practice any day! You should be really proud of yourself; I know that I am.

You'll never guess who got in contact with me this week! All out of nowhere, I got a message from Heiran of all people inviting me to her and Hyunki's wedding! I guess I was really wrong about that one... For their sake, I hope that their relationship is a bit better than it was in school. I was very surprised to be invited seeing as we haven't spoken in years, but I suppose it'll be nice to see everyone from school again. Perhaps I should tell Daejung that he can't come and you can be my plus one instead - I think you know the couple better than he does!

Another one of my friends just gave birth to a baby boy. All of this marrying and birth-giving is really screwing with my head. As far as I was aware, that's a thing that proper adults do and we're nowhere close to that yet. Even if I know that 24 is a very common age to be doing that stuff, it's still more than my brain can process. Once again, I am left behind as everyone else moves on to the next stage of life. I'm grateful, at least, that Daejung is pretty relaxed about all of that stuff. Hoping we can have a few more years before we start thinking about any of it - I still have so much travelling to do, things to see, and meals to eat before I flush all of my money down the toilet.

Jiwoo got really excited this week because she thought she saw Lee Byunghun walking past her work, so that made me feel a bit better about my life priorities.

Yours truly,

(Y/n)

P.S. I'm spending extra money to make sure this gets to you on time, so if it doesn't you cannot blame me.

P.P.S. My new address is - XXX

That year you and Daejung had finally moved in together. The apartment was small and in a less-than-nice area, but you'd been ecstatic at the chance to live with the man you loved. It had been a rough year before that - Daejung had missed out on a job offer for his dream role and you weren't able to go abroad on an excavation because he didn't want you to leave for months just as you were moving in together - but you'd seen the new apartment as symbolic of the new beginning you two would get together.

You'd also thought a lot about meeting up with Seungcheol that year. Looking back, it was crazy that you never did. Both of you expressed a will to do so, but something had always prevented you from actually doing it. You were completing your postgraduate degree part-time and working a service job that was supporting both you and Daejung at the start of the year, moving in together in the middle of the year, and Seungcheol had gotten busy with his new job in the latter half of the year. Even though you had never met up before, that you weren't able to that year was the first time it felt like a loss.

December 12th 2019

Dear (Y/n),

I've been thinking about you a lot recently. Writing to you has been the highlight of my month for a while now, and I'm so proud of you for everything you've achieved. It's amazing that you're already being asked to go on your first excursion as a proper expert, and I hope that Daejung comes around to the idea of you being away for so long. I'm sure that I'll miss your letters so I can imagine he's feeling much worse about it - but that shouldn't stop you from going. You might find an ancient vase and accidently release a curse upon the world, or discover a new dinosaur! Even if you go and are just digging up dirt with no results, I'll still be impressed.

One of the kids I mentor asked me if I knew what Starcraft was yesterday, and at that moment I really felt my age. I think it's led to some level of introspection I usually avoid, but one thing that has become clear to me is that I'm very grateful for this friendship. I hope that one day soon you can perhaps travel to Daegu and visit, or I can come see you in Seoul. Or perhaps it will take away the great fun of having a pen pal if we meet - you may be expecting someone completely opposite from me and seeing me may ruin the magic?

But the main reason I've been thinking about you is because I finally finished Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. You were very correct in your recommendation - I can't believe it took me so long to read it! Summary of thoughts: I'm raging and also apologising to my mother and grandmother every time I see them. You have to send me another recommendation now that I'm finished - maybe some sort of mystery or thriller if you know any?

Yours,

Seungcheol

P.S. I suppose I should send you a whip and brown fedora and then you can officially say you're Indiana Jones. 

January 7th 2021

Dear Seungcheol,

I'm glad you had fun on your trip! The picture you sent of the mountains was absolutely gorgeous and was a hilarious reminder that I have no idea what you look like. I keep saying I want to go to Japan but can hardly find the time, but after seeing the picture I really must go now.

I have some big news.

Daejung proposed and we're getting married!! 

I know it's a bit out of the blue - I was surprised too. He's been putting off any mention of marriage for the last few months so I assumed he just wasn't interested but I guess that was all a cover to stop me from suspecting the proposal. It happened a few days after I got back from Vienna. It was really sweet - he threw this big party with all of our close friends and family to celebrate the end of my project and proposed at the end of the night. I was pretty shocked which I suppose was the point, but I'm really just excited that we're taking that step together.

My main purpose for writing is that I wanted to invite you to the wedding. It's a big step, but it wouldn't feel right to get married without one of my oldest friends there. If you decide you don't want to and you want to keep our friendship strictly on paper then I'd totally understand. But if you do want to come, we'd love to have you with us. I'll cover any travel and hotel fees if it means I can have you here.

Your continued support via letter means the world to me. 

Yours truly, 

(Y/n)

The wedding. Oh, the wedding.

A few nights before your wedding Daejung had come to the hotel you'd been staying in that week to finalise all of the preparations and observe some old-fashioned pre-wedding rituals your mother insisted on as if you and Daejung hadn't lived together for years before that. He'd given you a marriage gift a bit early because you were supposed to go straight to your honeymoon in Japan on the day of the wedding. Your heart fluttered in excitement as you opened the box, electrified at the surprise of what your future-husband could have gotten you to symbolise your union together. The reality had been, you could now admit, disappointing. The necklace had been pretty, and certainly not cheap. A silver heart set with a gleaming diamond to match the ring that Daejung had picked out for you. You'd smiled, thanking him for the gift and tried to ignore the discontent brewing in your own heart.

The first time you saw Seungcheol was at your wedding reception. Because of his job and the distance, he hadn't been able to make your morning ceremony, but the fact that he even chose to come all that way meant a lot to you.

"Who's the hunk with the green scarf?" One of your bridesmaids, Jiwoo had asked, pointing out a man standing alone by one of the drinks tables. 

For a moment you didn't want to believe that it was him, but who else would be at your wedding that you didn't recognise? Tall and broad with fluffy hair and a handsome-beyond-belief face, Seungcheol had been a picture to witness. All dressed up in a suit, you thought he looked rather like a super spy or a CEO from one of those corny romance books. In any case, you were shocked to your core that that was the man you'd spilt your darkest secrets to for over a decade now.

"Oh, I think that might be Seungcheol," You breathed, voice wavering with uncertainty even though you were now certain it was him.

"Seungcheol - hmm, why does that name sound so familiar?" Your other bridesmaid, Mirae, pondered, her brow crinkled as she tried to identify the name in her memory.

"Oh my god, you invited your pen pal to your wedding?!" Jiwoo exclaimed, spinning on her heel to give you an incredulous look. 

"Of course I did, I've known him for almost as long as I've known you!" You stuttered, your head still trying to play catch-up after the dizzying appearance of said topic of conversation.

"Why didn't you tell me that your pen pal was so hot?" Mirae scoffed, mock fanning her face in a way that made you feel shamefully irritated.

"Surprisingly, he didn't mention it in his letters." You responded, offering her a deadpan look and an eyebrow raise. She shrugged, but you'd known that wouldn't be the end of that conversation.

About 15 minutes later, you'd finally managed to make your way over to Seungcheol's perch. It was hard to decipher if your delay was because of all of the people trying to talk to you at the same time (perks of it being your wedding) or because of the unexplained fear and anxiety that was bubbling inside you at the prospect of finally meeting him face-to-face. As you finally made eye-contact, and he'd flashed his teeth at you in an infectious grin, you'd felt all of that melt away from you.

"Hi," You greeted, not able to wipe your own smile from your face.

"Hi," He responded, a peace settling between the two of you. "You look really beautiful."

Your face was all ablush and you felt a sense of dread at what would happen if you started like this. Starting down at your dress, you were unable to look back up at him.

"Thank you, I had it specially made," You smiled, your eyes gleaming as he chuckled at your joke. "I really appreciate you coming all this way, it means so much to me that you're here. Please let me know if there's anything you need - have you eaten yet? I can get you some-"

"It's okay, I'm feeling great." His hand reached out to still your own, which you hadn't realised was nervously picking at at skin around your nails.

"I can't believe that this is how we're first meeting," You breathed, a sense of shyness overwhelming you at the feeling of his skin against yours.

"If you ask me, we've definitely met before. Just not physically." His words had your head spinning so much that you were struggling to remember that you were both at your wedding.

"Poetic," You agreed, trying to present at least outwardly calmer than you felt inside. 

"Oh! Before I forget, I got you this." Seungcheol extended a hand out with a small, wrapped box in his palm. "It wasn't on the registry, and really it's only for you so I thought I should give it to you personally instead of putting it on the gifts table."

"That's really generous of you, you didn't have to." You offered him a shy smile, taking the gift from him. The neatly wrapped box had been laced shut with a pretty blue ribbon, and you remember the thumping of your heart in your chest as you undid it. A small gasp involuntarily left your mouth, your hand moving to cover it in shock. 

"Important backstory - I found it a few years after you told me you were looking for it. I wanted to just send it to you then, but I thought that I should keep it for when we met. I never thought that it would take so long to do so, but I hung on to it just in case."

A small chunk of dark meteorite sat in the box in your hand. Looking up and down between Seungcheol and the rock, you felt your eyes well up with tears that you had to force back down to not ruin your wedding makeup.

"Oh wow," Your voice cracked, "Seungcheol, this is seriously so sweet. I'm shocked that you kept this for me."

You felt unable to tell him all of your emotions, hoping that the gratitude in your eyes was enough to express them all to him. The sweet, adoring expression on his face told you that he understood without you needing to say any more.

That, unfortunately, had been the highlight of your wedding.

Not an hour later, it had all gone to shit, starting with a well-intentioned comment from your best friend.

"The wedding is so gorgeous (Y/n), I'll have to take notes for my own." Jiwoo gushed, pointing at all the flowers that had now been revealed as people moved into the outside area of the venue.

"I know, Daejung did a really good job picking out this place." 

"I'm so happy for you two, especially after the whole Vienna situation."

A bolt of alarm rang through your bones as you a struck still by the comment. You didn't miss the panicked look Mirae sent Jiwoo, who looked equally as confused as you felt.

"What-" You tried to compose yourself amongst the rushes of fear that were threatening to render you completely useful. "What do you mean the Vienna situation?"

Jiwoo was now floundering, looking between you and Mirae with a gaping mouth.

"I just meant - I mean, nevermind - I thought... I thought you knew?" The last whispered part had your heart sinking to the bottom of your chest. Mirae was refusing to meet your gaze, and that was telling you all you needed to know.

"Did something happen when I was away?" You demanded, your voice slick with emotion.

"(Y/n)..." Mirae started, but the withering look you gave her immediately stopped her placating.

Four words later and your entire life had exploded. He cheated on you. Whilst you were away, no less. And then, as if it would magically make everything better, proposed instead of telling you.

The look on your then-husband's face when you stormed up to him demanding to know the truth was enough to convince you of the reality of your friend's words. You could now admit, amidst all of the hurt, anger and disgust you felt towards Daejung at that moment, your overriding emotion was utter panic at the thought of having to tell all of your guests that the wedding was to be stopped and annulled. A trivial emotion amongst the personal grief you were experiencing, but undoubtedly the cause of your greatest distress at the moment.

You didn't see Seungcheol as or after it all happened. Any pretence of calm instantly slipped the moment you began speaking to your family and friends - a speech which ended with you in floods of tears being escorted away from the hosts of shocked guests. It was only hours later that you realised that you hadn't said goodbye and, worse, that you'd invited him all of this way just to witness the shitshow that was your failed marriage. Too ashamed to burden him further, you chose not to write to him for months afterwards He gave you space too, and you weren't sure if you felt grateful for it or utterly alarmed that he may just never want to speak to you again.

May 6th 2021

Dear Seungcheol,

I'm deeply sorry for my complete silence, although I suppose I do not need to explain to you the reason for it. My hand has been itching to pick up my pen and write to you every month that goes by, but only now have I overcome my own shame and disgrace to do so. First of all, I have to sincerely apologise for making you waste your time coming to such an awful event. I can only hope that you managed to get a slice of cake before it all fell apart so that I could at least offer you the condolence of a delicious snack. I also must apologise for completely abandoning you during your trip to the city. I was really looking forward to showing you my favourite spots, and I let my own misery get in the way of being a good host.

I hope you are well. As I haven't heard from you in a little while, I don't know what's going on with you so I have little to comment on. But, at the very least, I wish for your good health and general happiness. If you are worried about me, you don't need to be. I have taken the last few months to put my life back together, and I feel like I'm making better progress these days - hence the letter writing. I'm thinking of getting a dog for companionship since I have vehemently sworn off men for the foreseeable future.

I also wanted you to know that I treasure your gift. As it turns out, meeting you and getting a meteorite was the best part of that night, if you'll believe it. I have it kept in a special box on my desk just to make sure that it's safe and that I'll never lose it. I wish I could have given you something in return. If we end up meeting again I'll have to start planning now to make sure my gift is just as good as yours was. Speaking of, you are welcome to come and stay with me any time you want, and we can rain-check that city tour. Alternatively, if you want to ignore this letter and never speak to me again, I'd also understand.

Yours truly,

(Y/n) 2021

May 19th 2021

Dear (Y/n),

I'm so glad to have heard from you, and that you are doing okay. As much as I appreciate all of your apologies, none of them are necessary. If anything, I feel that I should be apologising to you for leaving you in the dark for just as long as you left me - you had a much better excuse too. Although I didn't want to overwhelm you with letters after such awful news, I realise now that leaving it so long was not the right course of action.

I think getting a dog is a fantastic idea. Company is something you'll never lack with a dog around, and I can agree that dogs are much better companions than men.

As for me, I am doing well too. It's mostly just been a cycle of work and sleep, so I haven't got much to report, but I'm hoping for a more eventful summer. Visiting the city would be a wonderful way to achieve this, so perhaps closer to the time I'll write again to arrange coming to stay with you. I would love to see you again soon. My only other news that I know you'd be interested in is that Jeonghan has seemingly met someone. He's keeping all of the details close to the chest, so I'll have to update you in the next letter when I know more, but it's an exciting revelation. He seems very happy, which is all I can hope for.

When I told you that I wouldn't stop writing to you until I could no longer hold a pen in my hand, I meant it. I hope that you will never again think that I wouldn't want to speak to you -it's the highlight of my day.

Yours,

Seungcheol

P.S. I'm sure you don't want to talk about the wedding, but just so you know - he was a fucking fool to let you go.

You remember the relief you'd felt at getting that letter. The uncertainty of whether or not Seungcheol still wanted to talk to you was enough to keep you on edge for the entire 13 days that it took for you to get his response. But, as always, your friend was reliably there for you.

The time you'd taken over those last new months, and the few months afterwards had been tumultuous, but cleansing. In your post-marriage clarity, you'd realised all of the opportunities you'd missed because of Daejung. Deciding that you wouldn't let him take anything else from you, you'd arranged to go on a long excursion you'd waved off for wedding planning when you'd first heard about it. Learning about the project from one of your old professors who'd transferred to Cairo University, you were offered a position on the ongoing expedition in Saqqara. Although Egyptology was not your speciality, your master's dissertation on the mummified scarab beetles found at Saqqara in 2018 and your tutor's reference got you onto a low-level position on the expedition.

Six months in Egypt had been exactly what you needed to move on from Daejung. At that time, your relationship with your closest friends was also on the rocks, and it was really only Seungcheol and your family that you missed during your time abroad.

December 23rd 2021

Dear Seungcheol,

I've finally got some time off over the holiday break, and I'm ready to give you the download of everything that's happening here in Saqqara! But, first, I'm going to have to beg you for the details of your double date with Jeonghan and Jooyeon. How was it!? Was Jooyeon's friend nice? Were there sparks? How many times did Jeonghan bring up embarrassing stories about you as a kid?

I hope it went well - you deserve all of the happiness in the world.

Now, onto the important stuff!

I'm not sure if you saw on the news, but we've made some pretty huge finds since I got here, Obviously, I can't give myself all the credit, but just being part of the team that made it happen is pretty incredible. We've found multiple tombs of dignitaries from the reign of Ramses II. I'm doing a bit of research on one of the tombs, belonging to a military leader called Hor Mohib, but I have to keep taking breaks every 20 minutes to pinch my arm and remind myself that this is reality.

My Arabic has gotten significantly better now - I was rather rusty when I first got here. I'm able to have reasonably complex conversations with the Egyptian members of the team and the locals helping out, and it's pretty cool for my nerd brain to be surrounded by a group of people equally as excited to be digging up ornamental graves as I am.

I'm really glad I came. It's hard to admit, even to you, but my life really fell apart after the wedding. Honestly, I didn't even know if I wanted to keep working in archaeology or if I wanted to jet off to Iceland and buy a farm. And the worst bit is that it's been so lonely since. Losing Daejung was one thing, but I haven't spoken to Jiwoo or Mirae since. I can't bear to look at them knowing that they hid that secret from me for so long. Maybe one day I'll be able to forgive them, but it certainly won't be now. Your letters have been my only sanctuary of human connection in these past few months, and that's something I'll have to add to my list of neverending gratitude I hold for you.

I realize now that I haven’t been very good at expressing how much your friendship means to me, how it's been my lifeline in this mess. Your letters are the only constant, the only thing that feels like home even when I am surrounded by ancient wonders and new colleagues.

And so, I have a confession. I want to see you again. I want to tell you all of this in person. I can't say what will come of it, but I know that after all of these years, after all the letters and confessions and secrets shared, we owe it to ourselves to meet in a way that isn't rushed or overshadowed by anything else.

Maybe we could meet halfway between Seoul and Daegu, or I could take the train down to visit you? I need to see you again, not as a guest at my ruined wedding, but as Seungcheol, the one person who’s known me at my best and worst, and still chooses to write back.

Let me know what you think.

Yours truly, 

(Y/n)

P.S. I've included a small rock I found on the dig - nothing special but it reminded me of our old conversations. I hope it makes you smile.

P.P.S. Please don't feel pressured to say yes, but know that I would really like to see you again.

You can't quite recall what possessed you to write such a bold letter. Perhaps it had been the desert sun, the thrill of discovering something new in something old at Saqqara, or simply your immense loneliness.

Days had turned into weeks as you anxiously waited for a response, checking your makeshift mailbox daily. Then one morning, there it was—a simple white envelope with Seungcheol’s familiar sloping handwriting.

January 17th 2022

My Dear (Y/n),

I've thought about meeting you countless times since our first encounter. After reading your words, I realise that I've been waiting for this just as much as you have. How's this - I'll take the first train up to Seoul when you're back and we can spend the day together. No distractions, no interruptions - just you and me, finally getting to know each other beyond the pages of our letters.

I'm looking forward to me, more than I can express. Until I see you again, take care, and know that I'm counting down the days.

All yours,

Seungcheol

P.S. the best bit about the date was spending time with Jeonghan. No more needs to be said.

You stare down at the letter, your heart pacing as fast as it had the first time you'd received it. Beautiful words from a beautiful man with a beautiful soul.

You'd gotten back to Seoul by the end of March 2022, and, as promised, Seungcheol came to visit you that first weekend in April. When he'd stepped off the train in the bustling station at the heart of the city, you were there to greet him. You'd spotted him standing there, taller even than you'd remembered, with that same easy smile that had always leapt off of the page.

The world around you had seemed to blur as you walked toward each other, nerves fluttering in your stomach but quickly dissolving as he pulled you into a gentle, lingering hug. The connection between you, once confined to words on paper, felt more real than ever.

You spent the day wandering through the city, visiting old bookstores, sipping coffee in quiet cafes, and talking as if no time had passed since that fateful wedding reception. Every shared laugh, every story swapped, deepened the bond you'd forged in ink.

June 14th 2022

Seungcheol,

It feels like only yesterday that we were wandering through Seoul together, but at the same time, it feels like a lifetime ago. I keep finding myself replaying that day in my mind - how easy it was to talk to you in person, as if we'd done it a hundred times before. It's strange, isn't it? How someone can feel so familiar, even when they're a whole new experience at the same time.

I've been thinking about our conversation in the bookstore. You said something about how some stories are better left unfinished, that sometimes the best part of a tale is imagining what could be. I can't stop thinking about that - about how some stories do need an ending, and how others are meant to keep going, even if we don’t know where they’ll lead.

There's something I've been meaning to tell you, but I haven't found the right words yet. I guess I'm still figuring it out myself. It's just that being around you feels different to how I expected. There's a comfort, yes, but also something more, something I can't quite define. It's like we're on the edge of something new, and it's exciting and a little terrifying at the same time. I'm not sure if you feel it too, but I hop you do.

Anyway, I don't want to get too ahead of myself as usual. I'm just really glad we've reconnected, and that we've managed to keep in touch after all these years. 

It means more to me than I can say. Let’s make sure our next meeting isn’t too far off—I’m already looking forward to it.

Until then, take care of yourself, and don’t work too hard. I’ll be watching the clock until I see you again.

Yours, 

(Y/n)

That day in April 2022 hadn't been the last time you saw Seungcheol. You'd made that mistake once in the past, and neither of you was willing to do so again. He continued to come to Seoul to see you, and you travelled down to Daegu to meet him and his friends. Your letters ceased for a while over this time due to the frequency you were seeing each other, but for the first time that didn't bother you.

You remember, with teary eyes, the day that you finally confessed your feelings.

It was 25th September 2022, after a whole summer spent together, and the air was tinged with the first hint of autumn's chill. THe leaves were just beginning to turn, painting the streets in warm hues of amber and crimson as you walked side by side in a quiet part in Seoul. The easy laughter and conversation that had marked your friendship over the years felt heavier that day, as it something unspoken was lingering in the crisp air between you.

You had spent countless days together that summer - visiting museums, trying new restaurants, even embarking on a spontaneous week trip to the coast. Each moment with Seunngchaeol had felt like a dream, a slow realisation that your heart was no longer just content with friendship. But with that realization came a fear you hadn't expected. What if this was enough for him? What if risking everything by confessing how you truly felt would unravel the beautiful bond you had spent so many years cultivating?

That evening, as the sun dipped low on the horizon, casting long shadows across the park, you found yourselves sitting on a bench overlooking a small pond. The water was still, reflecting the fiery colours of the sky, and for a long moment, neither of you spoke. Seungcheol had been quieter than usual that day, his expression pensive as if he, too, was wrestling with unspoken thoughts.

You felt your heart pound in your chest, each beat louder than the last as you tried to summon the courage to speak. The words were caught in your throat, but the fear of losing him if you didn’t say them was stronger. Finally, unable to hold it in any longer, you turned to him, your voice trembling as you broke the silence.

"Seungcheol," you began, your hands nervously fidgeting in your lap. He turned to look at you, his eyes soft and attentive, encouraging you to continue. "There’s something I need to tell you… something I’ve been feeling for a while now."

His gaze didn’t waver, but you noticed the slight hitch in his breath, the way his fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the bench. The world seemed to shrink to just the two of you, everything else fading away as you gathered your thoughts.

"I—" You paused, trying to find the right words, but there were none that seemed adequate to express the depth of your feelings. "I think I’ve fallen in love with you."

The admission hung in the air between you, a fragile confession that you could no longer take back. For a moment, time seemed to stop, the world holding its breath as you waited for his response. You searched his face for any sign of what he might be thinking, every second feeling like an eternity.

Then, without a word, Seungcheol reached out, his hand gently cupping your cheek, his thumb brushing away the tear that had escaped down your cheek. There was a tenderness in his touch, a warmth that radiated through you, calming your racing heart.

"I’ve been waiting to hear those words," he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "Because I’ve been feeling the same way for a long time too."

His words washed over you, a wave of relief and joy so overwhelming that you felt your breath hitch. You had been so afraid, so uncertain, and now, with his quiet confession, all those fears melted away. He leaned in slowly, giving you time to pull back if you needed to, but you didn’t. You closed the distance between you, your lips meeting his in a gentle, tender kiss that felt like a promise—one of many yet to come.

Hearing the doorbell ring down below you, and the sound of your husband's voice calling out to say he'll get it, you rush forward to reach your favourite letter - just one more before you return to reality.

November 3rd 2023

My dearest (Y/n),

I'm so glad you're having such a good time in Rome - I'm rather jealous of all of your sightseeing and pasta-eating. Kkuma and I are holding the fort down at home, although I had to be scolded yesterday for breaking the toaster when I tried to make Kkuma some breakfast. I sent some more suncream over in the mail because I know you've already run out and forgotten to get some more - I'm not sure if this letter will reach you first, but if it does look out for the parcel.

Now, I'll admit, the main purpose of my letter is something a little different than simply catching up, as much as I love those letters too. I thought about doing this once you returned home, but you've already had one man declare his everlasting intentions to you after you returned from an excursion, so I thought it better to avoid rehashing those memories (we'll do this again when you're home, but I thought it might be fun to do it this way).

If you have the suncream box already, then you may have a sneaking suspicion of what I'm about to say.

I've loved you for as long as I've known you. As a twelve-year-old kid, I didn't know that was what it was, but the level of obsession I had with writing to you and receiving your replies was beyond any normal friendship. You were always so fascinatingly cool, out of reach, and genuinely yourself. Being in love with your pen pal isn't always an easy thing - the cold sweats I would wake up to after dreaming about meeting for the first time, the constant updates about a life that I wasn't a part of, the announcement of your engagement to another person. I tried to pretend it wasn't real for a long time, see other people, because of how silly I felt about being in love with someone I'd never met.

And then I saw you standing there, in that beautiful white gown with your hair up and that gorgeous smile on your face. Did you know that my hands were sweating when I gave you that gift? I don't think I've ever told you that before. I became certain then that I was completely screwed. Entirely head over heels.

I'll never be happy that that marriage didn't work out for you - all I've ever wanted is your happiness, be that with me or someone else. But I won't lie and say that nothing has made me happier than the consequences of it.

This past year has been the happiest time I've ever known. Every moment with you is filled with such joy, and every moment without I'm left with a record of memories to remind me of the time we've had together. When I look at you, I don't just see my past, but also my future. I see a lifetime of shared experiences, of laughter, or quiet moments that mean more than words ever could. I see us growing old together, supporting each other, and playing trash hockey on the wooden floor of our kitchen.

You are my best friend, my partner, the love of my life. And I want to spent every day making sure you know just how much you mean to me.

So, that being said, will you (Y/n) (Y/l/n), do me the honour of marrying me?

All yours,

Seungcheol

P.S. Please don't feel pressured to say yes, but know that I would really like it if you did.

You fiddle with the precious ring on your left hand, your fingers lingering over the smooth chunk of dark stone in the centre.

A gentle brush of a hand on your shoulders brings you back to the real world, tears now flaking on your cheeks as you sniffle at the words on the page.

"Are you okay, darling?" Seungcheol asks gently.

"Yes, sorry, I know the guests are here now - I just wanted to look at these," You reply, holding up the letters for your husband to see.

You watch his expression soften, a suggestion of moisture in the corner of his eyes as he looks over the written words.

Swooping down, he places a long, loving kiss on your forehead, letting your bodies rest together in harmony for a moment.

"I can't believe they still make me cry," You huff, letting out a soft laugh. "And I don't even think I can brush it off as hormones."

"Seeing that just looking at them has me tearing up, I don't think I can either." Seungcheol smiles, stroking the back of your hair affectionately.

"They're probably getting antsy downstairs, right?" You say, beginning to pile the letters back up into the box.

Standing up, you lean forward to press all of your passion and adoration onto your husband's lips. You can feel his intensity matching yours, his hands finding the side of your hips to keep you stable.

"They can wait," Seungcheol replies, his forehead leaning softly against your own. "They're not the ones who are pregnant after all."

You laugh, a sound filled with both joy and contentment, feeling the warmth of his love surrounding you. "I suppose you're right," you say, a smile spreading across your face. You take one last glance at the box of letters, a testament to the incredible journey you've both shared—one that began with innocent childhood exchanges and blossomed into a love story more profound than you could have ever imagined.

Hand in hand, you and Seungcheol make your way downstairs to greet your guests, the letters safely tucked away in their satin box. As you step into the room, you know that no matter what the future holds, you'll always have those words, those memories, and most importantly, each other.

[sairenharia]

Why Chloe Deserved A Miraculous

Its a thought that's been stewing in my head and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was true. Chloe was entitled to a Miraculous.

From a Doylist Perspective.

When there is conversations of if Chloe was entitled to a Miraculous is always presented from a Watsonian perspective. For those who don't know, Watsonian means the perspective of someone inside the story. A character. Doylist is the perspective of those in the real world. The author and audience.

The problem I see from fandom discourse is how often people don't actually consider the tools in a story. Often they take a Watsonian perspective, talk about what is right and sensible and should be how things work if this was a real situation. But the thing about stories is they have messages. They have tools and metaphors and themes to help display these messages. Sure, shows are about entertainment, but a story always has some kind of point. It may not be a moral lesson, it may not be some grand philosophy, but any story worth telling says SOMETHING. It takes a stance. The Fast and the Furious is all about doing cool stunts with cars, but it also has a message of doing things for family because if you just want to see cool car stunts, just go watch cool car stunts, but no, people want at least a little humanity in the car stunts, so there is a message of family. Sharing is caring, do your best, the heat death of the universe comes for us all, the messages can be vast, but there's some point of emotional reality to invest us in this specific media.

If we talk about Chloe and the Miraculous from a Watsonian perspective, no, she is not entitled to a Miraculous. No one is entitled to an object of power. Not even Marinette nor Adrien are entitled to their Miraculous.

But superpowers aren't real. Superpowers have always been a tool to emphasize a point. The stories of superman only focused on his powers are boring, but when you tell stories of how he tries to fit into a world that is not made for him, stories of how much he loves this world despite how easy it could be to be cruel, it gets interesting. The reason superhero comics started is there was a want to show that there can be incredibly powerful people who choose to be good. To choose to make the world a better place.

Superpowers made just to be cool and show off are boring. There is only so much you can watch a fight with a cool power before it gets dull and repetitive. But you relate the powers, the struggles of using the powers, to the person wielding them, the story has a lot more staying power. The powers say something about the person, and is part of their development.

And honestly, Miraculous is a good case for why this is important.

Because good god, most of the superhero team is boring.

And I don't just mean because they're good people, so there's no spice, though that's also true, but because the powers aren't really used to emphasize anything about the character. Max has portals. Why? His mom wants to be an astronaut, but we never really hear about Max wanting to travel. Doorman is a better example of a portal hero because he loves going to other places and learning about them.

Now portals are good for a tactician....except Max is never the tactician despite the fact we know he's brilliant and is good at video games. He just does as he's told by Ladybug for where he should put his portals. Its so close, but its not utilized.

And that is the case for most of the superheroes. Like the bones are there, but nothing is properly utilized. Sabrina is definitely a dog, good at getting things, and is in fact well practiced in recognizing what things may or may not be important. But we've never actually gotten to focus on her BEING a superhero, she only had a small cameo with the power, basically. Same with Ivan, really. They're pretty perfect for their powers and it suits their personalities, but none of it is EXPLORED. And that's the case with most of the heroes.

Juleka and Rose were pretty good at using the Miraculous to develop more of someone's character and emphasize a strength about another in turn. These are good hero episodes because we learned more about them and their journey.

Kagami's first episode with the dragon showed off more of her, such as she could be reckless, which is new information, but we learn a lot about her without it, and nothing new beyond that.

Luka could have actually been incredibly good because the snake both emphasizes a big part of him, and something he needs to work on. Luka is someone who steps back and watches. He observes. However, he has a problem where he often is too willing to step back. But with the snake needs someone who can observe AND act. So its a Miraculous that uses an important part of his personality, but could have also helped him grow.

And the rest are just...nothing.

There is a little for Nino and Alya. Nino is definitely more bold about defending his friends than he was at first, and Alya learns to be better about secrets, but these are the primary secondary heroes. We should have seen a ton of impact and development due to them having the Miraculous.

Here is the stance Miraculous should be taking in their story.

The desperation of those trapped and the power of being given good options.

Most of the Akumas are people who are trapped. They feel powerless. They are desperate to escape their problem and feel like they have no proper recourse with things are they are. How accurate this is varies, but this is how they feel in the moment, and that is what Gabriel preys on. These people agree to the deal because they don't feel like they will be helped any other way.

Ladybug and Chat Noir are meant to bring hope to those who felt hopeless and chose a terrible way to try and escape. They are support. They are a hand people desperately need.

So by that same token, the Miraculous should be a good way for people who feel trapped to be given an option, OR give those people the ability to extend their own hands to help others.

While it doesn't have to every time, it should often be the case those who are given a Miraculous; A, dealing with a huge problem and the Miraculous helps them solve that problem, regardless to the Akuma being related. Like if Juleka was working on trying to speak up even if the Akuma wasn't her parents and the Tiger still helped her do that. B, they are related to the Akuma and why they feel trapped, so they are working through their own issues with the important person. Like Rose when Juleka felt guilty. Or C, the person wants to find a way to help in general and kind of go how it went with Nino becoming Carapace. Where they were trying to be that hand a person needed, and earn the Miraculous, and that helps them on their journey to provide more support and help.

But its often it is someone they know, but them being the hero doesn't REALLY matter. Penalteam, the people were just there, these specific people didn't matter. Why did Zoe need to be Vesperia? Anyone could have taunted Chloe and she got turned into a banana real fast, her being the Bee didn't really bring a lot, to the bee, to her, or even to Chloe, and then she proceeded to just not bring much as the Bee, to the story, or herself.

Now part of this problem is that Marinette is not allowed to not learn a lesson, and has to be the one to save the day. These heroes do have skills. They have things they could be good at. But often....the plan is just what Marinette says. These heroes are not allowed to have agency.

They can't make decisions on their own.

Often times, they're just bodies being told to do the power without the ability to make the decision how and when. Sometimes they let the heroes do things and make decisions, but nine times out of ten, its Marinette who says who does what and when and her mental health is degrading because of it.

The Akumas are stories that always at least tell us something about the person because we see what problems hit them hard. There is something to learn, a bit of conflict to develop from.

The Miraculous should be following that trend, but in a positive way, but...doesn't.

All that being said.

Chloe was entitled to the Miraculous.

Because here is the stance Miraculous takes.

Someone is trapped in a situation and chooses to lash out violently and while that violence can not be permitted to continue, the heroes offer their support so the victim can feel like they have another option.

This is the story of Miraculous crystalized. People who feel alone and helpless are easily convinced to hurt others until someone is willing to help them despite this harm.

Chloe is the story of Miraculous.

Akumas are a metaphor.

And Chloe is the reality.

A child who is alone. Who feels trapped in her situation. Who doesn't know what else to do. So she does the only thing she knows how. She lashes out. She hurts people. She keeps them distant because then it doesn't hurt as much when they leave, or when they treat her like dirt.

Chloe is an Akuma personified, but her problems are brief moments. They're not a bad day that someone took advantage of. They are ever present and continuous and more over, reinforced to continue.

Chloe knows being a brat gets her what she wants from her father and was never taught to not be like that. Because he didn't discipline her, because her mother acted like that, because all adults around her was staff. Making demands is what she was TAUGHT and learned, through observation and guidance.

A behavior she continued to do with kids, and she found out teachers responded to the same threats and was never properly stopped. Other kids, reasonably, didn't want to deal with her, or submitted to her like Sabrina.

Chloe was not never taught how to be good. She was, in fact, very much taught to NOT be good. Her parents both set a terrible example. Her father is a corrupt politician. He may spoil her, but he we know he bribes and blackmails people, plus, you know, abandoned his daughter and technically kidnapped Zoe. This is not a paragon of a man. Then there was her mother. But she had a choice, listen to the man who had to weasel and cheat and play back handed games to get what he wanted, or the woman who got anything and everything she wanted...of course she would try to be the woman who seemed to get everything her way.

Because if her mother got everything she wanted, if Chloe was like her, maybe she could get everything SHE wanted.

Except it wasn't working.

But Chloe wasn't taught it was because she was cruel. She just started to believe she wasn't GOOD ENOUGH.

Maybe if she was as great as her mother, it would work.

By the time she would be old enough to recognize that wasn't how the world worked...well, by then, most of her peers hated her.

And here is something I think goes under the radar about Zoe.

Zoe knows how to act like Chloe. Audrey didn't blink at it. Zoe defaulted to the same behavior as Chloe. Zoe said she put on an act and she was tired of it.

Zoe WAS CHLOE.

And we know what happened with Zoe. Zoe stopped acting like Chloe. And then she got bullied. People were mean and cruel and put cockroaches in her locker and she only had one friend.

I'm sure that's why Zoe moved to Paris. Zoe went to her mom because she wanted a clean slate. She wanted the bullying to stop.

Even then, she struggled to stop. She defaulted to her habit, and we see that she CONTINUED the act around the hotel for some weeks after, because it was a hard habit to break.

But then...

Zoe got support. A hand was held out to her. Marinette gave her a chance, and so did everyone else, and Zoe took it because she wanted to be herself and she wanted to stop being cruel. Of course she's nice. She was given the space to be so.

Chloe is never given that support.

Chloe doesn't know how to be kind. She doesn't know how to be nice.

But the greatest tragedy is Chloe does know how to be GOOD.

Out of all the heroes, besides Chat, to a lesser degree Alya, and Alix and Luka by nature of their Miraculous, Chloe shows the most agency as a superhero. All the other heroes have their hands held by Ladybug. She tells them what to do, to an overly specific degree, and they are just bodies to use a tool. Chloe? Chloe acts on her own. To good and bad effect. Discounting the whole Queen Wasp break down, just when Chloe is actually acting as a superhero, she doesn't wait for Ladybug to tell her everything all the time. She calls out to her father, which was a mistake, but then there is every other time she's Queen Bee...

And she's fantastic at it.

Miraculer, she almost had Mayura's Miraculous.

Star Train, she gets people away from the Akuma.

In Bakerix, she's the last the to leave the train car.

In Ladybug, she's defending Sabrina.

In Style Queen, played Style Queen in an effort to find a way to save Adrien.

In Heroes Day, she is a great teammate. Keep in mind, everyone on the team knows who Chloe is. Ladybug was desperate and doesn't fully trust Chloe as a general rule. Rena Rouge and Carapace definitely don't trust her at all. Chat Noir is the only one who believes in Chloe as a person.

And yet, throughout the entire fight, Chloe is keeping up and picking up the slack with everyone else. She fights, she keeps civilians from being hurt, her synergy is on fire despite the lack of trust. When Rena Rouge and Carapace go down, she is quick to try and protect them and even after two EXTREMELY dangerous Akuma show up by way of her parents, who are both gunning for her real hard, she holds her own for a while and even then, she had to be mind controlled to stop and to feel negative emotions. It took FOUR AKUMAS gunning for her specifically to corrupt her, akums who are made to mess her up mentally to boot. When they confront Gabriel at the end, she prepares venom without being asked, to have a back up for taking him down. She makes decisions and when she was trusted to act as a hero, they are largely good ones.

And she never once complained about the mental hardship of what she went through. Because that's the thing, all her times as Queen Bee are super intense. They are her loved ones she's fighting, they are incredibly powerful Akumas. She fought a frickin' army.

And everyone...

Just insults her.

She risked her life for people and no one cared.

She fought her family and no one cared.

Chloe doesn't know how to be nice. Nor kind. But she was so good. And while the next day, people appreciated her, it was only a day.

And the tragedy is Chloe didn't immediately go back to being a bully. After Despair Bear, Chloe's bullying habits took an extreme nose dive. We only see her being unreasonably cruel a few times. After Maledikator, the only time is when she bullies Aurore and when she teamed up with Marinette, but also Marinette was with her and they were both doing it for fear of losing Adrien reasons. Not reasonable, but also not just to be cruel and honestly, her plan was fairly benign. She wanted Kagami to leave, not even humiliate her. And even Aurore is because Chloe was reaching the point she did in Miraculer where she was doubting Ladybug's trust in her and as she is want to do, she lashed out.

Most of the time when we see Chloe, what we see is her bragging about being Queen Bee. Which, sure, isn't a great thing...

But better a braggart than a bully. And when things go wrong, she tries to use her status to help reassure and guide people, which is actually a pretty good idea. Akumas are attracted to negative emotions. If she can reassure them, then less likely of them getting akumatized. It may be bragging, but it could help.

Chloe may not have been picture perfect nice, but we literally have an entire classroom full of perfectly nice people. She may not be humble, but bragging is not a damnable offense. But Chloe was legitimately trying to be a better person. She put herself in between others and danger. She had faith and belief that there were solutions. Even without the Miraculous, she tried to help people.

She may have wanted appreciate and gratitude for it, but what's even sadder is she didn't require it.

Chloe believed in Ladybug for a long time. She believed Ladybug would trust her again. She believed she could be given a Miraculous again, and all on her own, ALL ON HER OWN, she was trying to be a better person.

Its actually amazing how good Chloe was being despite the fact no one was helping her.

Because that is the thing.

Zoe got support and help.

Chloe didn't.

Every. Single. Time. Chloe tried to do something different, something not cruel, she is rejected. She tries to join the art club and she's mocked out of it. She tries to be class representative, a job no one else wanted for years, and she loses it as soon as someone did challenge her. She auditions, legitimately, for a music video, with eight years of practice, and she loses it because she isn't nice enough.

She stops bullying, tries to be a reassuring presence, and she is treated with suspicion and derision.

And still.

And STILL.

That isn't what breaks her.

What breaks her is the realization the only time where her efforts were appreciated was taken away. And even then, she holds onto the pieces. Holds onto hope that maybe she would be given a new chance.

Her parents are in danger. The reason she was given she couldn't be a hero is because she and her loved ones would be in danger.

Except her loved ones were in danger.

She was in danger.

Not having a Miraculous didn't change anything. It didn't keep them safe, it didn't keep her safe.

And its only then, after months of no one believing in her for more than two days, of no one holding out their hand, helping her, supporting her, believing her, with the one person she thought DID believe in her proved that she didn't believe in her, and couldn't even give her the safety that not having a Miraculous was supposed to bring.

For months, Chloe only thought Ladybug believed she could be good.

Adrien wanted her to be less cruel, but Chloe knew her being good wasn't necessary for him.

Nor was it for Sabrina.

But Ladybug?

Ladybug needed her to be good to believe in her, and she thought Ladybug did.

Chloe was able to largely bite back her desires to lash out at people based purely on the fact one person, ONE SINGULAR PERSON, needed her to be good, and believed in her ability to be so. It got her derision. It got her suspicion. It got people comparing her to villains. It got her dismissal. But she still tried. She still believed.

A person who didn't really believe in Chloe very much.

And there is also the Watsonian argument that Marinette doesn't owe it to Chloe to help her improve AND THIS IS INCREDIBLY VALID and honestly, in a perfect world, it would be great if it was Adrien who helped Chloe improve.

Or you know, Zoe. Someone who has a clean slate with Chloe and understands where she's coming from and could help her.

But no, this is the Marinette Has To Solve Everything Show.

So from a Doylist view, it IS Marinette who has to help Chloe, but also the Watsonian problem could be helped if it was CLEARLY ESTABLISHED that Marinette knows she doesn't HAVE to help Chloe, and people aren't pressuring her to do so (coughBustiercough) because that is a bad message...

But Marinette can CHOOSE to help her and make that clear.

Because Marinette has seen a lot of Chloe and could understand that she really does just need a little more help. That Chloe needed just a bit more support and help. And, you know, didn't actively encourage Chloe to please her abuser.

But we're going from the Doylist view and we can solve the Marinette being the one to help Chloe problem by not having it be Marinette, but LADYBUG.

And this?

This is why I say Chloe was entitled to a Miraculous.

Because Chloe is the reality of the stance of the show, and so helping her problem with the metaphors would go a long way.

You see, Chloe doesn't know Ladybug is Marinette. And Marinette knows being Ladybug means being the bigger person. Ladybug believes in people. Ladybug helps everyone she can. Its not about the victim helping their bully, its the superhero choosing to help someone who NEEDS HELP.

Chloe is stuck in her situation. Her mother will always be emotionally abusive. Her father will always be an enabler. She can try to change, but no one will BELIEVE in her change. She will be derided and mocked and treated poorly because no one is willing to give her the chance to grow, and they certainly won't help.

Frankly, its a miracle that Chloe's Akumas are so merciful.

Because Banana Queen is the most destructive of Chloe's Akuma forms. Most of Chloe's Akuma forms don't care about HURTING people. They care about WINNING. She either wants to win or for people to just listen to her.

But give Chloe the Bee Miraculous, and suddenly things change.

Chloe feels like she has OPTIONS as Queen Bee. She doesn't feel she has to meet her mother's expectations as much if she's Queen Bee. She has people who trust and depend on her. At least right after she saves people, she gets a little praise, a little belief.

And people may say being a hero for glory and attention is a bad thing, but the thing is, Chloe's need for glory and attention is about being ACKNOWLEDGED. As feeling like people value and care about her. This is a BASIC HUMAN NEED and she doesn't know another way to get it. Its not like she's demanding physical things for her heroics.

She just wants to be appreciated.

By giving Chloe a Miraculous, she is given the tools to try and be good. She is given an escape from her situation. She is given SUPPORT in her efforts because the other heroes have to support her.

And over time...

That trust will grow.

Because what Chloe doesn't know, all her classmates are the other heroes.

And suddenly, all her classmates will see her as a different person. They will see what she's like when the chips are down. How much effort she's willing to put in. How seriously she takes the job.

Is she still a braggart? Sure. Is she still rude as hell? Absolutely.

But she will risk it all to help people, without asking for anything in return except a little faith.

Chloe is entitled to a Miraculous.

Because her story without a Miraculous is a story of a little girl who no one wanted to help, who were unwilling to offer her help because she lashed out while trying to survive a situation she couldn't escape, and because it wasn't super charged by a terrorist, she was deemed unworthy of it and instead deserving of isolation and constant emotional abuse.

But with a Miraculous?

Chloe is a girl who, when given a little faith, a little trust, a little help, returned it tenfold. Who puts her all in trying to be the best hero she could be. Is she imperfect? Sure. But she's giving it her all. (And frankly, she's spicy and it makes for entertaining character dynamics. You can have a character be a jerk and good, tsunderes are popular for a reason.) And as she gets more trust, as she gets more help, as she is offered that hand of help over and over again, she would continue to improve.

And as she's given power, she uses that same faith to figure out how to offer her hand to others. To help them. To spare them the same pain she suffered.

Because that is what given to the Akuma victims. They are given a little help, and a little power to break free of their magically abusive mindsets.

To have someone go from the continuing the cycle of abuse to someone who would save other people from that?

That is a real superhero story.

Chloe is undeserving from a Watsonian perspective.

But she's so very deserving from a Doylist perspective.

[naturesapphic]

jw x r fluff req : sikowitz ships them and they’re always together in partner projects etc

The perfect play

Jade west x fem!reader

Warnings: cussing, fluff

A/n: this is from episode 7 season 3

“All right! Now let’s talk about the new play im directing!” Sikowitz says with a creepy smile on his face. “Do I get to star in it?” Jade asks and Andre immediately gets defensive. “Uh I think it’s mine turn to star in it.” Andre argues and then everyone starts to argue and get into a hissy fit while you just sat there playing with your hands. Jade sees this and gives you her keys to play with so you don’t pick your nails or skin. Sikowitz sees this and makes a mental note of it. He secretly ships you and Jade together and with his new play he’s making, he knows just how to spice things up.

“This time, you people will choose your own roles.” Sikowitz says as he grabs a little box and hands it to Andre and beck. They are playing as twins and Andre makes a funny comment about how the mom has some explaining to do which made everyone laugh. Sikowitz makes a annoying car sound and stops by jade and she picks “Walter swain. Loving husband of Nancy.” She said blankly. Then sikowitz makes more noises as he goes over to you and puts the box in front of your face. You put your hand inside the box and picked out a piece of paper that read “Nancy swain. Loving wife of Walter swain.” You read out loud.

You felt your cheeks heat up and you look over at Jade who still had a blank look on her face as she looked at you. You didn’t notice but when sikowitz walked away he had a big smile on his face as he was hoping that his plan will work. For the next past few days you and Jade have been hanging out so y’all could rehearse. You started to see a side of jade that you didn’t even think beck saw and you were grateful for it. Jade behind all of her tough and scary exterior was really just a hurt girl who just wants love and to be treated right. Jade and you were putting on y’all’s costumes before the play when sikowitz came over. “Are y’all ready? We will be starting in two minutes. Y’all got this!” He said quickly and yelled at cat to get him his coconut.

You walked out with Andre and beck onto the stage and started it the play. All eyes were on you and you definitely started to feel the nerves and pressure of it all now, but it went away when you heard the car door sound come on, signaling that Jade will be coming out. A few more minutes into the play and it was about over, Jade did the part where she pretends to fall asleep on your chest and she puts her full body weight onto you. “Honey? Wake up.” You say softly as jade shoots up looking around crazily “blastoff!” She exclaimed. “No. No you were saying I’m so…” you started and Jade cuts you off “oh right. You’re so good, gentle…how can you love a sleepy loser like me?!” She exclaimed and looked up dramatically. “You are no sleepy loser. You’re an astronaut.” You said lovingly as you hold onto her arm as you look at her with so much love in your eyes. “I love you.” Jade says as she looks deep into your eyes.

“I love you.” You replied and the scene was that you were supposed to hug but what you weren’t expecting was Jade to grab you by your waist and crash her lips onto yours. You kissed her back as you heard clapping and cheering in the background. The both of you pulled away and grabbed each others hands and bent forward. Out of the corner of your eye you see sikowitz clapping and cheering y’all on like a crazy person. The curtains were rolled, covering the stage and you looked at Jade once more. “Did you do that for the show or did you actually mean it…” you asked Jade, hoping that you will get the answer you are hoping for. “I meant it. Go on a date with me…please?” She silently begged at the end which made you smile because you know that THE Jade west never begs. “Of course we can. How about now since the play is over?” You said as you grabbed her hand and Jade followed you out of the school building to your car. You were gonna thank sikowitz later.

A/n: sorry anon that this took so long but I hope you enjoyed this! And I hope the rest of y’all enjoyed it too! Remember to stay hydrated and to rest! I love y’all :)

[five-rivers]

The Intern

AO3

Inspired by a variety of DPxDC posts, but mostly this one by @gettingcomfyinyourwalls

.

Before Danny's Accident, he and Jazz had competed for the title of "the normal one" with an intensity and ferocity achievable only by siblings in families where there was no normal one.  After the Accident, he had to cede the title, however reluctantly, to his sister, who then, in a turn around only possible for siblings, then dedicated herself to giving Danny the title of "the one everyone thinks is the normal one."  Combined with his chosen friend group - a girl who pursued weird as a lifestyle, and the kid who once tried to use a tamagotchi to hack a vending machine, then gave the tamagotchi an Egyptian burial when the attempt killed it - it was very easy to forget that Danny was not normal at all.  Not even if you ignored the whole "half-ghost superhero" thing, which was very difficult to ignore.  

It was even easier to forget what kind of not normal he originally was, before the accident, and continued to be even afterward.  

However, the world (and particularly Sam and Tucker) was about to be reminded.  

"Guys!" shouted Danny, literally skipping up the hallway to come to a bouncing stop between Sam and Tucker.  "Guess what!"  He was quivering with so much excitement that his edges looked a little blurry.  

Tucker put a hand on his shoulder to get him to stop.  "I guess it's a good thing, and not that your parents invented a ghost wiggler or something?"

Danny stilled.  "The ghost wiggler.  My enemy."

"Wait, I was joking."

"Mom and Dad weren't.  That thing was evil."

"Okay, okay," said Sam, raising her hands, "it didn't have anything to do with one of your parents' inventions.  What did happen?"

"Two of my summer internship applications were accepted," said Danny, almost sparkling with delight.  

Actually, he was sparkling.  If he had an internship outside of town, he would have to get that under control.  

"That's great," said Sam.  "Which ones?"

"Lexcorp and Wayne Industries!"

"Lexcorp?"

"Wayne Industries?"

"You applied to Lexcorp?" demanded Sam, appalled.  

"You're going to Gotham?" asked Tucker in the same tone.  

Danny looked from Sam to Tucker, then back again.  "Yessssss?"

"To work for the guy you call Bald Vlad?  The one who keeps trying to kill Superman?"

"The place with all those crazy villains and mad scientists? That Gotham?"

Then, together, they asked, "Why did you even apply there?"

"Lexcorp is a civilian leader in astronautics, meteoritics, cosmochemistry, nuclear physics, quantum computing, robotics and medical research."

"Because Lex Luthor is trying to kill Superman."

"And even beyond Wayne Industries, there are so many great scientists in Gotham, like Dr. Isley, Dr. Crane and even Dr. Fries!"

"Danny, those are the villains."

"Well," said Danny, "I figure I'm never going to meet Lex Luthor, being an intern and all, but if I see any dangerous weapons, I can trash them!  I have lots of experience."

"Don't you think it might be a little dangerous for you to work for an avowed human supremacist?"

"It’s not any different from staying home."

Sam leaned back to stare at a point over Danny's head, flummoxed.

Tucker, not liking his point being ignored, squeezed Danny's shoulder.  "If you miss fighting that much, I'm sure any ghost you ask will be happy to spar with you.  The villains, Danny.  Why do you want to go somewhere with that many villains?"

"It's not like I'm joining them."  Danny rolled his eyes.  "I just want to talk to them.  If you're so concerned, I can take Dr. Isley and Dr. Crane off the list."

"Why only those two?  Why not get rid of the whole list?" asked Tucker, shaking him slightly.  

"Because Dr. Isley was mostly for Sam and Dr. Crane was mostly for Jazz.  Dr. Fries is for me, and Mom and Dad want me to try to convince cousin Hugo to try therapy again."

"Why," said Sam, as Tucker glared at her, "do you think I'd want you to talk to Poison Ivy?"

"Uh," said Danny, "because you admire her work?"

"Admired, past tense, and that was before she started turning people into trees."

“But the ‘turning people into trees’ part is way more applicable to our lives!”

“Forget about that,” said Tucker.  “Why do you want to talk to Mr. Freeze?”

“Well, Doctor Fries is an expert in cryogenics and incorporating ice into technology.  I want to be able to do that.”  Danny looked back and forth between Sam and Tucker.  “Come on, I’m not interning for him.  I just want to expand my knowledge base!  Just think about all the cool things I could make!”

Sam and Tucker, united in horror and purpose, grabbed Danny by the arms and dragged him bodily into Senior English.  

"Jazz," said Sam, hauling Danny forward by the arm she held, "your brother is turning into a mad scientist!"

Jazz looked from Sam, to Danny, to Tucker, then back to Sam.  "Yessssss?"

"Well," huffed Sam, "aren't you going to do anything about it?"

"No?  Why would I?" 

“Mad scientist,” repeated Sam.  

“That’s generally a bad thing,” said Tucker.  

“It’s fine.  Danny has a very strong sense of ethics.”

“And lab safety!” chimed in Danny.  

“And lab safety,” agreed Jazz, nodding.  “Now, if you want me to help you with your internalized prejudice, I can refer you to some resources I’ve found quite helpful myself.”

“Internalized prejudice is when you’re biased against yourself,” said Tucker.

“Yes.”  Jazz returned to the task of arranging her pens and notebook on her desk.  

“Wait,” said Sam, “you are not calling us mad scientists, are you?”

“Well,” said Jazz, “Mad Science Disorder isn’t in the DSM, but there’s a movement to have it included in the next edition, and I think you would fit the proposed diagnostic criteria.”

“No,” said Sam.  

“Yes,” said Danny.  

“I have seen the inside of your greenhouse, Sam,” said Jazz.  “You’re at least on the road to being a mad botanist, if not a mad ecologist.”

“I’ve been saying that for years,” said Tucker.  

“And you’re obviously a mad computer scientist, with a minor in archaeology.”

“Wait, why are you saying this like they’re college majors?” asked Tucker.  

“It’s easier that way,” said Jazz.  She frowned slightly.  “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing.  It’s just that you should be aware of it, so you don’t wake up one day and start planning involuntary human drug trials, or something like that.”

“Jazz did that, once.  I was five.”

The warning bell rang.  

“You should go to class,” said Jazz, pleasantly.  “You don’t want to be late.”

.

“Listen,” said Sam, leaning over the desk to whisper at Danny, “couldn’t you, I don’t know, just do the Wayne internship?”

“Hm,” said Danny, rubbing his chin, “maybe.  But I kind of get the feeling I only got the Wayne internship because I got the Lexcorp one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, like we talked about way back, Bruce Wayne has to be funding the Justice League, at least a little.”  He pushed his math homework - already finished - to one side.  “It’d make sense for him to keep an eye on anyone Lex Luthor personally hires, on account of the Superman thing.  It’s either that or corporate espionage.”

“Wait,” said Tucker, leaning in from the side, “go back to the ‘personally’ part.”

“It’s a special internship?” said Danny, somehow still managing to pull off the clueless innocent look.  “It was, like, competitive?  You know what I mean.”

“Luthor personally hired you?  Reviewed your application and whatever?”

“Yeah.”

“And you think he isn’t going to meet you?”

“Why would he?  I’m basically going to be getting a tour, then doing drudgework for a month.”

“I love you, man, but you are so, so dumb sometimes.  The man is going to meet you.  Jeez, I hadn’t even heard he was doing internships like that for our age group.”

“Age group?” asked Danny.  

“Dude.  No.  Tell me it was at least limited to just high schoolers.  Tell me you didn’t apply for an internship meant for college students.”

“There wasn’t any age on it as far as I remember.”

“Mr. Fenton,” said Mr. Falluca, “will you please come solve this triangle for the class?”

Danny huffed.  “Rule of cosines,” he said as he stood.  “Give me an easy problem…”

“Why is he even in this class?” mumbled Sam.

“Ghost hunting,” Tucker mumbled back.  

.

“How are you even going to get to Metropolis?” asked Sam as they walked away from the school.  “You don’t have your license yet.”  He probably wouldn’t have his license ever.  Three Fentons driving had, evidently, proven too much for the local DMVs.  Jazz, as conscientious as she was, had gotten hers from the one in Elmerton before they, too, realized the horror that was Jack and Maddie.  

“Jazz is going to take me,” said Danny with a little shrug.  “She’s doing a pre-college thing there.  Some kind of volunteer thing.”

“And how are you getting to Gotham?”

“There’s a train that goes there,” said Danny.  “Like, a regular one.”

“And getting back?”

“Mom and Dad will pick me up.”

“Where will you be sleeping?”

“There’s on-site dorms on each site.”

Sam curled her lips.  “The return of company towns in the modern era.”

“I don’t know, I think the Wayne ones are probably fine.”

“But you’re sleeping in the Lexcorp ones?”

“I figure I can disable any subliminal programming devices that might be installed there.”

“Do you not see how crazy that sounds?  Tucker, back me up, here?”

Tucker sighed.  “Honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to change his mind.  I’ve been picking out funeral flowers.  You still like lillies?”

“It’ll be fine.  I’ll call you guys if I need help.  Just like you’ll call me if some new ghost shows up and starts causing trouble, right?”

“Yes,” said Sam, exasperated.  “But you understand those two things aren’t the same, right?  That with the way things are here, there probably won’t be a new ghost causing trouble?”  

Danny had made… peace probably wasn’t quite the right word, with the Fentons, the Guys in White, and the lack of an organized overarching social structure, but there was an understanding between him and the ghosts.  Without that understanding, he wouldn’t have been able to take the time to apply for internships, let alone actually go to any.  

“I mean, if it’s an imposition–”

“That’s not what she meant,” interjected Tucker.  “Nope.  Nope.  You aren’t wriggling out of calling us when a supervillain kidnaps you.  She’s trying to talk you out of taking an unnecessary risk.”

“It’s not really a risk for me, though.”

It really wasn’t.  Danny might not be invulnerable, but the sheer variety of his powers along with his accelerated healing made that point academic.  For most enemies.  

“This is the guy who fights Superman, Danny,” said Sam.  “For all we know, he’s got some kind of anti-ghost material in the same cabinet he keeps his Kryptonite.”

“I don’t think that’d work very well, actually,” said Danny.  

“It was a metaphor.  Be serious.”

“I am being serious.  This is something I want to do.  I want to go there and learn and prepare for the future.”

“You sound like Jazz, you know?  You’ve got two more years here.  You don’t have to do this.  If this is some kind of overcorrection because of the ghosts–”

“It’s not.  I told you why I wanted to do this.”  He stopped on the sidewalk, pulling on the hem of his shirt.  “Is it really that bad?  Is it really that terrible that I’m going somewhere and doing something that I’m interested in?”

“No,” said Tucker, awkwardly.  “We’re worried about you.”

“And I’ll be fine,” insisted Danny.  “Really.  I will be.  And, you know, like I said, I want to do this kind of thing in the future, so it’s good practice.”

“For what?” asked Sam, crossing her arms.  “Scamming supervillains?”

“Well, yeah,” said Danny.  “That, too.”

Sam’s arms fell, along with her jaw.  “What?”

“Scamming supervillains,” said Danny, starting to walk again.  “Like, obviously, I want to either do something with spaceflight or something with a big humanitarian dimension, but scamming supervillains is definitely going to be my backup.  Or maybe my hobby.  They always have the coolest stuff, and a lot of money, too, usually.”

���Coolest stuff?”

“Yeah,” said Danny, almost skipping, now.  “Ice rays, supercomputers, gene therapy, rapidly growing vegetation, limb regeneration, cloning techniques… Lex Luthor came up with a cure for, like, over half a dozen different types of cancer.”

“Because he wanted to kill Superman,” said Sam, taking up an earlier refrain.  It had only 

“Yeah, but imagine what he could do if we could convince him that Superman got his strength from, like, world hunger or something.”

“I hate it,” said Sam, after a long moment, “but I think you have a point.”

“You two could go into business with me.  Some villains go through goons so fast, I bet we could hit them about a dozen times.”

“You’re not planning to do this now, though, are you?” asked Tucker.

“Huh?  No.  No, not until after graduation.  Most I’ll do with any supervillains I see this time around is talk.”

“That’s a lie,” said Sam, immediately.  “There’s no way.  The first time Man-Bat or Brainiac jumps out of a sewer, you’re going to start swinging.”

“Man-Bat is a geneticist and a chiropterologist, you know,” said Danny.  “I’d love to take Brainiac apart, though.  Do you have any idea how many planets he’s wiped out?  And the stuff he’s got to have–”

“You’re floating,” said Tucker.  

“And glowing,” said Sam.  “You’re really going to have to work on that.”

“Oops,” said Danny.  “Sorry.  It’s just, like, everything I’m Obsessed with.”  He landed, but still fidgeted, as if shaping something invisible with his hands.  Which he might have been.  “It’s– I still want to help people.”  The plaintive note in his voice made it clear that ‘want’ was, in this case, closer to ‘need.’    “I don’t mind doing the hero thing, and I can’t ignore a cry for help.  But I’m not going to just waltz into someone else’s territory and start messing with stuff.”

“I think the territory thing is more of a ghost thing than a hero thing.”

“Eh,” said Danny, “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

.

Danny waved goodbye to Jazz as she pulled away from the curb, then grinned up at the Lexcorp building.  Wow, it was tall.  And probably had a lot of really sketchy stuff in the basement.  

But!  He wouldn’t start poking around with that stuff until he’d been there for at least a week.  

(Okay, he’d probably last twenty-four hours at most, but who could blame him?  How often did anyone get to poke around the lair of a supervillain who wasn’t their archenemy?)

He walked into the lobby, craning his neck this way and that to take it all in.  It was… honestly pretty boring.  Not unlike Vlad’s buildings.  But he supposed that all corporate buildings were like that to some degree.  

“Hello!” he said, walking up to the front desk.  “I’m–”

“You’ll have to wait for your parents to come out, I’m afraid, sweetie,” said the secretary.  “Company rules.”

Danny blushed.  “No, um, I’m here for the internship?  The Innovators of Tomorrow Today internship?  I’m Danny Fenton.  Daniel.  Daniel Fenton.”

The secretary blinked at him, then looked down at her computer for a moment.  “I’ll need to see some ID.”

“Will my passport be okay?” Danny asked, tugging on his bracelet to get it to lie more comfortably on his wrist.  On account of the whole ‘no driver’s license’ problem, he didn’t have anything else, other than his student ID.  

“That will be fine,” said the secretary, reaching for it.  She looked it over carefully, becoming more and more confused.  Danny wondered if she was expecting it to be fake or something.  “You’re fifteen.”

“I know I’m short,” said Danny.  “But I’m almost sixteen.”

“I see,” she said.  “Well.  Here’s your visitor badge.  We’ll have someone come escort you to the meeting room shortly, and your internship badge will be ready when you start tomorrow.  You can leave your luggage here, and it will be scanned and brought up to the dorms.”

Danny bobbed his head happily and took back his passport and the badge.  He couldn’t wait to meet the other people he’d be working with.  He bet that there’d be a lot of people his age, no matter what Tucker said after he looked it up and saw the website.  

A tall man wearing an earpiece and some kind of weapon - a taser, probably - walked up to Danny a few minutes later and scanned his badge.  With a few words, he directed Danny to an elevator - one with a keypad code - and brought him up to the tenth story.  The elevator opened directly into a… Danny wasn’t entirely sure what to call it.  It was square and very large and open, with soft, rounded furniture, a kitchenette, and a catered lunch spread out on several long tables.  One wall was all windows, looking down into Metropolis, and another wall was covered in cool, art-deco Lexcorp posters.  

There were a lot of people.

A lot of tall people.  

A lot of tall, college-aged people.  Older college-aged people, even.  No teenagers.

Tucker had been right.  Great.  

A middle-aged woman extracted herself from the loose crowd and came over to Danny, smiling.  

“Hello!” she said.  “You must be Daniel Fenton.  My name is Liberty Rue, I’m the coordinator for the Innovators of Tomorrow Today program.”

“Hi,” said Danny, “it’s nice to meet you.”

Ms. Rue nodded.  “Thank you, thank you.  We’re just giving everyone a chance to get to know each other before we start the orientation.  Please feel free to take any of the refreshments and mingle.  All of you are going to be working together closely.  Your specialties were electrical engineering and space science?”

“Yes,” said Danny.  Although, to be honest, he didn’t really have a specialty.  He was more of a generalist.  

(Unless you counted ghost science, but there was absolutely no way he was going to bring that up.)

“Excellent.  Let me introduce you to the group you’ll be working most closely with–”

What followed was something of a whirlwind.  It wasn’t that there was a lot of people, but it was one after the other, and Ms. Rue seemed to be… showing him off, almost?  Or showing the other people off?  In any case, there was a weird tension to it all.  

Was it because he was younger?  

He tried not to dwell on it too much, though, because everyone here had so much cool stuff to talk about.  Almost all of them had been involved in serious graduate or undergraduate research projects.  Strange matter, transient dimensions, reality fields, meta gene analysis, non-quantum teleportation, reproduction of extraterrestrial technologies…  Danny was starting to feel a little inadequate.  The project he’d sent in was a ‘theoretical’ blueprint for a spy-bot disabler.  One that he was proud of, sure; getting a localized EMP effect without a nuke wasn’t easy, but it was doable.  And the EMP part was definitely the ‘last resort’ stage of things.  It was, after all, much better to hack into Vlad’s bugs and have them send him a hundred hours worth of rickrolls.

In the middle of a conversation about exactly how much room you needed for a decent particle accelerator, Ms. Rue stepped aside and put her hand to her ear.  Danny hadn’t noticed the earpiece before, but now he looked at it with curiosity.  It was well made, and he could barely hear it, even with his slightly augmented hearing.  He wondered if they were designed to counter Superman.  

“Mr. Fenton,” said Ms. Rue, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to steal you away for a moment.

“Okay,” said Danny.  He followed her back to the elevator, stealing a cookie as he went.  They weren’t as good as his Mom’s, but he was pretty sure they tasted the way they did because of their ectoplasm content, so…

Ms. Rue punched a code into the elevator and scanned her badge.  “Alright, Mr. Fenton.  Go ahead.  You’ll be taken where you need to go.”

Well.  That was maybe a little sketchy, but Danny was nothing if not curious.  He got in.  “I’ll be back in time for the orientation, right?”

“If you aren’t, I’ll make sure you’re shown around personally,” promised Ms. Rue.

The doors closed and the elevator went up.  And up.  Then stopped for a moment, during which Danny felt the tingle of a very thorough full-body scan.  And up some more.  All the way to the top.  The doors opened to a sparkling office.  Everything in it was white, chrome, or glass, with smooth straight lines and geometrically perfect curves.  It blended perfectly with the skyline of Metropolis framed by the full-wall windows.  

Between Danny and the windows was an enormous white desk.  Behind the desk was Lex Luthor.  

“Daniel Fenton,” said Lex Luthor, inclining his head ever so slightly towards Danny.  “It is good to meet you.”

“Thank you,” said Danny, trying not to squeak.  “I’m happy to be here.  I’m looking forward to working here for the next couple of weeks.”

“It is heartening to see that you are more open to cooperation than Vlad.”  Luthor turned away, slightly, surveying the city below him.  

Danny took that as an invitation to come closer and peer out the huge windows himself.  What did Vlad have to do with this?

“I confess, I found myself frustrated by his lack of vision,” continued Luthor, “but youth often holds wisdom that age lacks.”  He turned back to favor Danny with a smile.  “On seeing your application, I was charmed by your initiative in circumventing your mentor.”

Danny’s train of thought, such as it was, derailed.  

“Mentor?” he asked.  

“You don’t have to hide it,” said Luthor.  “Not when we are both quite aware of the others’ knowledge.  Considering my wealth, I am privy to a number of things that ordinary people are not.  Including the beneficiaries of my fellow billionaires’ wills.”

Oh.  Oh, no.  Lex thought– But why–  Was he–  He couldn’t be right, but–  But did this make Danny a… a… nepotism baby?

The sprout of confidence that had been flourishing ever since he got the letter announcing his acceptance to the internship program withered.  This was even worse than finding out he and Jazz were test tube babies.  (And that was only so bad because his parents had felt the need to go on a long tangent about how they had selected their donor-parents, as large portions of Jack and Maddie's genomes were unstable due to a combination of the family proclivities and a variety of curses.)

Lex Luthor stood.  “Doubtless, you’re interested in the projects I outlined to Vlad when I proposed our cooperation.  The device blueprint you submitted for the internship referenced them quite cleverly.  I would like to show you how far they’ve progressed since I spoke to Vlad, and then we can discuss your contribution to their success.”

“I don’t have access to any of Vlad’s resources, Mr. Luthor,” said Danny, cautiously.  “I couldn’t provide any, er, funding to these projects.”

“I am aware of that.  But I think your value goes above and beyond the financial, Daniel.”  He put a hand on Danny’s shoulder.  “After all, the reason I approached Vlad was his science background.  And in a few years… Well.  Vlad Masters is not a young man.”

Was that a murder threat?  Danny thought it was a murder threat.  Oh, boy, did he have something else coming for him if he thought he could just kill Vlad like that.  

Luthor directed Danny back towards the elevator, and this time they went down.  Far down.  Into those basements Danny had been thinking about before.  

They stepped out into a vestibule, and a pair of much more openly armed security guards saluted Lex before running through a series of security measures.  Danny took note specifically of the ones intended to detect mind control and shapeshifting.  

From there, they passed through a series of locked doors and into a maze of gleaming white hallways.  The color made Danny’s skin itch.  Too much like the GIW for his taste.

Luthor opened a side door, and showed Danny into an empty lab.  Empty in terms of people, that is.  In terms of stuff… blueprints, prototypes, models, drawings, coffee cups… not so much.

“I had the team take the day off,” said Luthor.  “I thought you’d appreciate the chance to look at things without any distractions.”

Danny surveyed the plans with interest.  There were similarities between what was being built and the mini-EMP portion of his bug-zapper.  There were also echoes of shield technology…  some kind of energy projector or amplifier?  

“What is it supposed to emit?” asked Danny, unable to hold back his curiosity.  He touched, ever so gently, a hollow place he was sure the energy source was supposed to sit. 

Lex smiled.  “I’m glad you asked,” he said.  “Follow me.”

They went back out into the hallway, but only briefly.  The next room had even more security, but Luthor bypassed it all with businesslike efficiency and they entered a plain, all-white and bare room.

One wall of this room was taken up by a backlit display cabinet made of square cubbies.  Within each cubby was a tiny chip of crystal, like a sample display of particularly expensive rock candy.  Green, of many shades, was the best-represented color, but there was also red and blue.  That made sense, because each crystal was made of delicious ectoplasm-infused quartz.  Danny swallowed.  They were making his mouth water, but the amount of death energy they would have had to be around…

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Luthor.  “Kryptonite.  The key to repelling our would-be alien overlord.”

Yeah.  Remnants of a planet that imploded while still inhabited by billions.  That would do it.  

“I intend to create a Kryptonite field over the whole of Metropolis, one that should, at the least, disable Superman to the point where we can drive him out.  I will sell them to the great cities of America, and then, the world.  One day, the whole Earth will be protected, and Superman must either leave, or die.  But for now, it is still a dream.  That is why I need you, Daniel.”

Danny didn’t think Luthor’s weapon would work.  Not now.  There was too much missing.  Too much being missed by scientists and engineers expecting the Kryptonite to behave in a normal, logical way.  He was certain, however, that he could make something that functioned exactly as described.  He could even do it quickly, building off ghost and human shield technologies.  He could see the pieces of it fit together, like a puzzle.  

Making it, just to prove that he, Danny Fenton, could, was tempting.  

So tempting.  

But he had this little thing called morals, and driving Superman off Earth was definitely in the category of bad.  

“Well, I don’t know if I can fix problems all your scientists can’t, but I can sure try to help.”  He winced a little at the phrasing.  Why did he have to use the word help?  

“That’s all I ask,” said Luthor.  “But that’s far from our only project.  Shall we?”

“Sure,” said Danny, not at all faking his smile.  Even though he’d have to sabotage this stuff, it was really cool to see it!

.

Later that night in his dorm room - which was, incidentally, a lot more spacious than he’d expected - Danny rotated the bracelet on his wrist and pressed a button on its side.  Inside the thick band was a miniaturized and completely functional version of the spy-bot zapper he’d submitted as part of his internship application.  He listened to it click as it went through the different modes available to it.  It tweedled at him when it finished.  

Only then did he pull out his phone and power it on.  He clicked into his contacts and hit the button for his first favorite.  

“Hey,” he said, when the call connected, “Jazz, so…  Sam and Tucker might have been just a little bit right about my internship…”

.

May do more at a later time, but for now, this is it. I am incredibly forgetful, so I don't do taglists. Please consider subscribing to the AO3 version of this instead.

[inbarfink]

The deaths of all the Finch kids are really so unbearably tragic. It really speaks to the quality of the writing and storytelling in ‘What Remains’. They’re written as so vivid and human and real, but also so many of them died so young. They were children, it’s so much harder for me to do the whole ‘well, let’s appreciate the life they did have’ thing when the majority of them didn’t even have a chance to become the people they could have become. And yet the image of who they could’ve been if they survived is so vivid in my mind. 

Edith had that line about how she always imagined Molly as a girl she could be good friends with. Obviously if she didn’t die back in 1947 they wouldn’t really be at the same age group, but she’d be one hell of a Cool Aunt. I can only imagine her Weird Girl tendencies would’ve only grown stronger and stronger with age. Considering her fascination with animals, maybe she would’ve gone to study Zoology or Biology when she grew older? And since she was dissecting a sea star just before her canon death…

Sadly, I’m not sure if Barbara would’ve been able to resurrect her acting career. But there’s some subtle hints in her room that in reality she was more willing to move past it compared to her fictionalized version in that horror comic (which can’t be easy when you live in a room your dad themed entirely around your child-star years THANKS SVEN). That ‘horror convention’ seems to be an invention of the comic, Barbara’s actual room has a flier for a ‘Witch’s Ball’ at Orcas Island High School and a dress ready for it. 

Barbara Finch didn’t actually spend her last day on earth hopelessly trying to revive her dead career, she was hoping to have a fun Halloween party like a regular teenager. Maybe the fact that it was hosted by the Orcas Island High School Drama Club implies she still had an interest in acting and theatre. Maybe she could’ve ended up as a classically trained actress with the child-stardom as just a fun quirk of her past? Or maybe she just wanted to take part in the Witches Ball because she likes Spooky Things? And she could have found her way back into the Horror Scene in a different way, like being a writer or costume designer or something?

Maybe Calvin could’ve become an Astronaut like he always wanted? But I think Calvin might’ve been more enthralled with the fantasy of science fiction than the reality of space travel. I’m thinking a lot about how Sam described Clavin in Gregory’s memoriam as ‘lost in his imagination’. Maybe he could’ve become a science fiction writer or something?

Walter didn’t technically die young, but he still certainly lost most of his years to the Curse. Like, a big thing about the tragedy of Walter to me is realizing his original childhood bedroom was themed after “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and trains. 

Lil’ Walter did have an interest in adventure and travel, before his fears took it all away from him. If it wasn’t for the Curse, Walter could’ve actually something with it. Maybe he could’ve traveled around a bit and written about his experiences.

Lewis would’ve probably gone into game design. It’s not just how his fantasies manifest to us the players, but you can actually find books about game design and coding in his room. It seems that the problem was that his crappy job and his depression took away any opportunity he might have had to actually pursue this idea. Maybe if Milton never left, these three Finch siblings could’ve combined their creative skills together to make like, a very cool artsy game.

Speaking of which… man, Edith’s death stings the most because we got to know her far better than anyone else. And it’s not even the fact that she never got to share her all of her thoughts and creativity with the wider world that makes me the saddest. Getting to the end of the game and hearing just how much she was looking forwards to be with her son - even with all the hardships of being a teen mom, she was really looking forwards to it. To meet him, to share her stories with him. But instead, that worn old diary is the only connection between them...

And that’s like… part of what’s so great about WRoEF’s use of its own format. Like, the faux-interactive linearity of the Narrative Exploration/‘Walking Simulator’ is so perfect for selling this tragedy. The way each Death Flashback only moves forwards based on the actions of the Player, but it always moves on the same unchanging doomed path - really highlights both how stupidly preventable so many of these deaths feel and really make the Player wish there was a way to change them. After all, all they need is for Calvin to not swing so hard, for Gregory’s faucet to not turn back on, for Walter to not stand directly on those train tracks and everything would’ve been fine. But at the same time it’s so, so clear to the Player that this is an impossible wish. There is no other way these sequences can go - these deaths have already been written. The most you can you is linger, all you can do is delay the inevitable. 

But it hurts.

[basicallyaturtle]

never been part of a tag game, sounds really fun! tagged by dear Lanvender, @khan-crete

Do you make your bed? A freshly decrumbed, stuffed animal arranged and dirty clothes removed bed feels great. How often do I do this? We mustn't ask (like once or twice a month) that's all making the bed entails for me, I just have a fitted then normal sheet and blankets

Favorite Number? 4 4 4 4 4! I've loved four my entire life she is like a goddess to me. 2+2 2*2 2^2, divides into halves twice. can only compete with sixteen, whose status and 2^4 and 4^2 is nice, but not as symmetric. 37 and 73 have a place in my heart as the 12th and 21st primes, but not a large place compared to 4

What's your job? What do I get paid for? undergrad lab TA, what do I do? grad research in low energy nuclear physics

If you could go back to school, would you? In school technically still. Would I rewind time to experience school again? highschool no college yes. would I go back for another college degree? I could be convinced if it would be cheap and unobtrusive to my current schooling. Was always torn between physics and linguistics. I made the right choice but I always wonder what if.

Can you Parallel Park? I have done it, on the driving test, like four or five years ago. I think I could do it again, but not too confident

Do you think Aliens are real? Eh, probably in a 'the observable universe 9.3e+9 ly across, it must have happened more than once' kinda way, but not in a 'they've been feeding us tech for thousands of years or are visiting us' kinda way.

Can you drive a manual car? Never tried, hubris tell me yes, anxiety with even normal cars tells me I'd probably fuck up the transmission while trying to leave the driveway. gonna say yeag

Guilty Pleasure? I think like cheesy childhood disney live action movies?, generally I'm pretty full chested about the things I enjoy

Favorite Type of Music? yeah, hard, a lot of vocaloid, which isn't reallly a genre, a lot of edm genres from like old school monstercat, a lot of jrock by way of anime OP's of show's I've never watched then finding other songs by those artists. some rock music though that genre is also extremely expansive and I'm not sure how I'd categorize a lot of it. Generally my music consumption consists of a group of maybe five songs completely unrelated on repeat for months at a time and genre is not a huge factor in that

Do you like puzzles? twisty puzzles like rubik's cube type puzzles are really fun working, towards doing a 3x3 blindfolded but challenging, I used to do jigsaw's with my mom but over the course of a very long time because we'd get frustrated. crosswords, but I'm no good at them

Favorite Childhood Sport? Soccerrrr. Wish I'd stayed with it, but there were only a couple more years before there wasn't a league for my age group anyway, been trying to get back into it recreationally

Do you talk to yourself? I do, but as if I'm talking to someone else. I prefer not to do it because I'm not content with my voice atm, but I find myself doing it a lot especially when getting stuck on research stuff trying to talk it out or I will say a comment to someone I disagree with outloud rather than typing it and posting it. A lot of this is to my reflection which is probably part of the reason it feels like someone else lol

Tea or Coffee? tea all the way. drank iced sweet black tea my entire childhood and started drinking it hot with milk in college. I was the kind of person that disliking coffee was a sort of pillar of my tastes, but then a few years ago made it with like half milk and a lot of sugar and like it, lotta people wouldn't call that coffee, but eh.

First thing you wanted to be when you grew up? The actual first thing was everything. I would amalgamate like all the stereotypes of things kids want to be into one so a firefighter-astronaut-whatever else. When I got a better sense of my interests, inventor, so I guess like product designer, but what that meant to me was I got to sit around and think of neat gadgets and items then figure out how to make them like freeze ray, time machine, clone gun, that kind of thing lol. the first practical idea of a job I wanted was theoretical physicist in like middle school, which I kinda am now so success I guess

What Movies do you Adore? not much of a movie person, but like to watch movies other people are interested in with them, love castle in the sky, LOTR, howl's moving castle, your name, probably others in those categories I don't know about yet or have forgotten and I have a strong soft spot for childhood halloween movies like twitches and halloweentown

I'm curious what @arc-archernar and @charyou-tree have got to say if they'd like to, and anyone else that wants to participate!

[ckret2]

Chapter 19 of Human Bill Is The Shack's Prisoner But They Haven't Told Anybody Yet (title tbd), featuring: Wendy!!! Who hasn't been told yet! But she sure as heck knows something is going on.

also featuring: Bill wrangling Mabel into a secret plot against her better judgment; guest appearances from Soos, Melody, Thompson, and baby dragons; and digging into what Wendy's got going on under the "cool girl" facade.

####

Sitting on the attic bench, Mabel said, "Okay, here's an abstract one."

Lying spread eagle on the floor staring at the ceiling, Bill said, "Hit me."

"A president, an astronaut, and a movie star."

Bill paused. Bill looked at the ceiling thoughtfully. Bill said, "Which president?"

"Your favorite."

Without hesitation, Bill said, "Bury the astronaut, bed the—"

"Stop doing it wrong!"

Bill sighed noisily. "Betray the astronaut, befriend the movie star, and betroth the president."

"Really? You never marry politicians over artists."

Bill hesitated. "I don't?"

"Which president are you thinking of."

"I'm not playing anymore."

"Bill. Which president—"

"I quit. I'm bored now."

"Give me a hint," Mabel insisted. "Is he on a dollar bill—"

Bill sat up and pointed out the attic window. "Oh wow, what's that!"

Mabel's head whipped around to look.

"It's a change of topic!"

Mabel whipped back to glare at Bill. 

"No—no, I'm serious, don't give me that look." Bill lowered his voice. "I've actually been meaning to bring this up. It's something I need your help with."

Mabel gave him a skeptical look—behold the coward, trying to weasel out of admitting which president he clearly had a crush on—but said, "What is it?"

Bill glanced around. "Not out here. Anyone could listen in. Somewhere private."

Mabel pointed out the window. "But Candy's mom's about to pick me up..."

Bill stood up and peered out into the early nighttime dark. "Not for at least fifteen minutes, she isn't. I'll be quick. Come on."

"You're acting really suspicious."

"No, I'm acting secretive. You're the suspicious one. When have I ever given you any reason to be suspicious of me?"

Mabel raised a brow.

"Point taken. When have I given you any reason to be suspicious of me this year?"

Mabel raised the other brow.

"Any reason this week."

"You have had a good week," Mabel conceded. "Fine, but I'm not taking you somewhere private without taking precautions."

"Fine," Bill said. "What precautions?"

####

He looked in dismay at the sock gloves tied onto his hands with yarn. "You couldn't have at least given me the colorful socks?"

"Sorry! Dipper's socks are thicker than mine and all he has are white. I'm not taking any chances."

"You hate me."

Mabel shut the bedroom door. "Okay!" She sat on her bed. "So tell me what it is you want."

"Okay," Bill said.

He told her.

When he was done, she studied him with a thoughtful frown.

"What? I thought you'd love the idea!"

"I do," Mabel conceded. "The problem is all the other things you could do once you get your hands on it."

"From inside this shack? Not a lot."

"Mmm... It is a great idea..." Mabel screwed her face up. "I'll think about it."

"For how long?

"Give me a day."

"We don't have a day to spare. We're working in a very narrow timeframe if we want to pull this off."

"And whose fault is that?" Mabel planted her hands on her hips. "You pushed this on me at the last minute so I couldn't think it over!"

"I did not," Bill said, affronted. "I only thought of it myself a couple hours ago. Do you think I'd have wanted to do this last minute if I'd thought of it any sooner?"

Mabel wouldn't put it past him, if he thought the pressure would make her more likely to agree. "I'll consider it."

"For how long? Look, kid—it's a great idea, you know it's a great idea, but the longer we take to get started the less likely it'll happen, and if you don't do your half I can't do my half, and then the whole thing's ruined—"

"Hey!" Mabel pointed at Bill. "I said I'll consider it! If you try to make me answer before Candy's mom gets here, it's gonna be no."

"Okay, okay!" He raised his socked hands. "So, what—by morning?"

Mabel thought, then nodded. "Okay. I'll decide by the time I'm back from Candy's."

Bill cracked a wide smile. "I know you won't let me down." He glanced out the window. "And good timing; your ride should be here in..."

He trailed off. Mabel had put her glass pyramid from Ford in the window so it could catch the sunlight, and Bill was completely focused on it. "Hey, where'd you get that?"

Mabel looked at the pyramid. "Oh, that? Grunkle Ford gave that to me."

"He did?" Bill looked at her with undisguised shock. "What for?"

This was it. This was Mabel's opportunity. The moment she'd prepared for. With a casual shrug, she said, "To commemorate my initiation."

Bill's eyes widened further. "Your initiation?"

"Uh-huh. Into the Mysteries."

"Into the MYSTERIES?" If Bill's eyes got any bigger, they'd fall out of his skull. "Hold on a second! Did Stanford join a mystery cult? And he didn't tell me? Which one! Is it about me?"

Mabel tipped her head back. "I'm sorry, Bill, but I don't think you've been initiated into the Mysteries. I can't tell you what they're about."

"It's about me," Bill insisted. "It's got to be about me, why else would it involve..." He flailed one socked hand at the pyramid.

Out the window, Mabel glimpsed headlights sweeping by below. Perfect timing. "Sorry, Bill, that's my ride!" She put on her sleepover backpack, scooped up a doll—Allie-Ann the Alien could come this time—and tried to shove Bill toward the door. "Move. I'm not leaving you in here unsupervised."

As Bill was pushed, he twisted around to stare in wonder at the pyramid. He tripped over a pile of Dipper's dirty clothes and stumbled shoulder first into the wall. "Ow. At least give me a hint! Where did the Mysteries originate? Are we talking the original Greek stuff? Fishmasons? Cheap knock-off Cabala? Real Kabbalah? I've been expecting Sixer to get into that for years. It can't be, I didn't have anything to do with Kabbalah—"

"Who said the Mysteries have anything to do with you!"

"But the pyramid—!"

Mabel got Bill out of the bedroom with one last big shove and slammed the door. He stumbled over his feet and almost hit the wall again before righting himself. Mabel jogged past him to the stairs. "Bye, Bill!"

"Kemetism," Bill tried. "I'll be so disappointed in Ford. At least tell me it isn't Kemetism!"

"See you tomorrow!"

Bill groaned. "Hey! Remember what we talked about!"

The door slammed.

Bill dragged his hands down his face. His fluffy hands. Right. He'd forgotten to ask her to free him. 

He looked at one of his hands suspiciously. "It's not Kemetism, right?" he asked it. "You wouldn't do that to me."

He manipulated the sock into a hand puppet, deepened his voice, and said, "Of course I wouldn't, Bill. You taught me to have better taste than that." Gah, terrible impression. He sounded more like Stan than Ford.

Bill could go downstairs and pester one of the humans into freeing him from his sock gloves; or, he could figure it out himself, in case they tried to restrain him like this again.

Bill sat on the floor and started chewing through the yarn.

####

Wendy's parents looked at the forest differently.

They both had a tendency to go still and quiet when they were surrounded by trees, but that was where the similarity ended. Her father looked at the forest with Knowing, and her mother looked with Seeking.

Her father was a lumberjack. Her father was a Corduroy. He stood in the forest like he was a tree himself: still, tall, skin rough like bark, rooted to the spot by six generations. Wendy didn't know why "family trees" were illustrated as branches and leaves. They were root systems; your ancestors were buried deep below your feet, and their bony grips on your ankles slowly pulled you down into the dirt too.

Her father looked at the trees like he already knew every secret they held—every ancient lightning scar, every squirrel love affair, every bird with too many eyes and every eye in search of a bird. If you asked him where the Hide Behind was, he'd point at a tree without hesitation, and then he'd tell you to stop staring.

That was the thing with him: stop staring. He knew everything about the forest, except the things he didn't, and the things he didn't know he didn't want to know—and he didn't want his children to know them, either.

When her mother stood in the woods, eyes upturned, quaking like an aspen, she was like a pilgrim in a cathedral, standing weary and rapturous in the nave and gazing up at the stained glass windows. In later years, she'd seemed like a pilgrim who'd just realized she'd walked into the wrong god's church.

Aspens weren't native to Gravity Falls. You found them around Portland.

Her mother always wanted to know more. She talked about things her husband didn't and asked about things he wouldn't. But Wendy didn't think she was ever happy with the things she found out.

One of Wendy's last memories of her mother was of seeing her standing on the overgrown path to the old, abandoned Corduroy family cabin in the woods. Staring at it like it terrified her, but like she had some question she couldn't leave without asking it.

Her father, knowing what he knew and refusing to seek more; her mother, always seeking but never comfortable knowing; and Wendy was somewhere in between.

Wendy had worked in the Mystery Shack long enough that she knew where its occupants were, the way she knew where her heart and lungs were. When there weren't tourists, she could hear the pipes in the morning and know Mabel was showering upstairs—it was always Mabel, everyone else in the shack either showered before Wendy arrived for work or after she'd left for the day—and she could hear the TV through the "Employees Only" door and know from the cadence of the muffled murmurs whether it was playing an English or Spanish station; and she knew when somebody was cooking and could tell who it was based on the smell; and through the floor boards she could hear the washing machine in the cellar, but she could predict when laundry day was coming two days ahead of time because Soos had run out of white dress shirts and switched to blue.

She did the same thing at home. From her room, she was always aware of where her brothers and her father were supposed to be—there was a little hole in her awareness where she felt like her mother should have been—and each thud and smell and footstep and shut door confirmed her instincts. She wondered if she got that awareness from her mother or her father.

From her post behind the cash register, she was quietly, casually aware of where everyone should be. And when something was wrong, she knew.

####

Mabel came into the shack through the gift shop entrance, wearing her sleepover backpack and carrying a stuffed doll under her arm. "Hey Wendy!"

"Hey, Mabel." Wendy glanced at the ceiling under the upstairs bathroom. She could still hear the pipes running to the shower. Huh. Maybe Dipper decided he didn't want to stink this summer. "What's up?"

"Not much, not much." Mabel heaved herself up to sit on the counter next to the cash register and set her alien doll beside her. "So. Wendy. Home girl. I need a little help, and I hear you're the gal to help me."

"Oh, yeah?" Wendy propped her chin in her hand. "What kind of help?"

"You have a fake ID, right?"

A surprised smile crept across Wendy's face. "Yeah? Why?"

"The gas station cashier knows my family too well for me to use mine."

Wendy laughed. "Okay, you know what? I'm in, just to find out what a thirteen-year-old needs a fake ID for. I can't do drinks, but anything you need to be eighteen for, I've got you covered."

"Awesome! I'll see you after work?"

"How about my lunch break? Thompson's picking me up to go get something." Since the start of summer, Soos had asked Wendy not to keep her lunch in the kitchen fridge anymore. He said it was because between his own household and the visiting Pines, there wasn't any extra space. It was too crowded. "Too crowded" was the same reason he'd also asked Wendy not to eat in the kitchen, or use the indoor toilet, or spend her break in the living room. Wendy had her doubts. "We could get lunch at the convenience store instead of a drive-thru."

"Even better! Thanks, Wendy! I'll see you at lunch!" Mabel waved as she ran to the living room.

Upstairs, the shower turned off.

Wendy stared at the ceiling. Huh.

####

When Soos escorted the first tour group of the day into the gift shop, Wendy greeted him by bursting out laughing. "Your suit."

For almost two weeks now, Soos had been conducting his tours in a slightly-too-tight, slightly-too-short suit jacket Wendy would bet he'd had since high school. He hadn't said anything about it, but Wendy figured something had happened to his normal coat on the night he and the Pines had been dealing with that thing they refused to talk about.

But today, he finally had his usual, properly-fitted jacket back on; but the sloppy repairs done to the huge gashes in the back stood out like a sore thumb. "Man, you never told me your paranormal problem did this much damage."

Soos winced. "Is it that bad?"

"Dude." Wendy laughed. "The back of your jacket is shredded. It looks like you escaped a horror movie." She paused. "Uh—the repairs aren't bad though! They look great. You did a great job."

"Thanks, but it's okay. I'm gonna work it into the show. I'm telling the tourists a mama dragon almost killed me."

Wendy's eyes lit up. "Did you finish the baby dragons?"

Soos glanced around to make sure none of the shopping tourists were listening too close, then picked up a cardboard box. "Boom. Check 'em." It was full of live lizards with rubber bat wings attached with alien superglue. "Awesome, right? I'm gonna set up a terrarium for them in the museum. I'm putting in some red Easter eggs like they just hatched."

"This is gonna blow the tourists' minds." Wendy fished around under the cash register for a bag of chips and dropped a couple in for the lizards. "So... what was going on here a couple weeks ago? You never told me."

"Um." Soos immediately lost the ability to meet Wendy's gaze. "Well. It's—it's complicated."

"What, is it still a secret? I figured it was over by now," Wendy said. "It wasn't actually a dragon, was it?"

"No."

"Then what, a werewolf?"

"No... I really can't—"

"A ghost?"

Soos paused. "Define 'ghost.'"

"Uh... any kind of dead person."

Soos squirmed uncomfortably under the weight of the interrogation. "Does it count if the person should be dead, but, for some reason, is not?"

"Did we have another zombie uprising?"

"Not exac—"

A muffled voice shouted, "Hey!"

Something above the shop thudded. Wendy saw a light flicker. Wordlessly, she and Soos looked up.

"HEY! This isn't what we agreed to!" The thudding traveled across the ceiling, meandering through the gift shop. A few tourists gasping in alarm as the lights swayed over their heads. "If you think you can keep me locked up in here, you'll regret it! Let! Me! OUT!"

Everyone in the gift shop—Soos, Wendy, and a dozen tourists—fell completely silent, looking up. The ceiling creaked and rattled above them one final time before falling silent.

Soos swallowed hard. He let out a strained laugh. "Whoops, heh. Guess you guys found out what happens to tourists who don't buy anything. Am I right?"

The tourists laughed.

"Ha! Yeah, you guys get it! Wendy, hold down the fort a minute, I've gotta... check on something I forgot to deal with. Um. With the... spooky sound effects."

He rushed through the "Employees Only" door.

####

When Soos cracked opened the bathroom door, Bill's face was inches away, wet wavy hair dangling all over his face, irritated red eyes glowering straight into Soos's.

Soos flinched. "Dude. You jumpscared me."

"Nice of you to finally free me from the bathroom." Bill elbowed past Soos.

Soos rubbed his stomach where Bill had shoved him. "Hey, Bill—I know getting stuck stinks, but uh.... if you shout like that, the tourists could find out about you, you know? And you don't want that."

Bill whirled around. "Correction: if you don't keep your promise to let me move freely around the shack, you cause the tourists to find out about me, and you don't want that! We both know you'd never give me any rights if I didn't make the alternative worse for you—so if you don't want to risk getting arrested for kidnapping, don't put me in a position where I have to make things worse."

Soos patiently waited for Bill to finish spinning the narrative in his favor. "Okay," he said, "granted. But I just sort of accidentally didn't tell someone else to listen for you while I was giving a tour." Soos spread his hands in what he hoped was a conciliatory gesture. "Perhaps, in the future, you could make spooky ghost noises to remind me you're up here, so I can go 'Oh no, I forgot the triangle guy is taking a shower' without the tourists suspecting anything, instead of escalating straight to self-endangerment? That—that seems mutually beneficial, right?"

Bill considered that. He screwed up his face. He said, "Sure! Fine. That's fair." His voice was a lot more chipper than his sour expression. Soos wondered if Bill was aware that his face gave stuff away. "Next time I should just get Stanford to supervise. He'd say I have an hour and he'd be back in sixty minutes and zero seconds."

"Yeah, I don't think Ford wants to do that. Lately he's kind of busy with the whole figuring-out-how-to-kill-you thing."

"And I don't want to shower. Nobody is happy." Bill turned away from Soos. "Is Mabel home yet?"

"Uh, I think I saw her in the kitchen—"

And just like that, Bill lost interest in anything Soos had to say. He drifted down the stairs, stumbled on a couple of steps, and was gone.

####

Soos returned to the gift shop. "Thanks, Wendy."

Wendy dragged her gaze down from the ceiling. "Sure, no problem." She opened her mouth to ask what all that had been about; then decided she didn't need to hear again that she couldn't be told anything about whatever was going on here. But something was going on.

Whenever a customer wasn't checking out, Wendy listened to every creak and sigh of the wood, the way her mother once listened to the wind rustling in the birch trees. There were so many more thuds and thumps in the shack than there used to be; she'd noticed it for days. From her post behind the cash register, she was quietly, casually aware of where everyone should be. And when something was wrong, she knew.

There was something wrong in the Mystery Shack.

Time to start seeking.

####

Mabel trotted out of the gift shop in a dark blue sweater with an old-fashioned Polaroid camera knitted on the front. The camera lens was a piece of reflective plastic that looked like it had been popped out of a pair of sunglasses. She was also wearing a pair of cheap plastic reflective sunglasses with one lens missing, so Wendy didn't think there was much mystery about how Mabel had made this sweater. Mabel plopped down on the steps outside the shop beside Wendy to wait for Thompson's arrival.

"Okay," Wendy said, "I've gotta ask. How did you know about my fake ID?"

"Robbie said Tambry told him!"

"Oh, you guys are hanging with Robbie?" Wendy wondered if he and Tambry were back together again. She should ask Lee; he'd be the most likely person to know who it wouldn't be awkward to ask.

"A little. He's working on a music video that he wants creepy synchronized twins for, so he asked me and Dipper. We met up to talk about the details."

"Oh dude, he mentioned he was working on some kind of spooky song. Something about the 'ghost of childhood'?"

"That's the one! We're the childhood ghosts."

"Awesome. Let me know how it goes."

Mabel gave her a thumbs up. "Okay, I answered your question, now you have to answer one!" Her voice dropped to a faux whisper. "Why do you have a fake ID? Is it so that you can work at a casino across the border where you rendezvous with a handsome foreign spy?"

Wendy laughed. "What? No." She looked around. "I'll tell you, but you can't tell anybody else. Except Dipper I guess, he's cool."

"Promise!"

Wendy took off her flannel shirt, tugged her hair over her shoulder, pushed aside her undershirt to expose her right shoulder blade, and turned her back toward Mabel. "Check it out."

"Whoa! Tattoo!" Mabel poked the bag of ice tattooed on Wendy's shoulder.

"Yeah, I got inked in February. I think it's cool. Like, it's a weird tat, right? Who gets a tattoo of a bag of ice? But if you know, you know. That makes it personal." Wendy pulled her shirt back on and buttoned it up. "Plus, in like five years, I'll probably be dating someone who goes—" she put on a false high voice, "'Hey Wendy, why did you get this tattoo?' And I can go," Wendy squinted off toward the distant trees and adopted a faraway voice, "'It's a long story. About the greatest fight of my life. When the world... nearly ended.' All serious. But then it's still a dumb bag of ice."

"That's such a cool idea. We should all get matching tattoos!" Mabel pulled up her sweater sleeve, showing off her rainbow rock bracelet. "What if I get it on my wrist! So that the tail of the shooting star wraps around it like a bracelet! Do they have glitter tattoos?"

Wendy chuckled. "I don't know, but that sounds awesome. But you guys are gonna have to wait like, five years to get yours. Ooor, get a fake ID that says you're eighteen." She winked. "Robbie's talking about getting one too. He wants it on his chest, over his actual heart. I'm still waiting for a really funny time to be like, 'Oh, you haven't done it yet? I already got one.'" Mabel laughed.

Thompson pulled up, and they piled into his minivan.

####

Wendy wasn't quite sure what she'd expected Mabel to need an 18-year-old's assistance for (her best guess had been helping Stan commit voter fraud), but nowhere on her list had she considered—

"Scratch cards," Mabel said to the cashier. She would have looked like a real slick customer, with her serious expression and reflective shades, if one of the lenses hadn't been missing. She was a 50% slick customer. "I'm gonna need to see, uhhh..." She pointed at three of the scratch cards on display behind the cashier. Their art displayed a purple unicorn, a diamond-encrusted tiara, and a neon beach party. "All of these!"

The cashier gave Mabel a skeptical look. "How old are you, again?"

Wendy leaned on the counter beside Mabel and quickly said, "She's with me! I'm buying." She slid her fake ID across the counter to the cashier. "Mabel's just my... uh... helper?"

"Psychic helper!" Mabel said.

"Psychic helper," Wendy agreed.

"Yeah, I can tell which cards are gonna be winners," Mabel said. 

The cashier looked between them, looked at Wendy's ID, and shrugged. "Okay," he said. "You said you wanna get... all of these?"

Wendy went quiet, trying to figure out how much that would cost. "Um."

"No no no!" Mabel waved her hand. "I just wanna see them all. You know. For psychic purposes."

"I can't hand customers cards they haven't paid for. You might start scratchin' 'em."

"That's fine! Can you just... hold all of them up? One at a time? So I can get a really good look at each of them?"

The cashier stared at Mabel, then gave Wendy a weary look.

Wendy smiled nervously. She regretted not asking Mabel what she was planning. "Please? It'd be really cool of you," she said. "Also, I'll leave you a tip." She only had like fifteen dollars. She hoped she could cobble together a decent lunch cheap enough to afford leaving a tip.

The cashier sighed heavily and grabbed the unicorn scratch cards first.

While the cashier showed Mabel every card in all three of her chosen categories one by one, Wendy and Thompson circled the convenience store, prowling for food. Wendy grabbed a cereal bar, a protein bar, a couple flavors of jerky, a bottle of milk—added together that had to be, like, four and a half food groups, right?—and drifted over to the ice cream. "Oh, dude. Check this out, they're selling Summerween ice cream." She pulled out a pint and waved it at Thompson, showing off the jack-o'-melons on the packaging. "I thought Summerween was only celebrated around here. Is Doug & Jimmy's a local brand?" She didn't think she'd ever heard of the brand before. She studied the packaging, but only learned that all proceeds went to an (unnamed) charity.

"I don't recognize it. What flavor is it?" Thompson asked.

"Watermelon sorbet." The only other two Doug & Jimmy's flavors on the shelves were marionberry and huckleberry, which was about as stereotypically Oregonian as you could get. Maybe they were local.

"Aw, I don't like sorbet."

"Hey, Thompson! Buy me this pint, I'll pay you back later."

"What! Why don't you pay for it?"

"I've gotta use the last of my money to tip the cashier." She hoped Mabel had brought her own money to pay for the scratch cards. Wendy doubted she could pester Thompson into that. "C'mon, man, it's only like four bucks. I get my paycheck this afternoon, I'll pay you back." She shook the sorbet in his face. "And it's for charity. Are you gonna notdonate to charity?" She gave him an impish grin.

Thompson sighed, but held out his hand for the ice cream.

There were piles upon piles of unicorn-ed, tiara-ed, beachy scratch cards on the front counter when Wendy and Thompson came up with their purchases. The cashier said to Mabel, "So, that's all of them. Which do you wanna buy?"

"Hmm." Mabel put her hand to her chin, making a show of looking thoughtful. "I think... I'm gonna have to sleep on it and come back in the morning. I'll let you know then."

The cashier stared at Mabel in disbelief. The cashier stared at Wendy in disbelief.

Wendy grimaced. "Sorry, man. She's got this... process?"

"I've got a process," Mabel agreed, nodding firmly.

Wendy shrugged. "Psychics, you know?"

The cashier sighed heavily and shoved the scratch cards aside to scan their food.

Back in the van, Mabel watched as the convenience store disappeared behind them; then, laughing, reached into a hidden pocket in her sweater behind the knit camera, pulled out her cell phone, and stopped the video recording.

Wendy glanced back, did a double take, swallowed her mouthful of jerky, and said—with no small amount of awe—"Did you hide a camera inside a picture of a camera?"

"Yeah!" She pointed at the sunglass lens. "It sees through this like a one-way mirror."

"That's the coolest thing I've ever seen."

"I thought of it myself!" She played back through the video, rewatching to make sure she'd gotten reasonably clear shots of all the scratch cards.

"Why were you recording in there, though?"

"So I can show all the scratch cards to a real psychic!" Mabel stuck her phone in her skirt pocket and beamed at Wendy.

How much did Wendy believe that? Considering this was Gravity Falls, she figured the odds Mabel had turned up a real psychic were about 50/50. "Who is it? Anybody I know?"

Mabel was silent long enough for Wendy to turn and give her a questioning look. Mabel smiled winningly and said, "It's a secret!"

Wendy shrugged like it didn't matter. "All right, sure." There were a lot of secrets in the Mystery Shack these days.

####

"Omigosh are these baby dragons!" Mabel squealed. Several tourists turned to look at her.

Melody laughed. "Yeah! Soos 'hatched' them this morning." Out of sight of the tourists, she winked for Mabel's benefit. "He's gonna set up a terrarium for them this weekend, but for now they live in the shop." She saw Wendy coming and relinquished the cash register to her. "Hey, Wendy. How was lunch?"

"Hey Mel." She took back her seat. "Gas station junk. I found this, though." She held up her pint of half-eaten, half-melted Summerween watermelon sorbet.

"Oh, that's so cute! I've never seen that before, do they do that every year?"

"Dunno, first time I've seen it. I think the brand's new, they only have like three flavors."

"This'll only be my second Summerween," Melody confessed. "Last year, nobody warned me about it. I thought I was going crazy when I saw a bunch of kids running around in Halloween costumes in June. Some guy in a scarecrow costume knocked on my door and tried to scold me for not having any 'Summerween spirit' when I didn't have any candy. He calmed down when I told him his costume was awesome and asked if he'd explain the holiday to me. I think I gave him a bag of sour snakes? It was the only candy I had on hand."

"You really dodged a bullet," Mabel said.

"Oh yeah," Wendy said. "You're from Portland, right?"

"Yeah," Melody sighed. "There's nothing awesome like Summerween there."

Wendy wondered, not for the first time, how Melody could voluntarily move from Portland out to Gravity Falls. The local quirky holidays weren't that alluring. Anyway, everything Wendy had heard about Portland suggested it was the kind of city that would love to adopt something weird like Summerween.

Mabel said, "this is Dipper's and my second year too. Summerween sophomores!"

"Summerween sophomores!" Melody laughed. "This year, I'm going all out. I promised not to spoil the details, but Soos and I are doing a couple's cosplay, it's gonna be great."

"That'll be awesome! Hey, can you mention that in front of Dipper? We haven't made plans yet, and I'm worried he'll try to flake out on doing a twin costume with me this year. Maybe he'll be more interested if he knows some adults are doing it!"

"Ha! Yeah, I'll let him know."

"Oh, hey, Melody," Wendy said. "You're going in the house, right? Could I ask a small favor?" She held out the sorbet. "I know Soos doesn't want me using the fridge but, would you mind sticking this in the freezer just until the end of my shift? I don't wanna stick it in the cooler out here, I'm worried a tourist will walk off with it."

"Oh. Sure, no problem." Melody took the pint. "You leave at like three on Fridays, right?"

"Yeah. Thanks!"

####

Three came and went, and Wendy went as well.

She didn't pick up her sorbet—exactly like she'd planned.

####

(Thanks for reading! Please toss me a comment if you enjoyed, I love hearing y'all's thoughts and I'm excited we're finally getting to Wendy snooping around!)

[secretagentsloveblogs]

all i do is think about my honey oc 25/8 so have some aimless rambling about my favorite OC listener: Mara, aka Honey!

IMPORTANT: I will not apologize for having flawed characters. Mara is a purposefully flawed character who has made mistakes and will continue to do so. Firstly, for the purposes of the disclaimer: just because I write my character this way doesn't mean I condone or support their behavior. Secondly, it's a fictional setting, with fictional people. None of the events actually happened, it's just supposed to make you go "oooo. hmm. 🤔" and "ahhh. i see. 😲"

cw: [mentions of transphobia][cheating][cancer mention][chronic illness]

Mara is a 28 year old trans woman from Missouri. Her familial relationships are strained since coming out, but she keeps up with her mom, Heather, and brother, Zachary. She's still waiting to hear back from Richard, her father.

She's an astronomer, and she met Guy during a group project meetup when they ordered Max's Rustic Pizza delivery. She paid for the pizza and tipped the Pizza GuyTM $9.03, because this nerd wanted to remember the day she met her future lover. (They met 9/03/20 - #fanon) Oh, she also wrote her number on the back of the receipt, with her name signed with two stars for A's).

Speaking of stars, she has covered every room and place she's ever lived in with glow in the dark stars. It doesn't matter that she's an adult now, she will forever be the little astronaut with her head in the clouds.

Though her love of stars may be extraordinary, she also loves to collect animal bones. If Mara wasn't an astronomer, she would probably be a taxidermist.

In 2018, Mara was diagnosed with HIV. *this is crucial to her backstory and requires a deep dive*

One of her coworkers, Pamela, gifted her a 14 year old plant, a monstera albo, who's been named Big Boss. She 'inherited' the plant when Pamela was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.

If Mara hadn't transitioned, she is convinced she would have been recruited into the US military. (smth internalized transphobia and being recruited to feel needed in an unwelcoming society)

Tucked deep in the back of Mara's closet exists a closed storage bin, and inside it are the barbies, bratz dolls, littlest pet shops, and all the other small girls' toys she had stolen as a child. She wants to donate them to another little girl like her one day, but is still trying to process the love and guilt she has for the toys she had to take in order to experience 'girlhood.'

Based on Guy's first audio on the channel, Mara calls Guy 'stupid boy', but it's in a lighthearted, affectionate way. (it's fine because he's HER stupidest boy<3)

She created an art piece that reads "dream big, eat well, & fuck loud" and its one of her favorite pieces ever.

Mara doesn't let anyone but herself or Guy cut her hair. this is an autism related thing AND a trans related thing. don't look at me like that, go ask her about it.

Her and Guy get stoned on the weekends and play dress to impress. i will not elaborate how that goes. (jk i will, one day)

Mara is close friends with Geordi, and they helped each other both at the height of their relationship issues. She listened to Geordi talk extensively about his privacy issues (which is ironic all things considered but anyways) with Cutie, and he served as a listener/yapper when she opened up to him about-

Oops! This level of knowledge is locked. The information behind this door requires The Key of Interest to enter. [translation: i need to finish writing the extensive lore for these characters but i also need people to understand nuance and flawed characters before i share the backstory].