#and half of my employees are dedicated to making my life miserable

[rubinaitoart]

Social Anxiety is back from his coffee break and is cospiring with Mental Exhaustion to make it worse.

I’d appreciate that they’re working together but I’d rather they work on other things instead of my downfall.

[mandoinevarro]

NO REFUNDS

Words: 5.1k :))

Rating: E, baby

Warnings: Smut (surprise surprise), bad words :0, masturbation, a biiiit of praise kink, face fucking, cumplay? let me know on the comments, etc. etc. 

a/n: Happy Star Wars day!! The first few lines of this are an attempt at dumb comedy, but humor me a little and you’ll get a reward (smut) along the yellow-brick road

Finally, the lanky kid behind the counter stops air drumming with two chicken bones gnawed dry and trails his dopey eyes from the gloved fist on the table, up a bracer, and along a flexed arm, until they settle on the Mandalorian helmet staring him down and waiting for an answer. The employee removes the music bandeau from around his ears and settles it down, its noise so loud Mando can hear it from where it lays. The kid scratches the whiskers of facial hair growing patchy on his cheeks and thoughtfully nibbles on one of the bones, trying to figure out what one does when a client shows up.

“Uh, what?”

“I need to speak to the owner,” the Mandalorian repeats slowly.

“Oh, uh.�� Mouth gaping like a fish too stupid to know it should fear hooks, the kid calmly turns his attention to the four walls of the hardware store, searching for guidance in the fluorescent signs hanging around the room and dictating the store’s rules like they’re ancient scriptures:

NO CHILDREN

WILL BUY STOLEN GOODS FOR LOWER PRICE

NO IMPS

NO REPUBLIC OFFICIALS

NO REFUNDS

NO APPOINTMENT, NO MEETING

“You, uh,” the kid continues, lingering on that last stanza and flicking open a dusty agenda that probably hasn’t been touched since the war ended, “you got an appointment, uh, sir?” He drags a greasy finger down the planner, squinting at nothing and pretending to read the page that Mando can clearly see is empty.

The bounty hunter sighs, holding on to the last reserves of patience that hang precariously on the cliff of his self-restraint, threatening to let go and leave him to his own anger. “No. But she’ll see me.” You better. You better fucking see him. “I was sold equipment here a few days ago, some of it faulty. I need to speak to her.”

The navigator. The fucking navigator. Of all the bunch of overpriced, black market scraps you’d somehow convinced the Mandalorian to buy from you last time, it just had to be the navigator. He still has his old blasters. Pumps are cheap. Even the deflector shields he could’ve done without for a couple of months. But the fucking navigator. The lack of droids on the Crest means that Mando relies solely on the navigator to set coordinates. Without it, he wouldn’t be able to find his way out of a system, let alone make hyperjumps. Even worse, the model is so old, its glitching isn’t recognized by the control panel, so he had to hover around the atmosphere of this damned planet for three days before figuring out what it was, throwing off his schedule and losing track of two bounties in the process. All because you sold him a damaged version of the one part he can’t do without.

But your gaping-mouthed kid worker seems too unused to visitors to really care about Mando’s request, too entertained nibbling on a bare bone and eyeing the costumer in front of him as a knowing smirk cracks his lips and he says, “I dig it.”

“You…you ‘dig it’? I don’t…”

“The whole, y’know.” He draws circles in the air with the bone, signaling the beskar armor while he wipes the sauce around his mouth with a sleeve. “The, uh, Mondolarian vibe you’ve got going on. Very retro, dude. I dig it.”  

Mondo…? Bewilderment overshadows irritation for a second, and Mando focuses all his energy into searching the kid’s vacant eyes for a sign of intelligent life. “I…I am a Mandalorian.”

Fucking stars above, it’s never easy with you. If not your endless teasing, it’s the exorbitant prices, your unwillingness to compromise, or your scurrying around so he’s forced to play cat and mouse with you. Your latest impossible challenge for him to tackle is, apparently, getting a straight answer from the obtuse employee you must have handpicked from a catalogue of idiots to torture Mando. Maker, he’s surprised your store hasn’t gone bankrupt yet. He can’t imagine anyone else in the galaxy putting up with your whims. And he only does it because…well, because…

After dedicating a couple of seconds to crafting the perfect response for what appears to be his very first client, the kid muses, “Well, shit, what do I know.” He flashes a toothy smile as he rereads the dogmas on the walls. “Says nothing about Mondolarians here, but, uh—”  

“—Look,” Mando bargains with your gatekeeper, trying to level the exasperation escaping the vocoder, “I only have one faulty part. Let me talk to the owner, and—”

“—Shit. I bet it was the microvalves.” Your staff of one hangs his tuff of hair in shame, swaying it limply from side to side, before staring straight at the visor apologetically. “My bad, dude, I’ve been trying to get them right, but I always fuck them up. It’s hard, y’know? Red with red, white with white. Why not red with white? Or—”

“—No. What? No. Listen to me. You sold me a busted—”

“—I sold you?” the kid scoffs, his eyes suddenly snapping wide and offended, ignoring Mando’s clenching fists, which usually make normal people cower. “Excuse me, mister Mondolarian sir, but I don’t, uh, don’t recall selling you shit, in fact—”

“—Not—not you personally, the store, look, just—”

“—in fact, I’ve never even met a Mondolarian before and you’ve, uh, no right—no right— to judge my microvalves that I worked hard on—”

“Let him in.” Your voice carries its usual amusement as it cuts between the Mandalorian and the kid, breaking off the bickering from both ends and drawing their attention to the melody’s source. You lean on the doorframe leading to your workshop, holding a pair of pliers in one hand and a wrench in the other. Grease is smeared on your face, where teeth bite down on a playful smirk and the twinkle in your eyes speaks of terrible intentions—like always. You tilt your head back to the room behind you. “C’mon, Mando. Let my receptionist work.”

With a sigh, the hunter moves towards the separate room, not before glancing back at the receptionist, who throws him one last disapproving look and wraps the bandeau that never stopped blasting music around his ears.

“Why do you keep him here?” the Mandalorian grunts as you push yourself off the doorframe to move inside your studio.

You shrug. “It’s him or droids.”  

Mando trails after you inside the cramped workshop, filled to the brim with piles and piles of sensors and motors and all the other scraps from dubious origins you collect, fix, and resell. He closes the door behind him and pushes a large tube hanging from the roof to the side to walk closer to you.

Facing him, you plummet on your wheeled chair with a sigh, your arms dangling off the armrests, still holding the wrench and the pliers, like you’re the monarch of your little kingdom of junk granting him an audience.

There, Mando finally gets a good look at you, and—much to his annoyance—you’re as lovely as always. Glistening and greasy, you’re still beautiful with oil stains on your skin and fat droplets of sweat trailing your temple. You beam at him from your squeaky throne with that faint grin that attracts nothing but trouble. Maker, no wonder you always manage to talk circles around him. But not this time. This time he won’t fall for your little games. He won’t, he won’t, he won’t. Tonight he’s walking out of here with all of his money, no matter how much you bat your pretty eyelashes at him.

The Mandalorian squares his stance and straightens his back in a futile attempt to intimidate you, strutting ahead firmly and pointing an accusing finger at your face.

“You sold me a—”

“—a busted navigator.”  You roll your eyes and push yourself to your legs abruptly before the hunter can get any closer. He stops dead on his tracks. You wave the wrench and the pliers in the air like the conductor of an orchestra. “I sold you a busted navigator.” The vowels are dragged out with an exaggerated tune to make fun of him. “Yeah, I heard you the first four thousand times, Mando.”

Without looking, you drop the pliers to the side. They land dead center on an open storage box. Perfectly. Almost rehearsed. Something clicks. The Mandalorian suddenly finds the missing piece of a puzzle he didn’t know needed solving, and he feels his shoulders deflate and release some of the anger that drove him to your store in the first place.

You peacock closer to him, one foot in front of the other and swaying your hips as you look down to the wrench in your hand. “But, you should know by now,” you murmur once you find yourself only inches away from the beskar, your voice morphing its earlier mock exasperation into the tone you only use whenever you two aren’t talking business. You look up at him, failing miserably at masking the mischief in your eyes. “I don’t do refunds.” You lift the wrench and grin as it taps the beskar breastplate lightly with a tink.

And before you can blink, Mando’s hand flies to your wrist to clutch it roughly, squeezing without hurting you, but with enough strength to force your fist open. Just like he knows you like it. The wrench falls to the floor with a bang that makes you jump. It’s Mando’s turn to smile when he pulls you by the wrist to press you closer against him. The cocky glint in your eyes dulls into confusion.

“I never said it was the navigator,” he informs you lowly.

You tense under his grasp and shift your jaw. “You knew I’d come back,” he continues, encouraged by your grimace. Staring at your feet, you half-heartedly try to wriggle away from his grasp, but he grabs your other wrist instead and holds you flush against the cold beskar. “Okay. I’m back. Now give me my money.”

But his satisfaction is short-lived, because if there’s anyone in the universe who knows no shame, that’s you. So you simply bite your lower lip and move your head from side to side to shake hair and embarrassment off your face. When you look up at the visor again it’s with that brazen insolence that secretly gets the Mandalorian going like nothing else in the galaxy.

“A girl gets lonely in here,” you purr. Your wrists relax, and make no attempt to pull away. “Can you blame me for wanting you back a little earlier?” Your plush lips curl into the perverse smile of someone who’s holding all the cards, making heat rush involuntarily to his crotch. And it drives him fucking insane. He could have you tied, shackled, or bent over, and you would still sneer at him like you had him wrapped around your finger.

At his silence, you wedge a leg tightly between his thighs and massage it against the bulge between. Your gasp in fake surprise when his length hardens at the first hint of a brush, too unused to any sort of physical contact to remain neutral to your bold caresses. He bites down hard on his lip to suppress a moan. He won’t give you the satisfaction.

Mando’s learnt, though, that his restraint only feeds your audacity. Only makes you taunt him more. His lack of response spurs you on, and you crane your neck forward to lick a slow line along the beskar of the chest. You blink at him playfully as you go, stuffing your tongue back into your mouth once you reach the top edge of the breastplate.

You must find it funny. How his ribs expand and contract in anticipation. How he tends to roll and unroll his fists in an attempt to suppress the instinct to throw you on top of the table so crowded by clutter that he can barely see the surface beneath and fuck the smirks off your face. How he always gives in. How he stiffens both scandalized and impossibly aroused every time you introduce him to some newer, filthier act. You must think it’s so fucking funny.

And as much as the bounty hunter wants to shove you back against your crumbling wheeled chair, he knows you’ll only enjoy it more. So he simply lets go of your wrists and steps back.

“I’m only here for my money,” he lies.

The vicious grin grows wider. “Oh, so you’re making me work for it tonight.” You step back and lean against a table with your arms crossed over your chest, purposefully pushing your tits against the cleavage. Mando shifts in his place. Licking your lips until they glisten, you give him a once-over. You study him inch by inch, and an uncomfortable rope knots in his stomach when he realizes that this is how his bounties must feel when he watches them wordlessly.

Your eyes settle on his visor, and a decision seems to cross them as you walk over to sit on your creaking chair. “Or maybe you just want to hear me beg.” You part your legs wide and clutch the armrest with one hand while the other disappears under the waist of your pants. The contour of your hand shifts up and down slowly inside the crotch of your trousers, and your lips crook into a full O as they release a deep, foul moan. “Is that it?” Your eyes are glossy and malignant, trained on his visor. “You want me to beg for your cock?”

His leather gloves ball into fists, trying to coax blood into his head and away from his…well, his other head.

Yet you hold him in place with that sinful stare and the lewd whimpers that you know get him off, and yes, fuck yes, he wants to hear you beg and sob for him all night as much as he wants to clog your throat with his shaft and make you swallow your teasing.

But he can’t let you win. You can’t scam five thousand credits out of him and expect him to throw himself into your arms no questions asked. He wants to put an end to your little tyrannical rule on his cock. And he wants his fucking money back.

So the powerful Mandalorian watches helplessly as your hand quickens under your clothing and you throw your head back in ecstasy. That fucking smirk doesn’t leave you, though. Even less so when your palm picks up some speed and you hear his breath hitch involuntarily at the visual, loud enough to override the vocoder.

“C-come on, Mando, don’t—” Your hand sinks deeper into your pants and you hum at the adjustment. “Don’t you wanna teach me what—what proper cos-costumer service looks like? Huh?”

His cock jumps in his pants when you say his name in a wanton gasp, and Mando can see you’re sweating and moving your hips faster against your palm. He’s so hard it hurts.

Your smile falters and you frown impatiently as the pent-up tension threatens to snap in your body.

“Don’t cum,” Mando blurts before he can stop himself.

“Or what?”

“Or I won’t give you what you want.”

Your movements halt on command, and the hunter almost envies the control you have over your own body to be able to backtrack on the very edge of your release. You hold your hands up in triumphant surrender as you watch the Mandalorian approach and stop just a breath away from your body. He stands tall before you, crowding you with his size and turning down the volume on the nagging voice that reminds him that he’s letting you win.

Eyes on the prize ahead of you, you lick your lips and snake a hand beneath your sit. You pull a lever and the chair plummets a few inches until your mouth is directly in front of the rigid tent growing in his pants. Expert fingers undo his belt and lower his fly, but, stars, nothing is fast enough when Mando already feels the veins of his cock growing thicker and thicker. Skipping all formalities, your hand sneaks inside, cups his balls, and pulls all of him outside. He groans when you grab his shaft and squeeze hard from base to tip, your bare palm catching awkwardly on his equally dry skin. Mando melts into the sensation all the same, but you seem displeased with your palm’s lack of fluidity.

“Fuck. Hold on.” A pair of fingers disappear into your mouth and down your throat as far as they’ll go. You choke on them dramatically and your eyes water slightly, but they shine when the two small intruders drag outside your mouth, pulling a thick string of elastic spit with them and dropping it on his shaft, pulsing with anticipation. You lean forward and look up through your lashes as you unroll your tongue slowly and more gooey saliva dangles from it. It’s too dense to spill onto its target, so you pluck the heavy ropes from your mouth and smear it manually on his cock, while a thread of it hangs on your chin.

“Fuck.” Your tiny clenched fist wakes up every nerve in his body as it drags up and down his shaft, obscene and perfectly lubricated. Mando’s hips buck into its grasp involuntarily, so suddenly that you flinch at the unexpected jolt. It’s a small comfort for him, to see that he can also surprise you. But then you’re giggling again, locking him in place by grabbing the buck of his belt with your free hand.

“Eager,” you remark. You lean forward and place a chaste kiss on the tip that digs into his spine. Maker, it was barely anything, but he’s so hard and your mouth is so close. “Aren’t Mandalorians,” you tease, “supposed to have self-restraint?”

Mando’s only answer is a low groan and a gloved hand that tangles on your hair and pushes you forward. You resist, though, instead wrapping a fist around his base and dragging your hot tongue up his underside, stopping just before the tip. A tortured whimper echoes around the helmet, and the Mandalorian is not sure if you could hear it because his muscles pull tighter, drawing his attention to his cock and your mouth and the fact that the latter is not wrapped around him for some reason. As if you could read his mind, you suddenly engulf him whole. Spit gathers on the edge of your lips as you suck on his length, swallowing around the tip and swirling your tongue around his girth.

“Fuck, you’re so—so fucking g-good at this.” You hum in response, sending vibrations through his shaft that make his knees buckle. He always forgets how good it feels with you. He forgets that you take him perfectly like all your holes were made for him to fuck. That you make his blood run hot with every swing of your tongue and every spasm of your cunt and every insolent remark that escapes your lovely mouth, now busy pleasuring him.

You settle on his head and suck on the bulb, hollowing your cheeks to let him feel the delicious inside of your mouth. Mando grabs handfuls of your hair with both hands, still trying to extinguish little whimpers before they leave his throat. And you can tell. He knows you can tell because determination clouds your eyes as you yank him closer by the belt. You drag your tongue in a circle around the ridge of the head, before dipping into the slit on the tip and finally earning a punched out groan and some beads of precum as a reward. Somehow, you moan and chuckle at the same time, opening your mouth as strings of spit fall to the floor.

“You’re hard, Mando,” you coo, pumping his length while you rub it on the side of your face, “throbbing and so, so hard. You should’ve come to me sooner, baby. You’re desperate.” You suck on the head again, and the Mandalorian’s grip on your hair turns to steel, pulling you into him and no longer asking. Moaning, you let him, taking him as far as you can and wrapping a fist where you can’t reach. Your other hand releases his belt and snakes down to your lap, fumbling with the waistband of your pants.

Somewhere in the swamp of sensations drowning his thoughts, an idea flashes in Mando’s head, and he holds on to it before you can suck it out of his tip. One glove lets go of your hair and quickly grans the hand lowering into your heat to resume touching yourself. His cock still in your mouth, you look up at him with furrowed eyebrows and a silent question.

“You can’t c-cum,” he explains, forcing words out of a throat that right now only wants to moan, “un-until you give me my—my refund.”

You groan and roll your eyes, taking your mouth off him with a pop. “Fuck no,” you breathe as you pump him faster and harder, almost making Mando lose his resolve. Almost. His hold on your wrist tightens. “It’s store policy.”

“Y-yeah?” You continue sliding your fist along his shaft, as you lean forward and lower your face to start lightly licking his balls. The room spins around Mando, and his grip on your hair pushes you into him until you suck on one ball gently. “Is—is it store p-policy to—ngh—to f-fuck your clients?”

You chuckle against his taint. Your head straightens to set your attention back on his tip, where he’s leaking an almost embarrassing amount of precum. A thumb brushes over his slit, gathering the pearls and bringing them into your mouth to taste him. The way you rub your core slightly against the chair is sneaky enough, but the Mandalorian catches the movements and tugs your hand and hair tighter as a warning. Your shoulders slump.  “I’ll give you half,” you offer.

Mando guides your hand lower and curls it around his swollen cock, silently begging for your attention. His hand wraps over yours as he squeezes your fist and drags it along his shaft at a pace of his liking that sets his insides ablaze. “Eighty.” The helmet falls back as he revels in the wet sounds of your hand sliding back and forth his cock and giving him a nice enough memory for when he inevitably goes back to the Crest and is forced to take care of his needs himself.

You let him guide you, cupping his balls with your other hand and swirling your tongue around his darkening tip. Mando’s chest trembles with a long moan at the toe-curling feeling of your warm spit and your clenched fist working so hard for him, until you drop him from your mouth and answer, “Seventy.”

“N-no, I—”

“—Seventy,” you repeat and twist your hand away from his grasp, leaving his seeping cock throbbing and abandoned, “or you don’t cum.”

Fuck, he was close. He was so fucking close, before you turned the tables. Like fucking always. A part of him cradles his already bruised pride, shaming him for—yet again—not being able to hold it together around you. But his cock tugs harder. More insistently. It pulls every fiber in his body and screams at him to give you whatever the fuck you want.

“Fine.” He nods his head once, before his better sense can convince him otherwise. “Seventy.”

A full, beautiful smile that almost makes Mando forget he’s getting scammed graces your plump lips. You waste no time shoving your hand inside your underwear again and moving your arm frantically as you give him a couple of throaty whines. You open your mouth as wide as it’ll go and blink up at him, inviting him to take you however he so pleases. He tangles his fingers on your hair and shoves you against him as you wrap your lips around his cock and muffle your mewls on it.

The Mandalorian starts fucking your face, getting his money’s worth as he moves you back and forth. Your eyes water and you gag with every shove, but you work earnestly for him, hollowing your cheeks and moving your tongue and pulling just about every trick on your toolbox to make Mando’s eyes roll to the back of his head.

And stars, even through your pants and his helmet, he can still smell your arousal. He hears the wet squelching of your fingers working your pussy fast and if he could only get a look. One look is all he needs to cum, he’s sure, one fucking look at your clenching cunt and he’s done.

“F-fuck, l-let me see,” he pants, “let—let me s-see you—see your p-pussy cum, just—fuck—just a mo-moment, please, j-just…”

Tears from all the gagging fall out of your pretty eyes as you open your mouth and stand up, taking your trembling hand outside to fumble with your trousers. Your thumbs are hooked under their waistband and push down slightly before you suddenly stop and stare at the Mandalorian gulping all the oxygen he can get and waiting for you. “Sixty,” you say carefully.

Too intoxicated with you and too focused on the blood beating hard on his cock, Mando couldn’t care less. He doesn’t give a shit about percentages or money or parts or whatever half-forgotten excuse he had to come here tonight. All that matters and all that’s real is whatever he needs to climax, and if it means letting you win, so be it. “S-sixty. Yes. Whatever. Just—just take your fucking pants off.”

One swift movement and your pants and underwear pool around your ankles. Yanking hard on the hem, you manage to pull the right leg off your boot. You don’t bother with the other one, letting it hang on your left leg as you climb back on the chair, spreading your legs and hooking one thigh over the armrest to offer him the best view possible.

Mando’s cock threatens to spill at the sight. You’re fucking soaked. Your folds are blushed and slick and swollen with all the blood accumulated on your cunt. Three fingers rub your aching clit and everything around it with messy strokes, as you stare at the bounty hunter with raw lust and moan for him loud and clear, and this. This is worth the fucking navigator.

As soon as his shaft ghost over your face you lean into it and reach for him with your mouth. Mando takes your head between his hands and resumes his previous brutal pace, his eyesight now directed at the way your cunt spasms and seeps more juices with every circle you press against your lips. And, fuck, you’re taking him like you’re hungry for his cock. Pushing harder and further and faster despite the gagging, you’re making Mando see blotches cloud his vision and feel how his muscles turn into hot, thick magma. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he can’t hold it in anymore. His balls start pulling up as a warning and you’re sucking harder and mewling around him.

“I—I…I’m gonna—I—”

Mando can’t find enough words to put together for the life of him, but you nod and manage a chocked “Mhmm” and bob your head to the pace of your quickening fingers and stars oh fuck—

The wave of his climax hits him hard on his back and makes him curl around you. He braces himself against the top of your chair and the change in position makes his cock slip outside of your mouth, but his vision goes completely black and all he can feel is the rush of pleasure crushing his bones into dust. Maybe your name is falling from his lips, but he can’t be sure. The never-ending spurts of cum falling somewhere hoard most of his attention, and he focuses on that thick and heavy release, so rare for him that he puts his mind into savoring every second.

It’s not until the echoes around his ears dissipate that the Mandalorian hears you’re still whimpering. Hunched over you, he opens his eyes just in time to see you gather some of the seed that he spilled on your neck and bring it down to smear it over your bundle of nerves, rubbing it one, two, three, four times, before you’re sobbing long and loud. Your hole tightens around nothing, your forehead resting on his cuisse, and Mando thinks he could get hard again just from the image.

You both stay like that for a while, curled into each other and panting in turns, until Mando gathers all the energy left in his system to pull himself upright and shove his softening shaft back into his pants. It’s only then that he sees just how much of a mess he made: Cum landed everywhere. It hangs thick all over your face, on your neck, on your hair, on your clothes. He blushes darkly and he’s about to open his mouth to apologize, but you sense it. Somehow. You wink and brush off his shame with a smile and a wave of your hand, standing up to get dressed. But Mando’s quicker. He kneels in front of you and gently raises your underwear until it hugs your hips, wishing for a fleeting second he could press a kiss on the supple flesh there. You grab his pauldron for balance to sneak your foot into the pantleg that Mando holds open for you.

For once, it’s he who breaks the silence. “I…I do want my sixty percent, you know.”

“Of course.” You smile sweetly at him, reaching back to your work table to grab a clean rag, rubbing it against your face and neck. “I’ll even throw in some free microvalves for good measure.”

—

Taglist of two so you can keep each other company :) : @rosetophighlander​ @hellomothermoon

[tuancore]

Lost You (Part 15) :

Starring- Jinyoung x reader

Genre- Angst

Summary- It's your choices and actions which made you miserable.

Jinyoung was growing impatient by the rate with which the meeting was proceeding, three hours in the meeting and he felt like he has already spent an year inside the conference hall. Hyunjin kept on mouthing incoherent things to him, trying his best to prevent Jinyoung from daydreaming in such an important meeting.

"I hope you liked the proposal, Mr. Park" The new business partner exclaimed happily, standing up from his seat, finally getting Jinyoung's undivided attention. Jinyoung nodded his head with a polite smile standing from his seat as well, "Mr. Jung, I'm really looking forward for our collaboration, thanks for your precious time".

"No worries Mr. Park, I'm glad that we are able to work together" He chuckled again with a genuine smile, "I'll let my secretary send you the drafts of the agreement, you can have a look at it and if you would like to make changes you're most welcome".

"Sure, thank you" Jinyoung spoke for the last time shaking hands with Mr. Jung, "Sir, I would like if you don't leave the meeting hall until I'm done escorting them" Hyunjin bowed politely before guiding Mr. Jung and his secretary the way out of the company. Few other employees who were also requested to attend the meeting left the hall after greeting Jinyoung.

With everyone out, Jinyoung immediately fished out his phone dialling BamBam's number. He ran his fingers through his luscious locks biting on his bottom lip impatiently. He wasn't able to concentrate properly in the meeting but he did take note of the main points, he was growing way too impatient to be beside you again, in these two months it's for the first time that he has left your side for so long almost three and a half hours.

"Why the hell isn't he picking up my calls?!" Jinyoung yelled tossing his phone on the leather chair, after BamBam failed to receive his calls.

Hyunjin entered into the room swiftly, standing in front of Jinyoung from the other side of the table, "Hyunjin, I have to go. Whatever the agreement will be just email them to me", Jinyoung expressed striding towards the door to leave.

"Ma'am is not in the hospital" Hyunjin stated slowly turning his head to face Jinyoung, who halted in his steps before he could even push the door open, "What do you mean by that?".

"Sir, ma'am is not in the hospital. Yugyeom hyung messaged me that Ma'am gained consciousness almost an hour ago and that they are taking her with them".

"S—She woke u—up?" Jinyoung's lips quivered with happiness, which he wasn't able to supress. He hugged Hyunjin tightly almost cutting his oxygen supply, "I—I understand but you're k—killing me—me...".

He broke the hug placing his hands on Hyunjin's shoulder, he reconfirmed "You sure, that they were not joking.....She really is......I mean she.....Oh god finally!". Hyunjin's heart warmed seeing Jinyoung so happy for the first time in these past months.

"I'm also very happy Sir".

"Why didn't you inform me earlier?"

"If I had informed you earlier then you would've surely left the meeting and rushed there, and you know this meeting was very important for us, for the company.....I'm sorry Sir", Hyunjin hung his head low in guilt for not informing him about you soon just because he was being thoughtful for the company and not for you who is Jinyoung's life.

"Yah!" Jinyoung called, shaking Hyunjin's shoulders, "There's nothing to be sad about, I'm so glad that you were always there beside me, always handled the official work whenever I failed to, I know these past months were hard for you as well. But not even once did you complain and I appreciate you heartily for that, Hyunjin-ah".

Smiling softly, Hyunjin nodded his head. Many of the employees of the Park Inc. wondered as to why Jinyoung tolerated Hyunjin when most of the times Hyunjin bossed Jinyoung around, but the thing which both of them hid very well was that Hyunjin was Jinyoung's cousin, he offered Hyunjin to work for him for the sake of work experience which Hyunjin gladly accepted.

He was afraid that people in the company would think that Hyunjin was trying to take advantage of being Jinyoung's brother, so he decided to not let anyone know that he was related to him instead he'll work as a normal employee along with others. Reluctantly Jinyoung accepted it, being such a young lad Hyunjin was super smart in every aspect of business administration, just like Jinyoung was. And within a small amount of Hyunjin became the most dedicated and hardworking employee of the company.

"Thank you hyung...." Hyunjin muttered softly, "So enough of this melodrama, we'll continue it later, I was starting to like it though", he teased Jinyoung for getting sentimental as he barely expresses his feelings to someone.

"Yeah.......sometimes it's good to cry and rejoice like people in daily soaps" Jinyoung added, both of them laughing heartily.

"Let's go and have Ma'am back in your arms now shall we?".

__________

"Will you both speak now?" You asked the two boys standing in front of you sternly, eyeing them in irritation. After the little confusing revelation of Youngjae being your bff, you started losing your temper growling at both of them for their stupid attempt to protect Youngjae and Jinyoung and have you to forgive them. Not knowing specifically what has to be done they brought you to their studio.

Crossing your legs on the only couch in their pretty decent studio, you sighed, "I have no idea what you both are trying to pull off.....but it's not enough to change my mind".

"Noona to be honest we are also as clueless as you", Yugyeom stated sitting on his swivel chair, "What do you mean?" You asked tilting your head.

"Can we know why you're so mad at Jinyoung and Youngjae?" BamBam cut in with a humble smile, "What did they both do? That you don't even want to hear their names".

"Did you both hit your head hard?" You blurted in disbelief, the two have been sticking around with you since the beginning of all the mess and now they are acting as if they don't remember a single thing. Unbelievable.

BamBam and Yugyeom both didn't want to force things on you seeing your still not very stable state, but your words were getting to their minds they have to know what's the reason behind your outburst, your anger for the other two.

Giving you a stoic face, they insisted for you to explain the thoughts going inside your head. With that you let everything out from the beginning to end, how Jinyoung alleged you of cheating on him with Jackson, how BamBam came to know about Jinyoung and Jisoo seeing eachother, how Youngjae was in love with you because of which he caused misunderstandings between you and Jinyoung. How your heart got broken by him because of which you lost your child and attempted suicide.

"But I'm alive any way" You grimaced rubbing your temples. BamBam and Yugyeom felt their souls leaving their bodies, their face got pale with cold sweats forming on their forehead.

"Th—That w—was.....What w—was t—that?" Yugyeom stammered wiping the little sweat beads from his head, "None of this has ever happened? Then what are you talking about?" BamBam spoke with widened eyes staring into your chocolate orbs.

"Please don't act as if you've forgotten everything! Their betrayal is not something to be forgotten within two months!"

It's not like they wanted to shout on you, but your stubbornness made it impossible to let the things run smoothly, they had to burst your bubble because whatever you were saying was nowhere close to normal and if extended it can cause harm in real as well.

"We haven't forgotten anything! You— Whatever you're saying has never happened, none of it is true. You said I was the one who told you about Jinyoung hyung cheating on you right? Then why the fuck don't I remember a single thing?!" BamBam snapped rising from his chair pacing back and forth in the room.

"What the fuck do you mean by you don't remember a thing?" You snarled at BamBam, "How can you forget everything so easily? Or you're sympathizing with Jinyoung and Youngjae?".

"I'm not sympathizing with anyone Noona! I'm fucking not!" He yelled back, "You said you committed suicide, but let me tell you, you didn't commit such a crime!".

"BamBam stop! I clearly remember that I slit open my wrist with a shard, wait let me show yo—", You pulled the sleeves of your shirt, to see your wrist but words got caught in your throat.

"What? Show us" BamBam added, crossing his arms to his chest, almost challenging you. You traced your wrist which was badly teared open by the shard, "How—How....c—come there's n—no mark?".

BamBam stood beside you taking your said hand in his, "You slit it open here?", He emphasized, "And there's clearly no mark, do you think it some sort of a joke that hurting yourself with a sharp piece of shard will leave no scar?".

"Okay, let's assume it didn't leave a scar but after stitching your wrist up will the stitch mark fade so soon?" BamBam proclaimed, "Two months are not enough, sometimes the scar remains for lifetime".

"And that's the proof that whatever you told us.......was something that never took place" Yugyeom concluded, nodding his head at you.

Thats true, even a knife cut would take months to heal then how come such a severe wound will heal this fast. Your skin seemed to be absolutely normal, same as that of your other hand, yanking your hand from BamBam's grip, you bellowed "But all I remember is dying and then all of a sudden I woke up to your face! Can it be some coincidence?".

"We don't know what it is, but all we know is that whatever you are saying is nothing but your own imagination, since nothing, not a single thing has ever happened in these past few months!" BamBam grunted, almost losing his calm.

Your mind was spinning like anything, every single moment is burnt in your memory, you can call out every single detail of whatever you've said to them. Then how come they both are trying to defy your not so old past. Everyone was aware of how much BamBam and Yugyeom are fond of joking and pranking but this time there was not a slightest hint of humour in their eyes or body language instead their faces were emotionless and voice was stern.

"What is happening?" You mumbled trying to soothe your pounding headache which suddenly caught upto you. Rotating your eyes across the room you eyes fell onto the desktop calendar.

Striding towards the table, you grabbed it, pair of eyes following your each and every move, "What month is it?" You asked.

"It's November".

Your gasped at the reply, "How can this be even possible?" You mumbled to yourself. When you committed suicide it was the month of November. Then how come it's still November.

"If I didn't commit suicide, then why was I admitted to the hospital?".

"Yes you were admitted to the hospital, but not because you had committed suicide but because you had a severe concussion", Yugyeom revealed, pointing at your head and that's when you realised a bandage was wrapped around your head the entire time which you failed to pay heed to.

"Two months ago, you had an accident in which a lorry ran into your car", BamBam professed looking at your wrapped head, "Your car was found upside down, your head smashed against the dashboard, it was a huge trauma for all of us".

"Noona we don't know what's going on with you, but trust us, none of it ever happened. We can never do injustice to you by saving them if they would have done such a terrible thing to you", Yugyeom expressed softly with a subtle smile, "And the truth is that Youngjae hyung is your bestfriend and Jinyoung hyung never cheated on you".

Youngjae is your bestfriend.

Jinyoung never cheated on you.

Pondering over his words, you forced your brain into recalling the events from the past, shutting your eyes close all you saw was a small glimpse of the time where you were grabbing coffee with Jackson teasing him bout Minyoung. Gripping on your scalps harshly, you groaned at the excruciating pain shooting through your brain.

Part 14 // Part 15

______________________________________

(A/N: I seriously have no idea what you guys are going to think about this chapter so just let me know, sorry for all the mess, probably the next part will be the last one.Anyways thank you so much to you all).

[mamapeach7]

Daeul

Preview / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / bonus

Chapter 17

-

She herself didn’t know what to identify as when it came to Hyuk.

Their vacation in Tahiti had ended a month prior with the New Year following, having spent time with each other, friends of course Minji. Daeul was to turn three years-old in two and a half weeks which meant that his grandparents were thinking of him once more.

Standing at the doorfront with his son in his arms and Hanji by his side, he smiled at the woman next to him before turning his gaze to his parents once more.

“This is Oh Hanji…”.

She clenched tightly onto the sleeve of his arm as she smiled tightly at the elder couple in front of her.

They smiled vaguely to her -- a kind of warm yet soft smile that let you know that because they had already accepted her. Whether it was because they were aging by the day or because they knew that their son and grandchild needed someone else in their lives, regardless of whether she was grateful.

Hyuk seemed to have noticed as well since he quickly glanced down to her and smiled before placing a hand on top of hers.

They were certainly more domestic than their son -- insisting on making dinner themselves and ensuring that everyone had food on their plate at all times. Daeul sat between them -- Hanji to his right as always and his dad on his left.

“So Hanji…”, Hyuk’s older mother began, making the said female tense up a little.

“May I ask what you’ve studied?”

Hanji cleared her throat and wiped her hands with the napkin on her right before speaking softly.

“Well, I-I actually took history -- c-classical civilizations and monarchies.”

“Oh, that’s great! History was my favourite in junior high.”, Hyuk’s father piped in with a wide smile on his face, making Hanji feel a little more relaxed.

“Really! I uh, I actually taught ancient history for a year after I graduated.”

“A-Any plans for later on?”

She averted her eyes from the pair and focused on the silverware in front of her, thinking about her recent application to the museum in Manchester which Minji had told her about. She certainly did send them her best essays written in university and her teaching experience.

The one thing she hadn’t told Hyuk was that she had been accepted to begin work in England effective in three weeks.

“W-Well I...I’ve actually been granted a curating position in...in England.”

Hearing the scraping of Hyuk’s butter knife on his plate mid-way slicing up a piece of broccoli for Daeul, she immediately knew he came to a halt.

Hanji turned her head slightly to find his eyes on her before he quickly ripped them away and continued to feed his son.

“England! S-So then just mainly English history or..?”

“Well perhaps for the most part b-but of course I-I’ll get the chance to feature other areas…”

“You know, I had a friend in my second year…”

The voices around her had drifted off as she averted her attention to Hyuk who continued to eat in silence, occasionally turning to Daeul and feeding him some of his own food.

He finally managed to meet her gaze, fixating his eyes on her as they held a kind of sorrow that would linger in her mind for days to come.

~

“...That was mom -- she said she can’t wait to see you again for Daeul’s birthday.”

Hyuk sat in his bed, which he now shared with Hanji since they had decided that she was no longer considered as an employee under his roof, placing his phone down on the nightstand.

“Aw, that makes me feel so giddy.”, Hanji gleed as she gently sat next to him.

And as it became a habit, they shared a long stare of admiration in silence -- sharing the peace and quiet of the now sleeping house.

“A-Are you going to Manchester?”

Sighing heavily and avoiding his gaze, she instead grabbed hold of his fingers and resided in front of her on the soft gray sheets.

“It’s um...It’s actually been something that I’ve been planning e-even before we met.”, she whispered.

Now sitting up straight to properly face her, Hyuk crossed his legs as he leaned in closer. “H-How long will you be gone?”

“A while.”, was all she could say with a jutted lip which turned into a sorrowful smile.

He was silent momentarily, still playing with her fingers noticing her mauve-painted nails. She could sense that there was a slight worry in him -- perhaps even fear. There was something in him which whispered that like Daeul’s birthmom, Oh Hanji could leave him too.

That she could leave and promise to come back but would actually never.

“I-I’m leaving the week after Daeul’s birthday.”, she whispered before bringing both her hands to cup his cheeks and raising his head to face hers.

“Say something, Hyuk.”

It took him seconds to finally face her, bringing his head up mere centimeters in front of her. She didn’t miss the quick glances back and forth her eyes and lips, letting her know what he may have wanted.

“Y-You’ll come back, won’t you?”, he asked with his brows curled.

Do you even have to ask?

“Well, I have one very good reason to.”, Hanji spoke softly before pulling him close into a firm kiss, running her hands down his neck and over his plum blossom tattoo which was dedicated to his mother.

Hyuk rested his hands on her waist before slowly laying her down and hovering overtop of her, deepening their kiss as the dim yellow light in their room surrounded them warmly.

~

She knew she would miss a whole year and perhaps even more of Daeul’s life, so she hugged him tightly like she always did whenever she held him in her arms.

His small body would be bigger a year from now so she savoured every last second as she inhaled the familiar scent of baby powder and vanilla.

“Don’t grow up -- stay small forever.”, she joked as she swayed with him side by side as they continued to hug.

The boy could only manage to embrace her without a single thought or idea of what was going on and gave her a short peck when they pulled apart.

Thankfully the airport wasn’t too crowded -- Minji had come along to of course bid her sister farewell and to help unload the baggage. She was saved as second on the ‘to-hug’ list which Hanji kept quick as to keep herself from bursting into tears.

“To all those math kids who made fun of us social science students.”, Minji encouraged, making her younger sister laugh in glee.

And then there was Kwon Hyuk, whom she had hugged plenty the night prior and refrained from doing so again so as to not make her departure even more miserable.

“I hate goodbyes.”, he said as he held her hand, swinging it with his.

“It’s not -- it’s not goodbye.”, she reassured.

“Oh! H-Here’s my address in Manchester.”, Hanji pulled out a small piece of paper from the pocket of her jacket. “So if we can’t call every day for some reason, you can at least write to me or you know...send me something.”

She joked lightly with a smile, making him chuckle.

He stared longingly at her one last time before gently grabbing her by the back of her head and pulling her into a kiss, making her eyes water as she had promised herself she wouldn’t hug him right before she leaves.

“If you ever feel lonely -- look for the moon.”, he whispered into her ear.

“And especially when it’s full, you’ll know I’m with you.”

Her flight had landed her around seven o’clock in the evening. She stepped out into the crisp February air, her luggage resting on each of her sides as she waved a hand in the air for a cab to drive her to her accommodation.

As one pulled over and she began to place her bags in the truck, she caught a glimpse of the night sky -- the stars dancing in pitch black with a large moon hovering them all.

Just then she heard the ringtone of her phone go off and when she checked that it was from Hyuk, she furrowed her eyes as to how he was able to text her so quickly considering it was long-distance.

However, when she read that the only thing he had sent her was a simple icon of a crescent moon, all the fears and worries she had been holding slowly faded.

END

[earthtocass]

I’m Sorry

Dear Alex, 

I know you probably will never see this, because you haven’t used this site in forever but i need somewhere to say this to you and I don’t know if i will get the chance to make things better. 

Where do I start? our first date? I couldn’t believe that I had finally met someone who I resonated with quite like I did with you. 

Do you remember? we spoke all night like it was nothing, we shared our interests, our thoughts, our dreams, what we wanted in life. every aspect of what you wanted matched mine. I never wanted that night to end, I could have spoken to you until my lungs gave out. I could have looked into your blue eyes until I was old and grey and you would have captivated me every step of the way. 

I remember laughing and smiling, sharing shitty date stories, our heart breaks. I knew from the moment you walked into my life that I would do whatever it took to keep you by my side. to see your cheeky grin. 

I remember thinking how much I hated beards, but god damn did you look amazing in yours. I never wanted to see you without it, and to this day I haven’t. 

We started seeing each other frequently, and every time I saw you, my whole body caught fire. Touching you ignited a flame in me, it was electric, and i still feel it every time you touch me. Even to this day. While it may no longer be a intense burning, it is a warm welcome fuzzy feeling i like to call home. 

I remember feeling like a little school girl, with a crush, we went to the zoo I still remember the wild dog toy you bought me as a gift. the photos of that day still hang on our walls. Such a happy memory. 

we shared so much in common, music, games, passions, drive, a want for children, and so much more, you really were instantly the half of me I had been missing my entire life. It was like a melding of minds that just made sense, and I know you felt that too as we spoke so often about how we just instantly connected. 

It took two weeks for me to finally build up the courage to ask what it was we had become. I remember clearly i was at Lachlan’s house and they were all asking me about this mysterious boy and what you were to me. I remember yearning for you to say that i was your girlfriend, but I didn’t  want to get my hopes up for the fear that you weren’t ready to label us. 

Much to my delighted surprise, you wanted to be mine! my heart could have burst I was so happy. YOU, You wanted to be with ME! 

the days where we didn’t see each other, they grew shorter and shorter. I remember cooking for you and your family, and them cooking for me. Home life for me then was not the best, with a new step dad being imported from another country and all the concern that brought. Your home life wasn’t that fair either at the time. but I remember admiring how dedicated you were to your family, supporting them through a decision like moving states and keeping them afloat. 

It came a time where the Flemington house would be no more, what were you going to do?? where would you stay? would I move in? and sure enough, myself and my two dogs moved into a crummy little 2 bedroom house with a pink shower bath and wooden floors. 

It was by no means our flashiest moment of living, but it was ours. Okay Sean lived there too, and yes that presented its own set of challenges. But we wanted to help! and we did for so long. 

I remember you getting so drunk you threw up all over our bedroom floor, and on the day we had an electrician coming. I remember being so mad, but now I look back on it and smile, it isn’t a bad memory. You flooded our floor and were so sick. I cared for you that day, feeding you and cleaning you up. Because I love you and that is just what you do.  

I remember when it all got too much, and what a strain that put on us. but we talked it through and came out better. 

I remember when everything fell apart between your Aunty and your Mum, and that the family that said they would always have your back, suddenly abandoned you without work. I wasn’t earning the best wage then, but we made it work. whatever we had to do to make ends meet and to support each other. 

You started working with my dad, I still have fond memories of that, he got to know you so well and you him. You built a bond so strong, he would do anything to help you out. 

We stuck that out for a while, us and our little family. 

I remember in December of 2016, you had been driving around that cursed Mitsubishi with all it’s huntsmans and you hated it. I remember you looking at the most disgusting green wagon I had ever seen, but you loved it. oh the petty bickering we did about that colour. Yet somehow I still look back on those little sessions and I smile, we had differing opinions but we never let them be a focus we just made it witty little banter, that was uniquely ours. Like your love of the E30, which I will never understand. 

No actually I do, you love the engineering genius, you love that they are aerodynamic, you love that they are quick and punchy and they are able to be used for lots of things, you love the way they drive and you hate that you sold the one you had. You think they are comfortable and classic and beautiful to drive and I know your dream is to purchase another and to work on it. I know I said that I wouldn’t let you get one, but really I probably could be persuaded.  

Anyway off track, you wanted that wagon so much. I remember how much I wanted to make you happy. I wanted to give you the world on a silver platter, I still do. You said to me that this was your dream car, you had always wanted one, so one day on a whim we went to a dealer and we spoke to them about it. we took it for a test drive and I remember the look on your face, how excited you were, like a kid in a candy store. I wanted so bad for you to feel that every time you drove it. so we bought it. We made it work, was it a rash decision? probably, did it bring us joy and memories, bloody oath it did. So it was worth it. Every penny, every complex issue, it was worth every smile it gave you. 

Moving in with my mum to try and save was probably one of the worst decisions we made. But it allowed us to get in front, a little. I remember not caring that we only had a little bedroom to live in, if we could use this to build what was ours, it would be worth it. 

I remember you coming to me and not wanting to work for Greg anymore, we decided that if that was going to be the case we would find something you wanted to do. We obtained your mutual recognition as an electrician and you got a job doing your trade! how exciting! but not for very long. I remember wanting to murder the man who bullied you. How fiercely protective of what was mine, and so angered that it had resulted in you being left without work again. 

But you are smart and resilient, you picked yourself up, you dusted yourself off and we started the hunt for work again. You make yourself useful to every employee and you work hard! I admire that in you, you are such a hard worker, and you want to ensure that you are pleasing everyone. One of the many things that I love about you. 

We lost a dog, it was hard... and I know what we are going through now brings back memories of this. I remember being so stressed, but you were my pillar and I hope that I was yours. we got through it unscathed. It was time consuming, yes, but in the end, we came out on top.  

It then came the day we were moving out of that wretched house, away from the woman who gave us so much grief. Boy could we not be happier that day had come. 

Our new town house, all our own, no eyes, no family, just me and you! finally! we needed that I felt. While we may have bickered, I always ensured you knew how much I loved you at the end of every day. That love is never ending, and I know sometimes you felt like it wasn’t. 

Then I got sick, we couldn’t figure it out, and I was sick for a long time. You supported me, cared for me, and made me whole. I got better after a trip to the hospital and my love for you just continued to flourish and grow.

The time came where we needed to heal our hearts and welcome a new member to our family. You didn’t want another Siberian like I did, you wanted something cool, something different. 

We had stumbled across the Swedish Vallhund in our search years before when we were living in our little two bedroom home. You loved the look and sound of them and I loved that they would have the same energy as Evee who so desperately needed a friend. 

We made it happen, signed the contract and I went to go visit them, you drove 3 hours to come and pick me up from Bendigo. My god I love you. 

Months later, a little baby girl was made available to us, she was a dream come true, so adorable and cuddly, and perfectly ours. She brought us so many laughs and smiles, something to talk about outside of our daily lives. 

I got lost in showing her, I wanted to do it every weekend! now I reflect on it, it was not only about going out and doing something and it being a passion of mine. It was about spending time with you, the love of my life and our dogs. It meant that we weren’t spending every weekend in our house, but out seeing new places, meeting new people. We could talk about new experiences. 

I wanted to do things with you, for you to be involved and it seemed to be good at the beginning, but I know I over killed the ambition. I’m Sorry. 

We welcomed another into our home 6 months later, although it was meant to be temporary, that goofy little boy, you loved him so much. 

I remember the time you came into the kitchen and you told me that I needed to get my licence, that you couldn’t keep being the only driver in the house and it was taking a toll on you. I remember trying to defend myself like I always do, and I am not making excuses, but I was raised a defensive kid. I was so anxious, but the more I thought about it. The more I knew that I needed to do this, for you! I couldn’t let you feel miserable being the only one driving and able to freely move around. 

I thought about what you said long and hard and we began learning, I remember when you first took me out on the road in the wagon. You took me into the back streets of an industrial estate. I sat in the drivers seat for the first time since I was 18. I cried, boy did I cry, I had a full blown anxiety attack, but you held me until I calmed down, you were so patient with me and my heart flew. We drove around that estate for what felt like forever. 

You were patient and kind and reassured me I was doing a good job. But that car made me anxious, all that power, even if it wasn't that bad, I needed a car I would feel safe in. So on the hunt we went. We looked at so many cars, cheap ones, expensive ones, not so expensive ones. We looked together, we test drove so many. 

Finally we bought my car, while it was more than we wanted to spend, it was what made sense. Because it would make you happy and I could drive it and get my licence and you could be a passenger and we could sing together to our favourite music in there. 

I drove and I drove and I drove with you in those back streets, trying to learn how to park, becoming more confident. 

I remember the first time I drove home, you were so proud of me. I remember being so happy that I had made you proud and that I wanted to do this more so that you could continue seeing I was trying to make an effort. 

We welcomed a litter of puppies into the world, squeaky squarky little balls of beautiful fluff. 

We spoke many times over the years about buying or building, looking at houses, looking at land, looking at plans and hopes and dreams. Our vision changed a few times, with many discussions. We settled on maybe looking into acreage, a beautiful block. I’m sorry if that wasn’t what you wanted, I thought we had discussed it and agreed. 

I wanted the acreage not only so I could pursue my dreams, but you would be able to pursue yours too. You had spoken may times about wanting the E30, and a few other cars you could tinker with and rally around. Much to my worry, the thought of losing you to a car accident makes my heart stop. 

I know that the start of this year has been less than ideal, paying two lots of rent, being behind on things and now the dogs in their situation. I know that this puts a real strain on us financially, but we don’t have to do it on our own. Our family and friends are there to help support us. My dad would do anything to ensure that we are looked after, Ayla has offered her support, and I am sure your family wouldn’t let us go homeless either. 

I know that it is hard, because there is no one to blame, and it has put stress on us and we both haven’t been treating each other fairly. For that I apologise, I have been trying so hard not to let what is happening effect how I respond. To make sure I still check in with you and ask you how you are doing and make sure you know I am here to lean on, we could concur anything! 

I know you hate that I never just shut up and let you vent about work without psychoanalysing everything and giving you my thoughts. I try so hard to resist the urge, but it doesn’t come from a place of being right or wrong, it is because I want you to see the positives in situations and not focus on the things that are dragging you down, because everyone has their own stuff happening. It is my way of trying to support you. I hope you know that, and every time I see you make progress or rationalise something that maybe before you would have clung to, I beam, I get so proud of you for being the better person in those situations. 

I know I can be better, and I try to every day. When I say no, I usually say no because I am thinking about you, and us, and the life we want to build together. To make sure we aren’t making stupid decisions, but that is part of growing and learning. We make dumb decisions and then we work our way through them. 

I promise, if you come home, and you want to sell the wagon. We will do it! we will work out what that is going to look like and we will go through with it if it is what you want. If you want to move out of Geelong, we will look for something else. If you want to go back to buying something pre-existing okay lets go. If you want to buy a standard block and live in it for the next 10 years, okay. All I want is to be where you are and I don’t care what that looks like. 

If you never want to move again and you want to rent here for the rest of our lives. Okay, if you want to save slowly and take our time to find our what is right for us, there is no pressure for us to leave here.

I love that you listen and you want to please me, but I also want to please you. Let me listen to you, let me go along with what you want. 

If you want to move back to Adelaide, I will follow you, I would follow you to the ends of the earth if that is what would make you happy because every action I take, every decision we make, we do it thinking about our future. 

I was laying in bed the other day, after Cathryn’s wedding, thinking about how beautiful you looked. How much I loved seeing you all dressed up in that suit, how much I loved you. I began looking at wedding rings, and thinking that, well I could propose to you. 

I started thinking about where I could do it, what were our favourite spots. I didn’t even care that you had been smoking, in truth, it actually made you sexier, don’t ask me how, because you know how much I hate the smell and the taste. Not to mention how may little tiffs we had over it, me trying to understand. But you were just unapologetically you, in all your glory and I didn’t think my heart could be any more full in that moment because I had you. 

I know I put restrictions on recreational drug use, but I never wanted to stop you in full. I just wanted you to be safe, and not have an issue later in life which may be tied to the use. Those actions always came from a place of love, a place that wanted to keep you safe. For whatever reason you hadn’t been doing it much lately anyway, which I found surprising. But had you, it wouldn’t have mattered because you are the most important thing in my life. 

You left, and I have no closure, I don’t know if you are coming back, but by god I would move heaven and earth to bring you home. I keep going over things in my head, what did I do? can I make it better? was it me? was it money? did I gain too much weight? did I not ask what you wanted to do enough? I have so many questions unanswered. 

You need space, and I understand this and I am sorry I did not check in more. 

I miss you more than words can express, I feel like my other half of me is missing and I don’t know how to find it. I am torn in two not knowing if there is anything I can do to make this all seem like a blip in our road. 

Maybe we need time away, from this house, from the stress. at a little cabin or our tent, in the woods or on the beach where it is just us. No one else, no technology, just rediscovery and the comfort of each others presence. 

I honestly cannot express how much you and this relationship mean to me. I don’t care about physical things, I don’t need you to buy me gifts for my birthday or special occasions. I just need you, I’m not hard to please. Being with you has been the easiest thing I have done in my life, because it just made sense. 

I will be yours, always and forever. 

Cass 

[pluckyredhead]

Daredevil 101: Echo

Thanks for sticking with me through “Guardian Devil,” friends. Brighter days are ahead of us! Well, not for Matt, he’s going to continue to be abjectly miserable for about 12 years, but the comics are a lot better.

Today, Matt tries to process Karen’s death with a little rebound in “Parts of a Hole.” This is written by David Mack and the art is a collaborative process between him and Joe Quesada, blending Quesada’s more traditional (though still very experimental for the time) work with Mack’s paintings. The result is a book that definitely has some rough patches, but is visually stunning. (If Mack’s work looks familiar, it’s probably because his Alias covers were the inspiration for the Jessica Jones opening credits.)

[ETA: I was incorrect about the above - Mack did thumbnail layouts but the art is all Quesada.]

Also, it introduces Echo, and she’s the best.

This is how it starts:

Yeah, Matt’s not in a great headspace these days.

I think this page is mostly Quesada, with some Mack influences in the background and hand lettering. I’d love to know their creative process for this story, because this was still the early days of digital art and sending huge files to collab on was no small thing.

With the new headquarters of Nelson and Murdock still under construction, Matt seems to spend most of his time wandering around his palatial home in a robe, playing piano:

This isn’t really plot-relevant, but I couldn’t deprive you guys of it. Also, Matt must have made an insane salary working for Rosalind because he had no savings when she hired him and yet he apparently bounced back enough to get a place in Manhattan with floor-to-ceiling windows and fill it with a grand piano. (Quesada is the king of giving Matt ludicrous, implausibly expensive surroundings; in another miniseries Matt has an entire room dedicated to his collection of Japanese armor and weaponry.)

Matt is not the only piano player in this story, though. Meet Maya Lopez:

Maya is Cheyenne (and presumably Latina, going by her last name, though that’s not confirmed in the text). She was born deaf, but she can remember and perfectly mimic anything she sees. When her father, Willie “Crazy Horse” Lincoln, was killed, his employer became her legal guardian. Once the guardian realized she was a prodigy, he spared no expense getting her the best schools and tutors to allow her to develop her gifts to their full potential.

Maya is a celebrated concert pianist, boxer, performance artist, and more. Her body does everything she asks of it, and audiences love her story of overcoming the odds. (Don’t let the childish drawings fool you - she’s about Matt’s age. I like the conceit artistically, but it does make her come off as much younger than him or somehow emotionally arrested. I mean, I guess she is, since she hasn’t made peace with her father’s death, but no one’s more emotionally arrested that Matthew M. Murdock.)

And who is her munificent guardian? Oh, just Wilson Fisk.

Fisk’s narration at the bottom picks up some of the themes of “Guardian Devil” - that Matt’s problems are because the women in his life have failed him - and it’s gross. Also gross? That he’s about to pimp out his foster daughter in yet another effort to destroy Matt from the inside. STOP TRYING TO BREAK HIS HEART, WILSON. JUST FUCKING SHOOT HIM.

But yeah, even though Fisk does seem to genuinely care about Maya - and she loves him and has no idea he’s anything but a legitimate “spice dealer” - he also recognizes that Matt will be drawn to her due to their shared life experiences, and so he sends her to see him on some legal pretense.

Before that, though, Matt and Foggy have a client (who they’re seeing at Matt’s house, since the office is under construction). His name is Lenny, he’s a former employee of Fisk’s who wants to flip on him, and he’s got a speech impediment that Matt has no trouble with but Foggy can’t quite get a handle on:

The bullet grazes Matt’s cheek - and kills Lenny. Matt suits up and takes down the sniper - a weirdo of a hired killer named Murphy - but it’s too late to save their client.

The next day, Matt’s a little stiff and concussed, but Foggy’s a mess:

I think Foggy’s OTT emotional reaction here is supposed to be comic relief, but it’s worth remembering that in the last storyline Foggy was drugged and sexually assaulted, arrested on false charges, fired by his own mother because she thought he was a rapist, and lost his second best friend in the world to a horribly violent murder. So yeah, not a shock that he’s fragile right now:

Anyway, drink it in, friends: Matt holding Foggy while he cries and then someone assuming they’re boyfriends. Also, presumably Matt heard Maya come in but decided that Foggy was more important. Aw.

Maya tells Matt about the flimsy legal pretense Fisk sent her there on and they make plans to meet to discuss it in more detail while he’s wearing pants. (She’s an expert lip reader so as long as they’re facing each other there’s no problem with communication.) Matt is charmed because Maya is adorable and smells really good and Matt is profoundly vulnerable right now and also, as Wolverine once put it, “the biggest himbo that ever wore a pair of tights.” (That line is CANON, folks!)

Next, Maya goes to see Fisk and ask him a very important question:

Who killed Maya’s father? Why, Daredevil, of course.

Having a specific person to blame has a profound effect on Maya. She does her best to process this new information through her art, in a one-woman show she writes and choreographs called Echo:

The handprint on her face represents the bloody handprint her father left there as he died. (This page is pure Mack, btw.)

But just performing it isn’t enough. She needs revenge.

But first, she needs to meet Matt Murdock for coffee!

I love Maya’s description of Matt up there, which could come out of pretty much anything on AO3 today. (Maybe Charlie Cox really took this comic to heart while he was researching the character?) I also love that she is serving up a serious 1999 Look (TM) while he looks like a pallbearer.

Anyway, they are utterly smitten with one another and it’s super cute. They agree to see each other again and part happily.

A few hours later, Echo attacks Daredevil:

Right, so Matt obviously knows immediately that it’s Maya - I’m not even sure he knows she’s wearing a costume. (And the handprint doesn’t really hide her face anyway.) But unless Maya stops for long enough to read his lips, she’ll have no idea it’s Matt (even though he tries to tell her right away, which is admirable, but dude, don’t ever tell Foggy about that).

I have to say, Maya’s costume makes sense for “I’m a dancer in the late 90s who is gonna go do some parkour and kill a guy, what do I have in my closet that works?” but it’s pretty half-assed design-wise. It’s...a sports bra and pants and Docs. The feathers are a really lazy “Also, Native American!” addition. My kingdom for a redesign and series by a Native artist. (Maya’s plotline here only touches on her Cheyenne heritage in passing, but there’s a later vision quest storyline that’s...dicey.)

The fight is broken up when some kids appear and Maya doesn’t want them witnessing violence. Matt’s left trying to figure out why Maya’s trying to kill him.

Meanwhile, the Lenny case isn’t over! See, Lenny has a twin brother named Larry, and both he and Murphy (the sniper) are willing to testify against Fisk. The DA’s office makes Foggy a special ADA due to his familiarity with Fisk’s history and general badassery. To rattle him, Fisk hires Rosalind:

The absolute pair on you, Franklin. My God.

Taking this case is a sublimely shitty move on Rosalind’s part, of course, on multiple levels. (And yes, I know I said last time it would be the last time we saw her, but I’d forgotten about this. She’ll be back one more time in a few years, too.)

Foggy loses...and kind of flips out, openly calling Fisk a murderer and accusing him of buying off the jury. It’s not stated outright, but I have to imagine his mother coolly opposing him in court after abandoning him without a second thought didn’t help his emotional state.

As Fisk leaves the court, he’s attacked by Larry, looking to avenge his brother. Daredevil shows up, but too late:

Fisk falls into the river and is presumed dead. Matt takes the gun from Larry and is photographed holding it - and Maya, seeing the photos and the headlines, thinks Daredevil just killed her second father.

Meanwhile Foggy, still in his role as an ADA (with no acknowledgment from the story that he used to be DA), is tearing through Fisk’s organization while, uh, Matt faps to it:

ILU FOGGY YOU BEAUTIFUL AVOCADO

Oh, but Fisk’s not dead, of course:

Nope, just hanging out in the sewer eating rats. This is like the third time, idk why Daredevil characters always end up in the sewers but they super do.

Oh, and we get so Fisk backstory which clearly informed the show:

Baby Fisk kills some random dude with a hammer, not his dad - we don’t actually know what happens to his parents - but the hammer is there, as is the working class household full of fighting.

Meanwhile, Echo goes after Daredevil again - but when the cut from the earlier bullet graze opens up on his cheek, she remembers Matt’s injury and finally recognizes him:

Sigh. Did we really need that much sideboob, Quesada?

Anyway, Maya finally draws the inevitable conclusion: Fisk killed her father, not Daredevil. It’s not entirely clear why Willie would’ve asked his murderer to care for his child or why Fisk did it (side note: I’d love to know what kind of relationship, if any, Maya had with Fisk’s son).

And so Maya finally confronts her father’s killer:

Maya leaves town to figure herself out. Matt returns to the slow process of healing. And Fisk? Fisk gets the ironic ending. I’m not sure exactly where Maya shot him, but, well...

Next up: Bendis!

[everlarkingjoshifer]

A Different Way CHPT2

Hey there my lovelies! I’m back with yet another chapter of what I hope is a riveting story. Again I would like to thank @mega-aulover and @burkygirl for giving me great ideas. Tomy husband for being hella patient and @titaniasfics and @javistg for betaing the crap that I handed only for it to come out coherent and worth posting. I would also like to thank @sunsetsrmydreams for making this sweet ass banner. I would like to dedicate this chapter to @norbertsmom for her birthday. May you have a wonderful day babes I wish you many more! As this was originally a story written for @peetaisbae I hope she likes her ongoing X-mas present. As always, don’t forget to read and review ;)

Now onto chapter 2!

Katniss blinked a few times before recognizing the blond, blue-eyed baker before her. “Peeta?” she asked dumbly when her old schoolmate walked around the counter to give her an awkward hug that she’d mistaken for a handshake, and so now they were standing there with Peeta looking down at her extended hand and his arms midway through wrapping around her.

They both blushed as he pulled his hand out and she changed her position to that of wanting to hug him. Stuttering in mid-move, they scoffed at the ridiculousness of it all and blushed furiously when they decided that maybe a high five was as much as the awkwardness would allow.

Peeta ran his hand behind his neck giving her a lopsided grin followed by a shrug. “How’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in so long.”

“I’m good, thanks. Just here picking up some groceries, you know?” Katniss replied, hoping on all of God’s green earth that she looked as cool as she wanted to, although she highly doubted it.

After a few minutes of awkward silence and Peeta fiddling with his wedding band, he looked up at her chuckling. “So, what have you been up to? It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”

“Yeah, I haven’t been doing much. You know, working and, you know, life. How about you? I haven’t seen you since I moved out of my house,” Katniss said, hoping he would have a more interesting answer than her own.

“I got married,” he said raising his hand to show her a silver wedding band.

Katniss nodded. “I see. Well, congratulations, any kids yet?”

“One, a son. He’s in school now while I work part-time here,” he answered looking at the floor.

Katniss hated small talk, but what else could she ask or say? It had been so long since she’d seen him and even then they were only next door neighbors. He had several classes with her from time to time, but nothing deep was ever established between them. It made for a very short conversation. After some time she remembered his parents owned a bakery. “What about your parents?”

“Oh, they’re doing fine. They retired not too long ago and my older brothers run the old bakery now. I help sometimes, but now I work here,” Peeta said pointing to the small bakery he’d been in.

Katniss frowned. “Won’t your brothers need more help?”

“Well, the bakery is doing so good nowadays that they have their own employees and, well, I only just got back from the Navy. I was the chef-slash-cook.” Peeta muttered rubbing the back of his neck. Katniss noticed that it was a nervous tick of his.

“The Navy, wow, did your wife travel with you?” Katniss asked.

Peeta nodded without answering looking down at his hand and twirling his ring around again. He lifted his gaze back to her. “I needed to establish my own line of work and gain more experience other than my parents’ bakery.”

“Oh,” Katniss muttered nodding.

Peeta dug his hands into his pockets. “Gotta start somewhere if I plan to open my own cafe.”

“Wouldn’t working in a restaurant make more sense?” Katniss asked mystified.

“Well, despite having been in the Navy, I couldn’t find work so easily. Maybe having relied on my parents’ bakery wasn’t such a good idea,” he answered shrugging.

Katniss was sure she would have spoken to him for longer if a customer hadn’t come in to ask for an order. Peeta looked at the disgruntled suit and nodded quickly before turning back to her, “I’ll be done quickly, can you wait for me? Maybe we can have lunch during my break and catch up.”

Katniss shook her head. “Can’t. I have a deadline to hit and if I don’t my boss will have my head.”

“Well, then I guess I’ll see you around. It was good to see you,” Peeta answered quickly, looking nervously at the waiting customer. She noticed his shoulders drooped a bit.

Katniss grinned and waved awkwardly as she walked with cart in hands towards the cashier line. “Sure, I’ll see you around.”

Once she had put her groceries in the house, she walked about her kitchen and rummaged in the fridge before deciding that she’d have to forego the fresh slices of bread that Peeta had been selling and settle on Rice Krispies and milk. To be honest, she was caught so off guard upon seeing her old neighbor that she’d all but forgotten her precious bread. The fact that she somehow still remembered his name when all her other schoolmate's names’ were but a distant memory as it wasn’t her strongest suit. But she’d remembered him. She hadn’t even spoken much to him back when they were neighbors or in between classes for that matter. Now here she was sitting in front of her computer with a bowl of cereal in hand as she stared at her rough draft riddled with red marks. Who knew writing a piece on a little girl’s long-awaited trip to Disney Land provided by Make-a-wish could be so hard? Yet here she was, with half her work scratched off staring back at her as she crunched on the snappy cereal. It was like eating soggy pop rocks.

Suddenly, her Skype went off and the pic of Johanna’s middle finger flashed on the screen. Katniss clicked on the answer icon and saw her best friend on the verge of a Hulk status rant.

“Katniss, give me a reason not to kill Coin!” Johanna gritted out.

Katniss sighed. “Because it’s against the law of Panem State and if you do we’ll both go to jail because you know I’ll help you bury the body and I really can’t leave Willow with my mother.”

Johanna took several gulps to calm herself. None of it worked until she grunted like a bear and took several deep breaths before looking back at her. “Right, but can I fantasize about her death?”

“Fantasize all you want. No one can put you in jail for your thoughts,” Katniss replied swallowing her cereal.  

Johanna gave her a smirk. “I should be in jail for my thoughts.”

Katniss rolled her eyes. Yes, Johanna was that friend that turned everything into a dirty conversation. “What did she do this time?”

“She asked me to rewrite the whole fucking article,” Johanna groaned massaging her temples. “I mean, what more is there to say on a fucking weather report that hasn’t already been said?”

Katniss pursed her lips thoughtfully, “Well there’s words and you can quote me. Words like, Clouds, lots of clouds, cumulonimbus, vapor, um let’s see… did I say clouds already?”

Johanna did not look amused. “Katniss, shut the fuck up.”

“No, and for your information, I have to fix my own article for the umpteenth time so, you’re not alone,” Katniss reminded her friend.

Johanna, ever the drama queen, gasped and backed away as though offended. “Oh, she only asked you to fix it? Wow, she must really like you.”

At that Katniss flipped her off.

Johanna groaned once more and sighed, “Kat, please tell me something interesting to get my mind off of wanting to quit this stupid paper.”

“You can’t quit, you’ve got bills, and I forbid you to leave me alone with her,” Katniss warned.

“Whyyyy?!!!” Johanna whined.

“Because if you’re suffering, so am I, and I will hunt you down if you leave me with her,” Katniss explained.

Sucking her teeth, Johanna rolled her eyes. “Fiiiine, but know that I only do this because I mildly like you.”

Katniss didn’t take the words to heart because, as much as Johanna only said she liked her, she was the first one to stand up for her and the sort of person who put all her effort besides Prim when it came to Willow. So yeah, she was only mildly liked, but Willow was loved, and that was more than enough for her.

Katniss took in a deep breath. “Guess who I saw today?”

“Who?” Johanna asked looking rather distracted but enthralled.

“Peeta Mellark,” Katniss replied playing with her milk and bits of cereal floating on the surface.

Johanna frowned even deeper. “Who the hell is that?”

Katniss took in another deep breath in order to continue. “He used to go to my high school, and he was my next door neighbor.”

Johanna’s eyes widened as she sat up straighter, her attention now riveted on the new information. “Oh, is he hot?”

“He’s handsome,” Katniss replied slurping a bit of the sodden cereal and milk on her spoon.

Johanna rolled her eyes again. “Bitch, I’m not asking you if he’s handsome, my fucking landlord is handsome, I asked if he was hot, as in fuckable.”

“I don’t really know, I haven’t noticed,” Katniss replied matter of factly.

Johanna smirked. “Uh huh, yeah right. Fucking liar.”

“Well, it doesn’t even matter if he’s hot or not, the point is he’s married,” Katniss replied quickly.

“Then, why the fuck did you mention him if he was married?” Johanna asked looking like the cat that got the cream.

Katniss put her half eaten bowl of cereal on her coffee table before running her hand across her face. “ Oh my god, you asked me to distract you.”

“Yeah, but the main focus is single guys that can get lame ass Gale out of your head,” Johanna reminded her.

“That’s not nice,” Katniss replied, trying to hide her smile but failing miserably. “He’s the father of my child.”

“Still doesn’t make him any less lame and ridiculous. He just randomly decided that you, a good wife and mother, not to mention super gorgeous and way out of his league, was no longer the object of his affection and instead decided to switch you for a straight up whore who will most likely cheat on him. God, I hope she cheats on him. Karma cannot let this pass,” Johanna whispered the last part with gusto.

Katniss swallowed her pain. “Can we please not talk about him today?”

Johanna, noticing she’d gone too far, raised her hands in surrender. “Sorry, so anyway what’s with you mentioning that Peter dude?”

“Pee-tah. Like Pita Bread or PETA that animal rights group,” Katniss enunciated his name, wondering why she had to make sure her friend said it correctly.

“Okay, Peeta. Whatever, what’s he to you?” Johanna asked.

Katniss retrieved the bowl of leftover cereal and drank the milk with bits of soggy Rice Krispies floating about sparsely. “I don’t want to talk about him either. Now, how about we go back to doing our work? You and I both take forever to get shit done and we have to hand this in first thing tomorrow.”

“Oh no, Katniss, you’re not gonna leave me with this curiosity,” Johanna warned.

Katniss took another long gulp of her milk, and set the empty bowl back on the coffee table. “Tough, We got shit to do.”

“Just know that you’re on seriously thin ice and you’re breaking the girl code,” Johanna hinted.

Katniss rolled her eyes. “There is no girl code.”

“Yes, there is. Ask Prim,” Johanna half yelled. The poor woman looked like she was on the verge of teetering from the need to know every detail.

“Well, I’m not saying another word on the subject, and we need to get back to work,” Katniss reminded her.

“I hate you,” Johanna spit out while pouting like a toddler.

Katniss shook her head. “No, you don’t.”

“Kat, please, you can’t leave me like this! Just tell me one litt--,” Johanna yelled as Katniss moved her arrow to end the call.

“BYE!” Katniss interrupted pressing on the red icon. She looked around her living room and puffed out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding in.

[baneismydragon]

The not so secret diary of Gabriel Agreste

Because I needed some crack in my life. This is a gift for @geek-fashionista who requested my joke idea become a fic. 

And because writing ridiculous Gabe content cheers me up and I needed a good pick me up. (Hopefully this will get me back in the mood to finish the next chapter of Cut from the Same cloth. If nothing else it felt good to really sit down and write again.) 

Anyways- enjoy. 

The not so secret diary of Gabriel Agreste

(Edited and catalogued by Nathalie Sancoeur)

March 18th

So apparently driving 4 employees to a nervous breakdown in the span of 2 weeks is a problem to my board of directors. They claim it’s ‘not good for the company’. Also, apparently, backhanding one of them during the meeting for suggesting I ‘take a leave of absence to deal with the loss of your wife’ counts as assault.

To avoid charges, and more importantly a forced sabbatical, I have agreed to see a therapist. Hence this ridiculous writing exercise.  Oh well. At least it is only one wasted hour a week as opposed to several months of sitting in my house, watching them drive my company into the ground with their ineptitude.

March 25th-

My therapist says that I have a problem.

Of course I have a problem! My wife is missing. Honestly, I have to pay this man?

He says that I need to be ‘focused on healing and rebuilding a new sense of normalcy instead of lashing out at the people around me.’

Well perhaps if the people around me weren’t so incompetent I wouldn’t need to lash out so much.

Nathalie- does it count as attending my therapy sessions if I send a proxy in my place? Please investigate.

March 30th-

My therapist has informed me that I am developing an obsession, and that he is concerned that the loss of my wife and my need to get her back is driving me to an unhealthy dissociative state.

Well maybe that’s why it is so important that I get her back. Did you ever think of that? Then I won’t need to waste my time adjusting to my new circumstances, because everything can just go back to the way it was. It’s really not that complicated. For someone whose job it is to ‘help me cope with my grief’ he is quite the pessimist. He keeps insisting we discuss the possibility of if she never comes back. Thank God these sessions are only an hour long, I don’t need to get charged with assault again.

April 1st-

I told my therapist that his advice was working and that I have completely seen the error of my ways.

And Nathalie says I have a terrible sense of humor.

The crushed look on his face when I pointed out the date was priceless.

Nathalie- make sure we are having fish for dinner, Adrien will appreciate the humor even if you don’t.

April 9th-

I had the portrait artist come in today so that we could replace the family portrait at the top of the staircase. I pre-selected our mourning ensembles and Adrien was miserable the whole time. The artist asked me if he should take some artistic licence with our expressions. I asked him if he valued his commission. The finished work was a perfect testament to the state of misery in this house. Hopefully this will serve as an adequate reminder to anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to attempt to inform me that ‘things are never as bad as they seem.’

My therapist says this is yet another sign of my increased megalomania. I think that it isn’t my fault that more people don’t have the resources to afford appropriate decor for their homes based on the emotional environment. Given what I am having to pay out for these worthless sessions I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a half dozen portraits of his own scattered around some poorly decorated eyesore he calls a home.

Nathalie- please arrange for some new backlighting for the updated portrait. Either some cool blue tones or perhaps some purple.

April 14th-

Today my therapy session consisted of discussing my childhood. On the bright side I sketched out two new designs while I tuned out his prattle.

Nathalie- you owe me 20 Euro. I told you it would take less than a month for him to try the Freudian approach.

April 21st-

Yesterday was the runway launch of the new Spring line. Not some of my best work to be honest but still a far sight better than anything else released this season. Maybe the Italians will give me some competition this year at least.

One of the reporters asked if the line was being dedicated to my ‘late wife’. I ask him if he was going to dedicate this interview to his soon to be late career?

Of course Adrien heard the whole thing and has been in a mood ever since, although he didn’t let it affect his performance. Even as a child, he is more professional than a fair percentage of my staff. I am prodigiously proud of him. Now if only he would stop being so emotional. It isn’t good for him. He spent the entire morning and afternoon holed up in his room listening to angst ridden J-pop and ordering mint fudge ice cream from the kitchen staff.

My therapist says that I need to be making an effort to empathize with his grief instead of fixating on my own, and compensate more in my new role as a single parent.

Clearly the stress of this show has addled my brain because I stupidly attempted to follow his advice.

After a pre-scheduled family dinner I patted Adrien on the shoulder and told him that I promises that things will get better.

He stared at me for a few seconds like I had grown a second head, before hugging onto me like a barnacle and bursting into tears.

Wonderful.

I managed to send my own child into hysterics.

This is the sort of disaster that comes from listening to the advice of idiots.

April 22nd-

Adrien seems to have recovered from last night’s meltdown rather admirably. Thank God children bounce back from these sorts of setbacks. I am glad to see that my poor judgement in following my therapist's advice doesn’t seem to have caused any permanent damage. Now I can go back to the important business of figuring out how to bring his mother back instead of wasting everyone’s time with pointless platitudes. Really that is the much smarter approach.

It’s like I tell my employees- if you just fix the mistake you won’t have to spend your energy explaining why it was there in the first place. No one will care how many failures you went through to get there- all that matters is the end result.

Speaking of failures, what was I thinking when I chose the dining room furniture? It’s hideous.

Nathalie- remind me to set aside time to purchase a new dining set.

April 30th-

She has been gone for exactly 100 days.

May 9th-

Today is my 20th Wedding anniversary.

It was storming today. My therapist asked me how that made me feel.

I told him- wet.

I don’t think he appreciated my answer.

May 12th-

I have fired my therapist.

No the answer to my problems is not to ‘move on and accept my loss and just be grateful for each new day.’ What sort of idiotic attitude is that? If I approached my life according to the advice of this degenerate I would be designing pink sequins party dresses for some mass produced tween fashion label. Even worse, the toad-faced troll had the audacity to suggest that I should consider arranging for Adrien to have his own therapy sessions. As if my child needs any sort of support from a second rate psychoanalyst with delusions of grandeur.

Good riddance. Besides, 2 months of this charade should be more than enough to satisfy the board.

Nathalie- make arrangement for a private investigator to look into his business. Perhaps we can do the world a favor and get his licence revoked.

May 14th-

I have decided to keep this diary. I find writing about the stupidity of others quite therapeutic.

Nathalie please find a more appropriately color coordinated journal in which to properly transcribe my entries.   

May 17th-

I have hired a bodyguard for Adrien. He keeps trying to sneak out, and I can’t keep losing Nathalie for hours at a time while she chases him down. I don’t understand why he is so desperate to go out and meet other people. Hasn’t he figured out by now that very few people are actually worth meeting? Clearly the stress of losing his mother is clouding his judgement. I’ll arrange for Nathalie to get a few more of those arcade machines he enjoys so much to be shipped in. Hopefully that will help keep him distracted.

Meanwhile, perhaps I should up his modeling engagements. After all, throwing oneself into one's work does provide some temporary solace. It’s certainly the best plan I have come up with so far.

May 22nd-

Adrien’s new Bodyguard has caught him attempting to sneak out twice. Both times he sent me a text informing me that the incident had been taken care of and requesting an appropriate stipend for the installation of new security cameras.

This is clearly the best hiring decision I have made in years.

Adrien may be the closest thing to perfection in this world but alas, children will be children, so I am glad I have some competent staff to manage him until he grows out of it. I believe this teenaged need to rebel in light of our recent family tragedy is what the media refers to as ‘Emo’. I will make some calls to the main office to have more of our black pieces added to his wardrobe. And my ex therapist said I ‘wasn’t paying attention to my sons needs.’ Ha.

June 3rd-

Still no progress in my plan. This morning I woke up from a dream and I couldn’t remember if that is what my wifes laugh actually sounded like.

I can’t live like this. I won’t live like this.

June 5th-

Nathalie I will take dinner in my office. Also I am not to be disturbed for the rest of the weekend.

June 10th-

Feeling infinitely better today.

It has been uncovered that my recently disgraced ex-therapist was having an affair, and with a former patient no less! Clearly he was taking out his own frustrations with his own failed marriage out on me.

Unlike that hypocritical cow, I will preserve my family no matter what impediments I may face. I knew I was right all along. Still, it’s nice to have outside validation.

Nathalie- be sure to send a sizable bonus to the private investigator, as well as a nice fruit basket.

June 17th-

Adrien had a piano recital today. It was exceptional of course. I do wish he had chosen something other than Chopin. Really, is this emo phase going to carry over into everything he does?

I will have to send a message to his bodyguard to start monitoring his packages for hair dye.

Apparently he didn’t approve of me leaving as soon as his piece was over. I don’t see why. It’s not like I have any interest in the other performers and I already paid my admission so it’s no loss to the institution. Children can be so demanding.

Nathalie- make a note, the next time I am required to attend one of these functions make sure I have a tablet with me.

June 23rd-

Why have I still not replaced that dining room table?

July 2nd-

On the plane to London because apparently the instructions “just recreate the exact same show we did a month ago” are too complicated for my employees.

I am doubly glad that I hired a bodyguard for Adrien since he is ill and will not be joining us on this trip.

Hopefully I shouldn’t be gone more than a day or so.

July 6th-

Still in London. Apparently I underestimated just how moronic people can be. I miss my wife. She always knew how to get people to do what I needed them to do with causing them to burst into tears.

She also would have appreciated my puns.

Once I get her home I swear I am going to reward myself with an entire month of not having to speak to anyone whose surname isn’t Agreste.

Except for Nathalie, of course.

July 10th-

Finally home. Adrien has made a full recovery.

He spent all of dinner expounding on the merits of something called ‘MOBA’s. I’ve found it best to just nod and pretend like I understand what he is talking about when he goes on these tangents.

Nathalie- please get me the definition for the term Noob.

July 15th-

I am truly at my wits end. Between my lack of progress on my search for my wife and my constant set backs at the company I am for all intents and purposes trying to go up a creek without a paddle.

Nathalie is less than thrilled with me at the moment as I have taken to locking myself in the office with my cellphone and computer turned off. She doesn’t seem to appreciate having to slide notes under the door.

July 22nd-

Nathalie Sancoeur is the only person to whom I am not related by blood or marriage whom I would make an effort to save during a zombie apocalypse. (Adrien’s current favorite pastime is discussing how he would react to various ridiculous survival scenarios with his bodyguard, or more accurately at his bodyguard.)

She suggested that given my frustrations with some of my staff perhaps some personnel changes were in order.

There is nothing quite so satisfying as telling  a worthless employee that they should pack up their desk and go.

I am quite confident that none of the individuals fired today would survive a zombie apocalypse.

Nathalie- please give yourself a 2% raise. It might come in handy for purchasing supplies when we are under siege by an army of the undead.

July 28th-

Adrien had his friend Mllm Bourgeois over again today. He has asked if he can be allowed to attend public school with her this term.

I told him that if Miss Bourgeois is an example of the merits of a public school education I would sooner be tarred and feathered than let him within 50 feet of said institution.  

He seems to believe that going to school would allow him the opportunity to make new friends- so I suppose I can at least see the appeal. Though, after observing his interactions today I am amazed he doesn’t simply swear off friendship altogether.

Nathalie- look into putting together some sort of dossier of suitable young people with whom Adrien could potentially associate. Perhaps we can arrange to have some on call for social engagements in the future.

July 29th-

Adrien is not speaking to me today. He has locked himself in his room. Why is everyone in this family so sensitive?

Apparently ‘you can’t just buy friends.’

Clearly he has never been involved in politics.

August 2nd-

Adrien is still angry at me. Fine, if he wants to get into a petty game of who can ignore the other longer I will play his game. He’ll learn that no one beats me when it comes to the silent treatment, just like his mother did. The most she ever made it was 3 days. We will see if Adrien fairs any better.

August 3rd-

Upon further reflection, at the end of those three days I ended up with a broken nose when my wife punched me in the face. Perhaps I should rethink my strategy.

Nathalie- schedule a family meeting to discuss Adrien’s grievances. Tell him it will save time if he prepares a list of his complaints and proposed solutions for me to consult before the start of the negotiations.

August 6th-

Adrien is visiting with his friend Mllm Bourgeois so I am taking the opportunity to go through and organize my wife’s belongings. (The staff has been forbidden from disturbing anything but it is starting to get a bit dusty.) It is best to do this while Adrien is gone as I don’t know if I can tolerate another weekend of melancholy foreign ballads blasting from his room. Or worse that new Jagged Stone album I was foolish enough to order for him as a reward for winning his last fencing competition. I swear that man sounds like a beached whale screaming its way through a slow and agonizing death. I don’t know what Adrien sees to admire in it.

At least his attempted breakouts seem to have come to a temporary halt. Either the efforts of his bodyguard have finally tempered his resolve or he is secretly plotting some sort of elaborate scheme and is trying to lure us into a false sense of security.

I guess we will see how much he takes after me.

Nathalie- make sure all of Adrien’s electronic devices are equipped with GPS tracking.

August 8th-

Still slowly working my way through the cleaning process. The latest edition of some video fighting game arrived for Adrien so he has been conveniently occupied by that. It’s getting harder to face him knowing that I am still no closer to having an answer as to how to get his mother back, not that he asks. He has always been far too kind for his own good.  

Still, it is a parent’s job to do what is ultimately best for their children and for the first time in my life I find myself spectacularly failing.

No matter how many hours I spend locked in my office I am still no closer to a concrete plan.

At least Adrien has stopped trying to accompany when I am in there. It’s too hard enough coping with my own failure without my son having to bare witness.

I will figure out a way. I did not get where I am today without being willing to fight for what I want. And once I am successful all of this will just seem like a bad dream. Both for me and for my son.

August 9th-

I never realized just how much of a hoarder my wife was until I took on this project. How many souvenirs does one woman need?

There is an entire suitcase from our last trip to Tibet that she didn’t even bother to unpack.

I’ll take care of it tomorrow.

Nathalie- reschedule my lunch with the mayor. Until after the election if at all possible. 4 months isn’t an unreasonable delay for a man with my obligations.

August 10th-

It seems that there is some truth to the concept that one should actually OPEN the boxes one acquires. I now have in my possession a strange magical creature named Nooroo who seems optimistic in his belief that he can help me in my quest to restore my family. It seems I will have the chance to turn into some sort of super powered empath with the ability to grant powers to others to help combat the forces of evil in this world. Seems like a rather dubious power. Most people are insufferably dim and couldn’t be trusted with a butter knife much less magical enhancements. Still, it is the first positive news in months. I tried opening the other box with the peacock pin but after 10 seconds of the creature crying upon being awakened I have decided to simply return it to dormant and lock it in the safe. Perhaps it will be useful later but for now one miraculous should be more than sufficient.  

Nathalie- In light of my new associate we will need a few changes to the house. Additional security, new curtains,  as well as some additions to the kitchen inventory. I will upload a list to your PDA.

August 12th-

And Everyone told me I would never have a use for a secret lair. Well I showed them. I have asked Nathalie to arrange for a large shipment of butterflies to be installed for ambiance. I have also brought in a private contractor to hide the control panel. The last thing I want in for Adrien to stumble upon any of this and get the idea to become some sort of hero vigilante. Honestly I don’t know where that boy gets his ridiculous flair for the dramatic. It must be from his mother. Meanwhile I have decided to keep Nooroo dormant for a little while. He keeps wanting me to talk to him about my feelings. If I wanted to do that I wouldn’t have fired my therapist.

August 20th-

Lair is finally ready to go. I realize though that perhaps I should read the instruction manual that came with the miraculous before I attempt to utilize unpredictable magical powers.

Nathalie- please arrange for a large pot of coffee and my favorite armchair to be placed in the lair this afternoon.  

August 30th-

Apparently translating ancient codes with no resources or starting point whatsoever is, in fact rather difficult. I supposed I should ask Nooroo for assistance.

[shirlleycoyle]

Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit

American cities are facing a transportation crisis. There’s terrible traffic. Public transit doesn’t work or go where people need it to. The cities are growing, but newcomers are faced with the prospects of paying high rents for reasonable commutes or lower rents for dreary, frustrating daily treks. Nearly all Americans, including those in cities, face a dire choice: spend thousands of dollars a year owning a car and sitting in traffic, or sacrifice hours every day on ramshackle public transit getting where they need to go. Things are so broken that, increasingly, they do both. Nationwide, three out of every four commuters drive alone. The rate in metro areas is not much different.

“Without an integrated system of transit in our metropolitan areas the great anticipated growth will become a dream that will fail,” predicted Ralph Merritt, general manager of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, “because people cannot move freely, safely, rapidly, and economically from where they live to where they work.”

Although Merritt’s words could just as well apply today, he said them 66 years ago in 1954. This is a crisis facing American cities right now in 2020, but it’s an old crisis. The only thing that has changed is the problem has gotten worse.

Like most crises, there is no single cause. Our cities, and our federal government, have made a lot of mistakes. Some were obvious at the time, others only in hindsight, but most have been a combination of the two. We keep doing things that stopped being good ideas a long time ago.

Many of those mistakes have to do with housing policy, which is inextricably linked to transportation policy. But the most obvious cause of our transportation crisis is a simple one: America sucks at building public transportation.

Why is this? Why does the U.S. suck at building good, useful public transit?

It’s a question that has vexed me for years. Just when I think I’ve figured it out, some other facet I had never previously considered comes to my attention. I have spoken to a dozen transit experts and historians. I have read several histories of American mass transportation policy written by independent scholars as well as government agencies. I've scoured federal archives and interviewed employees of transit agencies planning their own big projects. I’ve analyzed budgets and construction costs and compared them to our international peers. The tangle of American governmental dysfunction is so profound, digging into it can feel like undoing a rubber band ball with your teeth.

But the failure itself is simple and obvious. It’s apparent to anyone who has traveled abroad in the last several decades. Whether it’s traditional subway and commuter rail systems, modern streetcars and light rails, high-speed intercity rail, or even the humble bus with dedicated lanes and train-like stops, the U.S. lags perilously behind. It is a national embarrassment and a major reason our cities are less pleasant, more expensive places to live.

Just to name a few recent accomplishments abroad lacking an American parallel: Paris has the Grand Paris Express, 120 miles and 68 stations of new lines, plus a host of new trams and express bus lines with dedicated lanes. Moscow is building 98 new miles and 79 new stations for its Metro. At two years delayed and three billion pounds over budget, London’s Crossrail qualifies as a scandalous by European standards. But when it opens—perhaps in 2021—it will provide 73 miles of new rapid, frequent trains across greater London, including right through the center of the city. Since the 1990s, Madrid’s Metro has added more than 100 kilometers to its system. There are numerous examples of highly functioning and useful public transit systems in Latin America, which also invented the Bus Rapid Transit, a hybrid system with enclosed stops and dedicated lanes. China, which had basically no rapid transit through 1990, now has 25 cities with comprehensive rail systems, including seven of the world’s 12 largest metro networks by length.

Source: Yonah Freemark. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

Of course, China’s massive central government means it can build what it wants when and where it wants. But it’s hardly just China and other authoritarian regimes embarrassing the U.S. when it comes to transit construction. Consider, for example, high speed rail, or trains between cities capable of going faster than 120 mph. Over the last 30 years, almost two dozen countries have built true high-speed rail networks, according to transportation expert Yonah Freemark. The U.S. has a grand total of 34 miles of high-speed track.

China is not on this graph because they're literally off the charts (sorry). Data source: Yonah Freemark. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

This isn’t to say the U.S. has built nothing in the same time period. Freemark, one of the most thorough chroniclers of American transportation projects, calculated that the U.S. spent more than $47 billion on 1,200 miles of new and expanded transit lines in the decade from 2010 to 2019 (most of that mileage has been on bus routes).

That may sound like a lot, and at first glance it can seem like the U.S. has made some progress. There are now 93 miles of light rail in Dallas, 60 miles in Portland, and 87.5 combined light and commuter rail miles in Denver. Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, San Diego, Sacramento, Phoenix, and others can cite similar improvements. For all their flaws, these are transit systems that didn’t exist 40 years ago.

But these systems, with the possible exception of Portland’s, do have one thing in common: they’re not especially useful because they’re not big enough and don’t go where people need them to. There is no perfect metric to evaluate the usefulness of a transit system, but, the most obvious failure is these systems haven’t changed their cities. Few people rely on them. As a general rule, these light rail systems serve fewer than 30 million passenger trips a year (LA has more, although as a percentage of the metro area population its usage is in line with other new systems). Even in cities of millions of people like Houston and Phoenix, light rail systems serve fewer than half that. Meanwhile, the Grand Paris Express and Crossrail are projecting ridership in the millions per day.

The basic truth is nearly everyone still depends on their cars even in cities with soul-destroying traffic. By any definition, the last half-century of American transportation policy has been a dismal failure.

Ultimately, this is not about trains and buses. This is about a political system uninterested in reform, a system unconcerned with fixing what’s broken.

But the problem isn’t limited just to new systems with growing pains. Older American cities with legacy systems have barely expanded to meet the growing footprint of their metro areas, as London and Paris are. The subway maps of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia look almost identical as they did in 1950; in some cases, they’ve actually shrunk.

Simply put, the U.S. builds less public transit per urban dweller than its peer countries. Freemark found U.S. cities “added an average of fewer than 2 miles of urban bus improvements per million inhabitants—and fewer than 1 mile of rail improvements.” Meanwhile, France added 10 miles of buses and 3 miles of rail per million inhabitants in that same time period.

There is, of course, no simple answer why our transportation systems are broken, in much the same way there’s no simple answer to why our healthcare system is broken or why our criminal justice system is broken, beyond, as Freemark put it, that our “dysfunctional, irascible political system [is] woefully unprepared to commit to anything particularly significant.”

Ultimately, this is not about trains and buses. This is about a political system uninterested in reform, a system unconcerned with fixing what’s broken. If we can understand how politics failed American transportation systems, perhaps we can make the solution part of broader reform that must occur if American government is to start addressing the needs of the people in all aspects of life, from health care to criminal justice to housing to employment law to digital privacy to climate change.

It’s more important to understand all those causes now than ever. Building lots of public transit fast is, according to the Department of Transportation, a key front in the fight against climate change, because transportation accounts for about 30 percent of U.S. emissions, most of that from private automobiles. Are we up for the task? Can we, as a nation, build the infrastructure we desperately need to create a more sustainable world?

Do you work for the Federal Transit Administration or a local transit agency? What are the challenges you face in getting public transit projects done? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com or aaronwgordon@protonmail.com.

The answer to that question depends on understanding why we have failed so miserably up to this point. While researching the question of why our public transit is so bad, I’ve encountered a series of partial but ultimately incomplete explanations. If you don’t feel like descending into the transit nerd tunnel with me, here’s the tl;dr version:

Everything costs too much

We build highways instead

We don't plan well

People don't trust the government to build things so they vote against projects under the assumption they will be executed poorly and waste taxpayer dollars

We don't give transit agencies enough money to run good service which erodes political support to have more of it

There are too many agencies at all levels of government, especially at the local level, and not enough coordination between them

Our newer cities are sprawled out which makes good transit hard, and our older cities are too paralyzed by political dysfunction to expand the systems they have

As a result of generations of privatization efforts by all levels of government, in the rare event we do actually get to build stuff there is not enough expertise within the agencies to do it well

The good news is all of this is fixable. At least, that’s what Freemark believes. “The idea that we can’t build new systems is ridiculous,” he told me in an interview. “We just have to assemble the political interest and excitement to make those things happen.”

“There Was Always A Subsidy Somewhere”

Before we go any further, it’s important to dispel a pernicious myth that has perpetuated in the United States about public transportation. This is the idea that transit ought to pay for itself just like any other business.

This was a popular position in local, state, and federal governments until the mid-20th century. It is also the founding principle of public authorities, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that oversees much of greater New York’s transit, which are legally required to balance their budgets every year. The concept is that well-run public transit ought to be profitable.

The problem—well, just one of the problems—with this philosophy is it’s based on a totally fictitious belief that the New York City subway once was a good business, or that the Boston subway once was a self-sustaining operation.

This was never true. “There was always a subsidy somewhere,” Jeff Davis, senior fellow at the think tank Eno Transportation Center said. Streetcars and early subways were paid for by wealthy financiers, real estate speculators, and electric companies, among others. The speculators bought cheap land on the outskirts of town and then built transportation that went there before selling the land for a tidy profit. Back in the day when lights were the main use of electricity, electric companies faced a huge surge at night. Streetcars were a convenient use of that excess electric capacity during the day when demand was lower. And, as the 19th century became the 20th, financiers (mistakenly) thought rapid transit would be a great investment, typically as part of an arrangement we now commonly refer to as public-private partnerships that required transit companies to keep fares low, usually at five cents.

Then it all slowly fell apart. Inflation jacked up costs, but transit companies were legally obligated to keep fares the same per their agreements with cities. The Great Depression hit. Real estate speculators sold off all their land and no longer cared about the transit connections. The public utility companies were forced to sell off their streetcar stakes by Congress under an antitrust provision. Long-term maintenance and upkeep rendered short-term profits illusory. Although most commuters still used transit through the 1940s, people tended to use private automobiles for recreational trips. Bills for decades of deferred maintenance came due. Streetcars went bankrupt. Local governments picked up the slack, and as part of the transition, closed the electric streetcars and converted those routes to buses. By the 1960s, most every transit system had either closed down or was under the auspices of some level of local government.

“And then that subsidy became an explicit job of the local government to subsidize and take over management,” Davis said. Private subsidies were replaced by public ones, just at the time when government was deeply, fundamentally uninterested in public transit. Because in the mid-20th century, cars were the future.

The Road to More Roads

From 1950 to 2017, the U.S. constructed 871,496 miles of roads, enough to go to the Moon, come back, return to the Moon again, and then get two-thirds of the way back to Earth. The pace has slowed in the last few decades, but barely. Thirty-seven percent of those miles have been built since 1985.

As traffic increased, it was accepted policy to widen a lot of roads under the mistaken belief this would reduce traffic. The Federal Highway Administration only started tracking lane-miles built in 1980, but in the 37 years between then and 2017 we added 881,918 lane-miles to our some four million lane-miles of road, an 11 percent increase. Urban areas in particular added 30,511 new lane-miles to freeways since 1993, an increase of 42 percent, according to the non-profit Transportation for America, which went on to call this program of building more lanes in a misguided attempt to reduce traffic a “congestion con.”

In the meantime, the U.S. barely built any new rail. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics only started tracking rail miles in 1985, but from that year through 2017 the U.S. constructed 6,247 miles of commuter rail, heavy rail, and light rail combined. That’s only 195 miles a year on average, compared to 10,017 miles of roads per year during that same time. In fact, the pace of building new transit has been so languid, America’s 20 largest metro areas have the same or even fewer miles of transit service (including bus routes) per capita than they did in 2003.

“It’s all about priorities,” said Jeff Brown, an urban planning professor at Florida State University. “What are the spending priorities that we’ve established?”

Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Transportation For America. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

Of course, the short term cost of building a mile of road is lower than building a mile of transit, but that can be deceptive. According to Transportation for America, it costs $24,000 per lane-mile per year to maintain a road in good repair, and much more for those in disrepair, as many of America’s roads are. And that’s even before accounting for the strain on public services by encouraging and supporting sprawl where every mile of sewer, water, and power line serves fewer taxpayers.

Nevertheless, we’ve also spent much less money overall on transit compared to roads. These funding mechanisms are extremely confusing and have changed over time, but what has not changed is that roads always get a lot more.

Congress gives states roughly $40 billion a year for roads, according to Transportation For America, which can be spent either on new roads or maintenance at the states' discretion. Meanwhile, public transit agencies have to compete for only $2.3 billion in annual transit funding for big projects such as extending rail lines or building new ones, some $37.7 billion less than what states get for roads (the feds dole out an additional $7.5 billion a year for maintenance and buying new subway cars and buses).

That $40 billion a year in road money is given out to states based on a formula. It’s automatic, and states can spend that money however they wish. Not so with transit money. Transit agencies have to apply for funding for individual projects.

And should the transit agency’s project be deemed worthy of federal funding, the federal government will subsidize a much smaller percentage of the project costs than it will for roads. Transit agencies can get a maximum of 50 percent of the project cost covered by the feds, whereas roads can get up to 80 percent (down from 90 percent during the highway spending spree of the 20th Century).

And this is just at the federal level. The discrepancy between road and transit funding is even wider at the state level, Freemark says, where legislatures are typically dominated by rural interests.

Brown, the Florida State professor, said the numbers don’t lie. “It’s not a sufficient amount of money to support grand project ideas.”

Of course, many people believe it is not the federal government’s role to be paying for mass transportation because it’s a local issue (rarely is a similar argument made about roads). This was very much up for debate when the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now a part of the Federal Transit Administration) was created in 1964. The upshot was that there’s no clear reason why the federal government should be subsidizing road construction, home mortgages, auto fuel, and any number of other things but not mass transportation. Plus, in light of the local and state government failures to pay for transit, if not the federal government, then who? Tellingly, the UMTA was founded under the Welfare Clause of the Constitution, not the Commerce Clause that authorized highway construction, because it is good for cities to have good transportation.

From nearly any vantage point, this road-heavy, transit-lite approach has been a disaster for American cities. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars constructing and maintaining an unsustainable roadway network, and traffic has only gotten worse to boot. In 2015, California’s Department of Transportation, which supervised some of the most fervent highway construction in the nation during the 20th century, came right out and admitted this didn’t work. More roads means more traffic. So, the state is no longer going to keep widening roads to relieve congestion.

Not only is there not enough money to go around, but it has to be shared by all the states. Federal rules require that no single project gets too big a slice.

“You can’t ask for so much money in a single year as to crowd out everyone else,” explained Davis. For example, he said, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) under the Obama administration told Los Angeles that it wouldn’t get all the money it wanted for the Westside Purple Line as one big extension through Beverly Hills and into Westwood. So, LA broke it up into three segments, with construction on Phase I beginning in 2014. Each got its own cost-benefit analysis, planning, and studies, and waited a few years between applications, which drives up costs. In February, LA received its grant for the third and final segment, a $1.3 billion payout that will cover just 36 percent of the cost. It is expected to be completed in 2027, meaning it will take 13 years to build a nine mile extension.

“Usually congressional and even executive branch political realities mean they spread the peanut butter around,” said Sarah Jo Peterson, author of Planning the Home Front, “and, when there isn't much peanut butter, they spread it thinly.”

The Costs Are Too Damn High

Not only does the money get spread too thinly, but once cities do get their money, they waste a lot of it.

“In the cities where rail transit works best,” Davis observed, “costs have just gotten out of control.” This is especially true for megaprojects, huge public works that cost billions of dollars.

I could spend an entire article on this subject alone and not even scratch the surface of just how profoundly screwed American megaproject costs are. Indeed, many writers and researchers have done exactly that, and one researcher in particular, Alon Levy, has more or less made a name for themselves on this subject.

New York City is responsible for the most expensive mile of subway track on Earth, at $3.5 billion per mile, the first segment of the Second Avenue Subway. The second phase is projected to crush that record. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway and commuter rail system, is also some two decades late and $8 billion over budget on the $11 billion East Side Access project, which will bring Long Island Railroad trains into Grand Central, a 15 minute walk from Penn Station where Long Island Railroad trains currently go.

What is undoubtedly clear is every transit project is first and foremost a political project, and political projects are about consensus-building. This gets us not the projects we need but the projects we deserve.

The problem is hardly limited to New York. California’s high speed rail project has given new definition to the term “boondoggle.” And, as Levy has documented, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and D.C., among others, all build subways and light rail lines at much higher costs than European cities.

“Nearly all American urban rail projects cost much more than their European counterparts do,” Levy wrote in Citylab. “The cheaper ones cost twice as much, and the more expensive ones about seven times as much.” This includes both heavy rail (subways) and light rail. “Only a handful of American [light rail] lines come in cheaper than $100 million per mile, the upper limit for French light rail.”

There are a lot of reasons for this, including:

Over-engineered stations

Arcane labor rules that inhibit productivity such as requiring more employees to work at a machine than is necessary

A lack of cooperation between agencies

But cost overruns are not a new problem for American transit.

“Cost escalation has been going on for some time,” Davis of Eno Center said. The D.C. Metro was initially slated to cost $2.5 billion but ended up with a $10 billion bill. Dating back to the Ford administration, the federal government started changing grant rules so the feds wouldn’t be on the hook for the inevitable cost overruns, leaving any eventualities to the transit agency building it and the local government overseeing it.

Do you work for a public transit agency or a contractor and have any experience with how projects end up costing so much? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com or aaronwgordon@protonmail.com.

Some cost overruns are attributable to unforeseen circumstances, but across the board, we are very bad at estimating how much these projects will cost to begin with. Sometimes, agencies give low estimates in order to make projects more politically palatable, knowing a realistic assessment will get shot down. D.C.’s initial estimate of $2.5 billion, according to George Mason University historian and author of The Great Society Subway: A history of the Washington Metro Zachary Schrag, was “never terribly realistic.”

Depressingly, it seems we gave up on ever building necessary infrastructure for the same price as other countries decades ago. Schrag also quoted Jim Caywood, head of the engineering firm that helped design Metro, as saying “there’s no way in this world that you can build a mammoth public works project such as Metro within a reasonable budget with all the outside influences. They won’t let you do it.”

The Biggest Outside Influence of All

What are those “outside influences” Caywood referenced? The big one is politics.

“Transportation planning is not just a matter of letting the engineers find the best solution to a technical problem,” Schrag wrote, “but a political process in which competing priorities must be resolved by negotiation among interest groups.”

If there’s one point on which all the experts I spoke to agree the most, it is that transportation is politics. A 1988 deep dive into the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system by Portland State University professor Sy Adler found any vague proposal for a transit project, whether it be highway or rail, produces competing coalitions with their own self-interests. Maybe they want to spur development in their own downtown area or make it easy for commuters to live in their suburb. These factions then weaponize the options on the table for their preferred ends. The protracted debates result in entire regions losing focus over why they wanted to build a new transit system in the first place. Over time, it becomes a battle not of which option solves a given problem, but re-defining what the problem is.

Meanwhile, another cohort of interest groups form to stop projects they don’t want. Typically, these are neighborhood associations that don’t want a transit line coming through their block, either out of fear of construction impacts or racist concerns that it’ll disrupt the segregation of their urban area. Sometimes, they are not just neighborhood groups but entire regions.

In the 1970s, in what was later called “referendums on race,” Atlanta’s suburban and overwhelmingly white Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett counties voted out of the region’s MARTA system before it was even built. In 1988, five years after voting in favor of a 200-mile light rail system with local financing, Dallas voters refused to approve bonds to pay for construction, growing skittish on the whole prospect due to the oil crisis which hurt the local economy, according to Indiana University professor George Smerk’s history of the government’s mass transportation policy. Seattle, Detroit, and scores of other cities either voted against major transportation projects or approved watered down versions of original plans thanks to local opposition.

What is undoubtedly clear is every transit project is first and foremost a political project, and political projects are about consensus-building. This gets us not the projects we need but the projects we deserve.

To take just one of scores of possible examples because it affected me personally: back in the 1970s the University of Maryland rejected plans to have the D.C. Metro’s Green Line stop on campus, again for predominantly racist reasons. This forced “a complicated redesign” that “later caused commotion in College Park,” Schrag wrote. Today, anyone looking to take public transportation to the university, with 41,000 students and 14,000 faculty and staff, must either take a shuttle bus from campus or walk at least 20 minutes each way. Repeat these fights dozens of times per project and it’s no longer so difficult to envision how they end up getting relegated to land the public already owns regardless of how useful it is like freeway medians or don’t get built at all.

Meanwhile, a great political shift occurred in the United States that made transit’s prospects even worse. First was the Reagan-era movement away from services provided by the government and towards private enterprise.

Transit was not spared. When Miami’s Metrorail opened, Reagan derided the “$1 billion federal subsidy” that “serves less than 10,000 daily riders” as a prime example of government waste. Better for the government to have bought everyone a limousine, Reagan quipped.

Nevermind that all of those numbers were incorrect and deeply misleading because the project hadn’t even been completed yet, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But factual errors aside, there was a larger ideological one. “Even if Metrorail doesn't turn a profit,” the paper said, “it will be performing a valuable service. Without it, thousands of new commuters would be forced back into their cars, making the roads even more overcrowded.”

Ironically, some of the blame for the wastefulness of federal transit money belongs to Reagan himself. He spent considerable effort trying to kill the main transit grant program, according to Davis, but Congress wouldn’t let him because these projects were often popular.

In order to keep the funding going, Congress had to resort to doling out the money through annual appropriations—in other words, the 435 members of the House of Representatives, with all its byzantine committees and rules, deciding for itself which projects to fund rather than career experts in the Federal Transit Administration—through a process called earmarking. In this way, transit projects became just another horse to trade.

“The nature of earmarking is that since there are 435 House districts and 50 states, and only so much money to go around, things get split more widely than they would if the Administration just got to pick a few.” Davis continued: “Ted Stevens [longtime Alaska Senator and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005] used to put a million dollar grants to little towns all over Alaska. I don't know what the hell they were for.”

Not only did it become fashionable to slash funds for big transit projects, but so too was it the sign of the times to slash agency budgets as well. Expertise then migrated to the private sector, in many cases to the very consultants and engineering firms hired to execute the few projects that got done. As a result, agencies were—and remain—ill-equipped to make big decisions on big projects, who hire those aforementioned consultants, who in turn charge a pretty penny for their services.

Do you work for a local transit agency and struggle with a lack of resources or funding? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com or aaronwgordon@protonmail.com.

“We often don't have really expert public staff making decisions, making some key decisions at least,” said Eric Eidlin, a former FTA planner. “We've given over that responsibility to consultants that have a profit motive. I don't mean to say that the consultants have this desire to subvert the public interest or anything, it's just not their job, right?”

Karen Trapenberg Frick, an urban planner at UC Berkeley who used to work for the Bay Area’s planning commission, echoed Eidlin’s point and said it had a real impact on what agencies were able to do, only further undermining the public’s willingness to give them money for big projects.

“There are certain cities where when I was a planner a long time ago and now, it's the same complaint: we give the city money but they can't move the project through because they don't have the staff to do it,” she explained. “And we don't have the staff to do it because there's been this whole neoliberal mind shift that the public sector can't do a good job.”

There’s a very sad irony here. The Reagan era cuts were ostensibly designed to make the public sector more efficient by harnessing the power of the market, but instead it made public agencies reliant on for-profit contractors that jack up costs, only making government less efficient and more wasteful.

“When there's no in-house public sector expertise, the ability to deliver projects quickly or efficiently is compromised,” Eidlin said. “And time is money, too.”

Who Decides?

So far, I’ve focused on the federal side of things because it has a lot of money and power. But what level of government is the right one to make decisions about massive transportation projects? Although there is no obvious right answer, it feels like the U.S. has discovered an awful lot of wrong ones.

As a nation, local authority is our founding principle. We fought a revolution to achieve it, wrote a (bad) set of rules to maintain it, scrapped those, then wrote a new set of rules we have been arguing about ever since. Most of those arguments have been about whether the federal or state governments should determine how we live.

But unprecedented depressions and world wars have a funny way of harnessing big government power, and the feds continued to flex those newly-discovered muscles as American cities deteriorated in the years afterward. From New York to Los Angeles and in dozens of cities in between, so-called “urban renewal” programs used federal dollars to quite literally tear down and rebuild massive sections of cities from scratch, sometimes in order to build a highway through the demolished portion. One of the many legacies of this program, which destroyed entire neighborhoods, was a growing distrust in the government to sensitively execute centrally planned projects. The preferred remedy was to have more local control, neighborhood by neighborhood.

This approach has its merits, but for transportation it has serious drawbacks. Whether they be subways, light rail, bus routes, or even the humble bike lane, any transportation worth using is a network that allows people to get from one side of a city to another quickly and efficiently. Giving substantial input or even veto power to individual communities along that network undermines the entire concept.

“Transit is fundamentally regional,” Eidlin said, “And I really feel like our general population and our decision makers don't universally agree with that or even had that epiphany yet.”

Just as too much hyperlocal control can stymie useful transit, putting transit under the auspices of entire states can have downsides, too. Several of the country’s biggest transit systems including New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. are controlled not by local authorities but state (or in D.C.’s case, quasi-federal) bodies. This means taxpayers who don’t obviously benefit from the system pay into it, a constant source of political tension. And when proposed projects cross state lines, it opens up a prolonged debate about who pays for what share, a fight that often takes years or decades to resolve.

Put the lack of funds for transit together with our country’s general desire to give local control as close to the individual citizen level as possible, and we’re left with a contradictory system where every limb and appendage fights the others. The lack of funds dedicated to transit means higher and higher levels of government—the ones with more and more money—often have control over transit, either by law or by practice. But those same agencies must seek local consensus for what are not local projects, a time-consuming and expensive proposition at best and a poison pill at worst.

This desire for local control yields bizarre outcomes. For example, Eidlin is working on a transportation hub project in San Jose, CA. Four different public agencies are involved, each for a different jurisdiction that will meet at the hub (this is indicative of the Bay Area, which has 27 transit operators and 151—yes, 151—transit agencies). As a result, Eidlin says much of the project’s work at this stage is not on the project itself, but administrative tasks to keep all the agencies up to speed.

“We value local control so much and we fund so many things locally that we never stop and ask,” Eidlin said, “what's the right level of government at which to be addressing a public issue?”

How To Fix This

As dire as the American transit landscape is, there are specs of hope. Federal funds are no longer given out through earmarks; that stopped in 2010. Now, the FTA grades projects based on merit. And some metro areas have big plans. Los Angeles and Seattle voters have opted to raise their sales taxes slightly to fund tens of billions of dollars in transit upgrades that could significantly improve their region.

But we need much bigger solutions, not only to build transit systems faster and more efficiently, but to run them better, too. In the vicious cycle of transit funding, agencies that are perceived as wasteful or bad at providing services have a harder time getting money from politicians, which then makes it harder to run a good transit service. This cycle must be broken.

Public transit…ought to be as natural a government service as trash collection.

More money for transit would obviously help. Bernie Sanders has proposed $300 billion for public transit by 2030 and $607 billion for a high speed rail network (Joe Biden, in an excellent distillation of the failures of American transportation policy to date, does not commit any dollar amounts to these issues in his platform, but does commit $50 billion in his first year to repair roads, highways, and bridges). That would be a lot more money where it’s desperately needed, and polling suggests it’s a popular platform with majority support.

The most noteworthy part of Sanders' platform, however, is not the money. It’s the framework under which it is proposed: the Green New Deal.

This, says Florida State University’s Jeff Brown, fits with the history of how big transit projects are proposed. “Transit, in most places, has very much been an afterthought or a reaction to some other perceived crisis,” he said. Traditionally, that crisis has been traffic. For periods in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the oil crises. Sanders, however, clearly puts better public transportation within the framework of the climate crisis.

But the very concept of tying transit construction to a crisis misses the point. Transit does address those issues, but it is more than that. We will never build good transit until we jettison the century-old misconception that it is a business the government happens to run out of necessity. Rather, public transportation is a public good on its own merits, good times and bad. Allowing people to move about their cities cheaply, efficiently, and quickly makes cities more productive and better places to live and has numerous knock-on public health, environmental, social, and economic effects. Public transit funding ought not to be a response to any crisis. It ought to be as natural a government service as trash collection.

On the other hand, framing transit as a fight against traffic is a losing battle, because it doesn’t take very many cars to create traffic. It is, as transit planner Jarrett Walker argues, a matter of geometry. It will always appear to a certain type of person that money was wasted. But positing that transit is a way for city dwellers to live better, more pleasant lives is a winning platform, as politicians across Europe can attest.

We also have to work out what the right level of government is to make transit decisions. New York, D.C., and San Francisco in particular have complicated and bizarre governance structures for their transit agencies. Most of these structures were created in mid-century when good governance types replicated the corporate boardroom as the ideal of good governance. History has proven this approach hopelessly naive. Transit is politics. It’s time to, as Freemark has argued, put transit squarely within the responsibility of one elected official who is clearly accountable.

None of this solves what may be the biggest impediment to good American public transit: costs. The solutions here are not easy. Hell, as Josh Barro of New York has pointed out, and I've also learned, we don’t even fully understand the problem. At the very least, fixing it requires cultivating long-term expertise on the local level so agencies aren’t reinventing the wheel the rare occasions they’re given enough money to undertake megaprojects. It also might require, as Laura Tolkoff of the San Francisco-based non-profit SPUR suggested, establishing governmental entities with in-house megaproject expertise, weaning the transit world off relying on expensive contractors and consultants and onto agencies looking out for the taxpayers’ interest, not the stock market’s.

These are just a handful of the high-level suggestions I learned while reporting this story. I will keep reporting on this and learning more, and you should contact me if you work in a transit-related industry and know anything I ought to know. But one thing we must always keep in mind is the answers are out there.

“[The U.S.] needs to learn what works in Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Taiwan, Finland, Austria,” Levy wrote. “It needs to learn how to plan around cooperation between different agencies and operators, how to integrate infrastructure and technology, how to use 21st-century engineering.”

To that end, Levy and fellow researcher Eric Goldwyn just received a two-year grant from the John Arnold Foundation via New York University to study why U.S. construction costs are so high. And they’re looking to hire a research associate, preferably one with language skills other than English. “We are particularly looking to extend our coverage outside countries where information is readily available in English,” their job posting for the project says.

“Imitate,” Levy advises. “Don’t innovate.”

Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[allofthismatters]

Relief

I just wanted to give Emma a break from her batshit-crazy life and a chance to cuddle on the couch with her husband, but I ended up giving her a cold with a side of angst.

Takes place shortly after the Final Battle.

She’s sick within a week.

Truly nothing serious, but thoroughly miserable nevertheless; she’s put her body and her nerves through too much lately, and now she’s paying the price. Naturally, Killian acts as though she’s dying and given the events of the past few months, she tries to be sensitive about it. He does come from a world where a fever and a sore throat very well could have been the beginning of the end. And, of course, there’s the fact that she very clearly did die (or at least came close to it) right in front of his eyes not even ten days ago.

In a way, it’s a relief. She can’t even think of the last time that she’s been free of gut-sickening adrenaline long enough for her body to succumb to simple illness.

It’s a relief to feel run down and beat up when the cause isn’t some malevolent magical force trying to wrench her away from the people she loves. She’ll take this any day when it means getting to wake up to her husband who still looks at her like she’s the most beautiful goddamn thing he’s ever laid eyes on despite the fact that her eyes are swollen and she can only breathe through her mouth.

He’d gotten up about an hour ago, kissing her forehead and lingering to feel for fever before heading downstairs.

Sleep a little more, love.

She had gone ahead and done just that, but now she’s conscious again and she still feels the warm breath and tender rumble of his words against her temple, the cool press of his wedding ring on her hot cheek. And just like that, she’s blinking against the sting of tears.

It’s a relief to be ill and have someone around who gives a damn about it. 

Sickness has only ever meant helpless panic to her before now.

It was the result of never having enough good food or anything thick enough to stay warm in the brutal northern winters.

It was the silent running whimper of I want my parents, I want my parents in her early childhood as foster families with varying degrees of tenderness and competence stumbled through caring for a little girl with the flu.

It was foster parents who made it clear that she owed them and better be damn grateful to them for coming to get her from the school nurse with Strep throat so bad she couldn’t swallow a sip of water.

It was hiding under a slide during recess and praying no one would notice the spots starting on her skin, because she’d finally made a friend here and didn’t want chicken pox scaring someone into sending her away again.

And later in life, it was the humiliation of briefly passing out on a sidewalk while trying to go to work with a 102 degree fever and waking up to concerned department store employees hovering over her.

Honey, is there someone we can call for you?

No, I don’t have anybody.

She pads downstairs, half leaning on the railing, eyes barely open, head still lolling a bit.

He hears her coughing and looks up when she reaches the kitchen.

The clock startles her when it reads close to noon, but she can hardly care when the clouds outside are dark and heavy and the two of them are still clad in clothes for sleeping, not a plan or obligation in the world.

He rises and wraps her in his arms, where she presses her face to his chest and groans pitifully for a few self-indulgent moments.

“Oh, my lass…”, he murmurs against her hair, rubbing her back in a rhythm that almost has her drifting to sleep again standing up. “Can you try and eat?”

She nods, mostly for his sake. The first night of peace they had together, he hadn’t been able to hide his grimace as he ran his hand over bare ribs and hip bones that hadn’t been in such sharp relief a few months ago, her entire body trembling just slightly with shot nerves and exhausted weakness. He’s been almost compulsive about getting food into her since, cooking big breakfasts and bringing back food from Granny’s that has just a bit more to it than it usual.

Killian keeps her close to his chest and walks her backwards to the living room, depositing her unceremoniously on the couch. She laughs softly, which of course turns into a string of coughs, and in a moment he’s back with a bowl.

The broth inside holds thick noodles and vibrant vegetables. Chunks of soft carrot, lush green stalks and leaves of something—who the hell is she kidding, she doesn’t know vegetables—that she’s seen growing in the garden behind the diner.

For the second time in a few hours, she’s sure she’s about to cry. She eats slowly, breathing in the steam and savoring every bite that she can barely even taste because she’s alive, and so, so warm, and she has a damn husband who cares that she’s fed. She hardly even cares that she hates vegetables. Right now they feel oddly like an extension of his devotion to her and his attention to what she needs; nutrients seeping into her blood and making her well the same way his love did. She tries to curtail her emotion before tears find their way out, because she really doesn’t want to have to tell him that he married someone who weeps over vegetables.

“Thank you,” she offers instead, setting the empty bowl down on the coffee table as he returns and sits beside her.

She lays against his shoulder for a while as a documentary hums in the background. A stray memory flits through her head of being seven years old, sick as a dog, and having her little body nudged off of another shoulder she’d sought comfort in, with a mechanical pat on the head and pursed lips.

Sweetie, no one wants your germs.

No one wants you, is what it had felt like.

But now she’s here, sitting in stillness with him, and he’s nothing but steadiness and unflinching dedication, and she knows it wasn’t true, and never will be again. You’re not alone anymore. She thinks the words fiercely, directing them to every version of her younger self, wherever she may exist now.

She tries to soak the moment into her soul, send the pure peace of it through time and space as a beacon…a plea to just keep going, so you can get here. He must feel the change in her, because he’s gathering her up again, laying back and settling her on his chest.

“Lie down, lass. Come here.” She adjusts her position a few times to get comfortable, and then a few more times just for the delicious feeling of making contact with his skin. She kisses under his jaw as the tears finally come and he responds with warm, lingering presses of his lips to her hairline and muttered words of love that fight off the pain of the past.

She’d go through hell again and again if it meant she got this at the end of it.

Because despite her depleted body, for the first time in her life she feels well.

[serceleste]

my victory over hamlet

I expect everyone who follows me knows about my Hamlet saga because I won’t shut up about it (sorry not sorry) but I really wanted to write down my experience, mostly for me, but I’m sharing it because so many of you have been amazingly supportive all the way through my disastrous first attempt to my eventual victory. So here it is, and if you just want to hear about Oscar and the play you can skip a ways down, lol. 

I wanted to see this play from the moment it was announced. I mean, it’s obvious that I love Oscar’s beautiful face and he just appeals to me in general, but I absolutely love him as a performer. So the idea of seeing him live, in Shakespeare, was just… But I kind of pushed it off, because it would have been an enormous expense. The tickets weren’t cheap, I live halfway across the country so there would be airfare, hotels, Uber/taxi fare, food… I’m not where I thought I would be in life at this particular point so it just didn’t seem feasible.

And then.

The play began. I started hearing about it. And I thought… if I don’t at least try, I’m going to regret it forever. I have far too many regrets in my life for still being young, stemming from my natural introversion and anxiety and from the fact that I have always, always tried to be responsible and level-headed and do what’s expected of me. But I just thought… fuck it. I am going to do something ridiculous for once in my life just because I want to.

The tickets were sold out, obviously, so I started searching for inevitably over-priced secondhand ones. I found one that wasn’t too bad. I found a hostel a mile away from the theater, I booked a flight, I took off work. I went to NYC by myself to see Oscar Isaac play Hamlet.

And then it got cancelled. I was devastated, guys, I think you all know that. The theater employee told me Oscar was ill and I just thought… you know what? That figures. It figures that I would do this crazy thing and it would crash to hell.

So I went back home. I’d had a nice time beforehand exploring parts of the city on my own but the memory of standing there and hearing that lady tell me it was cancelled and going back outside and just… It soured the whole thing.

I called my mother. I told her I was so disappointed that all I could think about was trying to go back. She told me that I should take a few days and let it settle, think about it, but it was my money.

That was Thursday. On Friday I was checking StubHub again and figuring out what day I could make it work. August is our busiest month of the year and a blackout period where no one can take off. Because of my promotion last year I don’t work weekends anymore but in August I do. I thought, okay, I’m working weekends the second half of the month, but if I go just before then, on a Friday evening or Saturday morning, see the play Saturday, and come back on Sunday, that won’t affect anything. Saturday the 12th was squashed right in between undoable time periods and literally the only day all month I thought I could make work.

On Saturday I went back to looking for tickets and flights and the hostel. I found one ticket, more expensive than last time but not overly ridiculous (and I had had my first ticket refunded) for Saturday the 12th. I found plane tickets only slightly higher than before. The hostel was 20 bucks a night more than when I’d stayed during the week but still cheap. I dithered.

Then chelliaphra told me that was the day she and her friend were going, and then she offered to let me stay in their hotel room, and I went !!!!!

I dithered a bit more, the seller upped their ticket price (BASTARD), I bought it anyway. I was going to fucking see this fucking play if it killed me, which seemed better than stewing in regret and disappointment.

This time it was a physical ticket they mailed to me. It arrived and the seller had SCRATCHED THEIR NAME OUT SO IT LOOKED LIKE I FUCKING STOLE IT. I mean, the name on the ticket was bad last time, it gave me anxiety, but at least it was a woman’s name so unless they ID’ed me, which seemed unlikely, it would have been fine. But this was SCRATCHED OUT LIKE I STOLE IT OH MY GOD. I had to call StubHub because I was freaking out. StubHub, or at least the woman I spoke with, has excellent service and made me feel better. I was still going to freak out until my butt was actually in my seat in the theater, but I felt reassured.

My dad’s reaction was the greatest. I told him, hey, so you know how I went to New York to see a play and the play was cancelled? Well, I bought another ticket and I’m going back. My dad just went, ‘oh no’. LMAO. Then he said he hoped it was a hell of a play and I was too embarrassed to admit that I cared less about what the play was than who was in it. :D (I mean, Oscar could have been in the shittiest production of fuck knows what and I would have wanted to see it.)

So I went back to NYC! I was so anxious I was nauseous, I slept maybe 4 or 5 hours, I got up at 3:30 am Saturday morning to catch my flight. I wandered around midtown partly to pass the time, partly to do the tourist thing because it was a different part of the city from what I’d seen last time, and partly to distract myself from how badly I was freaking out, to minor success.

I met chelliaphra and brehaaorgana, who were totally lovely (and I know this wasn’t your intent but thanks for actually making me eat! I was in NYC roughly 48 hours last time and ate exactly one actual meal, and I know myself enough to know I would not have eaten at all this time if I hadn’t been with you so thank you, lol) and we went to our hotel, which was AMAZING, I will never stay anywhere that nice again for the rest of my life, I am sure. Yay accidental free upgrades! \o/ There was a pillow menu!!

I got my period in the hotel, of course, which helped contribute to my severe nausea, like, omg, I was dying. I was so anxious over everything, over my ticket, over the play actually happening, over every stupid thing I could be anxious about. No even the truly magnificent comic book store (next to door to the magnificent bookstore I explored last time) could do much for me.

Actually arriving at the Public made me feel worse, if that can be believed, I was having flashbacks of how utterly shitty I had felt, looking at the corner where I’d called my mom and cried, remembering how fucking horrible I had felt walking down the street and figuring out what the hell I was going to do now. Thankfully we didn’t pass the awful bench I’d sat on feeling miserable, lol, before I walked to the park and wrote fanfic.

We took obligatory pics next to the poster of Oscar. We went inside. I was dying. Chelliaphra went with me to the desk to see if they could reassure me about the ticket but mostly it was down to StubHub. The announcement that the doors had opened came over the speaker and we went up so at least if there was a problem I’d be at the front. I thought I might vomit.

When the woman scanned my barcode and the “good!” beep happened I almost cried I was so relieved, it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard in my life.

And then my butt was in the seat!!!!! It was fine!!! I was going to see the play!!!!

Chelliaphra and brehaaorgana had seats in the front row and my jealousy was epic, tbh, but honestly I was so happy just to actually be there, after everything, that I would have stood in the doorway or something and thought that was good enough. The theater was very small, anyway, so all the seats felt pretty intimate. I was in the first row at the top of one of the aisles so it was actually rather nice, though I did end up having a bad angle for a little bit of it, Oscar had his back to me for one of the really key emotional scenes, which was a bummer, but whatever.

And the play! If you are looking for a critical evaluation of the play, this is not it. I had never seen Hamlet performed before and I read it once in school but that was a while ago. The closest I’ve come to seeing it was watching the movie version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, lol. I had zero expectations of how it should be.

I fucking loved it. It was wild. It clearly was a non-traditional staging and I dug every minute of it. Oscar was phenomenal. Just… OMG. He is such a brilliant performer and seeing him live was something else, I will never forget it. He has so much energy and intensity and he knew how to play to the entire room; he made you feel like he cared about every person in the audience and he made eye contact with EVERYONE, no matter how crappy your seat was.

He speaks Shakespeare as naturally as you or I would speak to each other, like it’s how he normally talks, so it feels conversational and everyday. You forgot he was actually speaking Shakespeare because it just rolled off his tongue as if that’s how he always speaks. His comedic timing is SO GOOD, I did not know Hamlet could be that funny. He pushed troll!Hamlet to a whole new level. His gestures, his body language, everything. A few favorite moments were when he makes this mocking kissing gesture to his mother, and when he was running around dragging Polonius’ body in a sheet before stowing it in the audience, and the ‘may I lay my head in your lap’ bit, when he’s joking about his, uh, parts, and he just like raises his leg up and gestures and I died for multiple reasons. I also loved the use of the comfy sweater, Ophelia wears it, and then throws it back at Hamlet when she’s returning his gifts, and then Hamlet wears it.

And he was so moving, dear lord. Watching him play Hamlet’s grief and loss was incredible. Knowing that he lost his mother this year really gave it an extra emotional impact, because you know that had to have informed his performance, I mean, the thrust of the play is the loss of Hamlet’s father. (Also I would just like to say that I was attacked by the playbill, like, it literally says the play is dedicated to Oscar’s mother, and in his little bio bit it says it again, ‘dedicated to my mother’, GOD I HATE FEELINGS.) When he cried it was impossible not to cry with him, he was so heartbreaking and moving. You could literally hear the sniffling across the audience. The scene where he sees his father’s ghost was amazing, and he was so good in Act Two in the big emotional part with Gertrude.

And, you know, Oscar with blood on his face is the most Extra.

Everyone knows about the lasagna but watching it was… I mean, he sat on a table and railed at a tray of lasagna with a knife and you could not look away, and when he says, ‘why what an ass am I,’ it was like you could finally breathe again.

(The lasagna was an A+ prop, btw, for the way Oscar murders it and for the way Ophelia just digs into it post-spurning Hamlet. And my friends informed me it smelled amazing, lol.)

And, yes, he spends a lot of time in his underwear (very small well-fitted underwear that sometimes rode up a bit one side and obviously I noticed, sorry not sorry). Um. He looked great in it. His ass is FINE, and I feel like this post would be lacking if I didn’t call attention to that. (He killed the lasagna in his underwear, for the record.) There was a bit in Act Two when he was watching the players where he was leaning over the back of a chair just in front of where I was sitting and that was indeed a perfect angle because DAMN. His shirt fell down to cover the front most of the time but yeah, that was not bad either, lol (and my friends confirm the answer to the question is cut, in case you were wondering). But all that being said, he was running around in his underwear and you couldn’t not look but he is also just such a fantastic performer that he was in his underwear and you were still mesmerized by the actual performance. Also I just liked it as a dramatic interpretation, I mean, he comes out when Hamlet’s meant to be a bit mad, no pants, a toilet seat protector around his neck, his hair sopping, reading the newspaper. It worked. Later on when he’s dressed again he whips the sweats back off to show his madness (or, as can be debated, his “madness”) again and I just really bought it.

Plus, he sang! Having never seen it, and only read it the once, I have no idea if that’s common practice or if it was just Oscar (I feel like it was just Oscar??), but I Approve. God his voice is lovely, I have witnessed Oscar singing in person, I can die happy.

Also I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about his hair because it’s me, hair is my thing, and Oscar’s hair… It was shorter but it was on point, and let me tell you, his hair just does that naturally. You know what I mean. It got wet a bunch of times and he would run his hands through it and it just curls like that, like, ridiculous, his hair is fucking amazing.

Of course I was there for Oscar but I greatly enjoyed the cast in general. I thought Gertrude and Claudius were amazing playing off each other and off Oscar, Ophelia was lovely (and what a beautiful voice!), Polonius was especially amusing in his ‘imparting wisdom’ bits (and looool at the bathroom as set piece), I really liked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Laertes was from Preacher! The gravediggers were played by Ophelia and Polonius and they were very funny. Ophelia knocked me in the head with her potted plant when she came down the aisle to cover Polonius with dirt and flowers and I felt blessed, lol.

But Keegan-Michael Key, OMG. What a fabulous actor. I knew he would be hilarious but I wasn’t expecting to be moved quite so much by his drama, his closing lines were especially good. I loved how much they played up the Hamlet/Horatio relationship, all the face touching, dear lord, and Oscar kissed him on the mouth! I kinda ship it now, tbh. I know Hamlet/Horatio fic exists and I feel like this performance should inspire more, lol.

But, you know, I have to note the play within a play, the reenactment of the murder of the king to try to provoke Claudius, with Keegan as the king and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the faux Gertrude and Claudius. It was EPIC. They were all great, with their large, overdrawn movements, but Keegan was… The audience was in hysterics watching his over-played parody of a death, and damn if he didn’t go Extra for us. Oscar was sitting there covering his face to try to hide that he was laughing (we all saw you Oscar) and you could just see his OH MY GOD. Keegan did a ‘thank you!!’ to us at the end.

Oh, and the cellist! There was a cellist playing background music and they used him quite amusingly at times, like when Claudius basically tells him to fuck off.

For the gravediggers scene, Oscar and Keegan came down the aisle to sit in the audience, and Oscar was perfectly diagonal to my seat and let me tell you, his eyelashes are INCREDIBLE. So fucking long. Ridiculous. How is he real, seriously. But that was an impressive bit, Oscar is stunning in the famous ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio’ monologue, and the actual funeral, fucking hell, he killed it and he killed me, and the way it cuts out after he and Laertes have just wrestled over the burial ground with Horatio trying to stop it and Hamlet is just lying there clutching Ophelia to himself killed me again.

And there was fencing, of course! I loved the fencing. Oscar put on the white shirt with the codpiece thing and I approved. Damn the fencing was excellent. And obviously then it was sad because it’s Hamlet and everyone dies. The finale was all rather gutting, good job all around.

So the play was wild and I loved it in a very non-judging way, I was just immensely entertained and I loved the cast and Oscar was fucking phenomenal. Obviously we gave them all a standing ovation.

I feel like I should mention now just how fucking tired I was. By this point I’d been awake about 20 hours on almost no sleep, and had spent the day an anxious, nauseous wreck. I was SO TIRED. OMG.

THEN. OSCAR. We asked an usher about seeing the actors and she told us that unfortunately, if we were hoping to see Mr. Isaac, he usually didn’t stay on Saturday nights. So we were bummed and went outside to find somewhere to get food. But I had to pee horribly so I went back inside and I won’t lie, I was totally taking my time because I was thinking maaaaaaybe, maybe if I stay long enough he actually will come out, or maybe the other actors will, and then I came out and thought damn, it’s louder than when I went in, and there was a crowd, and I looked, and THERE WAS OSCAR OH MY GOD OMG!!!!!!!!!

Chelliaphra and brehaaorgana had already come back in on account of the commotion so yay! We waited for Oscar! There were so many people! He looked fucking exhausted! I felt so bad, actually, at taking up his time when he probably wanted to go eat and be face first in his bed, but he was such a sweetheart and stayed and smiled for everyone, he was so lovely and gracious.

I tried taking some pics of him standing there but there were seriously so many people. But I got my moment! He was so nice!! He smiled at me and made eye contact and John Boyega is 10000000% correct, it is really hard to look away from his face, he is so damned handsome. Like, fuck. He is a beautiful man. No one should be that beautiful in real life, it is unreal, like, you look at celebrities and you know there’s make-up, there’s photoshop and airbrushing, but goddamn, he is so beautiful up close. SO BEAUTIFUL. Also he smells great. And he is so small! I did not expect him to be so small! Like, I knew he wasn’t actually very tall but it’s just startling in person how small he actually is, he’s just tiny and compact and cute, I love him.

So it is a miracle I actually formed words. I was so nervous my hand was shaking and my brain would not function properly, IDK, partly how tired I was, partly how shy I am, partly OSCAR ISAAC IS LOOKING RIGHT AT ME FUUUUUUUCK. I also was so anxious not to bother him any more than I already was, or take up more of his time, because I felt so bad, he looked so tired and he was being so sweet, I felt guilty at bothering him. So I really barely could make myself say anything beyond asking for what I wanted and thanking him five thousand times, I don’t even know if I ever told him how much I loved the play, like, damn, I hope I did.

He took a pic with me, I think you’ve already all seen it!! I stood right next to Oscar and he took a pic with his face next to my face!!! And he totally signed my Kylo Ren journal, that is full of fanfic, a good deal of which is Poe/everyone, I am deeply, deeply amused by this. I had originally wanted him to sign my playbill too but I felt guilty asking so I just got the journal. I’d thought about bringing a Poe comic for him to sign, maybe the #1 variant that has him on the cover, but it wouldn’t fit in my purse and I had like this tremendous embarrassment at the idea of having to carry it around and keep it on my lap during the play (I was already a bundle of anxious nerves so this probably sounds stupid to everyone else but I just did not need the added anxiety), so the journal worked because I always have it in my purse anyway, and it just really really amused me to have Oscar Isaac sign my Kylo Ren fanfic journal. I half want to never touch it again because I’m afraid of wrecking it but I also want to, like, write something particularly trashy in it now, haha. (Of course, a lot of what it currently contains is plenty trashy!!) Because I am an awkward dork when I went to the comic shop and was struggling to think of something to say to not-boyfriend beyond ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ I blurted out some nonsense about wondering if he knew how to take care of autographs, and I ended up showing him my Oscar Isaac signed Kylo Ren journal (WHY AM I LIKE THIS I HATE MYSELF), but I might take his suggestion and put it in one of my comic protector bags.

Oh, also! He was wearing that backpack he always has, that he clips in the front like a 5 yo whose mom made him do it except he’s a grown ass man and chooses to do it, he is so adorable and dorky, I love him.

As we were leaving we saw Gayle Rankin (Ophelia) by the door so we stopped and talked to her and she signed our playbills. I’m a bit bummed we didn’t see anyone else but tbh, Keegan-Michael Key could have been standing right next to me and I would not have noticed because OSCAR OH MY GOD.

We found out later that Lupita Nyong’o had been there too, and I’m so sad I didn’t see her, her bone structure is sooooo lovely, it would have been so cool to see her beautiful face in person, plus I think she and Oscar are so cute. But alas. I suppose at least I can say I was in the same room as Lupita!

So we went for pizza (again, thanks for making me eat guys, even if you didn’t know you were doing it!) and went back to the amazing fancy hotel and I sent my pic to like everyone I know, and I was just so blindingly happy, and I was fucking exhausted but I was so hyped I barely slept anyway, I would doze a little and go back on Tumblr and doze a little and text my mom, it was ridiculous, lol.

And that was my adventure with Hamlet and Oscar! It was so stressful and I was ridden with anxiety and I spent way too much money I shouldn’t have spent and at times it was crushingly disappointing, but in the end it all worked out and I had an amazing time, definitely one of my greatest experiences ever that I will cherish forever. I’m so glad I got to meet chelliaphra and brehaaorgana, as much of an introvert as I am and as much as I did like wandering around NYC on my own without any socialization pressure, it was so great getting to nerd out with them over Oscar and the play and they made it so much more fun. Plus, I appreciated the moral support when I was dying beforehand, lol. Thank you so much to everyone who put up with me through this whole thing, when I was freaking out and when I was miserable and when I was exploding with nerdy joy. <3 I’m sorry this is so long! I feel like I am leaving things out anyway!

Bottom line: OSCAR ISAAC IS BEAUTIFUL AND A FANTASTIC ACTOR AND A LOVELY HUMAN BEING AND HE HAS A GREAT ASS.

Sometimes being utterly ridiculous and just saying ‘fuck it’ totally works out, guys!

[soriseerakyra]

Nice to Meet You -4-

A/N: I’ve been in the middle of finals which is why I’ve been gone for so long :( sorry

Your accounting firm was in a large building situated nicely in downtown Gotham. Its location made for a beautiful view of the Gotham skyline as well as a dangerous journey home for anyone who didn’t watch their surroundings at night. Your bosses were pretty lenient as well. You supposed they fancied themselves the ‘modern’ sort. They opted for a set up without cubicles and instead built office floors with standing desks and the occasional bean bag chair, and kept the kitchen stocked with an abundance of free-trade artisan coffee.

 As you leaned carefully on of the thick glassed window-walls that allowed you to see the skyline, you flicked through your phone. Taking a sip of the cardboard cupped latte in your hand, you opened your Instagram app. Camille had been officially on maternity leave for two days, and while from the pictures she posted showed that she couldn’t have been happier, you were slightly miserable. It wouldn’t be right to say you were completely lonely, you’d gotten used to being alone and dealing with the reality of the alienated city life, but it was her that you missed. More accurately what you missed was quietly giggling to each other while the two of you people watched, mostly in a judgmental fashion. It was all in good fun for the most part through, most of the people that worked on your floor you liked. You may not have been the most social person, but you appreciated the fact that many here would have been willing to listen if you had told them your problem.

 You feel your lips pull down in a pout as another picture of Camille and her husband pops up on screen, this time his large hand placed lovingly on her rounded belly while she kissed his cheek and slyly peeked at the camera.

 “All right, this is sickening,” you say as you hastily put your phone to sleep and slip it into the pocket of your blue blazer.

 You turn your gaze out to the window again as you sip your coffee. Your eyes scan over the tall skyscrapers and then something out of the ordinary clicks in your mind. A familiarity works its way to the front of your brain while the word weaves itself deftly to the back.

 ‘smack’

 It was involuntary really, the contact that your free palm made with your forehead, but well deserved.

 “Oh, I’m an idiot.”

  ***

Majority of the time Bruce Wayne would say that he tried his best to run his company, well as well as he could, given his double life.  He remembered the names of his secretaries for the most part, but he supposed that was from doing thorough background checks on the people whom worked so close to his office rather than actually caring anything about them personally. The people whose names that he couldn’t quiet remember he would greet with a charming smile and enough attention throughout the year that many of his employees thought that working for Bruce Wayne “wasn’t so bad.” He even did his best to keep his eyes open during board meetings, he didn’t succeed most of the time but he always gave an effort.

However, there was one thing that he could care less about, paperwork. Hold up in lavish office, with a stack of files that needed his signature or documents that needed proper reviewing, he could not begin to give one iota of a fuck about what they said. In fact, for the past ten minutes he’d been hypnotized by the bouncing screensaver on his computer, something that he found vastly more appealing than the work he had to do.

 So, it was a relief when he felt the vibration of his cellphone on his thigh. He pulled the phone from his pocket and felt his brow furrow at the unknown number, however he answered it anyway.

 “Hello?”

 “So, you’re a pretty big deal, aren’t you?”

 His eyes widened at the voice before he let and easy smile slide its way across his lips. When he left the coffee shop the other night he hadn’t been expecting a call, and was happy that he hadn’t given his number out in vain.

 “Oh, what makes you say that?”

 “Your big stupid name plastered on the tallest skyscraper in the middle of downtown Gotham.”

 “Oh, so you noticed that, did you?” he said as he leaned back in his computer chair, paperwork forgotten. “If it makes it better, I didn’t design the building this way. My dad did.”

 “So, then your dad was the egomaniac.”

 “Precisely.”

 “Hmm, and you willingly admit this?”

 “I’m not one to hide things about my family.”

 “What about yourself?”

 “That’s a completely different story.”

 “I Imagine, maybe I can work out some of the things you’d like to hide about yourself over dinner.”

 He stood up and left his desk, slightly startled by the forwardness of the suggestion.

 “Why not?”

 “Good you can pick me up from work, I get off at 6.”

 “You aren’t going to tell me where to pick you up from?”

 “Use that brain of yours. I told you what I do and you know that I can see you or your building at least, it shouldn’t be that hard.”

 The smirk was so present in tone that the only way that it could have been more real would have been if he could see it in person.

 “Let’s see then.”

 ***

Bruce walked over to one of the large paned windows that opened to give him a more than lovely view of the city. While there were many accounting firms that dotted the city, there were few that garnered an unobstructed view of Wayne Enterprises. He caught the glimpse of a building that laid off to the right. A tall dark building decorated with gargoyles on its ledges. Ledges that he had often used to het a vantage point on the city. He also recognized it from a time when his father took him their when he was younger. Wayne Enterprises had its own accountants but Thomas Wayne had taught him the need to interact with the establishment, if only so you don’t piss them off.

 “You don’t seem like the type of person who’d work out at Wessler and Burns,” He said with a hint of playfulness in his voice. “To many suits.”

 “You’re right. I went in for an interview and I left with a restraining order. They call for new blood but when that blood has a cleavage the old farts can’t seem to keep their eyes to themselves. No offense, I know you’re not too far behind in the age range.”

 “I’m wondering if I should be offended. The youngest person with any value there is sixty.”

 “What are you? Fifty-Five?”

 “I’m definitely wondering if we should be going on this date.”

 “Don’t worry Bruce, I’m sure your old bones to can keep up with this young’un.”

 “The question is can you keep up with me?”

 “Who knows, I’ve been out of practice for a while.”

 “Don’t worry I haven’t.”

 “You old dog,” she said with chuckle in her voice, “Have you figured it out yet?”

 “I think so,” he stated as his eyes caught a glimpse at relatively new building that faced his own.

 “Good, because my break is over and flirting with an old man doesn’t pay the bills.”

 “I imagine it doesn’t”

 “Bye Bruce.”

 “Goodby-“

 The phone hung up.

 Carlisle and Preston accounting was a young firm for the city, having been there for about two years. It had sprung up on the west coast about ten years ago, and with an unusual swiftness for an accounting firm, opened multiple branches up and down the coast. This branch was the first on the east coast, and had likely brought Bruce Wayne’s date with it to the city. He’d found their unusual productivity strange, but there was nothing obvious or seemingly hidden that could be attributed to the success of the firm. Research had only turned up, that the CEOs Michael Carlisle and Jonathan Preston, regularly showed up at firms across the country and interacted as much as they could with their clients on a personal level. A relaxed working environment dedicated to the needs of the needs of workers in the 21st century made the seemingly boring profession more ‘sexy.’

 He leaned against his car, parked in front of the entrance of the building, hoping to catch a glimpse of the form that captured his interest.

 “So, you actually found it with your old man eyes.”

 The snarky familiar voice caught his attention as he saw the woman that he had been waiting for. He looked to his right and saw her approach, seemingly coming from a side exit rather than the front entrance.

 “Well, my building is the tallest in the city so even I can see something.”

 She smiled and then he noticed that her eyes flicked over his outfit.

 “I hope we aren’t going anywhere too fancy I am slightly underdressed.”

 He looked at her, blue blazer with a white blouse and jeans to match. If he took her to any of his usual establishments she would stick out like a sore thumb, they’d think he took her out as a charity case.

 “True,” he said thinking about their situation.

 “There’s not an Olive Garden in Gotham, is there?”

 “What is that?”

 She stared at him blankly, eyebrow raised lips quirked down at the ends.

 “You may be too rich for me.”

 “That has never been a problem for me.”

 “I imagine,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Listen, for now coffee will be our thing. And over said coffee we will eat small pastries and half-cooked microwaved breakfast sandwiches while I extol you the value of cheap carb loaded cardboard tasting Italian food and the like.”

 “Sounds thrilling.”

 “Trust me, when I’m done with you you’ll be addicted to breadsticks the same way most of middle America is.”

 “That doesn’t seem factu-”

 “Shhh, don’t question it,” She said as she made her way to the passenger side of his car. “Just let it happen.”

[pluckedrosepetals]

things are bad rn

father hates me so much that he has to dedicate half an hour to screaming at me about how i’m brainless and stupid and i need to think about very basic things that i’ve already been thinking about

1. driver’s license and car

he screamed and screamed and screamed at me about how i don’t have my license yet and tried to make me feel guilty that i wasn’t letting him provide for me bc he apparently wanted to buy me a car but you need a license for a car

meanwhile i’m not rushing my license bc it’s easier to buy a car after moving, i’m planning on moving halfway across the country it would be so much easier to buy a car after moving and transferring my license and it’d save so much money too but he won’t listen to me he just screams about how i’m a lazy undisciplined brat and this is why i need someone like him to guide my poor brainless stupid ass

2. Where i’m gonna live

first he asks where i’m planning on living then he screams at me for wanting to live in a specific city i have no idea what the purpose of this was

i told him about my plans to move to houston, he screamed at me for wanting to move to a new city halfway across the country with no job offers on the table. domestic job applications for 2019 grads usually open in the spring outside of business/consulting and grad school. do you see my problem

and then literally two messages later he complains that i’m not considering boston like

houston is so much cheaper and hopefully i won’t even need a cosigner with my credit score like i tried so fucking hard to minimize his costs bc he complains so fucking much about how expensive i was to raise like i didn’t have to go to an international school we could’ve lived in america and i could’ve gone to public school i could’ve gone to korean public school i never chose where he went to school, i could’ve gone to brandeis with a scholarship and saved him so much fucking money but he insisted that if i wasn’t going to apply to “real” schools that i go to the best one so obviously he chose amherst but i could’ve saved him so much money and in the end he chooses to spend that much and then make me feel guilty for his choices

3. lasik surgery

idek he screamed that he wanted to provide this for me but because i’m such a bratty bitch demon and a thieving liar he can’t, as if his hitting me and throwing shit at me had nothing to do with why i never want to go to korea again while he’s alive i don’t even know why he thought this was so basic like yeah in principle that’d be great!! but we both know that he’s just gonna hold it over my head as another way he COULD provide for me if i’d just stop being such a demon brat and be a good child for once in my miserable life

4. family

he says that i have no sense of family but guess what i do he’s just not part of it!! bc he’s an abusive asshole!! and i’ve passed afraid into tired!! he can’t control me anymore bc the stakes are exactly the same, if i do as he says eventually i’ll fuck up and he’ll kill me and what’s the worst that happens, he comes to kill me and then gets barred from campus? i am literally no worse off now so this is my choice, it’s my fucking life i’m not his to manipulate

also i fucking love how for over FIVE FUCKENING YEARS my mom let me believe that everything that was wrong between my father and me was all my fault? “he hit me and threw things at me” “well you deserved it because you were procrastinating on homework and your grades have been falling” i went from a 3.9 to a 3.0 that year bc of that incident and the next year i got a D in a class the next semester bc of the stress

we never talked to just check in we never had a casual conversation about anything since i came to college and anytime i tried he turned it into a sermon on what a waste of space i am

i don’t understand how a man can alienate his entire family to the point that his own wife won’t have a conversation with him while they’re living under the same goddamn roof, go through employees and coworkers like tissue paper (3 secretaries in 4 months bc they all quit are you fucking kidding me) and then lose all your friends bc they’re tired of you treating them like they’re morons and then still think that you’re the only reasonable person out of everyone in your life, like i’d feel sorry for him and how lonely that is and how it’s gonna catch up to him in a few years but honestly i spent so long thinking it was me that i even started calling myself a gremlin bc i thought i was that woefully inadequate at interacting with people like a goddamn human being when it turns out the problem wasn’t even me!!!! if you ask anyone at the college i have my faults but none of them are that i have a problem with communicating where i scream at the people i supposedly care about and call them terrible names and threaten to hurt or kill them that’s not a me thing!!

i’m just. so tired of living like this

meanwhile brendan’s really being such a trooper he’s been comforting me through all of this, tried so hard to make me laugh and feel better when i spent the entire day crying, called me on his way to work to check in with me, gave me some exciting news on his end to distract me

he’s been promised a trip to vegas sometime next year with his friend jim, he wants to take me with him but he also knows that i’m moving after graduation and he doesn’t want them to clash

he has an aunt who did this for his 18th birthday apparently he and jim went together that time too and his mom doesn’t trust him to travel alone bc he’s always losing things lmaooo but in all seriousness i’m just so grateful that he heard about the fact that he was being gifted a trip and the first thing he thought of was taking me along bc wow i do have a family it’s just not the one i was born with and brendan thinks of me as family too and i’m just,,, wow what did i do to deserve such an amazing romantic partner we’ve grown so much together and i love him so much

and my friends, my friends from flight rising who’ve become my gay snuggle pile, i love them so much too, they are my siblings and my parents and my family. jules bought me dinner yesterday bc my legs weren’t working and i was too upset to eat and when i told him i owed him my soul bc i’m broke as shit he said this was what family was for and honestly when will your friend-family ever bc i’m so cursed by my father and my paternal family but somehow i’ve landed in a place where i’m surrounded by love anyway despite my jagged edges and despite the fact that there are people who genuinely hate me in my biological family

my feelings are all over the place i need food and water and my stuffed sloth to snuggle for a bit

but tl;dr father called, of course it went terribly, it went something like: “You’re irresponsible and brainless so here are four very basic things to think about when you consider moving out after college” “I can answer these questions because I’ve already been thinking about it, here are my ideas” “YOU ARE BRAINLESS AND STUPID YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT THESE BASIC THINGS YOU’VE ALREADY PLANNED FOR” “I already have though, here’s the framework of my plan and my timeline” “DON’T INTERRUPT ME YOU BRAT YOU ARE A DEMON BITCH AND IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME I WILL MAKE YOU ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. HARMING YOU DOESN’T WORK SO I’LL HAVE TO THINK OF SOMETHING WORSE BUT I SWEAR I’LL MAKE YOU LISTEN”

... yeah he lowkey threatened to kill me so that’s fun c’:

but i’m still surrounded by love somehow and i don’t feel scared anymore

just so, so tired

[sarahburness]

The ABC’s of Personal Growth: How to Live a Happy, Meaningful Life

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” ~Abraham Maslow

Throughout my life, I’ve moved countries, studied a foreign language, changed careers, launched a business, run a half marathon, written a book, faced agonizing loss and grief, won awards, been deeply hurt, created awesome charity campaigns, lived with huge uncertainty and pain, found love and friendships to cherish, and given birth to three miraculous humans.

Throughout these and plenty more crazy, insane, complex, and utterly beautiful life events, I have collected treasured building blocks that help me live a life of meaning, purpose, and joy every single day.

I want to share them with you in the hope that throughout your own daily trials and triumphs, you can use these ABC’s to help you create a life you love.

Transformation is not a switch; it’s more like a gage.

The beauty is that you don’t have to flip a button and practice and internalize all twenty-six letters instantaneously.

Like learning anything, start with just one at a time.

Once you’ve mastered it, add another.

With consistent repetition, you’ll be fluent, and these personal growth building blocks will lay a magnificent foundation for all your life’s work.

You are the author. You hold the pen. You get to learn and read and write your own masterpiece, chapter by chapter, line by line, letter by letter.

You are the hero of your own story.

So let’s get back to basics: the ABC’s of personal growth.

Acknowledge:

Knowing your strengths, talents, and abilities is the first step to unleashing your potential and power and creating meaning and lasting transformation. We are all blessed with so many wonderful gifts, but we can’t unwrap and share them with others if we fail to acknowledge what they are. Acknowledge yours today! What are you good at? What do people come to you for help with? What experiences have you gone through, and what have you learned from them?

Blessings:

Blessings are all around us. If we choose to look for them, we will certainly find them. What are you grateful for? What makes you smile? What positives do you notice in your life right now? Each day, look for three things to be grateful for. These blessings multiply!

Control:

There are so many things in life that we have very little or no control over—what happens to us, what other people say or do. We are not the general managers of the universe. However, we have incredible control over how we choose to respond to every experience we encounter. Our control lies in our attitude and our behavior—our choices. Choose wisely.

Discipline:

The master key to success lies in discipline. We are surrounded by enticing temptations and obstacles that deflect us from our goals all the time. Discipline is like a muscle; the more we work on building this skill, the more we develop excellent habits that bring us closer to achieving our biggest success.

Discipline means asking yourself: What is the very best use of my time right now? And then consistently following through. Small increments every day lead to tidal waves of success—step by step, day by day with consistent discipline and dedication.

Encouragement:

We are all fighting battles, and a gentle word that offers hope and support can literally save a dream.

Are you an encourager or a critic? Do you accentuate problems or encourage solutions and creative thinking? Do you lift people up? Are you inspiring, motivating, and supportive of helping others to get further and reach higher? When we lift others up, we rise. Commit to becoming the most encouraging person you know. The world needs more cheerleaders desperately!

Focus:

What would you be doing with your time if you knew you had only six healthy months left to live? Focus all your time, energy, and resources on the things and people that truly matter most to you.

Vague goals produce vague results. Blurry goals yield blurry outcomes. Take the time to get clear about where you are going and what you’d like to accomplish. Write this down. Then focus. Whatever we focus on grows. Get clear and then laser focus on your most meaningful priorities. Don’t sweat the other stuff. Keep it simple and focus on what you care most about.

Give:

Giving to another person and knowing our contribution has had a lasting impact creates true happiness and peace of mind. Anytime you give, you grow; every time you give, you get, whether it’s a kind word, giving charity, volunteering, or connecting to a cause that speaks to you. Your giving has the power to light up the world.

Ask yourself each morning: How can I give of myself today? How can I show up more fully? How can I be of value and service today? How can I contribute today? What difference can I make today?

Help:

Think about the people you look up to, those who already are where you’d most love to be. Ask them how they did it. Reach out to the experts. Spend time with them. Learn from them. Get their help. Use the love and support of family and friends to spark your bravery and courage.

Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. Make a list of where you need a hand and a list of people who could become your greatest helpers on your journey. We’re beings of social interest. Helping is who we are. We thrive when we help.

Give and get help wherever you can. It’s a showcase of wholehearted and vulnerable living, which makes you real. People like helping real people. We’re all just walking each other home at the end of the day. That’s what it’s all about.

Inspiration:

Read, learn, blog, journal, go to classes and talks and lectures that inspire you. Commit to starting and ending your day with inspiration. One minute of inspiration can ignite a passion inside of you that can alter the course of your life forever.

Get out more, be curious, ask questions, become more open-minded. Inspiration is everywhere. Look for it. Inspiration is what charges us. When we are charged we grow. When we grow, we are happy.

Joy:

Choose to become joyful. Appreciate the gift of life. Each moment is precious, and fragile, and denied to many. Laugh and smile, have fun, and lighten up. If you see someone walking around without a smile, offer them one of yours.

Not feeling like you have joy to share? What lights you up? Do you have a list that you can plug into your week?

My joy list includes: a delicious cup of coffee, time with the people I love, a great run or workout, reading something magnificent, laughing and watching the sunset, to name but a few. I make sure to do these daily. You’d be amazed how many people love writing and sharing their joy list, but they forget to schedule and do the very things that bring them joy. Create your list and then live it—joyfully.

Kindness:

Imagine a world where each person is deeply and truly devoted to kindness. Let’s work on being the kindest spouse, friend, parent, manager, employee, coach, and child we can be. I truly believe that kindness is the only thing that will change and save the world. Tiny acts of kindness create ripples so far and wide, we can’t begin to comprehend just how far they can reach.

Learn:

I am known to be a forever student. As I complete one course, I enroll in another. My bedside table has a tower of books and I soak up learning with a desert-like thirst.

When we learn, we open our minds and discover new possibilities. We can learn to pioneer anything! The sky is the limit. Let’s give ourselves permission to try new things, take risks, and be humble enough to learn from new leaders and teachers.

Lessons are all around us. Failure can become our greatest teacher. Mistakes can become our greatest mentors. Make sure you spend time with people who know more than you. It’s humbling and awe-inspiring. Write a list of some of the things you’d love to learn this year. Each day, record one new thing you didn’t know before. Watch your horizons expand exponentially!

Mindfulness Meditation:

Slow down. Take time to breathe. Mindfulness offers incomparable value to the human spirit, psyche, and body. Dedicate a set time each day to pausing, being truly present, and listening to your soul and inner wisdom.

The research available on the huge benefits of meditation is mind-blowing. Treat yourself and everyone you love to the gift of meditation. Even a few minutes a day has the power to awaken, elevate, transform, and enhance your life in ways you can’t begin to imagine.

Neuroscience has evidence today that meditation literally rewires your brain and can change your thinking, habits, and negative beliefs. It’s miraculous and it’s accessible to every one of us. Try it for yourself. Start to live a mindful life of greater peace.

Never:

Never give up. Never do a permanent act based on a temporary feeling. Never say, “It’s impossible” when really, it’s just hard. Never listen to naysayers and non-believers. Never push aside a dream that means the world to you because of the time or effort it’s going to take to make it happen.

If today, “Never” is all you do, it’s more than enough, it’s plenty; in fact, it’s everything.

Optimism:

When we are optimistic, failure is merely feedback giving us significant information; hardships are learning experiences that help us grow and build resilience for bigger things; and even the most miserable day always holds the promise that “tomorrow will be better.”

Today, when faced with adversity, ask yourself: What would an optimist do right now? What would they try? What’s might be possible because of your optimistic outlook? What can you see that you never saw before?

The optimism sees the sunset and knows that even the most awful days can still end beautifully. The optimist knows that a few steps backward after moving forwards is not a disaster, it’s just a cha-cha, and the optimist knows that the cup is refillable!

Prioritize:

Prioritize your life so that your highest value activities take preference. Enhance and refine your time management skills so that you are able to identify what tasks you need to tackle first. Say yes to your priorities and make each day count. When you live this way, there is no regret.

Complete your highest value activity first so that it’s done. Done is better than perfect. Get the important stuff done before anything else. Always prioritize in writing. It’s not enough to merely think about what matters most to do; grab pen and paper to record and track your priorities so that you can measure and accomplish them every single day. Start today. Plan for tomorrow. Celebrate a life that’s not wasted!

Quit:

Originally I was going to share a long list of things to quit—like complaining, making excuses, indulging negative habits, staying in the same place when you’re itching to move, and letting fear and naysayers control your life. Then I realized it’s human nature to do some of these things from time to time. So work on these things, but quit being hard on yourself when you struggle.

You will never be able to completely stop doing all things that are unhealthy for you, but you can always give yourself credit for trying.

Release:

What are you carrying right now that is too heavy? Every day, practice letting go of the things that weigh you down.

It’s not easy to let go of regret, mistakes, anger, resentment, ego, jealousy, and compassion, but each day offers us abundant opportunity to practice. Try to catch yourself when you’re getting caught up in a story in your head so you can take a few deep breaths, center yourself, and free up your energy for the people and things that bring you peace and purpose.

Sorry:

We all need to learn how to apologize to those we’ve hurt, intentionally or unintentionally. And though will all deserve the same in return, we also need to learn to accept an apology we were never given. Then, we can move forward without anger. Forgiveness is a gift both to others and ourselves.

Let’s decide today to be courageous by apologizing or offering forgiveness.

Turning the page allows us to move on to the next chapter of the story. We can’t do this if we keep re-reading the one we’re currently stuck on.

Thank You:

We all want to be acknowledged for our efforts. “Thank you” is such a simple phrase, yet it means so very much.

Recognizing what others do for us not only reminds us to be modest and humble, but it opens doors to more deeper and meaningful relationships, enhances our empathy, and improves our psychological and physical health.

Who can you thank today? Start with one person and extend your appreciation as far and wide as you possibly can.

Unplug:

Unplug from technology. Switch off. Spend time with yourself, by yourself. One of the greatest discoveries of self-transformation and personal development is not only getting to know yourself, but getting to like what you find.

Connect to all your loved ones. Look people in the eye. Listen with all of your senses. We miss out on so much when we are plugged in to devices rather than to hearts.

Spend time in nature. How can you redesign your day so that you create time outside? Do you take regular breaks? When was your last vacation? When was the last time you admired a flower? Do yourself a favor when you have the time. Take off your shoes and go walk outside barefoot on the grass. Watch the sunset. Play with a ladybug. Stare at the clouds. Just be.

Voice:

Speak your truth. Wear your passion. Let people know what you care about. Let people get to know the real, beautiful, one-of-a-kind you and what you stand for.

You have a unique voice. You have greatness within you. You have something the world needs. That’s why you are here. Use your voice to speak your goals. Use your voice to care. Use your voice to inspire. Use your voice to make positive change. Use your voice to pray. Use your voice to sing. Use your voice to laugh. Use your voice to help. Use your voice to care. Use your voice to love. Speak up.

Work:

Even the most brilliant, tried-and-tested life tools in the world can’t work, unless you do. There are no quick fixes or magic wand. Real transformation is a slow, gradual, and real process that requires hard work and consistent effort. With commitment and dedication to working hard, nothing can stand in your way of moving forward.

Hard work means that we are willing to try, fall, and stand up again; we are willing to be bold; and we are willing to face ridicule and criticism. Work on your goals each day, step by step. We are designed to grow. As we work toward our dreams, with patience, comes tremendous reward. What you put in is what you get out.

eXtra:

Don’t be someone who just does the bare minimum required in life. Go the extra mile and do more than you did before.

Expand your comfort zone with extra focus, extra power, extra love, and extra drive.

The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is just that little extra. Today, where can you show up a little EXTRA?

Yesterday:

Leave it behind. Glance back to see how far you have come, but keep moving forward. Leave your past mistakes behind you. Yesterday just determines your starting point for today. It in no way predicts how far you can go.

Live now, savor the present, and plan wisely for tomorrow. Don’t get stuck in what was, you don’t live there anymore. Today is a new day to set new intentions, get inspired and motivated, and start taking meaningful action toward your goals.

Zest:

Do you do things just because, or do you do things with fervor, zeal, passion, energy, and enthusiasm?

Where in your life are you still fast asleep? Where are you merely snoozing or drifting aimlessly?

Now is the time to wake up. Choose one thing to do today that makes you come alive.

Today, you get to decide to be accountable, not helpless; you get to decide to be interested, not indifferent. You get to live your life today on fire. You get to put your whole heart into something.

What is the first thing you’re going to do, right now, to get the momentum rolling?

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Each of these building blocks can stand alone or stand together. Choosing to work on even one of these will have a powerful positive effect on your life. Whether you are the kind of person who prefers a step by step process, one letter at a time, or you love to dive in deep and work on multiple tracks, these ABC’s will give you an outstanding foundation on which to build a more purposeful, happier, and fulfilling life.

About Andi Saitowitz

Andi is a Professional Life Coach, Global Personal Development Strategist & Lumina Practitioner, published author, motivational speaker, blessed mom of 3 awesome children, and lover of books, coffee, kindness and sport. In her spare time, she is involved in charity work and community. Andi’s coaching practice incorporates techniques and tools from the fields of Behavioral Science, Organizational Communications, Psychology, Mindfulness & NLP. andisaitowitz.com

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