#also he gets dusty since he is mostly on display on a shelf

[wool-string]

Kei desperately need a deep clean so he had a spa day

[delimeful]

taking the fall (2)

warnings: fear, injury, mild blood

-

It was Roman’s love of the arts that did him in.

He was loath to admit it, but Virgil had been right. He’d always been enchanted by the musical productions he’d seen on human teevees, always finding a spare moment to perch on a dusty shelf and take in as much as he could.

So, when he overheard a musical chorus while scavenging for extra paper from the apartment with the newly-moved-in tenant, there was simply nothing else he could do except to investigate further!

One trek and several hiding spots later, he’d found the perfect angle to eavesdrop on the human’s computer. Even better, once he was unpacked, the human was consistent. There were schedules and calendars and sticky notes all over his desk, and he adhered to them strictly, making his apartment the perfect place for Roman to borrow for their little community.

And if he happened to make a return trip and perch himself on the shelf above the human’s rolling chair at the perfect time to see whatever stage production the man was watching this time? That was nobody’s business but his own.

He certainly wasn’t about to tell Virgil, who seemed to get secondhand stress from Roman’s accounts of past riskier borrowing trips. The outie was more than accustomed to the dangers of living outside, but ‘human beans’ were a whole different story.

No, Hot Topic would never get the odd almost-longing that Roman sometimes felt when he saw the amazing things that humans could do. On the tiny laptop display, he could almost pretend those wonderful theatrical productions were actually done by people his size, that they could perform without worry of discovery or capture.

It was a combination of indulging such thoughts and knowing the human’s schedule back-to-front that made him so bold.

When Logan came home with an armful of art supplies, Roman was immediately intrigued, though he justified it as checking for useful materials to borrow. He spent that afternoon watching as Logan methodically glued, hammered, and painted wood into the shape of a miniature house-- no, a set!

It looked just like the stage for the most recent musical Logan had (unknowingly) played for him. Roman was enchanted, coming back every day between borrowing trips to see how more tiny furniture and stairwells had been carefully crafted with the help of a magnifying glass and precise tools. The set came together piece by piece, until it was as complete as any Broadway production.

And then, the downfall. It was during one of these little visits that he overheard Logan on the phone, reassuring whoever was on the other end that the ‘scale model’ was finished and ready to be brought in tomorrow afternoon. Roman had felt a tightening in his chest, and after probably too little time spent deliberating, he was settled.

He was going to stand on that stage, at least once.

It took some doing to cover his tracks-- Mari had been oddly antsy lately, and it had been making everyone else jittery as a result. He’d been playing up his own glittery-ness in order to  reduce the tension, and had volunteered to take another shift borrowing at 2B, the apartment with the snakes and the human that had been eerily perceptive lately.

It wasn’t lying, really. He would go borrow from there, just… after he’d made a quick stop to fulfill his newfound dream!

Logan always slept heavily until his alarm went off, so Roman felt no fear sliding down to the floor at the early hours of the morning. He remained alert, of course, throughout his entire trek over to the table that the human had spent so many hours hunched over, but as he predicted, there were no unusual sounds from the human’s bedroom.

From there, it was only a swift climb up with the help of his hook, and he left it nestled there in the wood, just in case he needed a swift getaway.

Finally, he was before it.

The strangest part about it all was the way that everything seemed to fit just about right for someone his size. He was used to cobbling together chairs and beds out of whatever material was at hand, repurposing anything and everything that came customized for humans.

These chairs were like real ones, human ones that fit together and had all their pieces, and Logan had been so meticulous about making sure everything was to scale that there wasn’t any awkwardness to sitting down on it. Overcome, he nearly sprinted up the model’s stairs to the bedroom terrace above it, flinging himself onto the bed-- perfectly matched up linen, pillows and pillowcases, just like a real bed-- and muffling his delighted squeak into his hands.

The instruments on the dresser were light and easy to grab, though Roman was disappointed to find that the ornate hand mirror didn’t have very high quality glass and was a bit hazy. The hairbrush seemed to be handcrafted, however, and Roman ran it through his own hair once, twice, immersing himself in an imaginary scene.

He had the dialogue mostly right after Logan’s obsessive rewatching of scenes-- pausing often to jot down set reference-- and he wasted no time in pacing around the room and ranting in a whisper, detailing an imaginary conflict in an aside to the audience. He mocked slamming the hairbrush down on the dresser, and turning, the anger drained from him, to walk to the terrace and look out longingly.

He hesitated.

In the scene, the character would be staring up at a night sky. In a play, the actor would be looking out over an audience hanging off their every word.

In reality, he was staring out at a world that was and always would be too big for him.

His soliloquy trailed off to bitter silence, and Roman backed up, shaking his head. He hadn’t a clue why he’d thought this would help him, rather than just rub his nose in what he couldn’t ever have.

Carefully, steps silent, he readjusted the bedding, removed a stray hair from the hairbrush, placed everything neat and right where he’d left it. He would leave no evidence of his presence, just like always.

When he turned around, he met the gaze of a human, standing only a few feet away bedecked in a bathrobe and fluffy unicorn slippers.

It was like Roman had been suddenly drenched by an icy downpour, his whole body going cold with shock. His muscles locked up, and even when the human took a step closer, he couldn’t seem to wrench himself free of the mental paralysis.

Talk about stage fright.

Normally a boon, his imagination was working against him now, spinning elaborate visions of what was to come. He’d been seen, and now not only would he be doomed to die by a human’s whims, but he’d also put every borrower in and around the building in danger. All borrowerkind, even, if this human was bad at keeping secrets.

“So, how are the proportions?” the human in question asked, leaning forward slightly with an excited glint in his eyes.

Roman blinked, befuddled.

“Are they to scale? You seem to be able to manipulate them easily, which bodes well, but I’m not sure the dining room chairs have short enough legs to make sitting at the table feasible…,” Logan trailed off, looking between Roman and the lower level of the model as though measuring him mentally. “Would you mind sitting in one?”

He reached out for something on the set, and Roman’s instincts seemed to kick back into high gear, sending him skittering back across the scaled-down room, grabbing his bag as he went. He remembered seeing a window cut into the backing of the room adjacent, there—!

Heart racing in his ears, he barely registered the human’s voice raised in alarm as he swung himself over the miniature window ledge. The landing jarred his bones, but he was still all in one piece, and that was good enough for him!

There were only moments before the human leaned around to see where he’d gone, so he wasted no time in sprinting to where the desk met the wall. Logan’s laptop charger trailed down in the small gap behind the desk, the closest thing he’d get to a rope down with his real hook on the other side of the table next to the human.

Logan seemed to be a bit slower than usual, since Roman managed to slide down out of sight before the human could move to even catch a glimpse of where he’d gone.

His hands stung slightly as he descended much faster than advisable, already trying to come up with his next step. All his entrances were higher up, but if he could get under nearby furniture, he could cut into the fabric and hide in the hollow underbelly until the coast was clear--!

The only warning he got was a barely audible click from above, and then his ‘rope’ gave out and he was in gut-churning freefall.

Roman fell for three fluttering heartbeats, just enough time to realize what was happening, and he hit the ground feet-first.

His right leg gave out with a dull crack, and the pain-- impossibly overwhelming-- reached him only an instant later. He bit down on his arm to muffle his cry, tears forming as the slightest shift of his leg sent ripples of agony through him.

Well. No longer in one piece, then.

He struggled to come up with a course of action as his head swam. His entire body had gone cold and sweaty, his vision darkening despite his best efforts to stay alert.

An enormous shadow fell over him, and his one last attempt to move was enough to finally make him succumb.

---

Logan allowed himself one very heartfelt swear, watching as the tiny person under his desk slumped over, limp and boneless.

This was not what he had expected when he’d shuffled into his living room to go make some celebratory coffee for managing to finish both the last touches on his latest set model and his ridiculously elaborate statistics midterm all in one night.

Perhaps he could have handled the situation better, but to be fair to him, upon spotting the miniature person, Logan had honestly assumed that he’d either started hallucinating, or had fallen asleep after all. He figured that if he was going to imagine such things, he might as well try to soothe his own concerns about any imperfections in the scaling.

The spike of fear and guilt that he felt hearing that tiny, muffled cry of pain meant that there was no way he was heading to bed anytime soon. He sent a few texts to Patton, informing him that he wouldn’t be able to bring the model to the theatre today and asking him to smooth over any ruffled feathers.

He was well aware that this was completely unprofessional-- he would surely be getting an interrogation from his friend later-- but for the moment, he needed to focus on more important matters.

From the injury he was sporting, the tiny person hadn’t landed on his back, so it would be alright to move him as long as he acted with care. Logan carefully slid a plastic folder under the stranger, muttering apologies when that tiny face crinkled up slightly even in unconsciousness. He lifted the folder up slowly and moved to the kitchen, where the first aid kit was stored under his sink.

From there, he quickly assessed the injuries he could see.

The leg was expected, and it seemed to be swelling rather severely. Unexpectedly, there seemed to be bleeding along the arm, and Logan had to retrieve his magnifying glass to see the injury in detail.

Upon closer inspection, the wound was in the shape of a tiny bite mark, indicating that the stranger had bitten down on himself to avoid screaming. Logan felt his heart sink a little further at the continued confirmation of the terror he’d seen in the stranger’s face before he fled. He’d really frightened the poor creature by moving so thoughtlessly.

He took a deep breath and pushed the feelings aside, flipping the lid of the first aid kit open. He could worry about potential reactions to his presence after he made sure the tiny stranger would at least wake up with less pain than before.

It was his fault this had happened, after all, and so he would do his utmost to fix all that he could.

[theflashdriver]

Guardian (A Silvaze Fanfic)

For as long as Blaze had known him, Silver had always been an overprotective person. Outside naiveté and obviousness, the hedgehog’s strong sense of justice and want to make things right were his strongest traits by a wide margin; he’d take far countless burdens upon himself of both miniscule and galactic proportions. Even with the future saved, even though he was now living peacefully in the Sol Dimension, that fire had never truly left his heart. His protective passion had merely been lying dormant, searching out something new to focus upon. Well, starting around three months ago, it’d found its new target.

Blaze the cat, the queen and guardian of the Sol emeralds, was lounging atop a floating couch formed from pure psychic energy; being paraded around the library she’d once freely walked. Silver the hedgehog, the king and co-guardian of those aforementioned emeralds, was pulling book after book from the shelves in search of a tome she’d requested, constantly glancing back to make certain that she was comfortable. Psychic aura had begun to flare in an effort to expedite the process; books were being tugged from shelves, held to his eye, and flung back when they were found to be incorrect.

He was being silly, the feline was more than capable of seeking out the book for herself but, truth be told, she was enjoying this little display. Beads of sweat were gathering upon his brow; Silver had only been searching for ten or fifteen minutes but he was clearly worried that he was taking too long. It wasn’t as though they were in a rush and the book was hardly that important, it was just another addition to their ever-growing pile of baby-related literature, but he was seeking it out with the same fervour he’d used to pursue Iblis. This was all so mundane, but Blaze couldn’t help taking joy in it.

“Are you sure we’re in the right section?” He managed to ask, raking ten books from a shelf only to just as quickly throw them back, “We’re getting close to the end.”

“It’s here somewhere,” She cooed, reclining deeper into her floating chair, “I’m certain it was around this section.”

That was all the convincing he needed; Silver doubled his efforts immediately. Books from even higher up began to tumble but refused to contact the ground, encased in psychic cyan light. He threw glances in every direction, knowing instinctually when a book was hovering at his side. To put it plainly, the hedgehog was putting far too much effort into a relatively simple task.

The royal library was quiet today, devoid of visiting scholars and legal practitioners, but it’d been that way for a while now. Certain recent events had caused activity within the palace to slow and work-based visitation to greatly diminish. Well, it wasn’t as though the childcare section was usually bustling with life (in fact, they’d found it quite dusty upon their first visit) but the more complete calm of their surroundings had made their literature reviews far easier. Nowadays they couldn’t leave the palace without someone prying into their lives. It’d been years since life was last like that.

He froze in place, eyes darting twice across a single cover, before it was snatched from the air and presented to her, “Is this the one? The cover’s just like you described it.”

The hedgehog had produced a tome medium in size, only around one hundred pages long and (if she recalled correctly) filled with pictures. Its cover art depicted an array of cartoon fruit and vegetables tumbling free from an overfull mixing-bowl. Now that she’d seen the title, she immediately recalled her frantic flip-through a month ago; Nutrition and Newborns. This was indeed the book she’d requested.

She didn’t take the book immediately; instead, she leant in and beyond his outstretched hand, allowing her lips to weave their way onto his cheek, “Thank you, Silver.”

They’d been married for years and had of course performed acts far more intimate than such a tiny kiss, but watching his blush grow in response to her tenderness had rather become one of Blaze’s pastimes. As the book left his hand, it came to cup that very cheek while his prior beaming smile transformed into a more crooked, embarrassed, grin. He was still so plainly love-struck; rather recently she’d caught him in the wee hours of the morning, rubbing his wedding band and throwing her supposedly sleeping form all manner of tender glances. They’d been married for years but that reality still seemed to surprise him. Well, given the lives they’d lived, he could hardly blame him for feeling that.

“Do you want me to find anything else, do any others come to mind?” He asked, “I could go back through this section, see if we’ve missed anything good?”

“Perhaps later, this will do for now,” She attempted to quell his eagerness, “Let’s take things one book at a time, we’ve still got a few months after all.”

He smiled at that, almost daydreaming as the last books jumped back onto their shelves, “Yeah, just a few more months…” Silver reached up, she quickly took his hand.

Rather than simply float her, it was almost as though they were walking together; he led her back through aisle upon aisle of books to their little workspace. The worn couch and low table rather stood in stark contrast to their surroundings. While the royal library was filled with exquisitely crafted dark-wooden fixtures and floored with a deep emerald carpet, their table was formed of wrought iron and pale driftwood (crafted by Marine the raccoon herself) while the couch had more than a few patches sewn into it but was, mostly, wrapped in a soft red material. Truthfully, getting furniture that better matched their surroundings would have been easy, even if Blaze hadn’t been the queen, but the pair rather loved those mismatched pieces. Those out of place furnishings reminded her, and surely him, of their childhood amongst the flames but not the chaos tied to it. This spot reminded Blaze of ramshackle homes made in prior libraries, schoolhouses and musty old churches, their sanctuaries within a dangerous world.

The feline felt herself turn in the air, her hand slipped from his as she was gently lowered onto the couch; his psychic chair dissolved from the bottom up as it made contact with a real one and left sitting on the couch’s left side. Silver didn’t join her on it though; instead he stood on the far side of the table, concern still plain in his eyes. Knowing what was coming, her mouth curled into a small smile.

“Do you want more pillows or a blanket or…” Silver scrambled for more things to offer. He was trying so hard already, she felt lazy but so very cared for, “Something to eat, a drink…?”

He wanted to help so badly; Blaze felt herself grow softer still. She wanted to give him something to do, “We could take tea and read this together?”

“I’ll make a pot of decaf and hurry back,” He promised, beginning to turn away, “Are you sure that’s all?”

Ah yes, they had to cut back on caffeine… well, only she had to, but he wasn’t willing to let her face that alone. She was well beyond vomiting every morning, but cravings still lingered. The mere consideration of her common cravings caused one to spike.

Pinning her gaze to the book and trying to act nonchalant, she posited, “Perhaps a little bit of chocolate.”

Silver halted. He reached into his back quills and, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, produced a small, unopened, chocolate bar. Without so much as blinking, he presented it to her.

When he, eventually, noticed her befuddled expression, Silver simply smiled, “It’s your most common craving and I don’t like leaving you uncomfortable so…”

She felt heat across her face as she gingerly took the bar from him. Her eyes latched onto it, she could feel her tail flailing wildly, “Thank you, Silver…”

Was she really that obvious? Has she had this hankering that often? He interrupted her train of thought to reaffirm, “I’ll be as quick as I can, just shout if there’s anything else!” Before shooting between a set of bookshelves and towards the door, surrounded by psychic light.

Blaze slowly pulled back the foil and took a bite, but the taste did nothing to dispel her embarrassment. Her royal position had meant that, in this life at least, lots of people had tried to look after her, but none of them did it quite like him. Despite how oblivious Silver was to certain things, the hedgehog could notice the slightest of shifts in her disposition and pick up on things even she didn’t truly understand. Apparently, there were differences in the ways she purred and oddities in how her tail flicked but she’d be hard pressed to describe them. She supposed her cravings were far more obvious than those physical quirks, but it still seemed so bizarre.

Having eaten two of the bar’s eight total squares, the queen folded closed the wrapper and set it aside. She took up the book and scanned through the contents page: Foreword, Introduction, Nutritional-Timelines, Common-Mistakes, Weaning, Liquid-Foods, Solid-Foods and Additional-Recipes. Flipping through, only glancing, Blaze found that the wording was simple yet detailed, intended to be easily read but simultaneously informative. The illustrations also seemed helpful, they’d seemed rather useless on a cursory glance but, in hindsight, the feline needed all the help she could get with regards to cooking.

Before she could make a true judgement on the book’s quality though, the whir of psychic energy re-entered the room. She looked up from her book just in time for him to land in the exact spot she’d last seen him, tea tray in hand and a strong pillar of steam rising from a large pot. His quills had swept back to pin against his head and the sweat on his brow was plain. The kitchen wasn’t too far away but he’d plainly rushed, utilising far more of his power than he probably should have. The tea couldn’t have had more than a moment to brew; they’d have to leave it for now.

Despite this, Silver so very casually set the tray on the table and slunk around to sit beside her, “So, does it look alright? Anything interesting inside?”

“Well, it looks to be half nutritional guide and half cookbook; just like I remembered,” She responded, flicking her way back to the start and shifting to hold the manual between them, “I think it’s intended for slightly younger parents, but that just means it’s thorough and well detailed.”

The hedgehog shifted closer still, outer leg brushed outer leg, “So we’ll get a few new recipes out of it at the very least.”

With that, the pair begun their shared reading session; they quickly worked their way through the foreword and into the meat of the book. Her initial impression was proven correct, as she took in the nutrient-timelines, the information about baby’s requirements was handled gently yet informatively. Unfortunately, however, it was at this stage that Blaze noticed a change in her companion’s demeanour. The hedgehog wasn’t truly looking at the book, rather he was looking through and past it to what lay on the other side; a goofy smile had spread across his muzzle.

Knowing what was distracting him, Blaze rolled her eyes, but her smile grew further, “Go on, get it out of your system so that we can focus properly.”

Upturning the book and placing it upon the couch’s arm, Blaze gently raised the hem of her blouse. Her belly was revealed, still far from its full size but undeniably substantially grown. The royal baby was well on its way; the pyrokinetic feline was four and a half months pregnant. The father of her unborn child dropped to the carpet and began to tickle and brush his way through her white fur, plainly enamour by the growing form residing within her. Parenthood was so strange but it plainly excited him. Well, it excited them both, but he wasn’t literally attached to the baby twenty-four hours per day. He had to make his love known in more sporadic bursts.

They weren’t wandering into this blindly; they’d spent almost a year just questioning whether it was right to do. The life of a royal was one embroiled in politics and, even with the threats to their world long gone, the duties of a guardian were a lifelong burden. Working against that notion were their similar histories; Silver could hardly remember his parents and neither of Blaze’s had lived beyond her birth, their younger years had been wrung of relaxation by terrifying responsibilities. They’d been thoroughly enticed by even the notion of normalcy tied to parenthood. Their potential to give someone the comfort that they’d lacked had finally pushed them to decide.

Other factors had been considered of course, such as whether or how their inherent abilities would be passed on and the latent additional responsibility that would come with them. Silver’s powers were still an anomaly, unknown in origin and genetic nature, while Blaze’s had been consistently passed on for generations. Historically, her family’s powers had never mixed with another so, even as the baby grew inside her; they had no idea what would happen. It’d all been an almost blind endeavour that had, thankfully, come to bear fruit.

Blaze’s eyes closed as she felt his muzzle gently press against the bump and his fingers found her sides, “Hello there, it’s just me again.”

No response came from the baby bump, of course it didn’t, but that didn’t stop the hedgehog from listening intently. From her position it was difficult to make out Silver’s expression but from the way his ears had slightly flopped forward and the steady beating of his tail, Blaze knew this was exactly what he wanted. Despite the effort he’d gone to searching out that book, Blaze found herself forgetting their task as she looked upon him.

“I hope you’re doing okay in there, we won’t get to see each other for a while yet but I can’t wait,” He’d shifted slightly, letting his forehead press against the bump instead, “Your mum is doing wonderfully and I’m trying my best to help. I want things to be perfect when we finally do meet. Things are nicer here than they’ve ever been and we’re doing so much to prepare for you.“

Purrs broke past Blaze’s lips, their rumbling filling the quiet library. Her hand slowly came to mingle among his quills, gently rearranging them with no real purpose. Perhaps she’d braid them again tonight, their evening routine had rather changed due to their upcoming arrival. Where once they’d simply snuggle their way into bed, their journey to the land of the sleeping now took a few twists and turns. They always tried to do something before bed, considering that they’d soon be so much busier, they wanted to cherish such quiet moments. Massages would be given, books would be read, they’d play chess, watch a movie or she’d simply find herself playing with his fur.

Her touch caught his attention, the psychic’s eyes flickered up to her before returning to her midriff, “The baby’s right there, I can practically feel them, but it still doesn’t seem real…” Silver mumbled, leaning backwards and into her view, “I never really thought we’d get to…”

Words left unsaid resonated with Blaze’s very soul. One hand slipped from the depths of his quills to cup his cheek, “I wake up some mornings and question it myself, it almost seems impossible.”

“A-All of it does,” He managed to respond, “Even just being here, that weight being off our shoulders, is ridiculous. W-We’re safe, we’re comfortable, we’re together, we’re married…”

She could feel his wedding band as he brushed and rubbed the bump, hers was pressed against his muzzle, “I don’t regret a single thing, not a single moment.”

His eyes shot to meet with hers, “Me neither! I don’t at all, I just…” His head slumped into her grasp, seeking out her warmth, “Its been years since we settled, and I thought I had fully settled, but this it’s a step even further. This is normal, this is how things were meant to be; so very normal.”

She watched his tears begin to well and couldn’t help but smile. After all this time, he could still be so insecure, “Parenthood seems normal yet abnormal. We know it in theory and have our assumptions but it’s an all-new challenge, a brand-new adventure. No matter how we prepare, I’m certain something will surprise us.”

“We can read all we want but…“ As tears spilled panic came with them, “If I’m going to be a good dad I need to be even tougher than this,” He’d raised the back of his right hand to rub at his eyes, he was trying to hide his expression, “I-I shouldn’t be crying, there’s nothing to cry about, this is wonderful. I’m meant to be strong…”

“You’re still so naïve,” Refusing to let her hold be broken, Blaze thumbed away his tears. He managed to resettle in her grasp, “It’s just as you said; we were so on saving the future, neither of us thought we’d make it this far. You’re allowed to feel like this,” She promised, “We went through so much to get here, that’s why you feel this way. That and, well, parenthood scares most regular people. We’ve not lived the normal life we want for them.”

“You’re going to be wonderful at this,” He relaxed back into her touch, “You’re smart and strong and warm, you’ll do great,” He paused, as if unsure whether to ask his next question, “Do you think I’ll make a good dad?”

“Silver,” She sighed, shifting to cradle his head in her hands, “I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, you’re going to be a fantastic father. The baby’s not even here yet you’re trying so hard. I can hardly imagine how caring you’ll be when they finally arrive. I doubt you’ll put them down for days.”

He smiled at that but concern still cut his brow, “I’m so excited but so scared, what if we have to fight again? What if they have to fight,” He fretted, leaning deeper into her touch. They’d of course discussed this in the lead up to her pregnancy but, while they’d decided they wanted a child regardless, Blaze had anticipated that worry returning.

“What if we did have to fight again?” She asked, knowing it was best that he finished his train of thought.

“I would, of course I would, but…” He struggled for the right words, “I just really don’t want them to. I don’t want them to have to do what we’ve done,” Fighting for one’s own life was bad enough, the pressure of fighting for whole worlds was terrifying. It was a fact they both knew, first-hand, “I want them to grow up safe and happy and peaceful. I want to be able to look out for them rather than whole universes.”

“Well, then you don’t have to worry about being a good dad, I know you’ll make a great one,” She promised, “You want them to be secure and loved, that’s what’s most important,” The queen insisted, “We’ve done all we can to make sure that they can live peacefully, more than any normal parents could have, even if that wasn’t our intent at the time.”

He’d slowly gone from kneeling to standing; his right hand had shifted to cover the top of her baby bump and the left had arrived to hold her shoulder. The echoes of his tears remained, but his smile was almost blinding. Slowly but surely, he leaned in and closed his eyes. His forehead met with hers as he began to nuzzle. Without a moment’s hesitation, Blaze returned that gentle contact.

Sweet nothings were murmured, her hands found his chest fur and soon they were freely kissing. They were gentle and brief kisses, little more than back and forth pecks, but Blaze could feel his heart in every single one. Silver’s defensiveness had easily led into softness; while he’d fight ferociously to protect others, he would also handle them with care. Blaze knew that she was going to be the sterner parent, she’d be the one to insist that they get out of bed or do their chores, but she was more than fine with that. It was in her nature, not his. For as defensive as he was, for as much as he wanted things to be just, he’d always been softer than her. Of course he was worried that he’d have to feign hardness, she hoped he’d never have to again.

Wispy words broke the quiet library air. She wanted to reassure him, even if she didn’t know what the future held, “We’ve done so much together; we can do anything together.”

“If we can manage something as impossible as this,” She felt his hand trace across his midriff, “Th-Then we can do anything.”

This intimate session could have lasted hours, perhaps even the rest of the evening, but it was interrupted by something neither of them had expected. As Blaze was leaning in again, the words “You’re such a softy” tumbling from her lips, she felt what she could only describe as a small fluttering inside her abdomen. It’d taken a moment to register but by the time the sensation repeated Blaze had realised what it meant. The baby was moving inside her, she’d felt their first touch.

Silver’s eyes had opened wide, “Did you feel that?” He half whispered.

No, they had felt their first touch. This was the quickening, the first tangible sign of life.

She managed a nod in response, her purring grew louder still as she shifted her hands from him and to her sides. Silver dropped back to his knees, returning to eye level with her swollen belly. Ever so gently, he returned his second hand to her form just in time for another flutter, “I-Is that what I think it is? They’re…”

“Y-Yes, I think they’re kicking,” She managed to stutter, closing her eyes in an attempt to focus on the sensation.

This was the first real sign, their child’s first real impact on their world. It’d been clear that they were there for a handful of months now, but they’d never acted; simply grown and waited. This was entirely new; excitement coursed through Blaze’s veins just as it plainly ran through Silver’s.

“Hey there little one, I’m sorry. Am I taking up too much of mummy’s attention?” He responded to her bump, gently rubbing small circles into her fur, “She’s just too lovely, I can’t help myself.”

Her child’s kicks having alleviated thoughts of silliness or feelings of embarrassment, Blaze also began to talk to the baby, “Or is it that I’m taking up too much of daddy’s time? Keeping him from playing with you,” She felt Silver’s eyes upon her and, emboldened, pushed further, “I did marry him you know; I do want to kiss him from time to time. I hope that won’t be a problem for you...”

Another flutter drummed within the feline; the unborn child could only be voicing their outraged. A snicker breached Silver’s lips and was quickly mirrored on Blaze’s own. Soon they were fully laughing; Blaze’s hands slipped to the pillows in an attempt to steady herself as Silver finally pulled away from her belly.

When she’d finally recovered, the hedgehog managed to respond, “I think we might have a problem.”

“Picking favourites already,” The queen jokingly scolded, gently combing through her white fur, “You know, I’m the one carrying you around; he only insists on carrying me because he’s scared that you’re making it hard for me to walk. Your dad can be so overprotective. He’ll go out of his way to solve the smallest of problems, even when there are far more pressing issues,” She was almost chiding him, though she was doing so purposefully, “But I like that about him. He’ll always look out for you, just like I will.”

No further quickening was felt but, in its wake, Blaze couldn’t help identifying a tender calmness that had overcome Silver’s disposition. He managed to make his way back onto the couch beside her, almost dissolving into the floral material.

Bright yellow eyes collided with her amber set, “Did that really just happen?”

“If it’d only been me here, I don’t think I’d have believed it,” Blaze admitted, “I’d have told myself it was something else.”

He was beaming again but the combined endeavours of overly tending her, talking so deeply and observing the phenomena that was his child’s first actions had clearly exhausted him. Reaching just past the book, Blaze drew the chocolate bar and held it out to him. It took no more than a moment for him to understand, lean in and bite off the top square. As Blaze claimed a little more for herself, a blue bioluminescence engulfed the teapot and brought it to pour. The book was flipped open and gentle chatter ballooned to fill their little corner of the library as they shifted ever closer.

They were finally making their own future, no longer struggling to fix other people’s problems. Despite how unreal it all seemed, they were more peaceful than they’d ever had before.

[saventhhaven]

Remembrance

Pairing: Sam Winchester x reader

Tags: Stanford!Sam, Stanford!reader, past relationship, sort of AU where Jess doesn’t exist, emotions

Word Count: 2,062

(Gif not mine)

A yawn that you couldn't quite stifle behind your hand had you squeezing your eyes shut as your jaw practically came unhinged.

"Good morning." One of your newer officers poked her head through the doorway to your office, and you looked up from your laptop.

"Morning, Mason."

"I'm gonna get coffee before I get to work," she explained. "Can I get you anything?" Coffee sounded like heaven right now. It was 8:00 now, and you had been at the station since 7:30 yesterday... morning.

"That would be amazing, thank you," you replied gratefully. "I'll just take whatever you're having with an extra shot of espresso." Mason grinned at you with a slight shake of her head.

"You got it, boss." The second she was gone, you turned back to your computer.

You were already totally swamped between budget management, staff reports, and evaluations. But now, on top of it all, four little girls had gone missing in the last week and a half. Parents were furious and frantic, and you were only barely keeping your head above water. Your officers were doing the best they could, but even you were having trouble digging up any information. Four little girls just disappeared without a trace, and you were the one that had to tell their parents that you had no idea what happened - not exactly the most reassuring thing to hear when your child has gone missing. All four had vanished from precisely the same spot in the local park, but even stakeouts revealed nothing out of the ordinary. You were making zero progress, and it felt like you were just banging your head against a wall. And the wall was solid concrete. And also on fire.

"Cap?" Again, you looked up from your computer.

"What is it, Duffy?" you asked. Duffy was one of your more experienced officers. He was a bit on the smaller side, but he could still kick ass if needed - you had seen him in action before.

"I'm sorry to bother you." You turned in your spinning chair to face him, smiling kindly as you gave him your full attention.

"It's no bother at all."

"There are a couple men from the FBI here to see you. About the disappearances." You felt your smile falter, and you let out a long sigh. Just when you thought your day couldn't get any more complicated.

"Thanks, Duff. I'll be right there." Duffy let the door shut behind him on the way out, and you took a moment to yourself, burying your face in your hands. This was going to be interesting, that was for sure. You had worked with the FBI once in the past, and it wasn't what you would call a pleasant experience.

It was about two years ago when you had first assumed your position as police captain that two FBI agents had come to investigate a local cybercrime. Rather than work with you as you had been expecting, they mostly just wanted you out of the way and didn't tell you much else. But the times they did talk to you, they were rude and downright mean. You knew they were just doing their jobs, so, of course, you kept your mouth shut, but personally, you didn't think a badge gave them the right to be assholes.

With one final deep breath, you steeled yourself and stood, walking across your office in two short strides to open the door. As long as they weren't the same agents as last time, you were going to be fine. Besides, you had more experience under your belt now.

The second you laid eyes on the two agents, though, you instantly took back everything you had just thought. You weren't sure what either of them was doing here, but you did know one thing: they sure as hell weren't FBI agents. If you had any good sense left in you (which you suspected you probably didn't), you would have arrested them right on the spot. But you couldn't. 

Instead, you found yourself frozen in place - from shock or anger, you couldn't tell - forced backward in time as all of your memories played like some torturous slideshow at the speed of light before your eyes. Back to all the late nights studying in the Stanford library, as you slowly but surely fell in love with him; back to the laughter that echoed through the kitchen when he burned dinner on what was supposed to be your first date; back to all the times that he had made love to you in your shared apartment. ...And back to the time when he left without a trace, and your world collapsed in on itself. Sam Winchester.

"S-" The beginnings of his name died on your tongue when you remembered where you were, and you bit your lip hard to stop yourself from calling out. Not that it was any surprise, considering how much time had passed, but he looked much older. His hair was no longer short and mussed, with his bangs drooping into his face like you recalled. Instead, it was longer, smoother, and darker, no doubt because of age. The extra years he had to fill out his face and physique suited him. He looked far more comfortable with himself than he had ever been when you were together, and you were suddenly struck by the pang of how much had changed.

But those eyes - those beautiful greenish hazel eyes that could never make up their mind what color they wanted to be - those were still the same. And when Sam finally spotted you standing breathlessly, his eyes widened, though you couldn't decipher the emotions behind the wall he had put up.

"Agents," you called out, willing your voice not to shake. "We can speak privately in my office." You had only met Dean once: the last time you saw Sam. Judging by the way he brushed past you into your office without a second glance, he didn't even remember you. But you remembered him. Sam looked searchingly into your face as he followed his brother. You held his gaze for a brief moment before tearing yourself away, closing the door behind both of them.

Despite your better judgment, you found yourself standing in front of him, still not truly believing that he was really here.

"Y/N," he breathed, just as transfixed as you were.

"Wait, wait, wait," Dean cut in. "Y/N as in your girlfriend from college, Y/N? From fifteen years ago?" Dean's question fell on two deaf pairs of ears.

"What happened to you?" you asked. "I..." You swallowed hard. "I looked for you." Sam looked away shamefully, and you took notice in the way he was unable to meet your eyes when he answered.

"I had to deal with some family business." You had to admit, his answer surprised you. You knew Sam very well, and he was many things, but a liar just wasn't one of them. Since when did he not tell the truth?

"That does not answer my question," you pointed out irritably. "Nor does it explain why the hell you and your brother are playing dress-up as federal agents! Have you lost your damn mind?" The youngest Winchester turned to his brother for help, who merely gave a shrug as he suddenly became very interested in the blinds you had put up over one of the office windows. "You realize this can get you behind bars, right?"

"Well, what about you?" Sam asked with a not-so-subtle subject change. "You were working on law with me, not law enforcement. What happened?" Your heart stuttered sadly in your chest as you began to recount the story.

"October 31, 2005," you started, and Sam immediately grimaced. He already knew where this was going, but you didn't care. He wanted to hear what happened? Then he was going to hear it. "Dean broke into our apartment - which I still think was batshit crazy, by the way," you pointed out to which Dean gave a small nod of reluctant agreement. "You told me it was something with your dad," you continued, "and that you'd be gone for a few days - a week tops. Sam, that was the last time I saw you. It broke my heart, It almost killed me. Up until now, I never saw you again. I couldn't eat, and I couldn't sleep. I-I-" you started to stutter. You couldn't help it. "I stopped going to class." You saw the pity flood into of Dean's eyes as guilt filled Sam's. "My grades started slipping until..." You had to stop for a moment to get your emotions back under control. "I lost my full ride." Even though you felt your stomach fluttering like a leaf in a hurricane, you somehow managed to keep your voice even. "I had to go home. 

“My parents were furious," you continued. "They kicked me out, told me not to come back." Sam reached for your hand to give it a gentle squeeze as he listened to your story. "So, I packed up my car and moved out here. I took a waitressing job to pay the bills; I saved up for a few years for the closest police academy. The end goal there was to become a detective, so I could find you." Dean watched the two of you carefully, almost as if he was really seeing you for the first time. "I did it." You gestured to your old detective badge, displayed proudly on the shelf behind your desk. "But then they offered me the position of sergeant, and I realized-" A small choking sound came from your throat, and you realized that your eyes had started to well. You cleared your throat, blinking furiously. "-I realized it was time to let go. So, I took the promotion. That was four years ago." The chain from the overhead fan clinked against the lightbulb as phones rang outside your office door.

Somewhat lost in thought now, you nodded to yourself and moved back to your desk, where you rifled through a dusty filing cabinet. "But I still... Aha!" Your hand emerged from the thing with a huge cream-colored manila folder, packed to the brim, and rubber-banded shut to keep its contents from spilling out. Feeling a bit subconscious, you clutched the folder tightly in your hands. "This is everything I was able to dig up, but you disappeared somewhere around 2006." Dean gave his younger brother a knowing look, which you didn't understand, but you didn't press the matter. "Turns out, you're a hard man to track down."

When Sam opened his mouth to speak, eyes swimming with emotion, you were afraid your heart might stop beating.

"Okay!" You visibly jumped as the door to your office swung open, and Mason stepped in with a cardboard to-go cup. "One extra-large cappuccino, with an extra shot of-" She suddenly seemed to notice that Sam and Dean were in the room with you, and her eyes widened apologetically. "I'm so sorry," she apologized, setting the coffee on the edge of your desk before retreating back to the door. "I didn't realize you were in the middle of something. I'll get out of your hair."

"No worries, Officer Jones," you responded with a smile. "Our visitors were just leaving." Dean's eyebrows lifted in surprise, but he didn't object. "Agent," you addressed Sam politely, noting the disappointed air surrounding him at being treated as if the two of you didn't know each other. "I believe this should aid you in your search." When you handed him the manila folder that contained all hints of your extensive search, his fingers brushed yours, just barely, and his Adam's apple bobbed in his throat.

"Thank you." You saw the remorseful glint in his eyes, and in an impossible language that you couldn't explain how you understood, you knew that what he said was entirely different from what he was actually saying to you: I’m sorry.

With that, the two men were gone from your office. You felt yourself sag a bit in relief. It wasn't until Mason touched your arm that you realized she had been speaking to you.

"Are you okay? You look pale." Again, you concealed your emotions with a smile.

"I'm perfectly all right," you lied. "Just tired."

Thank you so much for reading! <3

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[lupinlongbottom]

Practically a Weasley 

Charlie Weasley x Reader

Summary: Newly bestselling childrens book author, (Y/N) (L/N) reconnects with her best friends, Fred and George at a signing. They invite her over for dinner to catch up. Charlie Weasley, also happens to be attending dinner that evening.

Prompt: Please can i request a Charlie Weasley x reader, where she is best friends with and the same age as the twins (they're all 18 with Charlie being like 23ish) and her and Charlie are secretly dating and then the whole family finds out? Thank you :) - Anon

Word Count: 3.4k 

Warnings: None

A/N: fluffy fluff fluff, oh, and dragons

Part 1.5 ... Part 2 ... Part 3 ... Epilogue 

__

She had promised to be their partner in crime, help with their shop as much as she could, but everything changed when (Y/N) found her passion. (Y/N) decided to travel the world to write children stories for young witches and wizards. She had always enjoyed writing and her creativity knew no bounds. Of course she’d want to expand the imagination of children, influence their thinking from a young age. The Tales of Beedle the Bard got ever so boring once you’ve read it so many times.

Fred and George were heartbroken. (Y/N) had been their best friend since the start of their Hogwarts years, the first person to break into their little world. She had been their sole confidant, their wonderful distractor and the girl everyone thought one of them would end up marrying. Not that Fred or George had thought about it before, but both came to the conclusion that it would be far to weird.

She was practically a Weasley.

The letters came about once a week, updating the twins on what country she was currently in, what sorts of new foods she had tried and what sorts of people she had met. One letter in particular recited the story of the altercation she had been in with a rather short Muggle man at a market shop. He left with a broken nose, (Y/N) left with a hefty discount on the tapestry she had purchased. Fred begged her to come back and visit, to show off her prized punching arm, as it had been far too long. She said yes, as soon as her first book was finished.

The Distracted Dragon was a huge success to say the least. It had found its way to a shelf in every bookstore in the Wizarding World, parents just couldn’t get enough of the new content to share with their children. The title character, a Common Welsh Green named Bancroft, found himself setting everything on fire, never paying attention to where he would be doing it. It was a funny story, filled with jokes and laughs. Kids couldn’t get enough of the singular fart joke (Y/N) reluctantly kept in. Fred insisted at least one joke be related to flatulence catching on fire. It was tasteless, sure, but did the kids quote that joke on the daily.

George nearly tripped on his own feet as he passed the window display at Flourish and Blotts, a new poster had been hung with delicate looping font.

Book Signing this Friday at 11am

Featuring: Author of The Distracted Dragon

(Y/N) (L/N)

He could hardly believe it. Fred thought he was bluffing, but the proof was in the pudding. Literally. George had placed a copy of the flyer that held the information and a lovely headshot of (Y/N) into Fred’s dessert. It was decided rather quickly that they both were going to close the shop for a little while on Friday afternoon, they wanted to surprise (Y/N).

—

The line stretched down the alley, funneling into the little bookstore. Children, accompanied by their parents, jumped up and down, excited to get their copy of the bright green book signed by the woman who made their minds soar.

“Do we have to?” Fred groaned, turning back to his brother.

“See our best friend? One we haven’t seen in the flesh for at least a year now? No, you’re right, lets head back home.”

Fred punched George lightly on the arm. “No you dingbat, I was talking about waiting in that atrocious line.” He pointed to the now growing queue of people.

“I mean, we do have an in with the writer…” George scratched his chin, rather dramatically. “And we are fellow shopkeepers here in the alley.” Fred smiled brightly.

“Right you are! Let’s skip ahead, shall we?” The twins forced their way into the store, noticed by practically everyone. Their brightly colored suits were rather hard to ignore amongst the sea of people. It was hard to move around the crowd and stacks of dusty books, but the twins found their way near the front of the line, the end in sight.

“…no, thank you! I really appreciate it! I hope you enjoy!” (Y/N) thanked the young mother and her little daughter who had just gotten their book signed. She was brilliant, practically glowing with happiness. Fred and George knew that she was truly doing what she had set out to do in life. (Y/N) looked up at the next people in line, eyes widening with shock. “You’re kidding!”

“Ma’m, do you think you could sign this for us?” Fred teased, holding out a rather worn copy of her book to her. He had read it and re-read it countless times before today.

“Address it to ‘The Gorgeous Weasley Brothers’, please and thank you!” George added.

“You two—but how did you? Oh it doesn’t matter!” (Y/N) flung up from her chair and ran around the table, embracing the tall redheads tightly. “I’m so sorry I haven’t visited before! I was planning on surprising you both tonight, but I suppose you beat me to it!”

Fred laughed. “We’re always—”

“One step ahead!” George said, ruffling (Y/N)’s hair.

“Stop it! I have more books to sign!” (Y/N) tired to flatten her hair back to it’s original glory, but she knew it would look rather frizzy the rest of the signing. “Yours included! Give me one moment,” (Y/N) dipped her quill into her ink pot and opened the worn copy open to the front cover. She sprawled a message in cramped handwriting, directly under the dedication, which she had made out to Fred and George respectively. She shut the cover and handed it back to Fred.

“Would you like to come over for dinner? Once you’re done, of course, Ms. Popular.” Fred winked, gesturing to the seemingly endless line of people.

“Yeah! Mum’s been on us about how you’re doing! You should come to dinner, she’s making chicken.”

“At your parents? The Burrow?” (Y/N) glanced at the two of them rather quickly, as if trying to decide who to look at.

Fred nodded. “Well, yeah? That’s where they live?”

“Charlie’s supposed to be back in town today too, so she’s already making extra.” George said, picking something out of his teeth.   

“Oh,” (Y/N) chuckled nervously. “I’d love to come. Tell Molly to save a place for me.”

“Already did last night!” Fred chanted triumphantly. “We knew you were going to say yes, she’s so thrilled to see you again you know.” 

(Y/N) nodded. “Of course, I’m excited to see the rest of the Weasley’s too! I’ve missed Molly’s cooking.”

“And you’ll be able to meet Charlie! Well, again I guess. He never was one to hang with us for the first two years.” George scratched the back of his head. This was true. Charlie was far too busy in his last few years of school to really truly hang with the twins and their subsequent friends.

(Y/N) stiffened ever so slightly. “Charlie’s the one that works with dragons, right?” 

“The very same!” Fred chimed.

“You and him would get along quite well I reckon, seeing as you’ve written a best-selling book about dragons and all,” George chuckled. “Careful though, he won’t stop talking about them once you get him started.” 

“I have my ways,” (Y/N) said, mostly to herself. The twins shook their heads slightly, as if they had misheard her. “I mean—I’m sure he stops at some point.” She shrugged, face growing a light shade of pink.

“Probably when he’s dead.”

“Or sleeping.”

(Y/N) chuckled. “Whatever you say,” She glanced over at her manager, whom gave her a rather trying look. “Listen, I have more books to sign. I’ll Apparate to The Burrow at 6, if that’s okay?” Fred and George looked at each other, only to shrug.

“Whatever.”

“We don’t care.”

“Okay, 6 o’clock it is then.” (Y/N) waved them off, settling back into her creaking seat, rubbing her aching wrist ever so slightly.

—

“(Y/N)! You look so wonderful! Come in!” Molly exclaimed, opening the front door to (Y/N), who stood in the dripping front entry way. It had rained just before (Y/N) had Apparated, the damp smell surrounded the house. Molly wrapped (Y/N) into the biggest and warmest hug she had gotten in quite a long time.

“It’s nice to see you Molly,” (Y/N) squeezed out, slightly gasping for air. Molly’s hugs were wonderful, truly, but they could leave you quite breathless if you weren’t careful. “Molly—can’t—breathe.”

Molly immediately released (Y/N), a shocked expression was left on her face. “Oh dear! I’m so sorry! It’s just, none of the kids will let me hug them for so long,” Molly sniffled. “And you always are so willing for a good hug!” Molly stopped herself from grabbing (Y/N) again.

“What smells so good?” (Y/N) asked, removing her coat and old (Y/H) scarf, setting them both on the coatrack. The small hands at the end of the hook grabbed ahold of them tightly. 

“That’d be the chicken!” Molly waved her wand, a slew of potatoes flew in the window from the garden, finding their way to the kitchen. “Fred! George! Come peel the potatoes!” She hollered up the stairs, hoping to see the identical redheads peek their heads down them. No answer.

“I can do it Molly.” (Y/N) walked towards the kitchen, pushing her shirt sleeves up to her elbows.

Molly clicked her tongue. “Absolutely not! No guest of mine is peeling the potatoes,” The front door opened again, only to shut once more. “Charlie! Welcome home dear, how was the market?”

Charlie’s eyes met (Y/N)’s for a moment, but only to look down at the bags he had been holding. “Just fine Mum, got everything on the list.” Another glance at (Y/N).

“Glad to hear it,” Molly patted him gently on the back. “Would you mind helping (Y/N) with the potatoes?” Charlie nodded, his cheeks glowing pink. “I’ll be upstairs cleaning before your father gets home, let me know if the chicken is burning.” 

“Will do,” Charlie smiled, giving a slight wave to Molly as she ascended the stairs. “Nice to see you again.” He mumbled, grabbing a knife to start peeling.

(Y/N) chuckled. “It has been quite some time, hasn’t it?” She playfully bumped into Charlie’s side, causing him to cut a hunk off of the potato along with the peel.

“A few hours can really change a person,” He grinned, bumping back into (Y/N). She yelped in surprise. “How was the signing?”

“Huge turnout. I had no idea so many people enjoyed my book,” (Y/N) said, placing the peels into the ceramic blue bowl sitting on the counter. “It’s all thanks to your expertise no doubt.”

Charlie chuckled. “My expertise? Oh love, your fantastic writing is what people are buying the book for. Nobody would buy a book about me droning on about dragons.”

“You’re right,” (Y/N) hummed. “It’d just put people to sleep.” 

“Hey!”

“Kidding!” (Y/N) giggled, readjusting her sleeve. She gave a quick glance around the kitchen, as if to make sure nobody else was there. “You haven’t told them? About us?” 

“No, not yet,” His voice was hushed, barely audible. “Why, have you?”

(Y/N) shook her head. “I almost let it slip today,” She wrung her wrist slightly, it still ached from the signatures. “When I was talking to Fred and George.”

“What did you say?”

“They mentioned you being home, obviously I knew that, because you had traveled with me for the book signing and—”

“You said something about how adorable I am? Or how lovely my freckles look in the candlelight?” Charlie grinned, slanting his eyes down at (Y/N).

“I said that one time!” (Y/N) huffed, recalling the romantic dinner they had not too terribly long ago, surrounded by candlelight. It was their 6th month anniversary, Charlie intended to make it special. She continued on the potatoes.

“But it was ever so cute,” Charlie leaned closer, whispering in (Y/N)’s ear. “Tell me, do my freckles look lovely in this lighting?” 

(Y/N) turned her head quickly, as if to offer a rebuttal, or focus on his freckles, only to be caught in Charlie’s lips. He grabbed the small of her back, pulling her in softly. Their lips connected in tandem, moving gently against one another. (Y/N) sighed into the kiss, wrapping her arms around Charlie’s neck, fingers teasing the tip of his ponytail.

“Oi! My eyes!” 

The two jumped away from one another, faces fully flushed. They had forgotten where they were. Fred, however, had come down the stairs at the precise time to catch his best friend and his older brother, whom he thought have never met, sucking face.  

(Y/N) sputtered, trying to find an answer for an unspoken question. “Fred! It’s not what you think—”

“Not what I think? What do you think I’m thinking right now?” Fred asked, crossing his arms.

Charlie gulped. “I’m not sure, probably something along the lines of, ‘Wow! They sure are hitting it off!’ or something?”

“Here I was, coming down stairs to peel the potatoes, like Mum asked,” Fred hopped down to the kitchen. “Only to find my brother, not only getting friendly with (Y/N), but I could almost swear I saw tongue!” 

“We didn’t get that far,” (Y/N) mumbled, kicking her toe into the floorboard. Fred shot (Y/N) an exasperated look. “Sorry.”

“How could you Charlie? I thought you had a girlfriend! What’re you doing snogging (Y/N) for?” 

“Well…” Charlie rubbed the back of his neck, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “Funny story actually…”

Fred did not speak. He merely looked back and forth between (Y/N) and Charlie, both wearing guilty faces. 

“How long?” George appeared from the stairs, he had heard the commotion and came to investigate.

“Almost a year.” Charlie spoke up, now growing unashamed at the situation.

George just let out a hearty chuckle, grabbing ahold of his stomach. (Y/N) shot Charlie a nervous glance. “So that’s how you wrote about dragons so well!” George laughed some more. “Because,” George gasped for air. “Because you’ve been shagging Charlie!” Fred couldn’t help but join in on the laughter.

“That’s—stop it!” (Y/N)’s face shone with the brilliance of roses. The laughter did not cease.

“Why didn’t you tell us? Think we’d be mad?” Fred asked, slumping into a chair at the table. George followed close behind. 

“Well, yeah?” (Y/N) said, somewhat confused. “You two are my best friends! I can’t exactly write an owl and say, ‘Thanks for the new tea, it’s delicious! By the way, I’m dating and snogging the crap out of your older brother, who happens to be five years older than us. Tootles!’”

“Tootles?” Charlie mouthed down to (Y/N), clearly amused. She smirked.

“I’d rather hear it through an owl than having to witness it with my own eye orbs, thank you!” Fred exclaimed.

“Hear what?” Molly had appeared in the kitchen, almost too conveniently.

“That Charlie and (Y/N) are dating.” George said, mindlessly twirling a fork that had rested on the table.

Molly glanced up at the couple, who stood as still as they possibly could. Her face was difficult to read, no expression had blossomed quite yet.

“Mum?” Charlie muttered, hoping to get an answer.

Molly’s eyes started brimming with tears. “Oh my…” She clutched her chest, as if she tried to hold her heart. “How…wonderful! Oh, Arthur will be thrilled to hear the news!”

“You’re okay with this—us?” Charlie asked, snaking his arm atop of (Y/N)’s shoulder, pulling her into his side.

“How could I not? (Y/N) is a wonderful girl! Very talented at what she does, make any mother proud to have her dating a child of theirs,” Molly said, resisting the urge to wrap the two of them up in the biggest bear hug to grace this earth. “Though, I would have put my money on one of you two.” She waved her finger between the twins, who just laughed.

“Sorry, no offense Mum, but I’d never date (Y/N), not even in a million years!” Fred said, pushing his hair out of his face.

“Yeah! She’s like our sister!”

“Hey! You two’d be lucky to date me!” (Y/N) joked, joining in on their laughter.

“It’s true,” Charlie said, hugging (Y/N) closer into his side. “They’d never be so lucky.” The laughter died down, leaving a rather awkward silence in it’s wake.

“How’d you two meet?” Molly asked, putting the now peeled potatoes into a pot, turning on the stove. “Again, I mean.” 

Charlie looked at (Y/N), as if to decide who was going to tell the story. They both awkwardly smiled, urging the other to speak up.

“I was in Romania, trying to get inspiration for a book,” (Y/N) said, smiling fondly. “Cute little coffee shop—has amazing muffins by the way—I saw this guy walk in, redheaded and freckled,” Charlie chuckled. “I had thought to myself ‘He looks like a dead-ringer for a Weasley’”

“Which you had said out loud, mind you,” Charlie said, patting her shoulder. “Never can keep your thoughts to yourself, could you?” 

“Oh hush—anyway, he had heard me. I knew almost immediately that it was the elusive Charlie Weasley that had lived in Romania, the one I had seemingly never met at Hogwarts.”

“Too be fair, studying and Quidditch took up most of my time.” Charlie added.

“Right. Anyway, he offered to buy me another cup of coffee, saying something like ‘Any friend of the twins is a friend of mine!’. But I think he just thought I was cute.”  

“She’s right. I did.” Charlie smiled, glancing at the twins. They tried to look disgusted, but deep down, Charlie and (Y/N) knew they were happy for the two of them.

Molly sniffled again. “So Charlie helped you with your new book, (Y/N)?” She asked, only to see (Y/N) nod.

“You see, I also did the illustrations for the book, so Charlie offered to show me a real Common Welsh Green. Said it’d do more justice than the grainy photos or drawings in textbooks.” (Y/N) shrugged. “The youngest one, Harriet? I think that was her name—she had gotten too close to me—”

“She just wanted to show you some affection, sweetheart,” Charlie said, patting (Y/N)’s shoulder. “She didn’t know any better,” Charlie looked at Molly. “We hadn’t exactly fire train her quite yet.”

Fred laughed. “Did you leave with all of your hair?”

(Y/N) face flared, as did Charlie’s. “Yes, my hair was fine. My dress on the other hand…”

George gasped loudly. “You saw (Y/N)’s delicates! Merlin! What an intrusion of privacy!” He shouted, causing the couple’s cheeks to deepen in color.

“It’s not like he hadn’t seen them before that…” (Y/N) mumbled, picking at her fingernail. Charlie smiled, he had been the only one to hear.

“Well, by any means, I’m glad Charlie was able to help with your book, (Y/N),” Molly said, stirring the pot of potatoes. “Oh this is just so thrilling!”

“Do the younger twerps—siblings—know?” George asked, finally setting the fork back down on the table.

“Ginny and Ron?” Charlie shook his head. “No. You three are the first to know, well, Bill had his suspicions when he visited.” He chuckled.  

“Did keeping it a secret make it more,” Fred leaned in. “Passionate?” He wriggled his eyebrows up and down, flicking his eyes back and forth between the couple.

“Shut it,” (Y/N) laughed. “It’s not like that at all. We just didn’t know how you’d react, that’s all.”

“But to answer your question,” Charlie stared Fred directly in the eye, sight unwavering. A grin sprawled across his face. “It did. Totally did. One hundred percent.”

Fred’s face went red. “Oi! You didn’t have to answer it like that!”

“You asked,” Charlie mumbled. “But we were sort of planning on waiting until Christmas. (Y/N) was going to come and visit with me, we’d be able to tell everyone then. The younger ones would be home from school and everything.”

“So you were planning to pretend to not know each other tonight at dinner?” Molly said, pulling the chicken out of the oven. The couple nodded.

“Pretty much.”

“Exactly right.”

“Well, whatever the case, I’m glad this has happened and you told us,” Molly said. “It warms my heart to think that (Y/N) could very much be a Weasley one day.”

“Mum!” Charlie hissed, growing embarrassed.

(Y/N) smiled at the thought. Wearing a white dress, carrying a bouquet, surrounded by the various redheads of the Weasley clan, watching her and Charlie swearing themselves to one another. Nothing else would really change, Christmases would be more fun, holidays would be full of love and light. She’d be able to call the twins her real brothers, now by marriage and not by friendship. It seemed like the perfect solution to the years that had passed by. After all,

She was practically a Weasley.  

[wineanddinosaur]

Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters?

The labels are colorful, cartoonish, comical, and a bit grotesque.

There’s Tater Bait, depicting a woman with a massive head of 1980s hair cascading over a visor.

Smash Bill shows a poor man’s Rambo, armed to the teeth with an M60 machine gun.

While Waxx Dippz displays a bald-pated man with a Van Dyke beard, seemingly staring into your soul.

Though you might not understand the joke, each of these (and six others labels) seem to be blatantly mocking the modern bourbon geek, that sometimes vile species of obsessive who covets Pappy, clears store shelves of formerly mid-tier stuff like Weller and Eagle Rare, and even adulterates bottles with silly stickers and post-purchase wax coatings, often with a total lack of awareness for their inherent absurdity.

“I deal with these people all the time. Sometimes their lack of a sense of humor is a little alarming,” says Matthew Colglazier, a longtime liquor merchandiser and marketer. “Taking a piss (out of them), that’s part of the fun, I think.”

Catch ’Em All

Colglazier has regularly found himself in the orbit of these whiskey collectors after more than a decade in the spirits industry in various capacities. The Indiana man has been buying single barrels for liquor stores for years and been making trips to nearby Midwest Grain Products (MGP), the massive, former Seagram’s distillery in Lawrenceburg for nearly a decade — well before most drinkers were aware that it was supplying upstart craft distilleries like WhistlePig, High West, and Smooth Ambler with much of the bourbon and rye they were bottling.

Scouring store shelves, looking at the thousands of non-distiller bottlers, as well as the countless craft distilleries that have emerged, all trying to get a piece of the perhaps $10 billion pie, Colglazier began to wonder how a new American whiskey brand could possibly set itself apart.

“When it comes to creating something new and different these days, that’s really a challenge,” says Colglazier.

Feeling confident in his industry acumen, however, Colglazier and some partners decided to branch out with their own brand in 2018. A family member had alerted him to Krogman’s, a whiskey and brandy distillery that had existed in Tell City, Ind., from 1863 until Prohibition, and then ran on fumes until the 1960s. Searching through trademark filings, Colglazier realized that no one owned it anymore. And, just like that, Krogman’s was his.

“We don’t own a distillery, we don’t own a license or anything,” says Colglazier. He sources all his “juice” and lets partners like Cardinal Spirits, a top craft distillery in Bloomington, do the bottling.

Early Krogman’s releases would include Krogman’s Bourbon and Krogman’s Rye, sourced from MGP and packaged at 90 proof in opaque black and red bottles depicting a drawing of the old distillery that no longer stands. It’s a typical way to launch a new brand, by evoking an esteemed history that isn’t necessarily your own and has nothing to do with the liquid in the bottle. These releases sold all right, but they certainly didn’t become a sensation among consumers. Colglazier knew he would have to start tackling his branding in a different way.

“How much innovation is there in the bourbon category today?” asks Colglazier. “I started to think: It doesn’t just have to be about the blocking and tackling of history.”

Around then, Perry Ford, MGP’s sales manager and an old industry connection, sent Colglazier an inventory list of the single barrels he currently had available. Looking over the menu, Colglazier noticed that all nine of MGP’s whiskey mash bills were available in single-barrel form, everything from four bourbons and three ryes to a corn whiskey and even a light whiskey. The MGP mash bills you’ll most often see in single barrel form these days are the ubiquitous 95 percent rye or the “high-rye” bourbon favored by Smooth Ambler and recent darling Smoke Wagon.

As a whiskey drinker himself, Colglazier wanted to try them all, but he needed a good excuse. His first thought: What if he created a unique single-barrel release for each and every mash bill, and then turned all nine into a set? Since the whiskeys were all 3 years old — a little youthful for your average bourbon enthusiast — he knew he’d have to make the labels novel, interesting, and highly collectable if he wanted to sell them.

That would start with what he called each release, naming them after the insider slang (so often intentionally misspelled) that had become popular on secondary market buy/sell sites, private Facebook groups, and message boards over the last decade.

“I tried to pinpoint relatively specific things that people would know,” Colglazier says.

Thus, there’s Tater Bait, a reference to neophyte collectors who do exceedingly embarrassing things in pursuit of rare bottles. Flipperzz refers to people who buy allocated bottles at retail costs only to immediately “flip” them for bloated, black-market rates. Dusty Hunterzzz is a nod to those who comb through off-the-beaten-path liquor stores for vintage bottles that have lingered on shelves for years gathering dust.

“Your civilian bourbon drinker would have no idea what these things meant and would just think, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting label,’” adds Colglazier.

He tapped local designer Aaron Scamihorn for the label art. Scamihorn specializes in a bold, vintage comic book style, perhaps more befitting the skate decks and even craft beer labels he also designs than the sort of staid, regal branding we typically see in the bourbon industry.

“When we first discussed this project it was the first time I’d heard the word ‘tater,’” recalls Scamihorn. His labels are inspired by the beat-up VHS box covers for campy, ’80s movies you would have seen stocked on the bottom shelf at Blockbuster (Buyy it Noww! was surely spawned from 1980s “Harlequin”). That era tracks with the late-30s/early-40s demographic of guys that Colglazier sees as most into bourbon collecting right now.

At the least, these are the dudes who already have a deep familiarity with the most online and underground parlance of the American whiskey world (Unicorn! Maxx Profitzz!) needed to get many of these jokes.

“Some were really on the nose, others were a stretch,” says Colglazier. “Some barely make sense.”

Of course, whiskey fans have long had the “gotta catch ’em all” mentality that, in many people’s eyes, has turned the industry into a game of liquid Pokemon, and Colglazier is well aware of that. But Krogman’s reminds me more of another set of trading cards: Garbage Pail Kids, the 1985 series of depraved and deformed characters meant to mock the then-frenzy surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids.

“It pokes fun, but honors [these people] at the same time,” says Colglazier. “It makes it recognizable to that consumer. It’s kind of a tightrope, and I’m not sure everybody understands.”

No BS!

The trickiest part of the tightrope, of course, is that the same people the labels are mocking are inherently the only people who might possibly desire having these crazy bottles in their collections.

“Looks like they are poking some fun at the bourbon world in general, but actually just bottling ALL 9 MGP recipes at cask strength with no BS!” wrote one man on Reddit. “Kind of better than all the other brands who make up a bunch of back stories. [sic]”

And that’s exactly Colglazier’s point. Yes, the Krogman’s labels may be satire, but the whiskey is no joke — it’s all non-chill filtered and bottled at cask strength, catnip for the whiskey cognoscenti who don’t really care about a brand’s nonsense “origin” story.

The set was first released starting in late summer 2020, mostly at big box liquor stores in Indiana, though Tater Bait made its way onto Seelbach’s, an online whiskey retailer that has plans to sell a complete set of nine in the future. There were three to four barrels each of most releases, so fewer than 1,000 bottles per SKU. (For the completists, bottlings made for the Kentucky market had variant labels meant to poke fun at all the Booker’s Bourbon releases like Country Ham.)

They sold for just $32 a bottle, a remarkably reasonable price in an era that has seen other sourced whiskeys cost many times as much. Smoke Wagon’s 8-year-old MGP single barrels, for instance, sell for upwards of $700 per bottle on the secondary market. That’s why another Redditor agreed that it was an “exploitable niche” to sell barrel-proof MGP so cheaply, calling the entire series a “slam dunk.” “The Whiskey Vault,” a popular YouTube channel, praised the series as well, loving its execution and transparency.

“Not subtle!” joked co-host Daniel Whittington.

A Collectible in the Making?

You could argue that Krogman’s is the most honest bourbon brand of this crazy era. It may seem like a troll — and, of course, it partially is — but it’s one of the few MGP-backed bottlers offering unique releases and not trying to dupe consumers and generate high demand based purely on hype. While other bourbon and rye brands pretend they exist in a vacuum, clueless to online discussions and tater-driven market forces, Krogman’s has a keen self-awareness of the hyper-obsessive culture it is being released into.

Colglazier isn’t sure where the series will go next, but a part of me feels that while leaning so heavily into the scene, he’s unwittingly created something that, in a few years, might end up being one of the biggest collectibles of the era. Krogman’s may be seen as an economically priced prank right now, but could it one day be the American version of Ichiro’s Malt Card Series released between 2005 and 2014 — of which a complete “deck” of the 54 bottles in the Japanese series sold for $1.52 million in late 2020?

Probably doubtful, as Ichiro’s came from the shuttered Hanyu distillery and Krogman’s is certainly not as well aged of stock. But sometimes it takes a few years for these ahead-of-their-time ideas to pick up steam. Even the Malt Card Series had initially been consumed by buyers, not squirreled away and collected.

“People really want to see themselves reflected back in the things they buy,” Colglazier says of his bourbon. “In many ways, what we buy, what we collect, these are validations of who we are. People have used lots of consumer goods to validate themselves. This is just taking it to the next level.”

The article Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/krogmans-bourbon-trolling/

[isaiahrippinus]

Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters?

The labels are colorful, cartoonish, comical, and a bit grotesque.

There’s Tater Bait, depicting a woman with a massive head of 1980s hair cascading over a visor.

Smash Bill shows a poor man’s Rambo, armed to the teeth with an M60 machine gun.

While Waxx Dippz displays a bald-pated man with a Van Dyke beard, seemingly staring into your soul.

Though you might not understand the joke, each of these (and six others labels) seem to be blatantly mocking the modern bourbon geek, that sometimes vile species of obsessive who covets Pappy, clears store shelves of formerly mid-tier stuff like Weller and Eagle Rare, and even adulterates bottles with silly stickers and post-purchase wax coatings, often with a total lack of awareness for their inherent absurdity.

“I deal with these people all the time. Sometimes their lack of a sense of humor is a little alarming,” says Matthew Colglazier, a longtime liquor merchandiser and marketer. “Taking a piss (out of them), that’s part of the fun, I think.”

Catch ’Em All

Colglazier has regularly found himself in the orbit of these whiskey collectors after more than a decade in the spirits industry in various capacities. The Indiana man has been buying single barrels for liquor stores for years and been making trips to nearby Midwest Grain Products (MGP), the massive, former Seagram’s distillery in Lawrenceburg for nearly a decade — well before most drinkers were aware that it was supplying upstart craft distilleries like WhistlePig, High West, and Smooth Ambler with much of the bourbon and rye they were bottling.

Scouring store shelves, looking at the thousands of non-distiller bottlers, as well as the countless craft distilleries that have emerged, all trying to get a piece of the perhaps $10 billion pie, Colglazier began to wonder how a new American whiskey brand could possibly set itself apart.

“When it comes to creating something new and different these days, that’s really a challenge,” says Colglazier.

Feeling confident in his industry acumen, however, Colglazier and some partners decided to branch out with their own brand in 2018. A family member had alerted him to Krogman’s, a whiskey and brandy distillery that had existed in Tell City, Ind., from 1863 until Prohibition, and then ran on fumes until the 1960s. Searching through trademark filings, Colglazier realized that no one owned it anymore. And, just like that, Krogman’s was his.

“We don’t own a distillery, we don’t own a license or anything,” says Colglazier. He sources all his “juice” and lets partners like Cardinal Spirits, a top craft distillery in Bloomington, do the bottling.

Early Krogman’s releases would include Krogman’s Bourbon and Krogman’s Rye, sourced from MGP and packaged at 90 proof in opaque black and red bottles depicting a drawing of the old distillery that no longer stands. It’s a typical way to launch a new brand, by evoking an esteemed history that isn’t necessarily your own and has nothing to do with the liquid in the bottle. These releases sold all right, but they certainly didn’t become a sensation among consumers. Colglazier knew he would have to start tackling his branding in a different way.

“How much innovation is there in the bourbon category today?” asks Colglazier. “I started to think: It doesn’t just have to be about the blocking and tackling of history.”

Around then, Perry Ford, MGP’s sales manager and an old industry connection, sent Colglazier an inventory list of the single barrels he currently had available. Looking over the menu, Colglazier noticed that all nine of MGP’s whiskey mash bills were available in single-barrel form, everything from four bourbons and three ryes to a corn whiskey and even a light whiskey. The MGP mash bills you’ll most often see in single barrel form these days are the ubiquitous 95 percent rye or the “high-rye” bourbon favored by Smooth Ambler and recent darling Smoke Wagon.

As a whiskey drinker himself, Colglazier wanted to try them all, but he needed a good excuse. His first thought: What if he created a unique single-barrel release for each and every mash bill, and then turned all nine into a set? Since the whiskeys were all 3 years old — a little youthful for your average bourbon enthusiast — he knew he’d have to make the labels novel, interesting, and highly collectable if he wanted to sell them.

That would start with what he called each release, naming them after the insider slang (so often intentionally misspelled) that had become popular on secondary market buy/sell sites, private Facebook groups, and message boards over the last decade.

“I tried to pinpoint relatively specific things that people would know,” Colglazier says.

Thus, there’s Tater Bait, a reference to neophyte collectors who do exceedingly embarrassing things in pursuit of rare bottles. Flipperzz refers to people who buy allocated bottles at retail costs only to immediately “flip” them for bloated, black-market rates. Dusty Hunterzzz is a nod to those who comb through off-the-beaten-path liquor stores for vintage bottles that have lingered on shelves for years gathering dust.

“Your civilian bourbon drinker would have no idea what these things meant and would just think, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting label,’” adds Colglazier.

He tapped local designer Aaron Scamihorn for the label art. Scamihorn specializes in a bold, vintage comic book style, perhaps more befitting the skate decks and even craft beer labels he also designs than the sort of staid, regal branding we typically see in the bourbon industry.

“When we first discussed this project it was the first time I’d heard the word ‘tater,’” recalls Scamihorn. His labels are inspired by the beat-up VHS box covers for campy, ’80s movies you would have seen stocked on the bottom shelf at Blockbuster (Buyy it Noww! was surely spawned from 1980s “Harlequin”). That era tracks with the late-30s/early-40s demographic of guys that Colglazier sees as most into bourbon collecting right now.

At the least, these are the dudes who already have a deep familiarity with the most online and underground parlance of the American whiskey world (Unicorn! Maxx Profitzz!) needed to get many of these jokes.

“Some were really on the nose, others were a stretch,” says Colglazier. “Some barely make sense.”

Of course, whiskey fans have long had the “gotta catch ’em all” mentality that, in many people’s eyes, has turned the industry into a game of liquid Pokemon, and Colglazier is well aware of that. But Krogman’s reminds me more of another set of trading cards: Garbage Pail Kids, the 1985 series of depraved and deformed characters meant to mock the then-frenzy surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids.

“It pokes fun, but honors [these people] at the same time,” says Colglazier. “It makes it recognizable to that consumer. It’s kind of a tightrope, and I’m not sure everybody understands.”

No BS!

The trickiest part of the tightrope, of course, is that the same people the labels are mocking are inherently the only people who might possibly desire having these crazy bottles in their collections.

“Looks like they are poking some fun at the bourbon world in general, but actually just bottling ALL 9 MGP recipes at cask strength with no BS!” wrote one man on Reddit. “Kind of better than all the other brands who make up a bunch of back stories. [sic]”

And that’s exactly Colglazier’s point. Yes, the Krogman’s labels may be satire, but the whiskey is no joke — it’s all non-chill filtered and bottled at cask strength, catnip for the whiskey cognoscenti who don’t really care about a brand’s nonsense “origin” story.

The set was first released starting in late summer 2020, mostly at big box liquor stores in Indiana, though Tater Bait made its way onto Seelbach’s, an online whiskey retailer that has plans to sell a complete set of nine in the future. There were three to four barrels each of most releases, so fewer than 1,000 bottles per SKU. (For the completists, bottlings made for the Kentucky market had variant labels meant to poke fun at all the Booker’s Bourbon releases like Country Ham.)

They sold for just $32 a bottle, a remarkably reasonable price in an era that has seen other sourced whiskeys cost many times as much. Smoke Wagon’s 8-year-old MGP single barrels, for instance, sell for upwards of $700 per bottle on the secondary market. That’s why another Redditor agreed that it was an “exploitable niche” to sell barrel-proof MGP so cheaply, calling the entire series a “slam dunk.” “The Whiskey Vault,” a popular YouTube channel, praised the series as well, loving its execution and transparency.

“Not subtle!” joked co-host Daniel Whittington.

A Collectible in the Making?

You could argue that Krogman’s is the most honest bourbon brand of this crazy era. It may seem like a troll — and, of course, it partially is — but it’s one of the few MGP-backed bottlers offering unique releases and not trying to dupe consumers and generate high demand based purely on hype. While other bourbon and rye brands pretend they exist in a vacuum, clueless to online discussions and tater-driven market forces, Krogman’s has a keen self-awareness of the hyper-obsessive culture it is being released into.

Colglazier isn’t sure where the series will go next, but a part of me feels that while leaning so heavily into the scene, he’s unwittingly created something that, in a few years, might end up being one of the biggest collectibles of the era. Krogman’s may be seen as an economically priced prank right now, but could it one day be the American version of Ichiro’s Malt Card Series released between 2005 and 2014 — of which a complete “deck” of the 54 bottles in the Japanese series sold for $1.52 million in late 2020?

Probably doubtful, as Ichiro’s came from the shuttered Hanyu distillery and Krogman’s is certainly not as well aged of stock. But sometimes it takes a few years for these ahead-of-their-time ideas to pick up steam. Even the Malt Card Series had initially been consumed by buyers, not squirreled away and collected.

“People really want to see themselves reflected back in the things they buy,” Colglazier says of his bourbon. “In many ways, what we buy, what we collect, these are validations of who we are. People have used lots of consumer goods to validate themselves. This is just taking it to the next level.”

The article Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/krogmans-bourbon-trolling/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/656790305151057920

[novamm66]

Pic-Lit 8 (Part 2) - Cullen

I agonized over this drawing, and this story a lot.  This sketch was the first attempt of mine to draw something from my imagination.  And here it is, please let me know what you think.

The story was also tricky I could see it in my head but it was a struggle to get it down on the page.

He had been walking for what seemed like hours.  He was faintly regretting leaving his horse behind, but Kiaya hadn’t taken her Forder with her and there was no clear path to speak of so a horse would have been a bad idea.

Cullen stopped in the fading light and pulled out the letter Kiaya had left in the war room.  He stared at the paper then checked his position.  Maker I hope I am reading this right.  It had been a passing conversation a month ago, one of the personal tidbits that she has started to share with him.  Cullen sighed, putting the letter back in his pocket, and started walking up the hill again.  The lyrium in his system had been sparking and buzzing the entire journey but he couldn’t tell how long ago she had passed.  He had come prepared to spend the night but only just.  He had wanted speed when he had finally gotten away from Haven.

Barely minutes had past when Cullen stopped again.  Smoke, wood smoke; the wind shifted and it was gone.  Cullen waited until he could smell it again on the air, and he set out in that direction.  His pace quickened as the terrain got steeper, trees crowding in on both sides. A hundred paces and he broke through the edge of the trees into the strangest little hideaway he had ever seen.  

At his feet, a small stream slid past on its way to another waterfall below.  Past it, the cliff wall curved around to form a wide-open shelf about ten paces across. There was a small half cave at the end. On the other side trees loomed to the left and right creating a window with the treetops below.  This place would be almost impossible to find unless you stumbled on it.  There was only one way up and that was mostly over grown.

Fire wood had been stacked along the wall and a fire was burning at the back of the curve, the smoke disappearing into the ceiling to leak out invisibly into the hill side.  This place was practically unnoticeable.

Cullen stood looking at the empty campsite, listening to the water and the wind. A sharp intake of breath behind him had instinct kick in as his hand fell to his sword.  As he turned slowly around a shadow rose from the rocks and trees on his left.

“Cullen!?!  You figured it out! You came… FUCK!!!!”

---

Kiaya had known she was going to run, even before they had returned from Redcliffe.  She always ran.  That was why she had started prepping this place almost as soon as she found it a month ago.  She always felt better knowing she had a place to run to when she felt like she was losing control.  And Redcliffe had been too much.  Running away was how she regained some control.  It was not a good way but it was a way and it kept her sane.  She had never felt as out of control of her own choices as she has since the Fade spit her out.  Here, things were simpler; it gave her time to think, she had to get her head on straight again.  True, the whiskey was probably a bad choice, but it was a choice.

When she had gotten here she had every intention of making camp but after the fire was lit she sat down for a rest and a drink, and well...  She had gotten lost in her drawings again.  At some point the bottle appeared from the pack that Dorian had insisted on packing for her, while he lectured her on not eating or sleeping; in fact she was surprised that he had included the bottle at all.  After that she had become completely unaware of the passage of time. The first drawing had reached an end, at least until the sun came up again, and she had found herself sketching randomly, which had turned into a pair of eyes.

When Cullen walked into the clearing, Kiaya was far away in daydreams of amber and gold. She didn’t notice him right away, and he hadn’t seen her, sitting on a rock in the shadows of the trees. When Kiaya did notice him, she froze for a moment.

She couldn’t believe it.  He had remembered and he had figured it out.  It had been weeks ago that she had told him about her grandfather, who couldn’t read or write but would leave messages in drawings. They had made a game of it when she was small.  Kiaya still found herself doing it from time to time, it kept her childhood close.  That Cullen had recognized it, and actually come after her.  She swallowed, wishing now she had less to drink, or anything to eat, or both.

“Cullen!?!  You figured it out! You came… FUCK!!!!”

Cullen started at the sight of Kiaya tangled up in her own feet and her pack, sprawled on the ground.  The drawing kit that Varric had given her had been balanced on her pack and was now scattered on the dark ground.

Kiaya suddenly realized that she had sat still so long both of her legs had fallen asleep, she could no longer feel them.  She had almost pitched head first into the stream. As she crouched on the ground, almost at Cullen’s feet, Kiaya continued to curse and berate herself at her klutziness. ‘Maker, what he must think of me. Why? Why can’t I control my feet when I really need to?’ As she struggled to right herself and blood made it back to her feet, she could suddenly feel all too much, she hated when her legs feel asleep, it was such a horrible feeling.  

Kiaya could feel the blush rising up her neck and added to the redness that was all ready in her cheeks.  She sat on the ground, thumping feeling back into her thighs, thinking nasty thoughts about herself in general, when she was interrupted by the sound of Cullen, turning a laugh into a cough unconvincingly.

“Are you OK?”

“Yes, I’m fine.  Apparently up is not a direction I travel well.”  Kiaya’s could stop the grin from growing on her face; she truly must have looked ridiculous.  What an entrance.  For someone who hated being noticed she sure was great at making a display.  Kiaya’s eyes were dancing with suppressed mirth when she glanced up at Cullen, and he couldn’t stop his chuckling anymore.  Kiaya started to smile, then chuckle, then her head shot back and her laugh rang out like a bell. It echoed and leaped from stone to stone, bubbling up like the stream she was almost sitting in. Cullen was entranced, it was the first time he had heard her laugh, really laugh, without a care.

Kiaya’s outburst of mirth ended with a sigh, she glanced down and wiped her cheek.  She felt lighter somehow, lighter then she had in a long time and more like herself. She still wasn’t ready to face her future, or the possible lack thereof, but she would get there.  She always got there.

With another sigh, Kiaya started to scan the ground for her tools. It was almost full dark and looking for leads and charcoals in the dark was not going to work.  She found what she could and left the rest until morning. She corked the bottle, put it in her bag and climbed to her feet. She swayed a bit and she realized her hands were shaking, when had she eaten last?  She swung her pack on to her shoulder and immediately felt it lifted out of her hand.  Her surprise forced her head up as she swung around, unbalanced again, until she collided with Cullen.  His arms circled her waist to steady her; her hands and arm landing against his chest plate, the cold metal a sharp reminder of reality.

He wasn’t wearing his gloves and the touch of his hands on her back was electric.  Cullen’s touch was burning through the light cotton of the shirt she was wearing.  Kia couldn’t feel her knees anymore, feeling like she was floating, heat sizzled up her spine and pooling low in her belly. The air seemed to shimmer and swirl around them, filling Kiaya’s head with the earthy smell of him.  Oakmoss, and leather and him, everything him; she couldn’t take her eyes away from his, his gaze seeming to read every thought, ever secret that she struggled to hide from everyone.  She would gladly drown in those eyes forever.

“When did you eat last?”  Not the question Kiaya was hoping for.

“I’m not entirely sure.”

“What did you bring with you?”

Kiaya blinked and dropped her eyes from his, her breathe fogging Cullen’s breast plate.

“… I don’t know.  Dorian packed for me.  I don’t think he trusted me...” Kiaya’s voice petered out as she lost her courage.

Cullen could smell the soap that Kiaya had brought back from Val Royeaux, the only thing she had spent coin on for herself, Cass had said. It was unique and perfectly Kiaya, a gentle floral scent with a wild tang underneath.  Her breathe was sweetened with the whisky she had been drinking.  He could feel her shaking and he realized what Cassandra had been worried about was true. As he stared at the top of her head, memorizing the freckles that were scattered across her forehead, breathing her into his soul, Cullen realized that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her.

Kiaya sighed against Cullen’s chest and leaned closer into him for a moment, “I am sorry I left before I could apologize for how I acted the last time we spoke,”  Kiaya’s words petered out as Cullen placed his fingers under her chin and raised her face so he could look her in the face again.

“I want to apologize as well, but maybe not tonight,” Cullen stared into the grey-green universe that was in Kiaya’s eyes.  It took a great force of will to step away from her.  “Tonight we are just two soldiers fighting in the same war, sharing a campfire and a drink.” Cullen uncorked the bottle and took a drink.  He smiled softly at the happiness blooming on her face, her eyes shining like stars as she gazed up at him.

“Now, why don’t you get cleaned up and I will see what we have?”

“Cleaned up?  What do you mean?” Kiaya looked down at her clothes, they were a little dusty but not bad for a day in the woods.

Cullen’s smirk widened at her confusion.  

“Why are you looking so smug?” Kiaya demanded, placing her hands on her hips.  Cullen started to laugh at the proud tilt of her head as his eyes traced the large charcoal smudges running across Kiaya’s forehead, nose and cheeks.

“Varric calls you ‘Smudges’ doesn’t he?”

“I have smudges all over my face don’t I?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Fuck.”

And there you have it folks, a deeper look in to Kiaya.  Thanks for reading.  If you would like to check out the rest then you can find them at he link below.

Kiaya’s Art; A Group of Writing & Drawing Dabbles

Feel free to re-blog, I would love that.  But please, respect my work.  Don’t Steal it.

[batbigblueprint-blog]

Big Blueprint Hanger - Blueprint storage systems

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