#and i spent a lot of time in my adolescence focusing on my attraction to women mostly bc i had a bf who didnt take my sexuality seriously

[doggirlbuck]

i as a trans man have somehow managed to be repressed about my attraction to men. gender win?

[honeypirate]

In Madness lies Sanity

Ushijima Wakatoshi x Reader - College AU

Based off the bit by Allan Watts. I read the transcript and I thought— Ushijima in love with his best friend listening to this talk about love in one of his classes and realizing that he needs to tell them the truth. Allan watts bit is in blue, the fic is in white.

Ushijima wasn’t one to dwell too long on trivial matters. He works through them and then forgets them. He focuses on what is important and what will bring him closer to his desired future. He isn’t one who is sucked into madness and drama, he has a strong level head and it’s something he takes pride in. So he’s trying to apply his ideas to how he handles his feelings for you, is it trivial? Is it important to tell you? He was struggling before he walked into class Monday morning and had his eyes opened by the video played during lecture.

- I’m going to talk to you about a particularly virulent and dangerous form of divine madness which is called falling in love. Which is, from a practical point of view, one of the most insane things you can do, or that can happen to you. Because in the eyes of a given woman or a given man, an opposite who go to the eyes of everybody else a perfectly plain and ordinary person can appear to be God or Goddess incarnate .... And this is an extraordinary disruptive experience a subversive experience in the conduct of human affairs

You were never a plain and ordinary person to him and he believes that’s where it got confused. He always has and always will see you as an extraordinary individual, regardless of things that may be seen as flaws or imperfections, regardless of your mistakes. You didn’t transform from one thing to the next, you were the same angel he knew, so when his heart flipped from friendship to love, he wasn’t paying attention.

- Because you never know when it will strike off for what reason. It’s something like contracting a very chronic disease once you get into it

If anyone asked Ushijima who his best friend is his first thought is you. His first thought thought is always you. His constant. His true best friend who is there for him through anything. He’ll open his mouth and say “y/n is my best friend” and when people would point out just how close they are he just shrugged, weren’t friends supposed to be close?

When he thinks back now, now that his feelings are obvious, he realizes that it was just a matter of time until he fell in love with you. He can pinpoint every moment along his life where love was obvious, every joke and hug that at the time he thought was just nice, when he loaned you his sweatshirt and then didn’t wash it because it smelled like you. When he would spend all his valuable and limited free time with you just because he liked the way you would smile as he walked you home. He thinks back to all of his dates in high school and college, of the dating app conversations he’s had or blind dates his friends had set up, and they all failed because of one simple reason- none of them were you.

- I would like to make some reflections on this particular form of madness, and to raise again a very disturbing question. And this disturbing question is as follows: Is it only when you are in love with another person that you see them as they really are? And in the ordinary way, when you are not in love with people you see only a fragmented version of that being.

He’s spent hours turned to days to weeks as he keeps thinking about whether or not he loves you or if he just thinks he could because of how close you already are. He’s lost track of time connecting different dots and making different lists and theories, replaying you’re entire friendship back in his head. He’s thought about the times he saw you drunk in college and puking on his shoes as he helps you home, when you decided you wanted to try and longboard and turfed it so bad your arm was gashed from wrist to elbow and he had carried you to the urgent care. all your reckless and crazy ideas you dragged him along with, you were almost as bad as tendou but he just wanted to take care of you as best as he could. He can feel the desire in his bones to make sure you were always taken care of, a feeling he knows he’ll have until he dies.

He thinks about when you had dated Oikawa and for the entire three months he had an ulcer but didn’t know why. He thought it was because of his pain relievers and quit them the week you broke up with him, not realizing the connection. When he’d get acid in his throat when you talked about dating someone else, he thought he just needed some milk. How blind he had been.

-Because when you are in love with someone you do indeed see them as a divine being. And suppose that’s what they are truly. And your eyes have by your beloved been opened in which case your beloved is serving to you as a kind of guru. An initiator. And that is why there is a form of sexual yoga, based on the idea that man and woman are to each other as mutual guru and student. And through a tremendous outpouring of psychic energy in total devotion and worship to this other person who is respectively the goddess of the god.

Being someone’s best and closest friend consisted of seeing their entirety and choosing to stay and love them anyway. To care for them. He can’t say for certain where he crossed over into love, into wanting to hug you and kiss you, wanting to be the only one you think about, but there’s not much he can do about it now and he doesn’t want to.

Ushijima sees you. He sees your good and your bad and everything in between, he sees you for you. Your ordinary mundane ways of life that he can’t help but want to share with you. Grocery shopping, library trips, post office runs, he wants them all to be done with you. He truly cannot imagine anyone else taking that spot in his heart.

Wanting to show you what he sees. What he knows to be true about you. he wants to scream from the rooftops how amazing you are and he’s not a very loud person. He sees the way you care for your friends selflessly and give and give all you have just so that others can be happy and you never complain. You do what you can when you can and still have time to take care of yourself he never knew how you did it so effortlessly, even when you’d vent to him you never regretted helping others.

He sees the way you lift up those around you. How you leave everyone a little more positive than before you talked to them. He doesn’t know how you do it. He’s convinced you’re an angel and he’s dying to show you just how amazing he knows you are. But he doesn’t want to ruin your friendship. He sees your entirety, your full book instead of just the cover, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He wanted to give you this energy and receive it in turn and he’s never been so absolutely terrified.

-You realize by total fusion and contact with the other organism. You go down to the divine center in them and it bounces back and you discover your own or you could put it in this way which is another aspect of it that by falling in love and regarding falling in love not just as a sort of sexual infatuation, because it’s always more than that, isn’t it. I mean you can have a great sexual enjoyment with a pleasant friend, you know. But you may do so simply because he or she appeals to your aesthetic senses. But when you fall in love, it’s a much more serious involvement, you just cannot forget this person. You feel miserable when not in their presence, you’re always yearning, that’s get to see more of each other let’s get together that’s we’re completely entangled and then you see you’ve actually kind of out what I would call spiritual element has been introduced. And the Hindus were sensible enough to realize that this was a means of awakening, enlightenment, and therefore it was. Surrounded. With a sort of rigid religious ritual meditative art, with a form of sexual yoga that is designed to allow the feeling of mutual love to the extent of grand passion to have an extremely fitting fulfillment and expression.

Ushijima has always thought you were beautiful. Any human with eyes would think that. But your beauty and attraction went far deeper than that. Sure he’s had fleeting thoughts about how good you looked in a dress but he never let them linger. It felt wrong to think of you like that. But now that he’s an adult, a grown man and not a teenager anymore, he wants to kiss you, to hold your hand, maybe more but it wasn’t about that. It was about the intimacy, the closeness, the vulnerability.

Awakening. Enlightenment. Two words that before he didn’t really think about. But now he feels changed. Now that he’s realized how much he loves you has lifted his spirits, made him dream of the passion and happiness you could have together. He feels himself slipping into the joy of being in love with his best friend and imagining all the ways that love could grow. He feels only half of himself when he’s without you, always needing to see you or be around you, but you never made him feel clingy or bad. You met him in kind, telling him how much you wanted to be around him too.

At first he thought that this love was a trivial thing, something he could push from his mind, but after his weeks of thought he knows this is a lot more serious than he’s experienced before.

-Falling in love is a thing that strikes like lightning and is therefore extremely analogous to the mystical vision. We don’t know. No how really people attain the mystical vision. There is not as yet a very clear rationale as to how it happens because we do know that it is opened to many people who never did anything to look for it. And many people especially in adolescence have had the mystical vision all of a sudden without the slightest warning and with no previous interest in that kind of thing

He remembers what he was doing when it dawned on him that he was in love, when he felt the air leave his lungs and his eyes widen softly when he realized how nice it would be to kiss your temple and he couldn’t even finish the thought as the feeling ran from his head to his toes.

He was standing in your kitchen as you finished making your lunch for the following day and you made a joke that made yourself laugh, he didn’t think it was a very funny joke but you didn’t care. You giggled to yourself and he couldn’t help but wish he could witness that forever. It hit him like a brick that he would, in almost an instant, give his entirety to you. It terrified him when he imagines you and him ending like his parents. But behind the terror, the fear of divorce, was a softer and quieter emotion that he tried to focus on harder than the insanity of his anxiety. A softer, lovelier, hopeful feeling that he usually gets every time you smile at him. That was the feeling he was searching for, everything else was irrelevant for a few glorious moments.

-But as yet we are not clear as to why it comes about and if there is any method of attaining it the best one is probably to give up the whole idea of getting it…. you see it is completely unpredictable and so it is in that way like falling in love, capricious and therefore crazy. But if you should be so fortunate as to encounter either of these experiences. It seems to me to be a total denial of life to refuse it. And what we therefore have to. Admit in our society is so that we can contain this kind of madness.

He called Tendou that evening, telling him that he thinks he loves you, and Tendou about had a conniption. He was in Paris as his best friend fell in love for the first time. He talked him through it, told him how good it can be. That yes it was going to be work but the reward would be worth it. To not sell himself short out of his own fears. He deserves much more than that. Tendou’s last phrase is what sunk in deep “I know it was unpredictable, that it feels so fickle, but that’s what love is like buddy! You can’t deny it Ushi, you can’t run from it or hide from it, it will only hurt you in the long run”

- You see, in this way we can think about and structure the necessary stable social institution of family sometime without it being constantly threatened of foundering on the rocks of love. Now you see this then means that when when people marry they take any vows at all to each other instead of saying that they will always be true to each other in the sense of meaning I Will Always Love YoU, It means I will be true to you in the sense of I will always be truthful to. I will not pretend that my feelings towards you ARE other than what they are. Because I marry you, because I think that you are a reasonable person to live with and therefore I want you to be you I want you to be someone else I want to be a rubber stamp of me–how boring that would be?! an arrangement in which people set each other free and make an alliance to cooperate with each other in certain ways. Now if it should so occur that they are of immense sexual attraction to each other, so much the better? That this should not be a primary factor in entering into marriage. Admittedly, you must be to a certain extent attractive to each other otherwise there will be no progeny. But this is this is seems to me to be a sensible and reasonable view and just because it is sensible and reasonable it can accommodate what is not sensible and reasonable which is falling in love.

Ushijima is terrified. He’s terrified because the instant immediate joy he felt when he realized he loved you was almost overtaken by worries and stress. He loves you! Now what? He loves structure in his life and he values stability but he knows how rocky relationships can be and how they can ultimately end. He knows he won’t deny it, he won’t back away because of his fear but he needs a plan. A plan to take to you and talk about it, he knows you’ll have the right thing to say but he doesn’t even know what he’ll even say to you yet. He loves that you are so carefree and goofy, a breath of fresh air to his stoicism. You’ve even gently worked your way so deep into his soul that you feel like his other half, his complete other in every way, someone who wasn’t like him at all and how wonderful that is.

Once in his life he thought that arranged marriages were smarter, you did it out of logic and bloodline and family, nothing messy to deal with. But that structure, that boring empty rocky foundation that an arrangement might bring made his mouth taste bad, although at the time he convinced himself it was because it would be more like another job that takes up his time (away from you)

Sensible and reasonable was right up his alley, he thought how nice it would be to have a mini him but he couldn’t think about having that with anyone. He couldn’t think of another half of dna that baby would share that would make it worth it. Not until he saw a picture of you holding your nephew, now whenever he thinks of his babies they share your genes. He thinks of a chunky baby with your eyes and his hair color, a mix of your personality and he’d share volleyball with them. He’s never wanted kids as much as he does when he thinks about sharing them with you. And that’s the part that feels senseless, the love part, the part where you give your entirety to someone and trust that they will care and keep you, no matter what happens, save its not infidelity or other deal breakers of yours he already knows.

Ushijima’s theorizing and thoughts about you over the course of time went from being about understanding why he feels like this to imagining fake scenarios where he wants to take you abroad to travel together, to be together every day and share the hard times and good times, babies or not, marriage or not. He just wants to make you happy for the rest of his life no matter what and he can’t go on much longer without knowing he has a chance to do so

- Well now really when we go back then to falling in love. And say it’s crazy falling. You see we don’t say rising into love. There is in it the idea of the fall. And it is goes back as a matter of fact two extremely fundamental things that there is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation. Taking this ghastly risk, is the condition of there being life. You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble

And so here he was. Sitting on a bench outside of your dorm, feet bouncing as he stared at the small patch of grass growing in between the sidewalk crack. It’s been a while since that class and he’s been thinking about this constantly.

He knows the risk, feels it in his heart every time he meets up separately with his parents since their divorce. He sees it every time he remembers his childhood and the messy separation. That mess he never wants to repeat. The fall that comes with this love is like that class video had told him, ghastly. He doesn’t know if this could ruin it all, if he takes the leap of faith and it all comes crumbling down years later he’ll be just another divorce. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to end up like his parents and have a child who feels the same. But when he imagines his life he doesn’t think he could be haply without you by his side.

- the moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith, because you don’t really know that the floors not going to give in to your feet. The moment you take a journey what an act of faith. The moment you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship what an act of faith you see you’ve given yourself up. But this is the most powerful thing that can be done surrender see and love is an act of surrender to another person. Total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me, do anything you like with me. So, that’s quite mad because you see it’s letting things get out of control all sensible people keep things in control.

You know something is up the moment you open the doors and see his back on the bench. You were going to his place since he wasn’t answering his phone, you freeze at the doors at watch him for a moment as your anxiety spikes in your stomach. His shoulders are tense as he leans forward, elbows on his thighs and hands clasped together as he looks down between his bouncing feet. Before you really think about it, you follow the urge to comfort him, to talk to him and make sure it’s all okay. Your feet carry you quickly to his side and you sit down, pulling him into a side hug and wrapping your arms around him.

He gasps when you sit and as you’re wrapping your arms around him he furrows his brows and hugs you back. His heart racing As his fears take the back burner. He didn’t expect you to find him but he also didn’t know how long he’s been sitting here. He buries his face into your neck as he you hold each other in the cool spring evening.

“What’s wrong?” You ask as you hold him and feels his walls break down, his arms tighten around you

“I’m scared” he says quietly and his voice cracks

“Of what Toshi? You can always talk to me” Your fingers run through his hair softly and it soothes his nerves.

He pulls back and cups your cheeks, his eyebrows were still furrowed and his stoic expression was broken by his eyes that were swimming with worry and insecurity.

You saw everything in his eyes and you met him with your determination and steady unwavering love he finds in your eyes. God he feels so mad. So incredibly and undeniably mad and insane and like he isn’t in control. He needs to tell you. Needs the words to come out of his throat so he can calm his heart and soothe his ulcer. The anxiety felt like it was immeasurable and his breathing was starting to get faster until you placed your hands on his cheeks, smothering the bad feelings completely “it’s okay Wakatoshi, I’m right here”

Ushijima feels the exact moment his heart relaxes into the faith, the surrender into love trusting that the floor isn’t going to collapse under his feet, the moment he gives his whole self, body and soul, to the fall, and that moment was when your lips touched his for the first time. Then he let go, the madness left his body and was replaced with a calm assurance that yes, yes this was it, what he’s been waiting for, what he’s been yearning for.

- for all the cost and wisdom what is really sensible is to let go that is to commit oneself to give oneself up and that’s quite mad,

-so we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity.

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

This is totally cool, lol! That's why I tagged you, I like different perspectives 🥰 and I adore lesbian Jenny

I've been thinking a lot about Jenny's character and sexuality lately since I'm in the middle of rewatching the show. I totally agree that she's attracted to women and most times she pursues guys it's mainly to increase social status and not because of genuine interest. Nate always felt different to me, though. Like, the two times she really pursues him is in season 2, when she's being homeschooled and trying to make it as a designer, and the end of season 3, which is after the whole Damien drama and she's just looking for someone who cares about her and respects her (I know you said once that it doesn't even feel romantic here, which I also agree with, poor girl just needs a connection). I do really see how it can be interrupted as comphet, though. Like she feels like she's supposed to be attracted to Nate because who wouldn't be?

I think the reason why I lean the other way is probably just projection. Jenny's been my favourite GG character since I first watched the show when I was 12, partly because I relate a lot to her, and since I'm bisexual... Add that plus the fact that I totally have had a crush on Nate and of course I'm gonna ship them. I've been relating to Jenny even more this time around cause I dropped out of school this year, so her season 2 arc really hit close to me. So this made my jenate feelings come back tenfold and also made me that much madder at Rufus, lol. I just wanted to go through the screen and shake his shoulders like "There are other paths than the one you want your daughter to have, not everyone has to go through life like society expects you to let your daughter carve out her own unconventional path you fucking idiot!" Luckily my parents have been way more supportive.

Mainly I just see Jenny as bi with a strong lean towards women, but I like to think about lesbian Jenny, too. It wouldn't exactly be the first time I had contradicting headcanons.

I don't know I just think it's really cool that different people can have such different interpretations of the same character. I think that's what's so interesting about fiction, to see how we view things differently depending on how we view and relate to things based on our own experiences. Tumblr can be so focused on hating people who disagree with you, but I like following people with different opinions, it helps me understand people better.

Yeah, I'm glad you tagged me!! back in November, some anons were mean to me about shipping Jenate (me??? who literally does not even - anyway) and ever since then I've been trying extra to ensure that Jenate shippers feel welcome on my blog - you may already know this, because I've brought it up before, but I'm saying it here to let you know that every time you tag me in your Jenate edits I get so happy that you're sharing something you're so passionate about with me!! I'm also a big believer of like........ making the content you want to see (a big part of why I even learnt to gif is because nobody was giffing Dan & Nate, and I was like...... that's the content I need, so if it's not already existing, I'm gonna make it happen!) so regardless of my feelings it's always so cool to see the way you conceptualise JN + their feelings re: each other, and your choice of scenes + lyrics (??? I'm not actually familiar with where you got the words for your edits, they're likely songs I haven't heard, haha) is just so interesting & good!

OH my full Jenny & Nate feelings are a lot more complicated than just comphet on Jenny's part. I feel like..... neither of them was romantically/sexually into each other? and that is kind of the appeal to me? I've always interpreted Nate's interest in Jenny during the s2 arc as sort of like - everything in his life is so unstable and undetermined, and here is Jenny who is so clear on who she is and what she wants, and he admires and respects that, and he wants to be there for her and support her, so when she kisses him he just sort of lets her take their dynamic wherever she wants to? that is very much the vibe I got. You already know how I feel about lesbian Jenny, I mean, you quoted my meta right back at me :'))

but I DO agree with you that Nate is different from the other guys to Jenny. JN have this really specific kind of honesty to them - well, when Jenny wasn't spiralling and trying to get power and acting out, and when the writers actually cared? I still think that NJ had the potential to be a SOLID dynamic but the writers made it sorta unhealthy on the show :(( - but I've spoken abt moments like in seventeen candles and the empire strikes jack before, where they're both able to be emotionally vulnerable around each other in ways we don't see them be with anyone else. I've even compared that to what I like about Derena, whom everyone knows I ship in every possible way, haha. But there's something about characters who trust each other and allow themselves to be honest with each other in ways that they wouldn't otherwise EVER be - especially with characters like Jenny & Nate who have spent so long trying to seem fine and okay even when they're really not.

I honestly really like the idea of queerplatonic Jenate - they're life partners, they're each other's rock, they're each other's person - but it's not romantic OR sexual - and for Nate & Jenny, whose adolescence has involved navigating other people sexualising them so much + not having the best track record with romantic relationships - for them, I feel being qpps gets REALLY interesting, because you get all the perks of a relationship without the romantic/sexual obligations? (obligations isn't the best word, but i don't know what else to use here? LOL) and that's something i love to explore.

I feel like book Jenny was bi! The way she gushed about Nate, whom she canonically had a crush on, and the way she gushed about Serena were EXACTLY the same. Also YES I love multiple headcanons always, it's a lot of fun seeing people explore that!!! I know people who have aroace readings of Jenny, or aro lesbian / ace lesbian readings of her, and I find that really cool, too!

I also definitely get you about relating to Jenny a lot, and feeling that kind of connection. It's similar to how I feel about Dan, and .... explains a lot of my contradicting dair views, actually. A few years ago I had a seriously intense crush on a girl who was... a lot like Blair, in many ways. I spent a ridiculous amount of time writing poetry about her, etc etc, but I never actually acted on it. If she'd fabricated schemes that involved us kissing, though..... I don't know. I don't think I would've denied it if I'd felt like I actually had a chance. I think we just had a case of bad timing, & I like to think in another universe, maybe we were actually together for a bit. I'm glad that your parents are supportive of you and better than Rufus! <3

I think that's what's so interesting about fiction, to see how we view things differently depending on how we view and relate to things based on our own experiences <- THIS exactly! this is a big part of why that "proship" is in my bio. like this is exactly what it means to me and how I conceptualise & understand it!!! Like you, I also like engaging with people who have different understandings and opinions of the characters -> it definitely helps you make new friends you would otherwise not meet by staying in your bubble, & from a fandom point of view, it also helps you develop a more nuanced understanding of a character. Some of the best written Jenny Humphrey I've read was in Jenate fics - and I've had people who don't even ship Blenny tell me they liked the way I wrote Jenny in my post canon blennyfic, so... idk. it's loving Jenny hours - each and every single iteration of Jenny!!!

[mor-beck-more-problems]

Forget Me Not || Morgan & Vic

TIMING: Current

PARTIES: @natusvincere & @mor-beck-more-problems

SUMMARY: The women gather more than just weeds and thorns when Vic comes to visit. Maybe we should have stayed home. :/

CONTAINS: Brief references to homophobia

Morgan set her basket down in the garden and brushed the frost from Deirdre’s pansies as she made herself comfortable in the earth for weeding. She was here to tend her own patch of witch hazel and tending to her lavender saplings, which were sectioned off only by placement, indistinguishable to everyone but her and Deirdre. She tended the yellow buds and tender stalks with swift, decisive care, until she heard her guest come through the gate.

“Over here!” She called. Strangely, she hadn’t been all that surprised when Vic wanted to do something calm, even gentle, on their friend date. She came off as brusque and dismissive online, but the times Morgan had seen her at the local art gallery, her look was so thoughtful and sad. She didn’t strike Morgan as someone with a thirst for violence so much as someone in pain. Of course, this was exactly why Morgan thought keeping sharp on her training skills with Victoria would be a good idea, but she didn’t have enough drive in the idea to push for it. She would rather heal herself than stay on her toes, expecting violence sooner than later. No, this was better.

When her friend came through the gate, Morgan waved and beckoned her over. “If it’s too cold for you, we can always duck inside. I’ll have you know I am a very good cook.”

Morgan Beck was certainly an anomaly in White Crest.  In a world full of annoying, nosy fools who always seemed to have a sinister endgame, Morgan offered a calm, gentle contrast that Vic wasn’t sure she’d ever been used to.  Though Morgan was still at arm’s length, it wasn’t often that Vic let anyone get so close, not in a genuine way, at least.  There was too much risk- of abandonment, of death, of someone lurking in the shadows, ready to whisk the happiness away in a heartbeat. And then there was the problem of Morgan’s obvious lack of a beating heart, stirring questions deep in Vic of the morality of the situation.  She refused to become friends with a vampire (ignoring the pull for friendship she often felt for Fran, what a ridiculous, weak thought).  Morgan never questioned her request for an evening gardening session, free from the threat of the sun, which was also slightly alarming.

Even as she walked up to the address Morgan provided her, she wasn’t quite sure she’d stay.  But then Morgan’s voice was beckoning her over, and Vic rolled her eyes as if closing the distance between them was an inconvenience.  “I thought you needed help gardening”, she said, glancing toward the small studio behind Morgan and trying to hide her disappointment at the thought of a change of plans.  “I mean, if you’re cold, it’s fine, but I’m okay.”  She blinked, pulling gardening gloves out of her pocket, not giving Morgan a chance to protest.  “What do you like to cook?”, she asked as she slipped them on.

Morgan grinned sheepishly. “I’m pretty sure what I actually said was, I’d really appreciate it if you would garden with me, since you seem to know so much about it.” She didn’t need help so much as she wanted to get to know Vic better. There was something familiar about the woman, a loneliness that seemed, to Morgan, to ache as much as it bristled. Morgan wanted to slip her hand past all the thorns and brambles Vic planted around her and clear just enough room for her to realize this was no way to be. Whatever she feared or grieved, it could be okay. “But you don’t need to sound so disappointed. There’s plenty of work here to keep us occupied for an hour or two.” She gestured to the weeds and the azaleas in need of watering. “But any longer and we probably will have to duck inside so you--we--don’t catch a chill or anything, huh?” As for her cooking, Morgan opted to claim the pride she held in her accomplishments. “Oh, lots of things. I bake a lot of pie and pastry, so I’m starting to get into the savory variety of those. And some traditional Irish dishes, for my girlfriend. But she says everything I make tastes good, so I’m not sure how successful they really are.”

“We don’t need to argue semantics”, Vic said, sending Morgan a stern glance.  She didn’t know how to respond to the compliments or kindness, it was too much to think about.  It was more useful to ignore them all together.  If Morgan was going to continue to be sickeningly sweet, she better get used to that reaction.  She let out a phantom breath at the sight of the weeds, happy to get started clearing them away with expert hands.  There was something peaceful about the act- some sort of silent therapy in cleaning up the weeds of the physical world when the ones that wrapped themselves up inside her heart and stomach sat there so stubbornly.  She furrowed her eyebrows at Morgan’s small slip-up, wondering what she meant.  “If you insist… but I don’t know how long I’ll stay”, she warned.  Truth be told, getting cozy inside of Morgan’s studio with a small bite sounded nice, even if she could live without the eating.  But the risk that came with it was greater than it was worth.  

She had been working rather absent mindedly, only half listening to Morgan’s rambling, when one word stuck out to her like a bell in a storm of silence.  “You have a girlfriend”, she asked, her hands pausing among the weeds.  “I didn’t realize you were… I didn’t realize you weren’t…” she swallowed, clearing her throat awkwardly.  “That’s… nice for you.  Do you...enjoy having a girlfriend?”

Morgan looked sidelong at Vic as she froze and sputtered over the mention of the word ‘girlfriend.’ “Is the phrase you’re looking for, ‘not hetero’? Not all lesbians look like Ellen, Vic. Some of us like wearing skirts sometimes. Some of us even wear lipstick.” Laughing, she smacked her pink painted lips to emphasize her point. She stopped pretending to work and shifted so she could sit and look at Vic straight on. She didn’t know what kind of uncomfortable the woman had fallen into, if it was just embarrassment or latent homophobia or something more tragic.

“I’m in love, Vic,” she said after a while. “I spent most of my adolescence convinced that the sheer magnitude of my gay was a literal curse on my family, and then the next ten or so years being closeted and awkward and afraid and pretty much all the time after that being convinced that even with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repealed, even with Obergefell v. Hodges, I was just not a person made to share a whole life with someone. And I did everything I was supposed to, I made do, I tried as much as I could be brave enough to try, but I was practically forty without a relationship lasting longer than six months. Dating for all people is hard, but for me, and probably for a lot of queer gals...it’s a different kind of hard. And then I fell in love, and in spite of our mountains of trauma, our fears, we fit in such a way that...it’s like being held. She looks at me, she smiles at me, she touches my hair or squeezes my hand or says something and it’s like being held. It’s a kind of safety I didn’t know I could have.” She shrugged and fished out her phone to show Vic the lock screen: Deirdre laying sprawled on a window seat in their home, all three cats sleeping peacefully on her, as she looked up at the camera with an adoring, sleepy look on her face, in that bright instant when she realized she was being photographed and composed her face. Morgan had been going for a candid shot, but she was still beautiful, still warm, still herself, and that alone made the image worth keeping. “If you’d told me that this would be my life even a year ago, I would’ve thought you were being cruel. But not every surprise life throws at you is a bad one.”

Morgan looked good and hard at Vic, trying to guess if anything had changed, if she suddenly had one foot out the door, if she should let her. “At the end of the day, I feel like everyone deserves to be known, and understood, and loved. Even if it’s just for a little while. Life is so fleeting, and there is so much beyond our control, but nothing else, people should be loved, by whoever they want, however they want, however the magic of attraction or understanding works out.” She held her gaze, still searching. “How do you feel about it? Have you ever been in love, Vic?”

“Ellen is insufferable”, Vic muttered. Her hands returned to busying themselves with the weeds, but Vic’s ears were focused on the rambling falling from Morgan’s heart.  Love.  She was in love, with a woman, so openly and freely without a goddamn care in the world.  Still, her naivety sparked something inside of the woman, and despite her best efforts, she let her eyes land on Morgan’s, taking in every word as if they were the sweetest sounds she’d heard in years. Maybe they were.  She let the rest of the world believe the was aloof about politics and world events, but she could admit, at least to herself, that she had much of the same reaction when the United States seemed to offer more and more rights to LGBT couples in the last 20 years than they had in her near 500 years on this Earth.  It was both exciting and frightening. She hadn’t realized it, but she was nodding at Morgan’s words with a silent expression on her face, one that told Morgan she related more than she was willing to admit. Her features softened even more at the picture she was offered, and it was all she could do not to reach out and snatch the phone from Morgan’s hands.  There was so much hope in her voice- so much warmth and love and happiness.  And then the way she spoke of her girlfriend, as if nothing more in the world mattered, as if everything made sense in her arms, it sounded so much like-

No.  No, no, no, no. She wouldn’t think of her.  She would not think of that time in her life.  It was frivolous, useless, tragic, awful, devastating, painful...

Seemingly suddenly, she stood up, looking away from Morgan with hard, angry features.  Her beat of silence lasted an uncomfortable amount of time.  “Love doesn’t exist, Morgan”, she said finally, her voice devoid of emotion.   “It’s the harsh truth.  Better you realize that now, than to have your heart broken down the road.”  She turned away from her willing the moisture in her eyes to disperse without her bringing attention to it.  “I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you, but that’s how it is.”

Morgan saw the pain and the longing in Vic’s face as she finally met her eyes. So, it wasn’t homophobia. Or if so, not the kind she wanted to send people away over. She followed Vic to her feet, waiting for the admission, as if it wasn’t already telegraphed by the tears shining in her eyes. “Vic...” Morgan whispered.

And then she spoke, stiff and hard as the shears she’d been handling a second ago.

“Of course it exists,” she replied, soft and patient. There was no arguing, just as you wouldn’t get worked up over reminding someone that the sun hung in the sky and flowers needed light and water to grow. She walked around to face Vic again. Whatever pain the woman was running from, she wanted to look at it with her, to understand where it had come from and how deeply it was buried. “Love is as real as air, or flowers fooled by a false spring…” she offered Vic a purple bloom from her hand, a gift, and a point. “I think some part of you knows that, too. Or you did once. What I don’t understand right now is who convinced you of such an awful lie, and what made you choose to say that to me just now.” She tilted her head and leaned in, anything to make the woman look at her. “Can you tell me, Vic?”

Vic scoffed out a laugh at Morgan’s insistence, looking to the side with a cynical shake of her head.  Love- long, everlasting love, was a fantasy, and Morgan was fooling herself.  In a cruel life that lasted forever, everything had an end.  And fate, with her twisted, evil intent, liked to make sure the end of happy things like love were especially tragic.  She let her eyes fall on the flower offered to her, but her hand didn’t budge to reach for it, no matter how much it ached to.  Instead, her eyes finally found Morgan’s, a mix of anger and sorrow gleaming from them.  Why was she doing this?  Morgan didn’t know anything about her, and somehow she sat here, gently demanding the truth- as if talking things out could make centuries of sorrow disappear. “I convinced myself.  Nothing happened, nothing is wrong, this is just something one knows.  You’re living in a fantasy, Morgan.  And nothing will come out of it but pain.”  She blinked, watching Morgan and waiting.  Waiting for her to demand that she leave, to tell her they’d never speak again thanks to her outburst.  When nothing seemed to happen, she let out an annoyed huff.  “I didn’t come here to discuss personal lives.  I came here to garden.  If we’re not going to do that, I suppose I’ll just leave.”

The anguish in Vic’s expression was only too recognizable to Morgan. She inched closer, as if she could read her trauma in her pores if she squinted hard enough. “People don’t convince themselves of anything that awful for no reason,” she said quietly. She flinched back as Vic flexed her cold stiffness, shutting Morgan out.

“You asked me,” she said. “I said one thing about fucking Irish stew, actually less than that! And then you asked me! Why is that? Is it because you’ve shut yourself so much that hearing about other people’s happiness is the only thing you have left? Because there’s nothing stopping you from being happy, Vic. You could have someone, you could at least have hope, if you weren’t spending all your energy into being like this. But why try to crush my happiness, why try to argue with me that everything I have isn’t real? Does it make you feel better when other people are as sad and hurt as you are, or do you actually think that you’re the only person who understands the world? Oh, stars, or better yet, are you actually so naive as to think that suffering makes you wise? Because I have some big news, teenage drama queen!”

She stared at the woman, searching and accusing. Her mouth throbbed with anger. She didn’t know this woman half as well as she thought she did. She hadn’t imagined that she could be cruel. Not to her, not with this much determination. But there was something in Vic that made them similar too, she reminded herself. She could see it in the water glazing her eyes, in the clench of her jaw. It was so much work, it must get exhausting sometimes, even if it had become muscle memory. She softened and breathed slowly. Her body didn’t need it, but it was a good distraction for her mind. She’d been caught off guard, and so she’d been hurt, but she didn’t know this woman. She didn’t have all the pieces she needed to understand any more than Vic had all the pieces to understand her. She had no idea how insulting she’d been, and so Morgan couldn’t hold that against her.

“You aren’t the only person who has suffered, Vic,” she said, her voice calm and even now. “And my decision to be happy, to love someone, doesn’t mean that I’ve been living some kind of gay Nancy Meyers fairy tale. You don’t know a thing about what I’ve lost or what pits scraped myself out of. I know what it feels like to have nothing, to have only your own suffering for company. I know. But I’m not going to play some cynicism game to prove it to you. I want to be your friend, and I don’t need you to see everything like I do…” Not yet, anyway. “But you don’t have to be so cruel. I don’t think I’ve done anything to deserve that, and I don’t think that’s the person you really are anyway.”

Vic stood there, stoic and unblinking as Morgan unleashed onto her.  Her jaw was clenched and she swallowed hard, but she refused to let emotion show on her face. This was, despite the swirl of emotions dancing deep in her chest, each of Morgan’s accusations stirring a new wave of recognizable dread. Morgan was speaking as if she knew her, as if they were friends, as if they had some deep connection that Vic had just severed by saying how she felt.

She was speaking the truth, and it was all too much to handle. She scoffed out a bitter laugh, shaking her head at the name calling.  Morgan’s grandmother wasn’t even alive when Vic was a teenager.  

There was a moment after Morgan’s calm words, a beat that hung in the air between them, but it was directly followed up with the storm that was Vic. “Are you done?” she asked, her voice coming out with more uneasy gravel than she intended.  “You’re the one being dramatic if you think me offering words of advice is so offensive.”  The words fell out of her mouth like lava, burning and vicious and unstoppable.  Later, when she was alone in the dark of the night, she’d bore over them, wondering why, why, why she didn’t ever stop.  “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me.  Everything you think you know is made up in your head to make things seem nicer.  I haven’t suffered, to burst your bubble, I’m just a shitty fucking person.   We’re not friends!”  The silence that followed was deafening, encompassing, suffocating.  They weren’t friends, they never would be, because there was nothing friendly or lovable she could offer.  She wiped at her eyes, finding tears there once more.  Weak. With a flare of her nostrils, she turned on her heels, running out of Morgan’s garden in double the time it’d taken her to arrive.  Going there, thinking something nice would come out of it, was a mistake, and she was sure she’d never be back.

[skznct127treacting]

My Stalker - Bang Chan (1/4)

October. A time for endulging in whimsicals fancies of corporate candies, horror movies, spooks that are camp and creeps that are chilling and for your small town - the Halloween carnival. The carnival had been a tradition for as long as you could remember, coming for the weeks leading up to Hallowe’en, with the main attraction being a haunted house - the likes of which had won numerous TV awards for being one of the scariest attractions in the country, with it being particularly popular amongst your age pool - adolescents and young adults.

You, yourself had never been. Perhaps it just wasn’t something of interest to you, or perhaps you were, like all your friends said - scared. What was there to be scared of? Well a lot. There’s a clown room for one, a maze room with a masked chainsaw man chasing you, a serial killers basement… need I go on? 

Regardless. This year. The year of 2019, was slightly different. Because one of the scare actors had caught your attention. Bang Chan. He had started the year late, but had somehow managed to weasel his way into your classes course. He was reserved and quiet, kept to himself mostly. He sat at the front of the class and was always early, he didn’t volunteer much but got 100% on almost any test he took. When people tried to engage with him he would laugh and be sarcastic and cynical and look at them with such intensity that you could swear he was burning a hole right through their skull - it was a look of superiority and confidence. Most people didn’t see that though, they just took his jokes at face value, but there was something cutting about them, something with an aura of uncomfortable truth to them.

He favoured dark clothes, sportswear mainly, he had an athletic build and was constantly slouching, making him appear shorter than he actually was. 

The first week you didn’t talk to him much, not having a reason to, but then the most peculiar thing happened. A week after he arrived you broke one of your pencils in your bag, it must have been crushed by your lunch, or your water bottle, or the endless notepads and folders you carry. Regardless, you put it on your desk intending to bin it after class but forgot to pick it up. 

The next day however, after class ended Chan pulled you to the side just as you were leaving, as you felt his heavy hand on your shoulder and turned to see he had your pencil - perfectly fixed and glued together, so meticulously that you couldn’t even trace the cracks.

“You should be more careful Y/N,” He teased, in his charming but acidic way as you stood there confused and unable to process why he had done this for you.

“Is this my pencil from yesterday?” You asked rolling it between your fingers, surely he had just bought another one or given you a spare. Which was equally weird, but hey it was a more logical explanation.

“What? No?! I fixed it for you Y/N,” he said - drawing out your name again as though enjoying the way it tasted. “I’ve seen you use that one a lot, it’s a pretty cool pencil with the sparkles and rainbows. It’s cute.”

Now your face had been peppered with a pink blush, the strange compliment leading your wave of confusion to be overlapped with that of fluster. 

“I’m Chan by the way,” He said loudly as though intending for you to hear his name. To remember it. You already knew his name of course, having been curious about him for some time. Your friends had done the whole social media stalk and found his facebook page filled with pictures of nights out with his friends, photos at the beach, his dog, his soccer activities. Your friends Josie and Eve were already in relationships though, and having seen the slight gleam in your eye when looking at his pictures - well, they both tried to push you into speaking to him. 

“Oh well nice to meet you. I saw you moved halfway through September, that must have been tough for you. How are you settling?” You asked putting the pencil in your pocket staring up at him only to look away, as though his bright glare was like that of the sun.

“It’s been alright so far, I’ve managed to catch up with classes,” He shrugged moving restlessly from side to side. “Well some of them…”

“I thought you were doing really well all things considering you seem to be getting full marks.” You smiled at him, and for the first time you saw his smile, as he beamed back at you. It was the type of smile that lit up his face and made him appear less intimidating, it was at this exact moment that you felt your heartbeat jump.

“Yes well from speaking to people everybody says your the best at this module, which isn’t surprising, I mean the only times I’ve seen you outside class you’re always in the library studying,” He said still with that charismatic smile, his movements becoming more animated, it was like as though for the first time you were meeting the real him. Of course this second outburst of compliments only deepened your rouge cheeks to scarlett.

“I mean I know some of it but-”

“Well if I ever get stuck I know who to come to for tutoring. Besides your in my debt now,” He smirked looking down at the pocket you had put your pencil in. “Well I’ll see you round Y/N~”

And as he set off the oddest thought crossed your mind… how did he know your name? I mean you had found his out through him telling it to other people when he introduced himself but he had never witnessed no such interaction on your part. He didn’t even sit near you. And what was with the pencil? Who does that?? Why??? Why does he need help? Why did he arrive late to school? All the while your head felt light, dizzy with the interaction, you had never acknowledged his looks and charm for yourself before, you had never felt like this before, nobody had taken such notice of you before. All the while Chan’s footsteps paced the hallways growing lighter, his smile widening, for he knew all the answers to your questions. 

That had been the first interaction, and after you had told Josie and Eve they brushed off the whole pencil thing as creepy, along with him, he was a creep, and they took back every good word they had ever said about him. The three of you were out that day, rummaging through shops for a decent Hallowe’en costume, it may only be the start of term but everybody’s mind was on the Monsters Bash on the 31st October which your school was running, it was to be an outside ball on the sports field with marquees and fairy lights and bunting, cheap alcohol would be provided along with Hallowe’en candy and students were already planning where they would pre drink and where the after parties would be and the buzz was only intensifying as the event neared.

“Slutty witch, slutty nurse, slutty cat, slutty clown… huh slutty scooby doo,” Josie rattled as she sorted through the outfits on the railings. She was a tall girl with a lithe build, long brown hair, pale skin and with an effortless beauty that you envied, she could make anything look stunning. Even a slutty scooby doo costume. 

“Imagine how many people are going to go as the Joker this year,” Eve said, rolling her eyes as she stood on the opposite side of Josie, she was the shortest of the three of you with dyed red hair that was constantly in some type of complicated braid, with her sweater sleeves always pulled over her hands and her shoes always a worn out pair of black converse. 

“I know! I’ve already had to persuade Jack that we’re are not going as Harley and the Joker, I upset him, and now we’re not doing a couple costume anymore.” Josie pouted.

“Same!! Me and Daniel couldn’t agree, I’ve told him for the millionth year that I’m not dressing up as Sally and Jack. It’s just so unoriginal.” Eve shot back with equal passion.

You stood there unable to contribute to such talk of relationships as your mind swirled to thoughts of Chan, what would he dress as this year? Would he even attend the Bash, did he even have anybody to go with? Like sure he had friends, but he didn’t have friends that he could go with. The thought of inviting him crossed your mind, but that was wayyy too ahead of yourself, but perhaps, if you talked to him more and got closer maybe you could go together. Maybe for once you wouldn’t be the 5th wheel in your friendship group.

“What are you going to go as Y/N?” Josie said pushing all the clothes on the railing to one side in dismay as you left the shop.

“Hm I’m not sure yet,” You said pausing your train of thought on Chan.

“Well I got an idea looking at that scooby doo costume.. how cute would it be if we went as the Hex Girls from that show, we can have our own couple costumes,” Eve piped up as Josie shook her head.

“No way! Who's going to get that reference?” Josie replied.

“Erm.. the intellectuals!” Eve laughed. “And if we don’t win best costume, I’ll literally sue the school.”

“So you’d be Luna, I’d be Thorn and Y/N can be Dusk?” Josie said, slightly coming round to the idea.

“Oh my god it’ll be soooo cute!” Eve gushed as you just nodded your head. 

So that was that on October 31st 2019 you and your 3 friends were going to the Monsters Bash as a 90s goth girl group from Scooby Doo, if that didn’t win round Chan.. what would??

Well after that shopping trip at the weekend Monday rolled around. It was the first day that you’d see Chan again since your class together on Thursday and you had spent the whole weekend playing out scenarios in your head like a bad fanfic. When you arrived to class you were surprised to see he hadn’t arrived yet which was verrry unusual for him so you sat in your usual seat towards the back and began to unpack your stuff. Too focused on this activity you had barely noticed somebody come and pull a seat next to you as you looked up to see Chan.

It may be because you had gotten a crush on him but damn he was looking way more handsome than you  thought he was. His dark eyes glanced at you as his dark brown hair, had been dyed a sludgy green over the weekend which was the first thing you complimented him for, it framed his face differently to his blonde hair, made him seem even more mysterious and alluring, his cheekbones more defined, his jaw sharper, his hair cut shorter slightly as you noticed several ear piercings down his ears. 

“Good morning Y/N,” he said cheerfully, although you could see how tired he was from the shadows under his eyes and a sheepish paleness to him.

“How was your weekend?” You asked, only thinking now that maybe it was a bit forward that he had just sat next to you today, with it being the only day he had been late, but those thoughts were pushed out with concerns for him and thoughts of his looks and your curiosity and- and- and-

“It was decent. I had a lot of practice to do though. I somehow managed to get a job at the ghost house and we’ve been doing rehearsals all weekend,” He said slamming his notebooks onto the table next to yours. You noticed him pull out a little red notebook by accident which he quickly shoved to the bottom of his bag which he kicked to the ground and under the desk. “What about you?”

“Oh that’s so cool. I’ve never been to the ghost house myself but I love the carnival. Well we went costume shopping for the bash but didn’t find anything, but we decided what we wanted to be though,” You said, subconsciously smiling at him.

“Whose we?” He asked raising his eyebrows.

“Oh just my friends Josie and Eve, they’re in different classes to me,” 

“And you’re going as….?”

“We are going as the Hex Girls if you know who that is, I’m going to be Dusk, you know blonde hair, green dress.. The drummer..” 

“That’ll be really cute,” He nodded as you felt that dizzy feeling again from his compliments, you were about to reply but with that class had begun.

[thegizka]

Say Cheese (fic)

The InoShikaCho Formation is a rising band currently on tour following the success of their first album. With some free time before their performance in Konoha, Ino meets her best friend Sakura for lunch to catch up on the wild twists their lives have taken.

Inspired by Ino Week 2019 Day 7: AU.

Note: I do not own any of these characters.

Read it on Ao3.

-----

Ino finished pinning the intricate braided twist of her hair before smoothing her long fringe.  Donning a floppy, wide-brimmed hat, she did an outfit check in her mirror.  High-waisted lavender capris hugged her hips, and a few inches of well-toned stomach peaked out beneath the scalloped hem of her loose white crop top.  Chunky white sandals, a stack of thin bangles, and large ombre sunglasses completed the look.  It was chic and anonymous without betraying her personal style.  She was ready to go.

She sent a quick text to Asuma to let him know she was heading out before stepping into the midmorning sunshine.  Pulling the motel room door closed, she descended from the second floor walk, noticing as she passed that Shikamaru’s curtains were still drawn despite the morning stretching into lunchtime.  She had invited him and Chouji to join her, but they wanted to spend their day sleeping and playing video games before tonight’s show.

She walked across the gated motel courtyard and let herself out at the front gate.  She could call for a car, but the weather was nice and she was familiar enough with the city to feel comfortable walking.  Her only possible concern was paparazzi and fans swarming her on the sidewalk, but it was still a novel enough experience to be a minimal risk.

There were a lot of people wandering between the shops, taking advantage of the warm late-spring Friday.  There were mothers coraling children on errands, businessmen discussing sales plans en route to lunch meetings, and young couples out on dates.  There were also crowds of college kids escaping their studies to enjoy the beauty of the day.

Ino contemplated swinging by the Konoha University campus, but she found that other young adults were most likely to recognize her, and she wanted to preserve the time to herself.  When she had convinced Shikamaru and Chouji to form a band four and a half years ago, she could only dream of signing a contract, producing an album, and going on a national tour.  But somehow here they were, halfway through a tour playing venues that were nearly ten times bigger than the bars and music clubs where they had started and working on music for their second full-length album.  It was a wild ride, and there were still a lot of elements of the industry she was learning to adapt to.  Life on the road under the ever-increasing public eye was new territory, and she knew it would only get more complicated as their success and popularity grew.

For now, though, she could navigate this city with nearly the same anonymity and lack of care as she had the last time she’d come here.  It felt like a lifetime ago.  She and her best friend Sakura had been touring the university, which was renowned for its medical program.  At the time, Ino had been entertaining the idea of becoming a neurosurgeon since the band was still working on gaining traction in the music scene.  If Shippuden Studios hadn’t offered them a contract a few short months later, she would have joined Sakura in pursuing her medical degree.  It was amazing how quickly the trajectory of her life had changed.

She had quite liked the university and city back then.  Built on the shores of a beautiful, large lake, Konoha was always buzzing with vacationers and students, a hub of activity and modernity.  She liked the balance of relaxing beaches and glowing nightlife.  It could have been a place for her to flourish.  She supposed it might still be, in a way.  Tonight’s concert at Hokage Pier would be their biggest show yet and a potential test of whether they could handle even greater popularity and success.  But she had hours before she had to take the stage, and she was looking forward to catching up with her bestie.

She was meeting Sakura at Cafe Konan, a lovely upscale bistro built above the beach with a patio overlooking the water.  They had eaten there two years ago after their tour, excitedly discussing the state of the art medical equipment and decorated professors they’d get to work with if they went to school here.  Ino arrived early and procured a table in the corner of the patio with a great view.  The beach was already peppered with people spreading out blankets or wading.  A few sailboats drifted further out on the water.  Seagulls darted above the surf looking for food.  If she had time, perhaps she’d join everyone for a stroll on the beach.

Ino spent the rest of the wait enjoying the fresh air and snapping pictures.  Some days she’d take over a hundred, staying up late to sift through them and select the best ones to feature on her Instagram.  She’d always had a good eye for composition and framing, and it had been a natural step to expand her personal account while spearheading the band’s.  As stardom put increasing demands on her time, they’d hired a publicity and marketing manager, Kurenai Yuuhi, to help keep their fans updated and satisfied.

“Still attached to that phone I see,” a pleasant voice called, interrupting her study of filters and lighting.

“Still attached to that big forehead of yours,” Ino retorted, but she was grinning broadly.  Jumping up from her seat, she embraced her best friend tightly.

“It feels like I haven’t seen you in forever!” Sakura exclaimed, returning the embrace.  “How have you been?  You look good.”

“So do you,” she observed, pulling back.  As much as she made fun of her best friend for her large forehead, she really had grown into it.  She stood before her as a mature young woman, sure of herself and free of adolescent insecurities.  A form-fitting red shirt and white shorts flattered her figure and long legs.  Ino was happy to see her so comfortable with herself.

“You’re growing your hair out again,” she observed as they took their seats.  “It looks good.”

“Thanks.  It’s a little easier to tie back now for labs and surgery.”

“And what does Sasuke think of it?” she asked, a teasing lilt to her voice.  Sakura just rolled her eyes.

“We haven’t been together for more than five minutes and you already want to talk about boys?  You haven’t even told me how the tour’s going!  Boys can wait until after we order.”

“Fine, but I expect lots of juicy details.”

They worked through the obligatory topics of conversation as they ordered their food and waited for its arrival.  Sakura groaned about the stress of school and the medical field, and Ino complained about the obligations of being a working musician.  The venting, however, was more ritualistic than sincere, as both were excited about the opportunities before them and content with where they were.

“Will you have time to visit home before your internship with Dr. Tsunade starts this summer?”

“I’ll have about a week, but I might need that time to find an apartment.”

“You’re moving here permanently?” Ino asked, a bit surprised.  Her friend shrugged.

“I still have a few years of school, and if I continue to get jobs and internships with my connections here, it’s not really worth carting my stuff back and forth for just a week here and there.  Plus you’re on tour most of the time now, and Naruto’s always traveling for his international diplomacy degree.  There’s not much to anchor me there anymore.”

“But there’s more here,” Ino probed, reading between the spoken words.  “Like Sasuke?”

“You are relentless!” Sakura grumbled with a smile.

“Only because you’ve been dating the hot pre-law student we met while touring here two years ago for a whole six months, and I just found out about it last week!  I’m entitled to more information as your best friend.”

“I know,” Sakura sighed.  It’s just hard to talk about.”

“What do you mean?  Is he super weird?  He doesn’t mistreat you or anything, right?”

“No!  Not at all!  He’s wonderful, just a bit...complicated.”  She swirled the water in her glass, smiling softly.  Ino could see a blush brushing her cheeks.  She’d never seen her best friend like this.  They had always been bold about their crushes, at least around each other, but this was different.  It was the delicate and deep feeling of mature attraction, maybe even love.  Ino was a bit jealous.  But she was also really happy for her.

“Sooo, how did you guys meet?  And I don’t mean being in the same tour group as prospective students.”

Sakura rolled her eyes, then began her story as they began tucking into their food which had just arrived.

“I used to see him all the time in the library, and I was pretty sure I recognized him from that tour, but he was always super focused on his work so I never approached him or anything.  But it was like every time I went to the library to study and get work done, he’d be there with that freakishly intense focus.  It turned into a game I’d play with myself--‘where’s the cute guy going to be this time’?”  She chuckled at the memory.

“Is he a nerd then?”  Ino asked.  “I figured only nerds like you would voluntarily spend that much time studying.”

“Ha ha,” Sakura laughed drily.  “And no, he’s not a nerd, he’s pre-law, and he helps at his family’s firm part-time so he’s always busy working on something.”

“Ah, so he’s a rich boy.”

“His family has money, yes, but I wouldn’t say they’re rich.  He had to take out student loans, same as me.”

“Have you met his family yet?”

“Hold on a second Miss Nosey.  Do you want me to finish my story or not?”

“Fine!  I’ll hold all questions until the end,” she smirked, spearing a scallop nestled amongst her linguine noodles.  “Carry on.”

“I didn’t actually talk to him until right before winter break last year.  Tenten, Hinata, and I went to this party that Tenten’s friend Lee was hosting, and Sasuke was there.  I guess he and Tenten’s boyfriend Neji had a few classes together and became friends so we ended up hanging out a bit at the party and chatting a little.”

“And he was immediately smitten and declared his love the next day.”

“Not even close!” Sakura laughed.  “We didn’t even exchange numbers!  And for a while I thought he hated me.”

“What?!”

“I know!”  She continued giggling.  “I totally didn’t know how to read him!  Sasuke exudes this effortless cool, but he’s actually hopeless with social cues half of the time.”

“So why did you think he hated you?”

“Because I’d never get the response I was expecting when I tried to be friendly!  Our interactions would be great when we were hanging out in a group, but if I was talking to him one-on-one, he’d seem distant.  He even stopped going to the library to work, or he’d leave shortly after I’d show up, which made it obvious that I was some sort of problem or annoyance to him.”

“Oh my gosh Sakura!  And you’re dating this jerk?!”  Ino leaned across the table.  “Why didn’t I know about any of this?  That’s awful!”

“It’s fine, Ino.  It really wasn’t that bad.  My feelings were hurt, but I still didn’t know him all that well, and I had plenty of school work to keep me busy.”

She studied her best friend’s face, reading the echoes of embarrassment and pain as she recounted this part of the story.  She knew Sakura.  If she was smitten with a guy, she went all in.  She was too honest with her feelings to hold back.  Ino felt ashamed that she hadn’t known her best friend was struggling.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I didn’t know you were going through all of that, and I wasn’t there for you.”

“Ino, it’s okay,” Sakura promised, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand.  “I had my friends here, and Naruto visited a lot.  It really wasn’t that bad.  You already had enough on your plate with your album blowing up the charts and Asuma booking so many interviews and performances for the band.  You didn’t need my drama on top of that.”

“But I could’ve handled it!  I’m your best friend.  I always have time for you.”

The promise tasted like a lie even though she willed it to be true.  The band’s success had swallowed so much of her time and energy.  Nearly every moment she was awake was spent working on music or travelling to some venue or curating social media posts.  She hadn’t seen anyone outside of the band and crew in months.  Realizing her new circumstances might make her inaccessible to loved ones in need was a painful reality check.

“I know,” Sakura assured her, trusting in the promise even if it wasn’t practical.  “But this really wasn’t a big deal.  I figured I just needed a bit of distance, and I was going to have all summer for that.  I stayed on campus to help Dr. Shizune with some research, and it was kind of nice having the school and city to myself for a while.  I didn’t have to worry about running into Sasuke at the library or while out shopping, until I did run into him on the beach one day.”

“I hope you didn’t literally run into him.”

Sakura laughed.  “Of course not!  I was looking for a spot to sit and read and suddenly there he was.  Apparently his family doesn’t live too far from here, so he and his brother come her to swim sometimes.  I don’t think I would’ve noticed him, but he recognized me and decided to say hi.”

“Wait, the guy who was ignoring and avoiding you approached you to say hi?” Ino asked, flipping disinterestedly through the dessert menu.

“I know, it totally caught me off guard!  But he was really nice, even though it was a bit awkward.  And his brother Itachi was really nice, too.  So we chatted for a bit, and we texted each other once in a while after that.  When he was visiting town, we’d try and hang out a little, and then we hung out more once the school year started up again, and now we’re officially dating.”

“Hold on, one minute he’s giving you the cold shoulder and now you’re dating?  Seems like a dramatic change,” Ino said doubtfully, handing her credit card to their waiter before her best friend could protest about not splitting the bill.

“He wasn’t giving me the cold shoulder.”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.”

“I told you, it’s complicated,” Sakura sighed.  “Sasuke is very driven.  If he has a goal, he does absolutely everything he can to achieve it.  It’s just how his brain is wired.  So when I came around and was being super friendly and seemed to always show up where he was trying to get work done, he deemed me a distraction and tried to distance himself so he could focus on school and stuff.”

“He decided friends were a distraction?  Seems awfully utilitarian.”

“Not friends.”  Sakura shook her head, a blush forming on her cheeks.  “Just me.”

“Oh my gosh, he was smitten!”  Ino slapped the table in excitement.  “This is some Mr. Darcy-level denial!  Damn Sakura, you go girl!”

“Ino stop!” she protested, cheeks growing bright red.  Despite the embarrassment, she was smiling happily.

“So what changed his mind?”

Sakura shrugged.  “I’m not sure exactly.  I think part of it was just the timing.  We happened to run into each other during the summer when he didn’t have to focus as much on school or work or impressing his father.  Plus I think Itachi liked me, and Sasuke puts a lot of value in his brother’s opinion.”

“And now that school’s back in session?  I assume you’re not a distraction since you’ve been dating this whole time.”

“I guess not.”  She shrugged again, but Ino could see the blush returning.

“Sakura,” she probed as they wove through the other tables to the front door.  “You’re keeping something back.  Come on, you can’t hide anything from me.”

“I asked him about it when he asked me to be his girlfriend officially, and he told me that everything else was the distraction and...now I am his new goal.”

“Oh my gosh!” Ino squealed.  “That’s so cheesy but so romantic!”

“I know!”  Sakura hid her embarrassment behind her hands, ears almost as pink as her hair.  “He has no flirting ability whatsoever.”

“Good thing you don’t mind cheesy one-liners,” Ino laughed, pulling her best friend into a hug on the sidewalk.  “I’m really happy for you.”

“Thanks.”  She felt the joy radiating off of her, seeping into her own body and dispelling the simmering jealousy with love.

“So, do I get to meet him today?  You’d better be bringing him to the show.”

“No, unfortunately,” Sakura sighed, pulling out of the embrace.  “He has to help his family this weekend.”

“Bummer,” she pouted.  “You have to promise I’ll get to meet him before you two get engaged.”

“Okay,” Sakura laughed.  “Do you have much time before the show?  There’s a great ice cream stand on the beach.  We could grab some dessert.”

“Yeah, I should have time,” she confirmed.  “Just let me update Asuma.  He likes to know where we are in case anything happens.”

“Makes sense.”  Her best friend linked their arms and leaned over her shoulder as she sent the text to her manager.  If it was anyone else, Ino would consider it nosy.  Instead she opened her camera in selfie mode so they could snap a pic together making silly faces.

“Come on,” Sakura chuckled, pulling her along with their linked elbows.  “You listened to me jabber all through lunch.  It’s your turn!  What’s new with you, besides conquering the world as a chart-topping musician and fashion icon?”

She shrugged.  “Not much.”

“Come on,” Sakura sighed,”you’ve been on the road for months and have nothing interesting to report?”

“Not really.  It’s a lot of the same stuff every day--arrive at the next show’s city, maybe do an interview, practice with the band, write music, do the show, and then hit the road.  It doesn’t leave much time for anything interesting.”

“But you get to travel all over the place and meet other musicians and famous people!”

“The famous people part rarely happens.  We’re not at the level of fame to be recognizable.  Like I’m not getting swarmed right now by fans so it’s not a big deal if we land a few late night interviews.  People will forget who we are as soon as we leave the set.  Which is fine, because my life still has a semblance of normalcy.  I can go to the grocery store or have lunch with my best friend without worrying about paparazzi.  I’m just so busy that I rarely get to do such things.”

“It sounds complicated,” Sakura observed, studying her friend’s face.

“It’s just the way things are.”  Ino smiled to reassure her.

“How are Shikamaru and Chouji handling it?”

“They’re pretty much the same.  Lazy, of course, but I think part of that is intentional.  It’s part of their public personas.  I don’t get it, but it seems to work for the fans.  There’s always a crowd of girls screaming hysterically for them at every show.”

Sakura chuckled as they stopped at an ice cream stand, pulling her friend into the line.

“And what about you?  Are there swarms of boys begging to see you every night?”

“There’s always a few, and sometimes some girls, too.”

“Really?”

“Mhm.”

“Look at you playing to both sides,” Sakura snickered.

“Hey, I can’t help it if I’m just so hot that everyone wants a piece of me.”

“Whoa there tiger, we’d better get you some ice cream to cool you down.  What do you want?”

This time Sakura snuck her money to the cashier before Ino could.  She protested a little but Sakura was already handing her the ice cream, and she had to stop arguing to eat it before it melted.

They wandered onto the sand, enjoying the sweet treat and beautiful weather.  The sun danced on the lake, fracturing its reflection into diamonds while boats bobbed and seagulls wheeled through the air.  The sound of waves whispering on the sand and happy voices murmured in the air.  It really was a lovely day.

“Y’know, I think Sasuke’s a bad influence,” she mused.  “‘We’d better get you some ice cream to cool you down’?  Terrible.”

Sakura laughed, loud and carefree.

“It was wasn’t it?” she chuckled.  “But really, between Sasuke and Naruto, can you blame me?  They’re both hopeless at flirting.”

“And somehow they’ve both got girlfriends now.  Isn’t life strange.”

“Maybe all girls secretly like cheesy pickup lines,” Sakura mused around a mouthful of ice cream.

“Or maybe we take pity on guys for being brave enough to use one.”

“Do your fans every give you silly pickup lines?”

“Nah.  I can usually tell which ones want to flirt and which ones are simply fans.  I find it’s best to avoid the former.”

“Would you ever consider dating a fan?”

“Nooo,” she groaned.  “I mean, whoever I date would have to like our music, but I think it’s a little creepy for a person to pursue someone just because they really like what he or she does for a living.  The band is just a small part of who I am, y’know?”

“But what if he’s genuinely a nice guy?”

“I can’t,” Ino declared firmly.  “If I open up that possibility, I’d have to consider every fan begging me for a date, and I can’t do that.  I need a boundary between my personal life and my professional one, for myself and whoever I might end up with.”

“It’s going to be hard to find someone with how much success the band’s having,” Sakura murmured gently.  Ino could feel a hint of pity in her words.  She didn’t want to be pitied.

“It’s just a little more complicated,” she said brightly, brushing her fringe back into place with her fingers.  “But I’ll figure it out.”

“You will,” her best friend agreed with the total confidence of someone with complete faith in making her dreams a reality.

“I suppose it’s good we haven’t really made it big yet,” Ino used.  “If I do meet someone, he’s not likely to be obsessed with me already.”

“True,” Sakura agreed.  “And you won’t have to worry about gossip magazines or paparazzi scaring him away.”

“Hopefully not, though those photographers can be pretty sneaky.  Take, for example, the camera that’s been trialing us since our ice cream stop.”

Sakura’s eyes widened a little in surprise.  “What?”

“Mhm,” she hummed, crunching the last bite of ice cream cone.

“Where?”

“Sakura, don’t look for him!  Either you’ll scare him off before I can yell at him, or he’ll take the acknowledgment as permission to set up a mini photo shoot right now.  Just act normal.”

“I totally didn’t notice anyone,” Sakura whispered, trying to resist her curiosity to look around.

“Shikamaru has the best paparazzi radar, but I’m getting pretty good at spotting them,” she replied with just a smidgen of self-pride.

“So if we’re not supposed to look at them, what do we do?  Try and shake them off?”

“If I’m doing something super boring I just ignore them until they go away.  Knowing my coffee order usually isn’t tantalizing enough for their magazines to sell.  But sometimes I do confront them and put the fear of Asuma into them.”

Sakura laughed at the thought of her friend’s laid-back manager being enough of a threat to scare anyone.

“Which will it be this time?”

“Come here.”  Ino led the way to a pile of rocks wedged into the sand.  The bank at this end of the beach started rising, eventually turning into a cliff.  Several college kids were diving off the rock with shrieks of joy.  There were fewer people at this end of the shore, which decreased the likelihood of her cover being blown when she confronted the paparazzi.

“Just relax.  We’re going to lure him in,” she instructed, leaning back on her hands.  She tried focusing on the warmth of the sun and ignoring the adrenaline building in anticipation of the confrontation, but she couldn’t keep a smirk from her lips.  She rarely dealt with paparazzi on her own as usually her bandmates and Asuma were with her, but Kurenai regularly met with all of them to go over how to proceed.  The guy following her today looked young, probably an enthusiastic new journalism graduate who couldn’t land a job at a reputable news company.  She almost felt bad for the chewing out she was preparing for him.

“That’s a cute shirt,” Sakura observed as she finished off her ice cream.

“Thanks.  It was a birthday gift from my mom.”

“She actually bought you a crop top?  Willingly?”

“Apparently she has no issue with them now that I’m an independent adult.  Plus they’re a trademark of my personal style.  I think she’s admitted defeat in her efforts to keep me away from them.”

“Excuse me.”

Ino was surprised by the polite voice.  She hadn’t noticed anyone approach, which was impressive considering she was on alert waiting for the photographer to come nearer.

“You!” she gasped, realizing it was, in fact, the very guy she had been waiting to ambush.  Seeing him up close, he really was young.  Maybe he was just an intern.

“Would you mind if I take your picture?”

“What?”  She couldn’t believe the presumptuousness of this guy!  His polite smile didn’t waver.  Was he really acting like he hadn’t been stalking them, sneakily snapping pictures for the past several minutes?

“Yes I do mind!” she cried, rallying through her surprise to stalk as intimidatingly as she could across the sand to him.  “I know you’ve already been taking pictures of us.  You think I’m unfamiliar with dealing with paparazzi?  I know exactly what you’re doing!”

“Ino-” Sakura began, but she wasn’t going to let her friend’s politeness stop her now that she’d started.  She really wanted to see that guy’s unwavering smile crumble.

“No, I may be familiar with jerks snapping pictures of me everywhere I go, but you definitely didn’t sign up for this!  And we have an exclusive agreement with the Hidden Leaf Times for all media coverage, so unless you produce proof that you’re working with them, which I doubt since this is such a shady way of getting content, you need to hand over all of those pictures you’ve taken and leave.”

“I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

It was unbelievable.  That smile didn’t move.  Did he think this was funny?  Did he enjoy being this rude?

“Oh really?  How about I get my publicity manager on the phone so she can explain in detail all of the legal violations we’re going to smack on you.”

“Hang on-” Sakura tried again, but Ino ignored her.

“And then I’ll call our connection at the Times so they can come after you.  What right do you have to invade a person’s privacy by following them to sneak pictures and then pretend you’re innocent and ask for permission after the fact?”

“Ino!”  Sakura grabbed the phone from her hand.  “He’s not paparazzi!”

“What do you mean?” she snapped.

“He’s just a photography student from the university!  Hinata’s had a few classes with him.”

Ino blinked at her friend for a moment, registering the laughter in her green eyes.

“It’s true,” the boy agreed.  He still had that grin plastered on his face, but his eyebrows had edged up to indicate bemused confusion.  “I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Ino, this is Sai,” Sakura introduced.  “Sai, this is my friend Ino.  She’s the lead singer and guitarist of The InoShikaCho Formation.  They’re performing tonight at Hokage Pier.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he smiled.  Ino wasn’t quite ready to make friends, though.

“If you’re not paparazzi, then why were you following us taking pictures?”

“I was practicing,” he claimed innocently.  “My teachers are always telling us to take any opportunity we can to improve our skills.”

“Shouldn’t you ask for permission before you take pictures of someone, even if it’s just practice?”

“I’ve heard it can be better to ask for forgiveness after the fact than for initial permission.”

She didn’t understand this guy.  No matter what questions she threw at him, his smile never wavered.  It was annoying.  But the more she looked at it and studied his face, the more she believed him.

“But why follow us?  Surely it’d be better to practice with a variety of subjects.”

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all day.”

“Wha...Huh?” Ino stammered.  Sai blinked at her, smiling innocently.  Was he being genuine?  Sakura snickered behind her.

“What the heck!” she cried, feeling flustered.  The prick of heat in her cheeks told her she was blushing.  “You can’t just say that to someone you just met!”

“But I’ve been told that honesty is the best policy.”

She could only blink at him, dumbfounded, blush growing deeper.  How was she supposed to respond to this?  Was he just being smooth, or did he genuinely think she was beautiful?  She couldn’t tell what he was thinking behind that charming smile.

“Say cheese,” he instructed, quickly bringing his camera up to snap a picture of her bewildered face.

“H-hey!” she stammered.  “I never gave you permission!”

“Sorry, but if I always waited for permission, I’d miss too many perfect shots.”

She didn’t know why his words made her feel warm all over, but they did.  Before she could gather her wits and come up with a reply, Sakura handed her back her phone.

“Shikamaru’s calling you.”

“Yeah?” she answered, eyes still glancing at Sai.

“It’s nearly time for rehearsal.  Where are you?”

“At the beach with Sakura.  Sorry, I must’ve lost track of time.”

“Do you need us to send a car to pick you up?”

“No, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Okay, see you soon.”

“I have to get going,” she told Sakura, slipping her phone back into her purse.  “I’ll see you later tonight.”

“I’ll be there,” her best friend promised, giving her a big hug.

“And you,” she said, rounding on Sai.  “You can keep those pictures as long as you don’t post them on social media.  And you have to give me a copy of all of them.”

“Works for me.  Can I get your phone number or email then?”

Ino fought against another blush.

“Just give them to Sakura.  She’ll get them to me.  I have to go.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, beautiful,” he smiled.

“Yeah,” she mumbled, turning and hurrying away before she lost her composure in another flustered blush.

-----

A few weeks later, Ino lay sprawled in her bunk on the tour bus scrolling through a folder of pictures.  She had been surprised to see Sai again at the concert that evening.  It turned out he was interning at the Hidden Leaf Times for the summer and was one of the photographers they sent to cover the band’s time in Konoha.  They hadn’t interacted much, but Ino had been hyper-aware of his presence throughout their interview with the paper and the concert.

True to his word, he had passed on all of the pictures he’d taken both at the beach and Hokage Pier to Sakura, who in turn emailed them to Ino.  She had to admit, he had a good eye.  She found herself scrolling through the pictures a lot, not because she loved how she looked in them (though they were all pretty flattering), but because they were just that good.  She thought she had a good sense of composition, framing, and lighting, but Sai seemed to have some deeper knowledge that elevated his work to art.

She’d used a few of the shots for social media posts, careful to credit him.  She’d learned from Sakura that he didn’t have social media, but he did have a small photography website, so she linked to it at the bottom of each image.  Sometimes when she was bored she’d check his website to see if he’d posted any new pictures.  It was her way of keeping tabs on what he was doing without being obvious and bugging Sakura to tell her about him.

It was weird.  She didn’t know him at all, and the fact that he’d followed her along the beach still gave her paparazzi vibes, but she couldn’t get him out of her head.

She opened a new window in her browser and logged in to her email.  She found a draft that she’d started nearly a week ago and read through it.

Dear Sai,

Thank you for the photographs of our performance.  The band was impressed by their quality!  I hope you don’t mind, but we’ve used a few for our social media posts.  We were sure to credit you and link to your website.  We probably should have asked permission first, but since you’re fond of taking opportunities as they come and asking forgiveness later, I figured you’d be okay with this.  If I was mistaken, let us know so we can take down the pictures.

I don’t know if you are aware, but our band is nearly finished recording our second album, and it’s time to start considering the design elements that will go into it.  We don’t yet have a photographer for the booklet and album art.  We were all so impressed with your work at the concert, we’d like to offer you the opportunity.  I know you’ll be returning to school this fall, but once our tour’s over, our time will be more flexible, and I’m sure an agreeable arrangement could be made.  Are you interested?  Let me know.

All the best,

Ino Yamanaka

She reread the text a few more times, even though she nearly had it memorized.  Technically the band hadn’t decided to ask Sai to be their photographer, but the few times she’d mentioned it, everyone else had been open to the possibility.  She was confident she’d be able to get them to agree if Sai said yes.

She debated a few moments on whether to add her phone number, chewing her lip.  That was the biggest reason she hadn’t already sent the email.  She’d denied him her contact information at the beach; why should she give it to him now?  But now they were discussing business arrangements.  It’d be a little rude to withhold it...right?

With the sense that she was doing something risky, she quickly typed her number beneath her name and hit send, trying not to squeal.  She was being so silly!  All she’d done was extend a business invitation to another professional (even though he was technically still in school and may or may not have a photography license), yet she felt giddy like a little girl.

She closed her laptop and rolled out of her bunk, stretching a little.  Maybe she’d go play Mario Kart with her bandmates to distract herself.  Turning towards the common room, her phone pinged to alert her of a new notification.

Her heart jumped when she saw it was a new email.  Sai had already replied!  Why had he done so so quickly?  Was he mad they’d used his pictures?  With some trepidation, she opened the message.

Dear Ino,

I’m glad you liked the photographs.  I do think they’re some of my best so far, though half of the quality comes from the subject being photographed.  You and the band made my work far easier, and the results wouldn’t have been as good without you.

I’d be happy to work with you on the photographs for your next album.  Perhaps we could meet to discuss your ideas.  I know you’ll be in Suna next Thursday.  Shall we meet for lunch?  I’ll call you to work out the details.

Kind regards,

Sai

Ino bit her thumb to keep back the happy squeals that were trying to climb up her throat for some reason.  He’d included his own phone number, which she saved to her contacts.  Then she reread his message, paying special attention to his postscript.

P. S. I hope you come prepared with your beautiful smile.  I’ll bring my camera with me.

It was a strange note to include, but it made her cheeks warm.  Maybe he was flirting with her.  She shook her head, trying to brush off the thought.  No, they were simply going to discuss business, even if it was going to be over lunch and he was specifically calling her to arrange it.  She could tell him to call Kurenai or Asuma instead, but she was capable of arranging a meeting on behalf of the band by herself.  And if she happened to schedule it when only she was available, surely they’d trust her to represent them all.

She brushed her long hair over her shoulder and turned up the volume slightly on her phone before turning again toward the common room, grinning and excited for whatever was coming next.

[dwayners13]

Lainey Can’t be Manipulated by Greg, Because Lainey Has a Psychology Degree???. . . WTF

I’m not sure who told Lainey or Greg that having a B.A in psychology somehow makes you immune from being in a manipulative relationship, but here’s the truth. (Just to put this in context, one of my undergraduate degrees is in psychology, I work in the mental health field with adolescents & young adults).

1.) Lainey didn’t have a B.A when Greg started talking with them or dating them, in fact, (if I’m not mistaken) Lainey didn’t even have a high school diploma at that time. Seventeen year old Lainey was a HUGE fan of Onision & believed they were soulmates based off his videos & social media. That’s a relationship ripe with potential for manipulation.

2.) A psychology degree gives you an excellent foundation in psychology, with respect to: it’s history, terms, schools of thought (cognitive/behavioral, nature/nurture etc.,.) the basics of various sub specialties (developmental, clinical, industrial, forensic etc.,.), a basic understanding of how research is done (control & experimental groups, compound variables, sample population, standard deviations, t scores, methodology etc.,.) & it provides you with the knowledge/background to then pursue a masters in psychology if you want to . . . however, the idea that simply obtaining a B.A makes you immune from manipulation or would make it so you could avoid being manipulated in a relationship, (especially one you’re already in) just isn’t realistic. 

3.) While having a B.A in psychology can potentially give you a better understanding of human behavior in comparison with someone who doesn’t have any formal education in this area, the idea that you can’t be manipulated represents one of the common misconceptions some graduates have, in that they overestimate their competency, capabilities & qualifications. For example, Greg & Lainey seem to think that since Lainey has a B.A., Lainey would know if Greg had a mental health diagnoses/disorder, which as Lainey should know is absolutely ridiculous. Where I live/work, having a psychology degree alone doesn’t even qualify you to get a job as a counsellor, let alone give you the ability to ascertain if someone you know does or does not have a mental health disorder. A psychology degree barely scratches the surface when it comes to knowing the various DSM diagnosis’s, the criterion for making a diagnosis, the various &/or specific testing instruments used in connection with specific area of concern (ie., what test are used when an individual might be showing signs or potentially possesses characteristics associated with a particular disorder/diagnosis).

4.) Even if Lainey took a senior level course in ‘‘Identifying Manipulation Tactics Commonly Used in Romantic Relationships” (I just made that course up as an sarcastic example) & scored at the top of their class, when you are involved in a close, intimidate relationship with someone, you lose your objectivity & develop a subjective bias that significantly interferes & negatively affects your ability to see things from an objective standpoint which is CRUCIAL. You tend to overlook certain concerning or problematic behaviors, excuse, ignore &/or justify other indicators of manipulation, as you don’t want to A.) believe your partner would do that, B.) believe that you could be being manipulated & not even realize it (by someone you love no less)  & C.) want to believe you’ve spent all these years in a manipulative relationship & didn’t realize it.

5.) When Greg started talking about wanting Lainey to get a girlfriend, so ‘Lainey’ could explore ‘Lainey’s’ bisexuality, saying that he just wanted ‘Lainey’ to be happy, that he worked a lot & a woman could give ‘Lainey’ something he couldn’t, I think A LOT of people could see where this was going & what Greg’s ultimate agenda/goal might have been. If not, they probably saw it when Greg specifically encouraged Lainey to give a certain attractive 19 year old (Billie) a ‘second chance’, even though Lainey expressed concerns that he & Billie seemed to be doing most of the talking during the first visit, to which Greg assured Lainey there was nothing to worry about as he was just being ‘friendly’. We all know what happened on the very next visit, once Greg realized Lainey didn’t want to include him in exploring their bisexuality, he literally used what he called “MANIPULATIVE LANGUAGE”, in order to do the things he wanted to do when he was left alone with Billie. Things he knew Lainey would’ve said ‘no’ to if he had been honest about his intentions. Greg even acknowledged that he felt Lainey ‘owed’ him, with respect to a threesome. If you think Greg trying to have a threesome with Billie & Lainey just ‘happened’ with no advanced planning or forethought, I’m not sure what to tell you. Right after Lainey wouldn’t consent to the threesome & left, Greg immediately focused on Billie, even telling her he ‘loved’ her, despite the fact it was only the 2nd time he met her & he previously told Lainey they had nothing to worry about after the first visit. When someone admits to using a tactic that, they themselves call ‘‘manipulative language”, what additional proof of manipulation could you possibly want or need. 

A good & (I believe) fair definition of ‘manipulative language’ (especially the way Greg uses it) would be, “intentionally using broad & vague language, in order to conceal your true intentions, but which can later be justified as being connected to the behavior, although very loosely & not overtly obvious prior to the behavior occurring.

6.) Even after promising Lainey, he wouldn’t use “MANIPULATIVE LANGUAGE” ever again (in fact, it was in the infamous relationship contract Greg drew up), HE USED IT AGAIN. And just like the first time, it was  because he want to do something with Billie (have sex without Lainey) that Lainey had already said no to. It’s Ironic that Greg says Lainey is the ‘‘alpha” in their relationship with respect to what he can/can’t do sexually, considering he just uses manipulation tactics (i.e., manipulative language) to get around Lainey’s ‘alpha-ness’. 

It gets even worse, as even though 1.) it was Greg’s idea for he & Billie to have sex, 2.) he broke the contract by not being honest & instead using manipulative language 3.) Lainey suspected what Greg’s true intentions really were, but instead of addressing it with him, they went to Billie 4.) Greg was the one who approached Billie for sex 5.) Greg acknowledged that when Billie repeatedly brought up Lainey being mad & not wanting this, he repeatedly told Billie it was okay because he talked with Lainey . . . yet Greg & Lainey blamed Billie because SHE didn’t keep HER promise to Lainey.

It gets even better, in order to show Billie was sorry to ‘Lainey’ & committed to their relationship, Greg gave Billie a number of options she could pick in order to show that she was sorry to ‘Lainey’, one of the options was to be tied up in the basement for 3 days, something Greg characterized as ‘hot’ & called “50 shades of Greg” (as it would fit into his ‘dom’ fantasies quite nicely) . . . So he got to: 1.) break the relationship contract he made, 2.) have sex with Billie even though he wasn’t supposed to, 3.) got Lainey to blame Billie for not stoping him & best of all 4.) one of the ways he wanted Billie to show ‘Lainey’ she was sorry, was to have Billie grant GREG one of his ‘‘Fifty shades of Greg’ domination fantasies . . .again,  to prove she was sorry to Lainey. Does anyone not see the manipulation in that. He got want he wanted, was able to blame the other person & the punishment for the other person  . . . was to grant him one of his ‘dom’ fantasies. Gee, that’ll teach Greg never to use manipulative language ever again. And according to Lainey, at this point they didn’t want to continue having a relationship with Billie, so why was Greg trying to get Billie to do these things, if not for his own benefit..

I know this is just my opinion, but If this isn’t manipulation, I’m not sure what is.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Greg is some ‘master manipulator’. iIn fact, I don’t think that he’s very good at it (at all), as the only people Greg seems to be able to manipulate are some teenage fans & those JUST out of their teen years. This is why I think A LOT of many adults have a problem with Onision pursuing relationships with not just teenagers in general, but teenage fans who look up to him.

(Please excuse any errors in grammar, spelling, tense shifting etc.,. I have an LD & usually have someone edit my writing, however not when it comes to stuff like this. It would cost me a small fortune)

[not-a-statement]

Chasing ghosts. Chapter 2

So for some reason I can’t edit my masterlist for this story. On of us - me or tumblr - is definitely a clumsy fool. 

Anyway, it’s been a long time but here I post again. This chapter introduces original characters and focuses on them exclusively.

Critics and opinions are always appreciated.

Baton Rouge,LA, January 23, 2035

The general office of the State Police Department was filled with sounds and people typical for Monday morning. Investigators, detectives, even a couple of court clerks were moving slowly between the work tables. Phones ringing, Maggie's coffee machine softly grumbling, detective Nate Parker rants about his little rendez vous with a couple of girls past weekend, which caused an occasional bursts of laughter from a small group of listeners. Someone’s complaining about son, who’s got yet another detention at school. That scallywag was caught smoking in the school closet during lunch break. “I mean, come on! What’s the school’s backyard is for? What’s wrong with these children?”

All this leaving no chances at all for detective Robert Brooks to focus on completing the report. Frankly, if there was anything consistent to write then probably no excuses could take place. The missing was found the week prior in the Pine Prairie area - one of the tourists called the police and said that near the shore of Lake Millers lied a body of a dead girl dressed in a white light dress. By the time detectives and the team of medical experts arrived, a decent crowd of onlookers gathered around the corpse, hence searching for traces at the crime scene wouldn’t be for big avail.

What else?

There’s no doubt that the victim was killed - even though the lungs were full of liquid and the fact that clothes and skin of the deceased were pretty much hinting that she’s spent plenty of time in the water, a rope trace was found on her neck. So, the drowning was staged.

By whom?

Well, here’s where interesting questions start.

No wonder why the crime scene was so crowded - case after case were quaking the whole country. People kept disappearing in a daylight - single men and women of different ages, usually without family and friends - those who wouldn’t be immediately claimed missing. Generally the search would last for about a week or two only to let detectives stand before such corpses (and it could’ve been worse, if one believed Nate the Chatter Box) or find victims alive but absolutely insane. Wearing rags, disoriented, and with no memory at all, no one even remembered their names.

People were frightened. And no one had even a small clue, even a hint, about this maniac’s whereabouts or appearance. His work was flawless - every time a new case appeared in press, this bastard’s already in another state. Probably.

At least everything looked like that  - no one had accurate information. And, which was a very bad thing to say, such cases were a nightmare for any detective - perfect addition to the record. There were adventurers, of course, who wanted to catch their own Zodiac, but most people were genuinely concerned about their careers.

And so it happened that careerist Brooks was not only brought to a partner of the adventurer Tam Bennett, and more so, he was appointed to investigate such a case.

Robert sighed, once again glancing over the printed report page on the computer screen.

Elizabeth Arthrisha Marlowe, born in 2019, blah blah blah ... Numerous abrasions on the arms in the forearm, blah blah ... The time of death was determined between 9 pm and midnight on January 17 of this year ... and more rubbish. Seriously, what else to write?

When he and Tam just started the investigation about two weeks prior Robert was saving hope that that time would be a fluke. Children and adolescents haven’t figured in such cases so far, and a sixteen-year-old girl could go to carouse with friends, or with some guy - anything. But the fact was bulletproof  - the corpse of Lake Millers was identified, parents were heartbroken, Captain Hernandez was constantly inspecting for progress on the case, and Bennett was obsessed with all sorts of theories. Or women.

Where is, by the way, that boy this time? Monday, ten in the morning! Wasn’t it Tam who kept calling me all Sunday while I tried to spend the day off with family, and reminded of all the chores to do on Monday? That’s not even funny.

Okay...This won’t work. Perhaps the morning coffee-tobacco ritual will help clear the thoughts? Yes, sounds good. A cup of Colombian black with cream, a spoon of cane Mexican sugar and a pinch of cinnamon in a compartment with a cigarette and fresh morning air. The first good idea for today, Brooks.

Robert got up from his desk stretched and headed for the dispatcher's counter. After receiving his equivalent of the Holy Grail from  Maggie, he passed the doors leading to the office, a corridor filled with civilians who were brought here or who came by their own will, then the hall and finally went into the parking lot in front of the department building. The weather was pleasing, here and there, however, small flocks of clouds were gathering, but the sun was shining warmly. The city, long awakened, performed a symphony of the weekday - passing pickup trucks and small cars, ordinary townspeople and important birds like lawyers and real estate agents scurrying around here and there. You could even hear a heavy truck driving in the distance.

Someday all this will be rewarded, Brooks thought, releasing cigarette smoke and slowly sipping from a mug with the inscription "Best Daddy in the World". Another five years, and I’ll be in higher position, and five more - and here comes the retirement. A small house in California somewhere in Palo Alto, a neat little garden for my Mary and a home winery for both of us. Our Aaron and Lucy would come over for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter ... imagine - a festive table with the family and you are sitting at the head of the table. What else can you dream about? Life will be like this cup of coffee - warm, reliable and with a very long aftertaste, if sipping small ...

“Aaaaaah!!!!”

Mother of…!!!

Brooks threw up his hands in surprise, spilling half the contents of the mug on the sidewalk. Thank God not on a work shirt.

"Are you trying to give me a heart attack at thirty-seven?" he yelled into Bennett's laughing face, sticking out of the silver Volkswagen’s window. Tam's hand was still on the honk.

"Seriously," he panted through his laughter, "you would see your face, Bob! Standing there, caught up in a daydream, and then this - Aaaaah!”

He mocked Robert’s grimace of horror.

That laughing blond face was so tempting to throw the rest of coffee at it! First he’s late for work, and now he decided to mock me!

All right, calm down, Robert, calm down. It would be disrespectful on your part to respond to the pranks of this toddler overgrown.

"Not funny, Tam," he said, trying to sound dignified, "what took you so long, by the way?"

“Oh, oh, oh! " Tam started fidgeting in the seat, shaking his arms around him.

"Wait ... where was it ..."

He began to search for something, bending in all imaginable and unthinkable directions. The front passenger seat, glove compartment, pockets on the doors, even under his feet. As Tam reached there, his head fell on the steering wheel with a swing, causing one more honk.

"Just find a spot and park already" Brooks said, rubbing the bridge of his nose with two fingers, pain in his voice. Seriously, not a partner, but a complete disappointment.

After Bennett parked his car in the far corner of the parking lot, and Brooks reached the porch of the building, finishing his coffee (great, the sugar at the bottom did not dissolve completely, and now the last sips are too sweet, splendid), they exchanged a handshake and went inside.

"I'm still waiting for the answer, young man" Robert said as strictly as he could as they crossed the hall.

"First, I'm not your son," replied Tam, smiling. "And second, I decided that I’d make you a surprise."

"What surprise for God’s sake? What are you up to again?”

"Don’t worry, Bobby, you'll like it! Very much!”

"Can you at least pretend sometimes that you're a professional?”  Robert didn’t like all those glances from people around, attracted by Tam's enthusiastic exclamations.

"Nah, I'm gorgeous just as I am" Bennett shrugged as they approached the door leading to the general office.

"Take the keys and wait for me at your car. Mine is... umm ... not in the purest condition today. I need to go to Sam, I'll be back in a moment”.

“Oh for love of...”

"Maggie! My doll!” - Bennett exclaimed, pressing his lips to the hand of the dispatcher, who immediately blushed and playfully giggled. The white blouse, she was wearing, obviously lacked buttons in certain places, which caused a lot of discomfort to Brooks. Bennett, apparently, didn’t mind this kind of view.

"How was the weekend, my sugar? Had many men kneeled?”

"I think you'd know better, detective," Maggie purred innocently  "or am I wrong?"

Really? In front of the whole office, these two would exchange so unconcealed expressions of passion and lust? Where’s the ethics committee when you need one?

"I'd love to know more ... dig a little deeper if you let me put it this way ..."

Wow! Okay, not listening to this! Gross and obnoxious!

"All in good time, detective. But next time you shouldn’t forget your promises about ... special equipment.”

The phone rang at the dispatcher's desk, putting an end to this vulgar scene much to Robert's relief. While Maggie, still crimson and still with a half-detached blouse, were answering the call, Tam winked at his partner and pronounced "handcuffs" with his lips, pointing his finger in the direction of that spicy’s lover. Just like a student at a dorm party.

"Don’t forget the keys!" he added, quickly moving away from the counter in the direction of Captain Hernandez office “I'll be in a sec!”

Brooks stayed where he stood, setting the mug on the counter. 

Here we go. Got nothing else to do but to stand here and wonder what this scoundrel has in mind. Every time. Every goddamn time. Easy to wound up with a half-turn, and everybody better run away within a radius of a couple of miles around. Cars soar into the air, tiles fly from the houses’ roofs, women in  panic, children crying. A real hurricane. Safe for the name - Tam, not Andrew.

"It's not even the first month that he works here. Sam lectures him constantly, I give instructions, and look at him. Always jumping ahead, as if his head’s made of stone and will demolish any wall”  Robert thought out loud “what's even going on in his brain? ..”

"Dunno much about the head, Bob," Maggie said in a caramel voice reappearing at the counter, dreamily slapping her eyelashes, "but trust me, what's going on in his pants ..."

"You know what, I already regret saying it out loud!" Jesus Christ, would this vulgarity scene come to an end already?!

Brooks got to his desk and sat down in the armchair. The plan for today, which could hardly be called consistent as it was, began to become completely insane. First the report, which he had nothing to write in, then spilled coffee, all sorts of bedtime insinuations - yes, Robert knew what sex was and where the children came from, he himself was a father, but that's too much - and now it's time to arm with a trowel and a little plastic bag to walk this boy. We ought to find a leash. Maggie probably would have one ...

No, no, that's a bad joke. Very bad.

Okay, probably the report can be a time killer, while Tam’s chatting with the captain. It’s not like time killers are always pleasing but what you gonna do, right?

At least there were some people who’d probably be happy with whatever Brooks wrote for a report of an adolescent girl’s horrifying murder. Newspaper editors.

It looked like they’re making it a competition to draw more attention to their source of information compared to competitors. "The Oregon maniac visits Louisiana." "Yet another reason to use the door chain." "Mysterious kids killer at large".

Blah blah blah. Scribblers.

Of course the case is serious and everybody mourns for the girl and prays for her parents to smother their misery, but is it really necessary to play with people's hearts like that? Add in the photo plastered on the front page - a police tape in the foreground and a bunch of people crowding behind it. Fresh stuff, just from the crime scene.

On Friday evening, when Brooks was about to leave home, anticipating a delicious chicken breast with Parmesan and eggplant for dinner, he found Nate and Tam in the interrogation room, staring intently at that exact photo from the newspaper. Enthusiasts. They say that the criminal always returns to the crime scene. So both decided to play bloodhounds. Also Robert could smell some booze in the room too, so...

On the other hand, if one took a sober look at things, then there wasn’t anything consistent either. No traces, no clues, even the smallest. Absolute zero. Robert had already suggested Hernandez to hand over the case to the special squad to take that burden of a case off his shoulders, but every time that question popped up Sam would just grin and pat Brooks on the shoulder.

"Bob, what are talking about? You have such an experience, such record! And what a chance to be a mentor to the young one!"

Sounds easier than it is...

“Surprise!” a folder fell sharply on the table in front of Brooks.

Oh my God…

“Cheer up, partner!" Tam said, plopping down in the armchair opposite to Brooks. "We have a case!"

"Um, I know," Robert raised an eyebrow, "and you always find an excuse to slick away"

"No, you don’t understand, Bobby." Bennett majestically placed his palm on the folder, touching it with his fingertips, and slowly moved it towards Brooks. "We have a case."

Robert, still looking suspiciously at the youngster, took the folder and opened it, going into reading. Photo, name, surname, lots and lots of text. With every line he read, the hope to at least somehow bring the present day to an acceptable level, was slipping away. It seemed that having a leash wasn’t a joking idea, but a very real necessity.

Brooks gave his partner a glance full of fatigue and disappointment.

“Well, am I good at making surprises or am I the best?” Bennett's brows creased conspiratorially.

"Please tell me this is a joke ..."

“Why?”

“Tam, I’m begging you.”

"What's wrong, Bob?"

Brooks heaved a deep sigh and began to read aloud.

“Mabel Jessica Pines, born in 1999, Piedmont, California. According to her landlords arrived on January 18 of this year from the city of New York. According to Smiths couple - owners of the apartment at 881 West Roosevelt Street Miss Pines rented - she came across as a modest, quiet woman, not particularly talkative and constantly thoughtful. Her interests were the surroundings, especially the University of Louisiana and Manchac swamps. Mr and Mrs. Smith also noted that she preferred not to answer questions about family and relatives. Only said that she was married, but got divorced a few years ago. Wasn’t seen participating in any phone calls. On the 20th of January she left the rented apartment and never came back. Was dressed in a gray coat and a long skirt, carrying a medium-sized travel bag and a mobile phone, which she stopped responding around 7 pm. Left a laptop and a notebook in the apartment”.

Brooks put down the folder and brought his hands to the bridge of his nose, resting his elbows on the countertop.

"Great, isn’t it?" exclaimed Tam. “Full set - you’ve got clues and description! All we need to do is restore her route, trace each her step, find her perso... What?”

Brooks, still holding his hands on the bridge of his nose, pointed to his partner with his finger, as if asking him to plug his fountain of enthusiasm.

"What's bothering, Bobby?"

Calm down, Robert, calm down. You are reasonable, smart man. You’ve had many of such conversations with your young son Aaron. It's the same, no differences.

"Bob, you're straining me."

Easy, easy. I'm straining him, you see. Well, well, let it be, a little bit of tension didn’t kill anyone so far. I'm still alive.

"Listen, you're breathing as if you've gone too far with pepper in the soup, Bobby.”

All right, that's enough.

Robert slowly raised his head, holding his hands together at the tip of his nose. He was breathing really deep and quite noisy.

"First," he began softly, clearing his throat, "call me Bobby one more time and you'll be riding in the back seat. And second, we have no new case. Foot down”.

Tam whistled.

“Hmm, mate, you're …”

"Let me ask you something" interrupted Robert, "when you accepted this case, which part of your organism was functioning as a thinking part?"

“What does it have to do with it? It's such an opportunity!”

“What opportunity? Tell me" Brooks asked, still keeping his coolness.

Tam looked at him with an expression of complete perplexity a second or two, then leaned forward and began:

“Listen. What’s the main problem we had with the Marlowe’s case?”

“The case itself.”

“I'm serious.”

“You don’t say! You know how to be serious?”

"Look, this isn’t funny” Tam frowned. "Our main problem was time which we’re lacking of. What did we initially know about the Marlowe girl? Almost nothing, neither where most likely she could go, nor her full circle of acquaintances. So no one expected that her loss could be just such a case.”

“What case?”

"Such a case" Bennett pointed to the folder, "clear as day."

Brooks raised his eyebrows.

"Give me at least a hint because I don’t really understand ..."

“There’s nothing to understand here. A lonely woman, from another city. Comes to nowhere and almost immediately disappears!” Bennett could barely restrain himself from being excited. "This is our Oregon maniac, I'm telling you."

Well, here you go.

When it comes to do paperwork, he has plan for the evening. And when it comes to burden me with additional stress, so he's first in line. It’s already becoming unbearable. How do I explain him?

"Ok, Tam," Robert said, restrainedly. "Here’s what we’ll do. You’ll take this muck to where you took it, wash your hands with soap and then we'll go to your piano tutor.”

Bennett made an uncomprehending face.

“Seriously. We are not taking this case and that’s final. We've had enough trouble with that Marlowe girl" Tam started to protest, but Brooks stopped him, lifting both his hands “No, I'm saying that’s enough. Get yourself a notebook, call it "My hasty conclusions that have nothing to do with reality" and write down all your speculation there.”

Robert got up from the table and began to pull on his jacket.

“Now you and I will get in the car, go for a coffee and do some work.”

With these words, Brooks took his car keys from the table, checked once more whether the token that hung on his belt of trousers was there and was ready to the exit the office when Bennett found something to say:

"So you'll go to Sam yourself?"

“For what?” Brooks froze half a turn, looking back at his partner.

Bennett just shrugged.

“Well, to tell him personally that you refuse to take the case, which he himself commissioned, for example?”

Sam did what?

“Come again.”

"The captain of the state police department assigns us a case, and you stand against the decision of your superiors." Bennett smiled ingenuously.  “Pretty brave of you, I must say.”

Oh no. No no no.

So it’s not Tam? Can this day get any worse?

Brooks sighed noisily and lowered his head, staring at his polished black boots. How many thresholds were overstepped by these guys, how many pursuits for criminals and capture operations they saw. How many times did Brooks polish them to shine, to look neat, while receiving a new title or listening a praise for a successfully disclosed case. How long have they gone and for what? In order to soon go to the dump together with the Robert’s career.

The vision of the house in California again appeared before him and immediately melted in a light haze. Nothing of the sort will happen if the captain continues to charge Robert with such hopeless cases and companions.

“So what?” Tam behind Brooks pointedly looked at his watch. “What did you say about coffee? Can we grab a cup for Sam? Well, you know, as a sign of respect and …”

"Come on ..." Robert muttered softly.

“Sorry, what?”

Brooks raised his eyes to the ceiling and repeated a little more distinctly:

“Come. On”

Bennett, grinning in a broad smile, instantly jumped from his seat, grabbed a folder from the table and flew past a still motionless partner, slapping him along the shoulder.

“That’s more like it!” he proclaimed joyfully. “New case, baby!”

Would you just shut up already an unfortunate thought flew through Robert's head as he sadly followed Tam out of the office.

***

“And she had very kind eyes. Hazel” Brooks looked into his notebook. Yes, this phrase has sounded for the third or fourth time for those half an hour from the time that detectives arrived to the landlords of the missing.

“Kind, but very sad eyes …”

"Yes, Mrs. Smith, I think I wrote it down," Robert said, holding out his hand to his cup of tea on the coffee table in front of him. Mr. Smith tumbled in the room noisily puffing, holding an ashtray in one hand while the second was already groping for his pocket.

“Anna really liked the girl” Mr. Smith perched in a chair next to his wife. The ashtray was placed on a table next to the cup of Brooks, and in the pocket finally found the coveted pack of cigarettes. A mischievous smile played on Mr. Smith's lips.

"Henry, for heaven's sake!" His wife threw up her hands. "How many times have I asked you not to smoke in the house! You know, my back does not welcome airing so often.”

"You can bear it once a week honey" Henry brought his lit-up match to a cigarette with trembling fingers then inhaled and immediately fell into a ruthless throaty cough.

Anna Smith shook her head worriedly, looking at her husband, and turned to the detective:

"I told him that forty years of smoking would make some consequences. Imagine - he wasn’t listening to me until he laid down on the surgery table! Who knew that you can get a tumor like that, right?”

"Benign," Henry finally cleared his throat, "it was benign, my dear. And the main thing I’m still in one piece. Head, hands, legs” he winked at the detective and folded his old mouth into a grin like a little mischievous schoolboy.

“And what’s betw…”

"When you, ahem ..." Robert hastily intervened to stop the phrase, which beginning wasn’t biding anything good "when you applied, you mentioned that Mabel reluctantly talked about herself. I believe that you’ve learned at least something about her?”

"Yes detective but very, very little." Mrs. Smith clasped her fingers and put them to her forehead, concentrating on something.

"She said she came from New York," her husband said, releasing a cloud of blue smoke, "god knows what called her to our backwoods ..."

"Oh shush, Henry." Mrs. Smith shook her finger in vexation. "I'm sure detective knows already where the girl came from."

“Can I clarify the question?” Brooks put the notebook aside on the table. “The bartender from the diner near the bus station mentioned that in a conversation with him Mabel said that she came in search for someone. Didn’t she tell you the same thing? Maybe mentioned who it was?”

"Ah, poor thing! Did she have to eat breakfast there?” Mrs. Smith shook her head in frustration. "If she came at once, I would feed her with a decent breakfast. What kind of muck could she be offered there?”

"They used to have good burgers," Henry shook the ashes, "at least five years ago, when I last had them ..."

“Nonsense! Burger for breakfast?”

“Ahem. Mrs. Smith …”

"Yes, sorry" Anna turned her attention to Brooks. "No, she didn’t say anything like that to us. She was married, that's all I know about her life. But her husband didn’t interest her very much, as far as I can tell. I did not see a ring as a lock, so he’s probably still alive. Maybe he was quite a scoundrel”

"And what’s her husband's name?"

Anna just shook her head.

"Forgive me, detective, but I never heard it from her."

From above came the sound of the door being opened, followed by hasty steps down the stairs. Found something a thought rushed through Robert's head. A moment later, Tam appeared in the room. His face was ... disappointed?

"Mrs. Smith, you wrote in a application that Mabel had a laptop and a notebook."

"That's right, young man, she left them in her room."

Brooks stared at his partner's face, puzzled. Tam only shook his head briefly.

"Is something wrong, gentlemen?"

"Have you left your house in the last couple of days?"

"Just to do shopping yesterday afternoon ... what happened?"

Brooks rose abruptly, and they both hastily rushed to the stairs to the second floor. Mabel's room was nothing particularly noteworthy - a bed, a desk, a window and four walls. Things were lying neatly, the bed was made. It seemed that the guest had left a minute ago.

“Checked the window sill?”

“Yes, it’s dusty as if no one touched it for several years”

“A lock on the door?”

“Just a latch, any fool would open without a trace ..”.

Brooks slowly walked to the table, on which was a layer of dust accumulated over the past few days. All the items seemed to be in their places, but two square spots were barely noticeable near the edge, in which dust seemed to sink.The distance between the spots was about 9 inches, as between the pads of a small laptop.

"I think we're done here" Robert muttered.

***

"So someone broke into the house at night, or when the hosts were not there," Robert and Tam were driving away from the Smiths' house toward the police department, "I think we both understand that it was our client."

“Here you go, drawing conclusions again!” Brooks briefly honked the driver who was still standing on the green traffic light signal.

"Maybe it's our client, or maybe just a burglar."

“Burglar who took only a laptop?”

"Did you have time to inspect the rest of the house? Found anything valuable?”

“No, but …”

“Exactly. Maybe he was in a hurry”

“Come on, you're just looking for an excuse not to solve for 2 and 2”

“I'm looking for an excuse to conduct an investigation of a case imposed on me correctly”

"Come on, Bobby, this is an adventure! Now we write a request to New York, find her family ... hey, need to have a leak?”

Robert pulled over and stopped abruptly. After that, he turned his head staring at his partner intensely.

“What?”

Brooks slowly moved his head toward the back seat.

"What’s that?" Bennett looked back “I can’t see anyth…”

Coming to a realization he slowly turned and gave his partner an incredulous look.

"Are you kidding me?"

Robert shook his head sarcastically.

"You're not serious."

"Very serious, Tam." Brooks looked at his watch briefly. "Hurry up, we're running late."

Rolling his eyes Bennett leaned back in his seat looking up above while groping for the handle. Twenty seconds later, when he got into the back seat and slammed the door behind him, Robert said with satisfaction:

"You have to bear responsibility for your words and deeds, dear Tam. Welcome to the world of adults”

He heard a loud raspberry being blown from behind and noticed in the rearview mirror that Bennett was now staring out of the window with his arms folded.

“Who I'm talking to though…”  Robert tiredly complained without addressing anyone “Seriously, my eight-year-old son behaves more adequately”

He accelerated and detectives continued their way to the department building.

[frickfrackjimin]

The One With The Prom Video

⇻ For twenty years, you had always viewed Jung Hoseok as your best friend’s cousin, who you could also probably call a close friend considering all he had done for you. It takes you one night and a home video to realize just how much he has done, and just how much you truly feel for each other. 

Pairing: Hoseok x reader  Genre: Fluff, mild angst (if you squint really hard?)  Words: 5k  Inspired by: Friends Season 2 episode 14, “The One With The Prom Video”  Warnings: Mild language, mentioning of alcohol, mentioning of drugs 

You were ten years old when you first met Jung Hoseok.

You don’t remember anything special about the details of the day. What you were wearing, what he was wearing, what you said to each other. You assumed you were wearing something along the lines of Bermuda shorts with a camisole over t-shirt combo from the department store you always shopped in with some obnoxious neon jewelry that you seemed to always wear in the fourth grade. He was probably in something like basketball shorts and a t-shirt, like most other boys his age wore. None of it really seemed to be that important at the time.

Jung Hoseok was always just your best friend, Hana’s, older cousin. He was constantly hanging around at her house since the two of them were stuck together more than glue itself. His family lived right next door so it was uncommon to find the two of them separate. This, unsurprisingly, meant that you saw quite a bit of him as well.

You never attended school with him. Aside from him being two years older than you and Hana, you also both attended an all-girls private school until high school, while he attended a co-ed public one. Once you hit high school, you both finally convinced your parents to let you attend a co-ed private school instead.

In your elementary and even middle school years, you loved being able to have Hana all to yourself at school, since you knew once she went home, she would practically be at Hoseok’s beck and call.

Even though Hana and Hoseok were close, when they were younger it was less of a friendship/close family relationship. More like Hana following Hoseok around trying to do everything he did, since he was older and in association, cooler. It took until she finally hit her moody teenage years to grow a backbone and stop doing everything Hoseok asked her to.

For a while, you didn’t see much of Hoseok. He was around age sixteen, and you and Hana were fourteen. Hana had said that his parents had shipped him away to some dance camp for the summer. It was in hopes that his semi-“rebellious” phase – that honestly was the worst way to define Hoseok getting detention twice for being late to school – would dwindle down.

When he had returned at the beginning of the school year and you saw him again, he had changed. He was a lot friendlier towards both you and Hana, and had grown about three inches. His jawline had slimmed down and he looked a lot older than he had in June when you last saw him. Even though he looked different and was a bit kinder, he was still the same Hoseok you knew before the summer had started. This was proven when you went to pour sugar in your cereal one morning after sleeping over and the top fell off, making all of the sugar in the container dump into your Rice Krispies.

Yep, the same, annoying Hoseok.

To be fair though, you had changed as well. You turned fifteen over the summer and one of your birthday presents from Mother Nature was boobs! Yep, that’s right. Boobs. You had gone up two whole cup sizes and had grown an inch as well. You and Hana had also spent the summer learning how to properly do makeup – no more of that too dark foundation and blue eye shadow from the local drug store. You spent almost all of your birthday money at Sephora and stayed up all night watching tutorials on YouTube in preparation for the start of high school in September.

Looking back on that summer now, fifteen years later, you find yourself laughing. You cared so much about how others would perceive you as you entered what you thought would be the most important years of your life. It’s comical now, at age thirty, that you really thought high school would be the prime of your life.

Now, at age thirty, you had already been engaged once. That lasted for a hot second before you realized you had more attraction to a closet door than you did to the guy and broke it off after a month. You had also gone to college and gotten your degree in secondary mathematics education and had a full-time, paying job as a geometry teacher at the local high school. You were still wallowing in student loans, especially since a teacher’s pay is pretty much shit. The kids could be assholes sometimes too, but when you’ve had a rough day, you still had Hoseok and Hana to cheer you up after all these years. Except now the cheering up included a bottle or two of wine.

That’s how you ended up here, sitting on the couch in Hana’s living room on a Friday night. Your group had expanded over the years, now including a girl named Yeona that Hana met in her first college class, and two boys named Namjoon and Jimin. Hoseok and Namjoon were roommates all throughout college and stayed in touch even when Namjoon moved in with Jimin, who had posted an ad online about needing a roommate. The six of you had been there for each other throughout the good, the bad, and the ugly over the course of the past decade.

It was finally time for Hana to join the club: the “I’m in my 30’s and still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing” club. Her birthday was on Sunday and in preparation for the huge party you would all have to tolerate tomorrow, you decided to pre-game with some alcohol and old home videos from the comfort of Hana’s living room. She had found a huge box of unlabeled DVDs at her parents house the previous week and decided that in celebration of her thirtieth time around the sun, she wanted to spend her Friday night watching the lot of them. The sixth movie of the night was playing on her flat screen, where a video of Hoseok and Hana playing his dad’s drum set at ages three and five could be seen by the six pairs of eyes glued to it.

“Hoseok, why the hell are you holding the sticks like that?” Yeona choked out through her laughs.

“I could barely hold a pencil at age five, how the hell was I supposed to know how to properly hold drum sticks back then?” he retorted back, taking a swig of his IPA.

“I bet you still wouldn’t be able to hold them correctly now,” you giggle in response from your seat on the floor.

“Hey! I’m very musically inclined!”

“With your voice and your dance steps you might have called yourself as J-Hope, but when it comes to instruments you’re J-Hopeless,” Hana retorts.

“Wow, very original, never heard that one before,” Hoseok mutters, lips touching the beer bottle but not taking another sip. “I thought we agreed to not bring up that nickname ever again?”

“Oh come on Hoseok, this is a night of reminiscing. I for one, would love to reminisce on how you insisted we call you J-Hope the first summer after you went to dance camp because you thought you were some hot shot with every ounce of swag you could have,” you say, trying desperately to hold back a string of laughs.

The rest of the group let out laughs of disbelief at the mention of Hoseok’s short-lived teenage nickname.

“Okay that’s enough, onto the next one,” Hoseok announced, trying to ignore the comments Hana was making about no doubt more embarrassing things from his adolescence. He stood up from his spot on the armchair and placed his beer on the side table before walking over to the DVD player. He ejected the disc and without looking placed another one in the slot and pressed play.

The laughter had finally died down by the time Hoseok had sat back down on the blue armchair placed next to the couch.

Everyone focused on the TV, waiting to see what memories would appear next.

When the screen finally loaded, you were met with the image of your parents standing with Hana’s mom in her kitchen. Hana’s dad’s voice could be heard from behind the video camera. Your dad had a regular camera in his hands, and they all seemed to be excited about something.

“Are they coming downstairs soon?” your mom asked Hana’s, looking excited.

“Yes, mom, we are,” you heard your own voice from behind the camera. It panned around and you’re all met with the image of you and Hana, dressed in gowns with hair and makeup done, ready for your senior prom.

You smile faintly, remembering how much effort you had put into looking nice that night.

You shopped for months for the perfect dress before deciding on a champagne colored mermaid dress with beading up the bodice. Hana had done your hair in a half-up, half-down look and you had done a dramatic smokey eye to compliment your bronzed skin. You remember tanning outside with Hana for two weeks straight trying to get enough color to look good in the dress.

Hana had spent just as much time on her appearance, wearing a silver dress that was also beaded from head to toe. Her hair was completely up with loose curls framing her face and even though she had done formal makeup, it looked minimal on her but it worked. She never needed to wear much anyways.

You heard saw Hoseok shuffling in his chair from the corner of your eye. Turning to look at him, he stutters out, “Oh, we don’t have to watch this.”

Complaints came from the others, insisting that they all wanted to continue watching. Hoseok continued to shift uncomfortably in his seat as his attention shifted across numerous objects in the room. You stared at him confused, but returned your attention to the screen again.

“Oh you look so great! So beautiful!” you hear from your parents behind the camera.

“Dad! Turn the camera off!” Hana whines, attempting to push the camera away from her face.

“This is a momentous occasion sweetheart! You only go to senior prom once!” he chuckles.

“Unless you’re Hoseok, then you don’t go at all,” she snickers.

“Oh you hush,” Hana’s mom scolds.

“Damn, you guys got THAT dressed up for prom? I went in a dress I found at JCPenney for $50, straightened my hair and called it a day,” Yeona states, shoveling a handful of popcorn in her mouth.

“I didn’t even go to my prom. My friends and I skipped and went to the beach that weekend instead. Smoked a fuck ton of weed,” Namjoon laughed.

“It was important to us!” you exclaim. “We happened to have been asked by some of the cutest guys in our school!”

“Guys from a private school? I don’t trust it, those guys are always dickbags,” Jimin replies.

“Shush, you’ll see! When we were eighteen they were peak cute.”

“How about now? Still peaking?” Jimin chuckles.

“Shut up, Jimin.”

Chuckles emit from the group as you all turn back to the TV.

“Now that you mention him, where is Hoseok?” you hear Hana’s dad ask, turning the camera around to inspect the room. Hoseok is now visible, leaning against the kitchen counter, staring at the two girls as they walk towards him.

“Oh, there you are,” he says, moving the camera to be more in Hoseok’s face.

“Seriously Uncle Jihun?” Hoseok mutters before pushing the camera out of his face.

“Alright, alright, I’ll turn it off.”

The screen turns black for a few seconds before transitioning into the next clip. The screen is mostly black, like the clip was filmed secretly. The top halves of both Hoseok and you are visible to the screen. You’re pulling up the top of your dress.

“You uh, look really pretty tonight,” Hoseok murmurs, his arms crossed over his chest as he looks at the ground.

“Oh, thanks,” you reply back, awkwardly playing with your earring. “So, any plans this summer?”

“Not really, probably just going to the studio with Jungkook to create choreography for next year’s fall showcase. Kid practically idolizes me,” he shrugged.

You, Hana and Namjoon all laugh at that.

During his sophomore year of college Hoseok met this kid named Jungkook after he joined the same dance troop as Hoseok. Hoseok treated Jungkook like a little brother and mentored him, always allowing him to stay with him later to practice the choreography for their showcases. He would find out the next year that Jungkook had a crush on him and that was why he followed him around all the time. Hoseok was shocked to say the least and had a hard time believing that 1: Jungkook was gay and 2: that Jungkook had a crush on him. He had to let him down as easy as he could and Jungkook was so embarrassed that he stopped talking to Hoseok for a few months. They finally reconciled after Jungkook met a boy named Taehyung, who became his boyfriend and later fiancé.

“Was this pre or post confession, Hobi?” Yeona chuckled.

Hoseok shrunk even further into the chair.

“Oh, that’s cool,” you reply back, still awkwardly lifting up the top of your dress. “Hey, is this thing hooked all the way? It keeps falling down.”

You turned around to have Hoseok take a look and attempt to aid you if necessary. What the camera captures that you didn’t see is Hoseok looking startled as your back practically meets his front. He stutters out a “let me check” before his fingers stumble over the clasp on the back of your dress.

“L-looks good to me, you look go-“ The doorbell interrupts him.

“Oh my God, they’re here!” you squeal in excitement with Hana, running away from Hoseok before he can finish his sentence. His hands fall to his sides and his gaze continues to follow yours as you run out of the camera’s range.

The next clip cuts to you standing in the hallway while Hana’s date, a boy with dyed blonde hair named Min Yoongi, gets his red rose boutonniere pinned to his tuxedo lapel. Flashes from your dad’s camera are seen against the two of them.

You lean over from your spot hidden from the camera’s flashes to ask him, “Where’s Seokjin? I thought you guys were coming together?”

“He’s on his way, relax,” Yoongi smoothly replies. “Had to pick up the bouquet or something, I don’t remember what exactly.”

You sigh, starting to wring your hands together in anxiety. Yoongi had arrived nearly ten minutes ago and your date, Kim Seokjin, still had yet to show.

“Damn, did you get stood up to your own prom?” Jimin asks from behind you on the couch.

“Just keep watching,” you murmur, eyes focused on the TV.

The next clip cuts to about thirty minutes later, when Seokjin still had yet to arrive to Hana’s house. You are starting to panic.

“I texted him but he hasn’t replied. He can’t be standing me up,” you say, looking at Hana sadly. “I can’t go without a date to prom, I can’t, its too embarrassing.”

Hana grabs a tissue from the box behind you on the countertop and dabs it under your eyes. “Don’t cry, your makeup will run. And hey, if you don’t go, I won’t go either.”

Yoongi walks closer to the two of you, seething out, “I’ll kick his ass, I swear,” before walking away.

The group chuckles at that, seeing how heated Yoongi had gotten over the possibility of not being able to attend prom too. 

The camera had followed Yoongi down the hall to the staircase, where Hoseok was apparently in a conversation with Hana’s mom.

“Hobi, I have a great idea. Why don’t you take Y/N to the prom?” she asks in a hushed tone as Hoseok is looking at his phone.

He chuckles before sarcastically replying, “Yeah, okay Aunt Jisoo. Like that’ll happen.”

From behind the camera, you can hear Jihun chime in.

“Your Aunt is right, Hoseok. You should take her. You can wear my tux, we’re practically the same size.”

“She wouldn’t want to go with me anyways, even if I did offer to take her,” Hoseok retorts dejectedly.

“Oh come on Hoseok, you’re a college man! Who gives a shit about some high school guy; you’re the real deal! Even if you weren’t in college, she would still be lucky to go with you,” you hear Jisun argue.

Your eyes are practically glued to the screen at this point. You had no idea that this conversation ever happened. Apparently, Hana is the same way as she can’t seem to look away either.

Hoseok locks his phone before shoving it in his pocket and meeting Jihun’s eyes. “I don’t know, she just sees me as Hana’s cousin that’s a pain in her ass all the time.”

“Oh come on, Hobi, look at her. She’s devastated,” he says, turning the camera back towards you and Hana standing by the counter.

You’re trying so hard to hold back your tears, as you whimper, “I can’t believe I’m not going to get to go to my own prom. I’ve literally dreamed of this since I was thirteen, Hana. We’ve dreamed of this since we were thirteen. Why is the universe playing this cruel joke on me?”

Hana continues to comfort you as the camera pans back to Hoseok talking with his aunt and uncle.

“…Okay,” he finally agrees. “Show me where the tux is.”

“Guys, I think we’ve seen enough,” Hoseok’s voice chimes in from your side. “Let’s change it to something else now.”

A chorus of denials comes from the group behind you, but you’re still in shock, eyes never once leaving the TV.

“Fine, but I’m not going to watch anymore,” Hoseok states, standing up from his chair and walking behind the group into the kitchen.

“Alright Hoseok, let’s see!” Aunt Jisoo says, now the one behind the camera. Uncle Jihun walks out of their bedroom first, followed by Hoseok. He is clad in a classic black tuxedo with a white shirt and a black tie. His hair has some product in it and is styled in a sexy kind of messy way, courtesy of Jihun.

“Oh, don’t you look handsome!” she exclaims. “Let’s go show the girls!”

Aunt Jisoo begins to walk backwards down the stairs, camera still on Hoseok as he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, muttering to himself. What sounds like ‘be cool, it’ll all be fine,” appear to come from his mouth a few times before he reaches the top of the steps. He grabs some flowers from their vase in the hallway before beginning his descent down the steps.

“Y/N! Wait until you see who-“ you hear Jihun begin, before he stops himself at the bottom of the steps.

“Oh.”

“Look who finally showed up!” you exclaim excitedly, in the process of taking pictures in front of the fireplace with your date, Seokjin. Hana and Yoongi are standing on the other side of you, looking equally as happy with his arrival.

“Oh dear,” you hear Aunt Jisoo whisper from behind the camera. Hoseok had stopped at the top of the stairs at the sound of your voice, the words from your mouth halting him in his place before he could be visible to anyone else.

“Jihun, how do I turn this off?” you hear her ask. Hoseok’s face is still in the frame. You can see him visibly swallow before looking at the camera and turning around to walk back into the bedroom he just came from, slamming the door behind him.

The screen then cuts to black.

The tension in the room couldn’t even be cut with a sword if anyone tried.

So that’s where he had gone when he disappeared? You assumed he got bored of all of the prom stuff and dipped without saying goodbye in true Hoseok fashion. Never in your life would you have guessed he was getting ready to take you to prom since your date had assumingly stood you up.

Everyone turns to look behind the couches to the kitchen where Hoseok stood. His one hand is on the counter, the other fidgeting with the bottom of his old Supreme t-shirt.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Hana breathes out.

Hoseok remains silent for a few seconds before responding with, “Yeah.”

You can hardly manage to look at Hoseok, still overcome with so many thoughts and emotions.

Why on Earth would he do that for you? For years Hoseok had always just been your best friend’s annoying cousin that always made you feel like the odd guy out in their friendship. That only changed once you went to college and could finally be seen as a somewhat equal to him, you assumed.

“You’ve liked her for THAT long?” Hana asks. “I thought it was just a recent thing.”

That breaks you from your trance. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been noticing something was up with him recently, I figured maybe it was stress from work but I realized that he only acted that way whenever you were around or even just mentioned. I just assumed.”

“Oh no, it’s been going on way longer than you think,” Namjoon chimed in.

“I’ll fucking rip your hair out of your head if you say another word, Namjoon,” Hoseok threatens from the kitchen.

Namjoon ignores the blatant threat of violence to his scalp and continues. “Freshman year he wouldn’t shut up about how much he missed this girl from back home. Told us all about how she had one of the worst temperaments out of anyone he knew, but it was charming. After every vacation we would come back to school and he would say that she just keeps getting more beautiful every time he sees her. Super corny if you ask me, but the dude was clearly in love so hey, who was I to judge? Imagine my surprise now to find out that it was Y/N after all this time.”

Your eyes are glued to Hoseok and his eyes are glued to the floor. His knuckles are white from gripping the counter so hard.

You slowly stand up, before softly asking, “Hoseok, how long have you felt that way about me?”

His gaze doesn’t lift from the floor as he awkwardly chuckles. “Do you remember after your first day of high school, where you came home so excited because some guy asked you for your number?”

You stare at him in astonishment. “Hoseok, that was over fifteen years ago.”

He nods. “Embarrassing, right? To be in love with your cousin’s best friend for nearly two decades, with absolutely no expectation of reciprocation? Trust me, I tried to get over you.  I dated other girls, I slept with other girls; you know that. At the end of the day though, I could be cuddling someone else and still be disappointed that it wasn’t you instead.”

His eyes lift from the floor to finally meet your wide ones. Your jaw drops a bit unexpectedly.

Of course you had always considered the fact that maybe one day you and Hoseok would end up together. It made sense, you had grown up together and he was that kind of friend where at 16 you make the agreement to marry each other if you aren’t already married by 30, but never actually take it seriously because you both know that it’ll never happen.

You had never suspected that he had felt this strongly about you for this long.

You rack your brain trying to think of any signs that you could have missed.

There was that one time when you were a junior in high school and you had just broken up with your first boyfriend after finding out that he had been texting other girls behind your back. Hoseok and Hana comforted you the whole day Saturday, watching reruns of That 70’s Show with you and stuffing your faces with cheesy breadsticks from the local pizza place. The following Monday at school, your ex-boyfriend showed up with a black eye. You were surprised but never questioned what had happened.

There was also the time when you were a senior in college doing your student teaching, and you were convinced that you had chosen the wrong major because the students you had to teach were so awful and rude to you. Hoseok had listened to you ramble on in tears about how you had screwed up your whole life and credit report for a profession that wasn’t right for you. He had calmed you down and talked some sense into you, and even helped you to develop a new lesson plan and teaching approach that might work better with the students, even though he knew close to nothing about math education or making lesson plans.

Then there was the time that you were all out at Yeona’s birthday dinner when you got the call from your mom that your grandfather had died. Hoseok was the one to drive you home and hold you all night as you sobbed over the loss of the man you had looked up to for so many years.

Then of course, the memory you didn’t even know was a memory until three minutes ago. Hoseok had dressed in his uncle’s tuxedo to take you to your prom, knowing how much you had gushed over going to prom since he had practically met you.

More memories came into play and hit you like a ton of bricks. You fell forward a bit, catching yourself on the arm of the chair previously occupied by Hoseok.

“Oh my God,” you whisper. You finally met his eyes and slowly began to walk over to him, a disbelieving pout on your face.

As you come closer to him, you’re hit with a new wave of emotions. This time, reminding you of all of the things he has done that have made your own heart flutter that you continuously pushed away.

The time that you first saw him after dance camp, and you noticed the way that his arms were a bit more toned than they were in the spring and you felt you heart rate increase, but blamed it on the frappucino you were drinking.

The time that you watched him in his first college dance showcase and you could see the passion in his face. The fluidity of his moves was enthralling, and continues to be to this day. You remember not being able to look away and getting a fluttery feeling in your stomach, but blamed it on the cold you were still getting over.

The time that you attended your first college party with him and he made sure that you didn’t get too out of control. He was dressed in an all black outfit that didn’t seem to suit his personality, but he still made it work and you felt your heart flutter again. When he pushed away the creepy guy that attempted to feel you up on the couch and your heart dropped into your stomach at the protectiveness you thought was coming from a big brother perspective.

The time that you got the offer for your full time job and he hugged you so tightly you thought he might snap you in half, and you got that same fluttery feeling in your stomach that you had all those times before.

How had you been so blind for so long?

Standing in front of him now, you look up at his face and graze his chin with your fingers, gingerly tilting his head up to look at yours.

Looking into his eyes briefly, you know instantly that you will not regret what you are about to do.

So you kiss him, and dear God it was like you had done it a million times before.

The way that you fall into each other so effortlessly, his hands grabbing at your sides as yours cupped his cheeks.

“I told you it would fucking happen! I knew she felt the same way!” Yeona yelled from behind you.

You break away from the kiss and immediately pull him into a hug, your head resting on his shoulder.

“You should have told me sooner,” you whisper.

“I couldn’t. I didn’t want to risk losing you completely,” he whispered back.

“Jung Hoseok,” you say in disbelief, pulling back a bit to look at his face. “Did you really think that little of me that you think I would cut you, someone that has stuck by my side for over twenty years, off in the blink of an eye because you have feelings for me that you thought I didn’t reciprocate?”

He simply stared at you, not knowing what to say.

You leaned your forehead against his, before whispering onto his lips, “You’re even stupider than I thought you were,” and kissing him again.

“Eh-hem,” you hear a throat clear from behind you again. Breaking away, you meet the eyes of Hana, arms crossed and giving you a smirk.

“Hana, if you’re not okay with this, we don’t have to-“

“Save it, I’ve been waiting for Hoseok to make a move for months. I’m glad you finally did. Just please keep the PDA to a minimum. I don’t need to see my cousin and my best friend sucking face and groping each other in front of me,” she shudders.

You laugh before turning back to Hoseok.

“Does this mean you’ll give me a chance?” Hoseok asks breathlessly.

“Of course it does, you idiot. Now kiss me again before I change my mind.”

[itztagninut]

a bit about myself and my background

After finishing Poppy Palin’s Craft of the Wild Witch, I had originally planned on going straight back into another magical text but I think I want to pause and re-evaluate, expand into some of my new ideas and practices. While doing that, I thought that, now that I’ve had a chance to get some content out, maybe I should take a second to do an “about me” style post?

As I stated in my preface to the blog, my name is שולמית shulamis. I’m a patrilineal Jew; my father’s family is from Galitsye, in what is now southern Poland. My mother’s family are mostly Scots-Irish and we reside on occupied Tickanwatic and Nʉmʉnʉʉ territory. I grew up on a fault line straddling a limestone karst escarpment, where my mother’s family has lived 5+ generations. Yes, I think all of that informs my practice.

Perhaps this is a little bit self-indulgent, but I think it’s worthwhile for me to outline a brief synopsis of my journey with witchcraft, even if only because it’s been helpful for me to write it out.

I was the kid who couldn’t get her nose out of fantasy books—I devoured everything I could get my hands on. In my early teens, I was the friend introducing my social circles to witchcraft. I would get together with a group of friends from time to time to cast spells we had painstakingly copied out of books from the library. We all shoplifted the mini editions of the Universal Rider-Waite from the local Borders and taught ourselves to read them in the internet’s adolescence. Eventually we all drifted apart and, from what I understand, none of those friends still seriously practice witchcraft (though a couple dabble).

There’s a very distinct memory at about 16 where I made a misguided attempt to evoke the Morrigan...it was a total disaster. Somehow the candles I was using all managed to tip themselves over in the middle of the evocation? I had to strategically place things on my dresser for years afterwards to hide the burn marks left by the candles and it shook me up enough to drop everything for a while.

Maybe another kind of religion, I thought? I tried out a more mainstream Modern Orthodox Judaism through Chabad. Unfortunately, even in the very liberal space I was in I wasn’t able to find enough space for my queerness or my questioning of Zionism. Eventually I struck out on my own and delved into personal study of Jewish text and Kabbalah that has settled into a more earth-based, Shechina-focused Reconstructionist Judaism. But that’s not really about magic.

About 4 years ago I started reading about the Golden Dawn, chaos magic, and sigil magic. Although ceremonial-styles of magic are interesting to me (and Jewish magic is largely a ceremonial tradition), I was really put off by Hermetic Qabalah. Similarly, there are interesting elements in chaos magic for me, especially in sigils. When I began making some sigils of my own and saw results, I was hooked. I started re-exploring some of the techniques I had been introduced to as a teenager and sort of wandered my way onto a personal path.

Three summer solstices ago, during one of my first experiences of a deep trance, I ran across the spirit of my great-grandfather (much to both of our surprise). I had been having intensely symbolic dreams about him, and other spirits of deceased loved ones, for years previous to that, but that engagement sparked a fascination with spirit work. Since then he’s taken on the role of a familiar spirit and often acts as a facilitator in my interactions with other spirits of the dead. After meeting him, I’ve gone on to cultivate my relationships with his wife and her mother, my great-great-grandmother, as well as several of the local spirits. The spirit world and my Beloved Dead, the spirits of my ancestors, are a huge part of my practice today. 

Up until now, my craft has been a mostly intuitive practice. I’ve read a bit from a variety of perspectives but I haven’t really attached myself to any particular ideology and I would not consider myself well-read in the occult. I’ve honestly spent much more of my time learning the Talmud and studying Jewish folklore in the past years, which strongly influences my craft.

I’m attracted to reconstructionism as a trend in magic but I’m not sure that Jewish magic lends itself well to reconstructionism (that’s another post for another day), although (in an obnoxious linguistic situation) Jewish Reconstruction is the mainstream Rabbinic Jewish sect I mostly closely identify myself with. In particular, I’m attracted to the evident henotheism in Hellenistic Judaism. I worship only the Shekhina (and, at times, other aspects of the G-d of Jacob, the G-d of my ancestors) but I work with with other spirits and G-ds. All of this is helpful in understanding my worldview, but I still haven’t pinned down a lot of my witchcraft, my practice of magic.

My goal here, then, is to refine my personal practice. Intuition is a powerful tool, but there’s a wall you hit eventually when trying to solely work intuitively. I want to really hone in on what exactly my craft is. 

[secondfuckingguessing]

This week's brought up a lot of memories. Strangely enough I think it all started with taylor swift's 10 minute version of all too well. I'm happy to say it didn't rekindle any kind of feelings towards jp, but it certainly felt familiar. Older guy, being deeply infatuated and then incredibly heartbroken. Believing that could be real and was within my reach only to have it taken away. Yesterday i saw a photo of diego. That made me dream of him. In my dream he has the same behavior that's already characteristic of jp: avoiding me at all costs. Being completely inaccessible. Jp in my dream was getting married or was married.

Anyway that night many years ago changed everything for me. Until then, i felt pretty much like a loser, as appealing as a parsnip. But then i caught the attention of 2 handsome guys, who were not losers like me. Who had no need at all to reach out to me. They could be with someone else. Prettier, older, more whatever. But they both wanted to kiss me. Me. The one who spent her adolescence years more focused on avoiding panic attacks than boys. Real boys at least. Me, who had only been kissed once even though I was 18. Me, who for the first time was drinking, that's how childish I was. I felt good. I felt like i was entitled to that. I wanted that to be real, i wanted his interest in me to be strong and genuine, like my time had arrived. We would be perfect together. Happy, he would make me feel safe and I'd feel good about myself for having him (supposedly) so attracted to me. He was alone here, which would be perfect too, i could provide him the family experience he probably craved being away from his and to top it all he was my cousins' very close friend. We'd be awesome and fun and travel a lot to bh and I'd show him around sp and introduce him to my cool friends and it would be perfect and we would live happily ever after, getting married later on.

That only happened in my head of course, or i wouldn't be here writing all this. I can't say how I'd be now, but probably not this jaded and cynic. I tyrned into a unbeliever. I think love is a lie, things never go well for me and that's all because it's impossible to be that interested in me. I'm not that cool after all. I'm not attractive at all and now I'm on the chubby side to help that. Guys I consider as interesting as them don't even acknowledge my presence in a room. I don't even blame them. Why would they?

The friends I thought were so cool are long lost, too. They never even missed my presence in their lives. When I felt I was losing the future I invented, I had to chase it all the way to bh in order to be closer to jp. He was the key, you see. I had absolutely no control over my own life, I gave it to him. There, instead of starting over, everything crumbled. I never got friends that close again. I ran into jp once, got my hopes up and nothing. I wasn't interesting in the light of day, my true self to his true sober self. Not to him and not to anyone else there. I grew sadder and sadder, felt extremely lonely. I still don't know if I ruined my life or if I was meant to go through that and learn from it. I've felt like garbage ever since. Not worthy of love or attention. I graduated from something I'm not proud of and no one admires. I never had the fancy party I've always wanted. I never had people saying they proud of the way they dud when my sister graduated from med school. The same people who got me a blouse as a gift got her a jewel. What I did wasn't worth of so much. No even my latest experience with F, who I never became that infatuated with and who I never saw as a modern version of a prince charming like jp was good. I tried so hard to make things work and he just wasn't into it. He didn't want to be with me. I wasn't worth of love again.

[stephenmccull]

Telehealth’s Limits: Battle Over State Lines and Licensing Threatens Patients’ Options

If you live in one state, does it matter that the doctor treating you online is in another? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, and the ability to conduct certain virtual appointments may be nearing an end.

Televisits for medical care took off during the worst days of the pandemic, quickly becoming commonplace. Most states and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services temporarily waived rules requiring licensed clinicians to hold a valid license in the state where their patient is located. Those restrictions don’t keep patients from visiting doctors’ offices in other states, but problems could arise if those same patients used telemedicine.

Now states are rolling back many of those pandemic workarounds.

Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, for example, recently scrambled to notify more than 1,000 Virginia patients that their telehealth appointments were “no longer feasible,” said Dr. Brian Hasselfeld, medical director of digital health and telemedicine at Johns Hopkins. Virginia is among the states where the emergency orders are expiring or being rolled back.

At least 17 states still have waivers in effect, according to a tracker maintained by the Alliance for Connected Care, a lobbying group representing insurers, tech companies and pharmacies.

As those rules end, “it risks increasing barriers” to care, said Hasselfeld. Johns Hopkins, he added, hosted more than 1 million televisits, serving more than 330,000 unique patients, since the pandemic began. About 10% of those visits were from states where Johns Hopkins does not operate facilities.

The rollbacks come amid a longer and larger debate over states’ authority around medical licensing that the pandemic — with its widespread adoption of telehealth services — has put front and center.

“Consumers don’t know about these regulations, but if you all of a sudden pull the rug out from these services, you will definitely see a consumer backlash,” said Dr. Harry Greenspun, chief medical officer for the consultancy Guidehouse.

Still, finding a way forward pits high-powered stakeholders against one another, and consumers’ input is likely to be muted.

State medical boards don’t want to cede authority, saying their power to license and discipline medical professionals boosts patient safety. Licensing is also a source of state revenue.

Providers have long been split on whether to change cross-state licensing rules. Different state requirements — along with fees — make it cumbersome and expensive for doctors, nurses and other clinicians to get licenses in multiple states, leading to calls for more flexibility. Even so, those efforts have faced pushback from within the profession, with opposition from other clinicians who fear the added competition that could come from telehealth could lead to losing patients or jobs.

“As with most things in medicine, it’s a bottom-line issue. The reason telehealth has been blocked across state lines for many years related fundamentally to physicians wanting to protect their own practices,” said Greenspun.

But the pandemic changed the equation.

Even though the initial spike in telehealth visits has eased, utilization remains 38 times higher than before the pandemic, attracting not only patients, but also venture capitalists seeking to join the hot business opportunity, according to a report from consulting firm McKinsey and Co.

Patients’ experience with televisits coupled with the growing interest by investors is focusing attention on this formerly inside-baseball issue of cross-state licensing.

Greenspun predicts consumers will ultimately drive the solution by “voting with their wallets,” aided by giant, consumer-focused retailers like Amazon and Walmart, both of which in recent months made forays into telemedicine.

In the short term, however, the focus is on both the protections and the barriers state regulations create.

“The whole challenge is to ensure maximum access to health while assuring quality,” said Barak Richman, a Duke University law professor, who said laws and policies haven’t been updated to reflect new technological realities partly because state boards want to hang onto their authority.

Patients and their doctors are getting creative, with some consumers simply driving across state lines, then making a Zoom call from their vehicle.

“It’s not ideal, but some patients say they are willing to drive a mile or two and sit in a parking lot in a private space and continue to get my care,” said Dr. Shabana Khan, director of telepsychiatry at NYU Langone Health’s department of child and adolescent psychiatry and a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Telepsychiatry Committee. She and other practitioners ask their patients about their locations, mainly for safety reasons, but also to check that they are in-state.

Still, for some patients, driving to another state for an in-person or even a virtual appointment is not an option.

Khan worries about people whose care is interrupted by the changes, especially those reluctant to seek out new therapists or who cannot find any clinicians taking new patients.

Austin Smith hopes that doesn’t happen to him.

After initial treatment for what he calls a “weird flavor of cancer” didn’t help reduce his gastrointestinal stromal tumors, he searched out other experts, landing in a clinical trial. But it was in San Diego and the 28-year-old salesman lives in Phoenix.

Although he drives more than five hours each way every couple of months for treatment and to see his doctors, he does much of his other follow-up online. The only difference is “if I was in person, and I said I was hurting here, the doctor could poke me,” he said.

And if the rules change? He’ll make the drive. “I’ll do anything to beat this,” he said of his cancer.

But will doctors, whose patients have spent the past year or more growing comfortable with virtual visits, also be willing to take steps that could likely involve extra costs and red tape?

To get additional licenses, for instance, practitioners must submit applications in every state where their patients reside, each of which can take weeks or months to process. They must pay application fees and keep up with a range of requirements such as continuing education, which vary by state.

States say their traditional role as overseer ensures that all applicants meet educational requirements and pass background checks. They also investigate complaints and argue there’s an advantage to keeping local officials in charge.

“It’s closer to home,” said Lisa Robin, chief advocacy officer with the Federation of State Medical Boards. “There’s a remedy for residents of the state with their own state officials.”

Doctor groups such as the American Medical Association agree.

Allowing a change that doesn’t put centralized authority in a patient’s home state would raise “serious enforcement issues as states do not have interstate policing authority and cannot investigate incidents that happen in another state,” said then-AMA President-elect Jack Resneck during a congressional hearing in March.

But others want more flexibility and say it can be done safely.

Hasselfeld, at Johns Hopkins, said there is precedent for easing multistate licensing requirements. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, allows medical staffers who are properly licensed in at least one state to treat patients in any VA facility.

The Alliance for Connected Care and other advocates are pushing states to extend their pandemic rules. A few have done so. Arizona, for example, made permanent the rules allowing out-of-state medical providers to practice telemedicine for Arizona residents, as long as they register with the state and their home-state license is in good standing. Connecticut’s similar rules have now been stretched until June 2023.

The alliance and others also back legislation stalled in Congress that would temporarily allow medical professionals licensed in one state to treat — either in person or via televisits — patients in any other state.

Because such fixes are controversial, voluntary interstate pacts have gained attention. Several already exist: one each for nurses, doctors, physical therapists and psychologists. Proponents say they are a simple way to ensure state boards retain authority and high standards, while making it easier for licensed medical professionals to expand their geographic range.

The nurses’ compact, enacted by 37 states and Guam, allows registered nurses with a valid license in one state to have it recognized by all the others in the pact.

A different kind of model is the Interstate Physician Licensure Compact, which has been enacted by 33 states, plus the District of Columbia and Guam, and has issued more than 21,000 licenses since it began in 2017, said Robin, of the Federation of State Medical Boards.

While it speeds the paperwork process, it does not eliminate the cost of applying for licenses in each state.

The compact simplifies the process by having the applicant physician’s home state confirm his or her eligibility and perform a criminal background check. If the applicant is eligible, the home state sends a letter of qualification to the new state, which then issues a license, Robin said. Physicians must meet all rules and laws in each state, such as requirements for continuing medical education. Additionally, they cannot have a history of disciplinary actions or currently be under investigation.

“It’s a fairly high bar,” said Robin.

Such compacts — especially if they are bolstered by new legislation at the federal level — could help the advances in telehealth made during the pandemic stick around for good, expanding access to care for both mental health services and medical care across the U.S. “What’s at stake if we get this right,” said Richman at Duke, “is making sure we have an innovative marketplace that fully uses virtual technology and a regulatory system that encourages competition and quality.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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[penderworth]

The (first of more, probably) religious trauma entry

For a very, very long time, I’ve been putting off writing or talking about this, let alone remembering it. Because as much as I love nostalgia, I hate remembering things. Why should I? They’re gone. Remembering them sounds like an unproductive way to spend time. No wonder I have such a hard time with therapy: There’s a lot of remembering things in therapy, and my dad’s voice is what said that last sentence, not mine. But we’ll get to that.

My struggle to find belonging the past few years makes complete sense in the context of my church experience. It’s a very common one, in fact, for anyone who leaves church. I hear about it often, like earlier today on The Sunday Thing. I mostly left the church when I turned 21, but all this started way before that, when I was 14 or so and Church on the Mountain split. Friends and all the other younger people started going to Lighthouse, where they had night services and it was edgy. Charismatic! They had flags! Fuck flags, man.

Originally though, when the church split, I stayed at COTM because it was tough to get up to Mammoth. Then the youth group moved up there as well, so I started getting rides from friends. And slowly, unconsciously, to their disappointment, I drifted away from the religion of my parents. But it’s okay, the new church had flags! Only for a little bit, though, then the old church got some again too. The ouroboros of church trends.

The new church also had dancing, louder music, and all the other things one finds when they Google for “charismatic church”. We just lacked Benny Hinn, Sith supreme. Fascinatingly, though, in the past few years, I find myself drawn to many of the things I spoke against in the church. But was it ever me speaking? No. It was the judgement of my parents, carried on habitually, as all family opinions are. The genes of one’s ancestors must not just make up our bodies; why not encode some opinions, traumas, and other chaos in there as well, triggering it at just the right moments? But worry not: You can avoid all this by continuing to play the game of your parents’ child.

Back to the dancing. The only relationship I’d ever had to it was that one time I asked Kristen out at a wedding, hosted at our second house in Mammoth. But wait, let’s deconstruct that real quick. Why did I ask her to dance? Someone told me to. Either my parents or my peers, probably the former. Someone said that asking a woman to dance is the key to her heart. And my adolescent mind immediately said “Yes, please, the key to those boobs! I mean, oh wait, heart. Yes. We must get married first, then the boobs shall be available.” And even the very young me sought much success in the world, so pursued what he wanted.

Then other ideas floated into my relationship with dancing. “Men only do that at weddings.” “Well, see, that makes you gay...” “Oh that’s just something they did in the 60s.” “I don’t know man, I think you might suck at it. I mean, do you even have hips?” So when Lighthouse introduced this new physical experience of church, I repeated what I’d heard my parents say, in the way one does when they’re afraid of the other: “This is getting a little weird.” To which a child for whom the world is entirely made up of wonder and mystery should reply, “Yeah! And let’s try it out.” But that child was dying. His parents and culture had killed him with their occupations, marriages, gods, and ideas. So many ideas.

Of course at this point, dancing wasn’t enough, so they added extensions to their appendages by gathering sticks with thin, colorful fabric attached, that flowed weightlessly as they spun them around, praising God. For some reason, though, if gay people wanted to celebrate a part of themselves in the same manner, that was different. And if we asked why, it was complicated.

I grew disillusioned and judgmental with all of this. Part of me – the one who was becoming someone – wanted to belong here, to be a crucial part of this community. That’s why I would plant roots, serve on their teams, play on the worship team. I wanted them to see that I wanted to be there, that I was dedicated, that I wouldn’t leave. I was seldom returned this effort. Church seems to attract many wounded souls who also don’t know how to love, hence the desire for an unconditionally loving God. I mean it’s in the marketing, right? Makes sense.

So part of me wanted to belong there. But the parental voices within said something different: This scares me, this is weird, make it go away, I don’t want to talk about how I feel. Because that last one is really it, isn’t it? You don’t want to talk about your feelings. Even you, mother. You, who feel so deeply in moments I can’t, yet freeze in many of the ones that matter to me. And that is how behavior and habits pass down to one’s children. I like to imagine we do that to our children because there are many problems in our lives that we just won’t get the chance to solve before we die, and they demand to be worked out. So we procreate to create new chances for these issues to be resolved. We’re dedicated coders staying on top of our repo.

Of course at this point, I do wonder where we are going if this is indeed the course of the universe. What would become of us if all our issues were to be resolved? A question for another time.

I remember the first time I went to Lighthouse, at their older location. I felt cool. There was such potential in this new place. It was NEW. Sparkly. They had a cool sound system, lots of drums, and a hip worship leader. This seemed like progress. I’d learn new songs, meet bandmates, find myself playing the House of Blues one day. The dream! Also there were new girls I hadn’t met before. The girl who’d rejected me previously was behind me – this was a new slate, the first of many in my life where I could recreate who Jacob was, until I eventually lost him entirely.

For someone who was homeschooled, all this was exactly what I needed. I got to meet other people my age twice a week now: Youth group on Thursday and church on Sunday. I’m sure none of my passion was driven by the sexual urges of an adolescent. No, I would never have such thoughts during my special singing and praying time with God; who, by the way, I did not understand, but was told C.S. Lewis would explain to me one day when I’m older. And all this time, they thought I wouldn’t come back one day to bite them with a joke, like the serpent who didn’t get to taste that juicy apple.

There was one other time I saw other people my age: Swim team. But I never wanted to be there. Not like I wanted to be at a mini rock concert, singing loudly and pretending to have spiritual experiences, sometimes playing on the stage myself. I was also pumped up on all the Dr. Pepper and Mambas I could buy with my allowance. If the church and educational systems focused more on embodiment, I may have made better choices. Or maybe I would have rebelled and eaten even more sugar – who’s to say.

What’s unfortunate is I never truly felt at home at Lighthouse, because there was a war going on inside me the whole time. My family was telling me it was bad, sinful, even evil and “demonic” at times. They believed more in the God than the Holy Spirit part of the trinity, and rarely talked of the Son, Yeshua. But another part of me was just happy to be among peers; my parents’ church was mostly old people who never seemed to be listening to me when we had conversations. Eventually I left Lighthouse because I moved. The first of many moves.

In examining my experiences finding community since then, they’ve slowly declined into what is currently an absence of it. My most recent sustained experience of community was in Isla Vista. Everything fell into place for me to move there. It felt like where I was supposed to be – I took it as a sign from God, because it happened so seamlessly, unlike other life transitions I'd forced.

I had incredible housemates that first year in 2014, each of whom challenged me in more ways than any of my classes ever could – I’ve always been more fascinated with relationship and the human condition than I was with any subjects. One of the most memorable things of that first year was the beginning of a more substantial deconstruction for me. Getting into deep, circular, and unreasonable arguments with my housemate Tarra would leave me cursing God, quietly and ashamedly, for how he had failed to show her what love truly looks like within the heart. Love isn't trying to convert someone to your beliefs, which felt more like someone trying to prove to themselves that what they believed was good for them by marketing it to other people as such.

At this point, I still listened to my heart. I still felt it often. When I passed a homeless person on the street, I felt the pangs of their hunger, loneliness, and disconnection from the rest of us. But I was told that’s not what we do when we see a homeless person, so I had to block that feeling to prevent myself from becoming overwhelmed, especially after moving to a larger city. This became a habit for me: Assimilating the emotional and behavioral patterns of the people around me, often without a second thought. I still had a critic within me who challenged things, but most of its energy was spent at AppStorm, finding flaws in the creations of others. Because that’s the role of a critic, I was told: To be an asshole.

Toward the second half of 2014, my faith in this God began to shake until it shattered. Breakups with another person are terrible, but try breaking up with the morals, community, and afterlife package you were given upon your arrival in this world. That fucking sucks. No one likes it. Which is why it took me years, from ages 20 to 24 to finally file for divorce with my church, my God, and my afterlife insurance plan, as Pete Holmes would say. And after all the sex I’d had while traveling, it felt freeing for a bit – maybe I hadn't greatly sinned after all, maybe I could listen to my body. But breaking up with someone usually guarantees their voice will return to haunt you for a while. And this was a 24-year relationship, so there’s a bit of history.

The wonder of that child I mentioned earlier has, at this point, really begun to disappear. I see glimpses of it some days. If he were a roaring fire at the start, he’s now a barely glowing ember. The optimism of even the 22-year-old self has been replaced with a stagnant disinterest in what life could possibly have that won't lead to more unnecessary suffering. And without people to win over, he’s unsure that he’ll ever be able to procreate, to pass at least a few of his problems on to the next great programmer who starts a branch on this vast repo. Plus the fear of all the things above, as well as those of his ancestors, and the shame of being white, having a job, and living what most would call a really great life, haunt him daily. Without the balancing optimism of others in his life, he feels as if he’ll collapse under the weight of all this. It truly is too much for one person to bear, yet in the words of Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

So he’ll run off now, to find some alternate realities in his dreams, where things are different. Perhaps those dreams are a future of this very timeline.

[mini-min-yoongi]

October AO3 Yoonmin readings:

1) Just like a tattoo (i’ll always have you)

Yoongi eyes him curiously, a small smirk playing on his lips as he observes Jimin’s movements. “First time?”

“Y-yes, I’m a virgin!” Jimin squeaks out, eyes wide and cheeks flushed, embarrassed at his own words.

Some sexual innuendos, Yoongi covered in tattoos and a very shy Jimin. Perfect combination.

2) Kickstart Series (Gang AU) (*)

This entire series is a masterpiece, I loved the story and all the characters. I recommend reading every single one even if Yoonmin is not the main focus in some of them.

2.1. Experto Crede (*)

“I-I don’t understand…” Jimin said, eyes watering as he focused on Yoongi. “I thought…you were going to kill me…in the bathroom.”

“Yeah, well so did I,” Yoongi said wryly, and Jimin flinched, trying to make himself impossibly smaller.

AKA It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Min Yoongi in possession of a heart will be in want of sleep.

I’m not lying when I say that i REALLY liked this one. If I’m not mistaken, this was my first time reading a gang yoonmin au and it was awesome. Dark and protective Yoongi taking care of a scarred Jimin. Keep in mind that this story deals with abuse and torture so please don’t read it unless you are comfortable with those themes. The only “bad” thing about this fic is that it’s only three chapters long (I needed more when I finished it SO BAD). Luckily, the author did a sequel which is the next one ->

2.2. Attero (*)

“Beautiful,” the man repeated under his breath, and Jimin felt a cold shiver travel from the bottom of his back to the nape of his neck. The way he said it wasn’t a compliment, or an observation, it was…it was like something Dongwon would have said, smiling as he held Jimin’s head underwater or ripped out chunks of his hair. It touched something that Jimin thought he’d buried a long time ago.

“H-have a n-nice day,” Jimin said softly, curling his fingers into his uniform apron. Sometimes it was best to pretend.

“Get lost,” Jungkook jerked his chin towards the door. “And don’t come back!” he called after the man, who glanced over his shoulder one last time before leaving the café.

*Follows Experto Crede

I loved seeing Jungkook and his foul mouth working as a barista and trying to protect Jimin with all his might. Also, Yoongi trying to be extremely careful with Jimin, worried about having scared him or disappointing him because of his actions. In general, Yoongi being so soft towards Jimin and wanting to protect him is such a contrast to his profession as a hitman (I MEAN HE CALLS HIM JIMINNIE). It’s a great sequel to Experto Crede and it shows us more of what Jimin had to go through during all those years so please be careful because it contains descriptions of torture and it can be triggering for some people.

2.3. Solus (Jungkook centric) (*)

“Yoongi changed you,” Jin said softly. “But Jimin is changing Yoongi.”

Jungkook frowned, teeth grinding together. “But…but I…” he said, looking at Jin hopelessly. “I don’t want him to change…”

*Companion piece to Experto Crede, but can be read independently.

MY BABY JUNGKOOKIE. I didn’t know I needed this but I really did. I appreciate so much this one because I came to understand better Jungkook’s actions in the first part. He really went through a lot and he just wants to be cherished and loved by the people who helped him and who he also loves. Also, I loved seeing Yoongi’s change in behaviour when he’s with Jimin through the eyes of another person. But the most important thing is how Yoongi cares so much about Jungkook but he’s not able to show him because he feels guilty. The hug broke my heart.

2.4. Cor Aut Mors (Namjoon & Seokjin)

The day Kim Namjoon said no to Kim Seokjin would be the day the earth stopped turning on its axis.

*Companion piece to Experto Crede, but can be read independently.

2.5. Caritas (Hoseok & Taehyung)

“Hoseok,” the boy answered distractedly, looking around the small space, the single bed. “Tae’s room? Are you Tae?”

“Mostly,” Tae shrugged. “Except when they give me medicine, and then I feel much less like him than I’m supposed to.”

“I feel that,” the boy nodded, reaching his arms over his head to stretch, a few joints popping along the way. “Remind me to never try and kill myself again,” he muttered. “One stupid time and they stick you in an asylum for half a year. But hell, I guess it worked. I don’t wanna’ die anymore, I wanna’ kill my family for sticking me in here.”

*Companion piece to Experto Crede, but can be read independently.

3) Give me a sign

Yoongi thinks the universe is a dick for a lot of reasons. Reason #1: It gave a deaf person a soul-mark that revolves around speech. Reason #2: Once he decided to hate his soulmate no matter what they were like, the universe gave him a really attractive soulmate. Reason #3: Said soulmate is overly kind, no matter how much of a dick Yoongi is. Reason #4: Yoongi is definitely fucked.

Soulmates au, deaf and stubborn Yoongi and some bullying. It was a good read.

4) Burn It Up (contains smut) (*)

“Hey,” Yoongi says. “It’s okay, what’s up?”

“I — ” Jimin stutters. “They — I dunno, hyung, I don’t — I think they might have fucked up my dosage or — I don’t — ” His voice cracks and he swallows, a little involuntary noise spilling out of his mouth as he tries to catch his breath.

Yoongi’s eyes widen in realization, something cold and numb slithering around his heart and squeezing so tight he feels like he’s suffocating.

“I think I’m in — ”

Alpha Yoongi and omega Jimin. They are both in BTS. I liked it a lot because the author mixed smut with angst and Yoongi tells us about his past and I really liked reading about his inner turmoil.

5) Where the heart is (contains smut) (*)

She hadn’t been ready to be a mother and Yoongi hadn’t been ready to be a father, but where she had turned tail and run, Yoongi had vowed never to do the same.

Single parent yoongi and babysitter jimin. I’ve been wanting to read this for a very long time and it didn’t disappoint. This story was extremely cute and the smut was GREAT even though what i enjoyed the most was reading about their struggles before they could have sex (living with a little kid is not the ideal scenario for sexy time) and the epilogue

6) Sweeter than sweet (contains smut) (*) 

Cupcake shop owner park jimin always worries & waits for his husband, special agent, min yoongi to come back home but one night he doesn’t.

I knew I was going love this the moment I saw the description. I really like seeing bangtan in the role of secret agents and gang aus and if you add a baker Jimin the combination can only be as sweet as this one.

7) Crybaby (work in progress) (*)

Min Yoongi and Park Jimin navigate the troubles of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood together; and all of the ups, downs and trauma that life brings.

“What’s the Park clan’s number one motto huh, Yoongi?”

“…Love yourself.”

GO READ THIS ONE RIGHT NOW. In this story, kid Yoongi has selective mutism and suffers from anxiety. I want to protect little Yoongi with all I have. It’s a work in progress but it’s going to depict Yoongi and Jimin’s lives as they grow up. I don’t like reading stories that are not complete but i’ve been wanting to read it since august and i finally gave in. It’s so well-written, I love Yoongi, Jimin and Jimin’s parents. I just loved all of it and I find Yoongi’s condition so heartbreaking and interesting and in a way relatable. I’ve been dealing with social anxiety for a very long time and even though it has never been to such an extent it still hits close to home and my heart breaks for little yoongs. Can’t wait to see how this story develops, (Seriously, I’m so obsessed with this story that I even made a moodboard because I’ve got no chill).

8) Bullet Boy (work in progress) (*)

If you want to make it big, you’ve got to start off small. This is something that Jimin acknowledges, for he just carries on singing features for underground rappers in the hopes of breaking into the mainstream scene even when the lyrics mean nothing to him.

If you want to make it in the scene, you’ve got to fake it in the scene. This is something that Yoongi understands intimately. But he’s never been one to be a poser, and there’s only far stuntin’ can get you before you burn out like the end of a cigarette.

Yoongi finally wants to move on from his bad past and take the gamble so that he can drop his first mixtape as ‘D-boy’, and he can’t think of anyone more perfect to feature on it than rising talent: Park Jimin.

Jimin really wants to break free from nights spent singing at hip hop clubs for a pittance and finally have his name on an official track in the music charts, but he’s going to need some help navigating the brutal world of music contracts and the paparazzi; and being involved in a scandal the likes of which the industry has never seen before.

GO READ THIS ONE RIGHT NOW TOO. This is another story I didn’t want to start until it was finished but OH WELL. It’s so good, like so freaking good. Her characters are all complex and I love it when fics deal with serious issues such as homophobia. This story is also set in South Korea and the author is working hard to get all the details right and I find that so commendable because it’s not easy at all. I really like how Yoongi ad Jimin kinda fall into the relationship slowly and naturally. I know there’s going to be so much more angst as the story progresses and it’s going to break my heart but the author said that it’ll have a happy ending so I’d recommend everyone to give it a try. It’s seriously good.

9) Pretty Little Baby Boy (contains smut) (*)

Jimin glanced through the open gap in the bag to see starched white cotton and a flash of bright red tartan, and that was when he realised what he was looking at.

Yoongi had brought a schoolgirl uniform to the love motel with him, which he was quite clearly going to wear just for him.

I read it this summer but I totally forgot about it because I didn’t write it down so that’s why I’m including it now (also i just reread it because it’s so good so here you go). Soft smut is always a blessing. Yoongi and Jimin explore crossdressing in this fic and you can find insecure Yoongi and reassuring boyfriend Jimin who is eager to see this side of his lover. Everything about this was so freaking cute. ALSO, Jimin taking pictures of Yoongi crossdressing was SO GOOD.

 Special mention of the month: 

~Creating a Home Series by  (*)

Namjoon/Seokjin + the rest of BTS as their foster/adopted kids

(She’s got a Tumblr account @thecheekybrunette so give her lots of love for such an amazing story) (Thank you so much for making me feel so many things and giving me five kids that I’ve come to love as if they were my own)

1.1. Welcome Home (*)

Seokjin is used to getting calls from social workers at all hours of the day, but never this late at night.

(In which Hoseok loses a mom and gains two dads and four brothers.)

This has to be my favourite namjin story I’ve read until now. I loved their characters and how they are not only a great couple but also the best team. They both care so much for each other and their children. All the children in this story have a special place in my heart: shy Hoseok, anxious Yoongi, loving but sometimes not gentle Jimin, epileptic and dramatic Taehyung and the cutest baby ever (I want to hug him and pinch his cheeks in every scene) Jungkook. This fic shows the hardships of taking care of children that aren’t yours and have many problems but also how that makes you love, care and worry about them even more. I loved this one too much.

1.2. Big Kids, Young Adults (work in progress)

“Jungkook had been so sweet growing up. He had the cutest little bunny smile, and he used to like snuggling something as he walked around, like his Elmo plushie or his teddy bear. He had been so cute.

And now he was so grumpy.”

(In which Jungkook forgets his place at home, and the rest of his family does their best to support him and each other.)

Sequel to Welcome Home. The kids have grown up and are teenagers now. It depicts the struggles that normal teenagers go through, but they have extra luggage that they are carrying from their childhood traumas and illnesses. I love how much Namjoon and Seokjin try to communicate with them and try their hardest with all of them even when sometimes they make mistakes. They are such loving parents and my heart broke so many times when reading especially with Taehyung, Yoongi and Jungkook. A scene that I won’t forget is when Jungkook lashes out at Seokjin in the car on their way to the psychologist, I seriously teared up because it was too real. Can’t wait to read the following chapters.

1.3. I Have You

There wasn’t an untouched piece of skin left on Jimin that Jin could see. There was blood matted in his hair and bruises webbing across his face. Maybe he was better off under his clothes, but something about Jimin’s bitten hands told him otherwise. His chest constricted.

“Up,” Jimin repeated, his soft forehead wrinkling in confusion.

Seokjin shook himself out of it. “Yeah, honey, come here,” he said, his throat closing up. The words were barely a squeak.

Jimin’s first night at Seokjin and Namjoon’s house.

1.4. Something to Do and Someone to Love

“Watching Seokjin take such good care of their son always made Namjoon feel like the luckiest man alive. He had such great kids and such a great husband.

One thing was for certain: Seokjin had made him promise to not let the kids spend more than ten dollars each on him, but he deserved way more than that. Namjoon was going to have to raise the budget just a little bit.”

In which, Seokjin wants his kids to have a perfect Christmas, Namjoon wants Seokjin to have a perfect Christmas, and this one is more about the dads.

The family celebrating Christmas. For some of them it’s their first Christmas and it’s the sweetest. Jungkookie in this one made me want to hug him so much, my heart melted.

1.5. Puffy Eyes and a Pink Nose

Seokjin came into the living room, wrapping his robe a little tighter against his body. “Look who’s asleep,” Seokjin said. His voice was soft in the wee hours of the morning.

“And look who’s not,” Namjoon replied as Seokjin joined him on the couch, curling into his side. “Why don’t you go back to bed, babe?”

“Nah. Wouldn’t want to miss out on all the fun.“

(In which Jungkook wreaks havoc during his first few days at Seokjin and Namjoon’s house, but it’s not his fault at all.)

Jungkook suffering from Neonatal Abstinence Syndrom and Seokjin and Namjoon doing their best even when it is too much to handle, especially when they have to watch their baby suffering and being unable to do something about it.

1.6. Lucky to Have Someone Like You

“Hey,” Namjoon said, pressing a kiss to Taehyung’s cheek. His nose flattened against Taehyung’s temple. “No crying. You’re okay. We’re going to eat dinner.”

(In which Seokjin, Jimin, and Namjoon all take care of Taehyung post-seizure.)

I have developed such an attachment to epileptic!Taehyung you don’t even understand.

1.7. Sunscreen and Sunshine

“Splish splash,” Jungkook said, smushed up against the edge of his playpen. Seokjin detangled himself from Jimin and Taehyung and freed Jungkook from the fence encircling him. The sand engulfed his tiny feet when Seokjin put him down.

“Do you wanna come walking with us, Jungkookie?” Seokjin asked.

“Splish splash with Chim Chim,” Jungkook said seriously, his cheeks flushed from the hot sun. Seokjin held his hand.

“Okay, let’s go splish splash,” he agreed, looking to see if Namjoon was ready to go. He had Taehyung clinging to his back and Hoseok’s hand in his.

“Ready?” Namjoon asked.

Seokjin squeezed Jungkook’s hand. “Ready.”

(In which Namjoon and Seokjin take the boys to the beach.)

Namjoon and Seokjin go to the beach with their five little kids which means laughter, tears, fears, excitement and every emotion you can think of. This was too cute, especially Jungkook’s obsession with crabs.

1.8. Vulnerable

“Jin?” Namjoon piped up, his voice small in the silence that had washed over them. Seokjin grunted in acknowledgement. “Do you ever… Do you ever…” Namjoon played with the hem of his sheets. “Do you ever think about what it’ll be like to bury Taehyung?”

Seokjin’s book fell closed.

(In which Namjoon is terrified for his newest foster son, and rightfully so.)

Namjoon’s special connection with Taehyung and his inability to stop worrying about him. It broke my heart when he talks about his fears to Seokjin.

* my favourite stories

[plounce]

there could be a thinkpiece written on growing up as a lesbian with most of your adolescence spent in slash culture: surrounded by same gender love(/sex) but still utterly focused on men.

the utter vilification and hatred towards women and and neglection + rejection of femslash. your sexuality developing in a community that is so focused on gay male relationships (although written largely by fetishistic cishet women, and from there often mimicking heterosexual relationship roles both in romance and sex). knowing you like women but also having so much of your free time reading and drawing men that it’s not obvious to you that you’re a lesbian (because you don’t recognize your attraction to women is different and special) - but it’s same gender love, so it still feels freeing and validating in a certain way.

i feel like a good chunk of lesbians in my age group have had to grapple with that sort of weird upbringing - there’s obviously the greater culture that we live in, of course, but... it’s weird. there’s a lot more to say on the idea, but i don’t have the words to describe it without feeling like i’m being angry at myself. i don’t think it’s wholly a bad thing but also not wholly a good thing. fandom culture is messed up in a lot of ways and negatively impacted me (especially in the development of my sexuality) in many ways, and this way specifically.

it’s weird and it’s another web to disentangle myself from as i grow into my identity as a lesbian.

[kalinara]

Rip - honour. Rip - intelligence. Rip - savvy. Rip - interactions. Rip - groups. Rip - pride, hubris, arrogance. Rip - resiliency. Rip - attraction. Rip - relationships (any/all kinds). Rip -privacy. Rip - secrets (both keeping them and being out of the loop). Rip - touch. Rip - respect. Rip - love (all of them). Rip - disaster. Rip - loneliness. Rip - leadership. Rip - ever be ready/willing to have a relationship again? Rip - relaxation. Rip - nemesis.

Rip - honour. 

Hah, that’s an interesting prompt because my gut instinct is that he is an honorable person…for the most part.

And for a certain definition of “honor”.  (Sorry, American.  I have no time for an extra “u”.)

I think he tries to follow a code of honor when he deals with the team, as much as possible.  He lies to them, yes.  But he also tends to be very open with the risks and their chances of success.  For example, when he recruited them against Vandal Savage, he might not have told them the whole truth, but he never let them believe it was anything but a nearly-impossible quest.  He always offered to take them home, and when Mick and Snart took him up on it, he didn’t make any attempt to stop them.

But at the same time, I think that he’s used to working on a bit more of a grand scale, with stakes that make honor and fair play a bit less of a priority.

Certainly, as we’ve seen, he isn’t inclined to a fair fight.  He’s got that stunner for a reason.  And while he’s a good hand-to-hand fighter, he does his best work via sneakiness and ambush.  But he’s a scrawny man with no superpowers, so it’s debatable as to how fair some of these fights would be anyway, if he didn’t cheat.  :-P

In the end, I think he’s a pragmatist who wants to be honorable, and tries to be honorable to an extent, but is willing to push that honor aside when the stakes are high enough.

Rip - intelligence

I think Rip has a lot of ingrained assumptions and prejudices with regard to intelligence and/or education.  I think that it’s a quality that he values very highly.  And I think we can see that in the way he initially responds to the crew.

He seems to immediately find a common ground with Martin.  They clash at times, but there was an immediate mutual respect.  As bad as he often was as a leader, he was usually pretty decent at managing Ray.  (And for that matter, in Fellowship, he seemed to be even a little better at keeping Nate in line than Sara usually is.)  He seems to have a lot more patience with the kind of accidental insubordination of distracted geeks than he does with other folk.

He gets along reasonably well with folks like Sara and Jax, who may not have the fancy degrees, but have a lot of natural intelligence.  He respects, although distrusts, Snart.

And it probably, subconsciously, fed into his issues with Mick at first.  Mick is not stupid at all, but his intelligence is on a social/emotional level that the Time Masters aren’t likely to value or even recognize.  And I think Rip’s personal history adds some interesting layers to it.

Rip spent the first formative years of his life starving on the streets.  We don’t know much about that time, but I’m inclined to think that if he’s so quick to stab an adult when feeling threatened, it probably wasn’t particularly pleasant.  I think we can probably hazard a guess that there wasn’t much in the way of educational opportunities there either.

But that changed when he got recruited to the Time Masters.  Suddenly, he was in this warm, safe, place, where he could eat his fill and no one could hurt him.   It must have felt like a completely different world.  And of course, the Time Masters didn’t just give their orphans housing and an upbringing, but an education as well.  (and a healthy dose of indoctrination).

So I tend to think somewhere in the unconscious part of Rip’s mind, he associates education/intelligence with all of the good things like food, comfort, safety.  Basically civilization. Whereas the lack of education/intelligence ends up associated with the fear, cold, terror, hunger of his very early past. 

I don’t really think it’s the key reason he didn’t like Mick at first.  But I think it’s tied up in all sorts of other issues.  Mick is a criminal.  Mick is brutal.  Mick is angry and uncontrollable and violent.  Mick is uneducated.  Somewhere in the back of Rip’s mind, Mick basically is associated with everything that Rip has been raised to hate about his pre-Time Master past.  And of course, the odds are that street-kid Rip would have met people that, on surface level, seemed a lot like Mick.  And those likely would not have been fun or positive experiences.

None of this, of course, is fair to Mick.  (Fortunately, Rip seemed to realize that after the Chronos debacle, and their dynamic shifts significantly and positively in the second half of the season.)

Rip - savvy. 

Okay, so I was going to type a lot about how I think Rip values shrewdness and practical knowledge, but that’s boring and I just typed a lot about intelligence anyway.  So instead, I will talk about pirates.

I think that Rip is secretly a big fan of pirate type media, and may have, at some point during rebellious adolescence considered running away and becoming a time pirate himself.

Gideon was always a little sad that he never followed through with it.  His pirate dreams were a lot of fun, and she always thought she’d make a good pirate ship.

Rip - interactions. 

I think Rip has no idea how to interact with people on a normal, person-to-person basis, without some sort of great goal or mission in mind.

I mean, can you imagine the poor guy trying to engage in small talk?

Rip - groups

So, the most interesting thing about the JSA/Spear reveal in season two, to me (as a single-minded Rip fan) was that it showed that Rip has actually worked with a group before.  And surprisingly enough, seemed to be really effective at it.

I suspect a lot of it comes from the fact that by the time Rip recruited the JSA, they’d been working together for more than a decade.  And even back in 1942, they were pretty calm, focused and disciplined.  So it would have been pretty easy for Rip to present his case to them, and once they’d agreed to help, they would have devoted that calm, focused, discipline to the pursuit of their mutual goals.

But as we’ve seen: Time Masters tend to work alone.  So I doubt he had any real appreciation of the work that goes into creating a team like that.  Recruiting the Legends would have been a nasty surprise.

 Rip - pride, hubris, arrogance

I think that Rip does tend toward a certain arrogance.  I hesitate to call it hubris though, because I don’t think he tends toward “excessive” pride.  (I think Rip’s deadly sin is more wrath than pride, honestly.)

Rip’s arrogance comes from his abilities and experiences.  He’s a Time Master and he’s a damn good one.  He’s Captained the Waverider for twelve years.  He’s feared by time pirates.  He has a shit ton of skills and training to back that up.

I don’t however think he’s a snob.  I don’t think he has an innate sense of aristocracy, or the belief that he’s better than other people.  He was pretty quick to treat his team as his equals.  He respected Martin’s ability to use time equations, Jax’s ability as ship’s engineer, Sara’s ability to fight and to lead.  I think that his initial issues with the Rogues weren’t so much feeling as though he was better than them, as they reminded him of an origin/life that he very much wanted to forget.  There’s an interesting distinction there that might fuel its own blog post one day.

Rip’s secret keeping probably does have an element of pride, but I think it’s less about an inflated ego, and more a sense of “this is MY responsibility, I can’t put this on someone else’s shoulders.”  

Now the Time Masters on a whole?  The epitome of hubris.  There’s a reason that I think of them as the time-space Order of Hermes.  They scheme, they manipulate, they control, and they tell themselves that it’s for the best.  That they’re the best people to make these decisions.  And in the end, their machinations led to their own destruction.

Rip - resiliency

Rip is a survivor.  He kind of has to be.  We’ve seen the trauma list.  But I wonder if maybe his resiliency hasn’t met its match.  Rip’s been different since Land of the Lost.   More shaken, less certain.  And I don’t think it’s entirely about confusion over his place in the group.  

I’ve described Rip as a festering knot of rage and sarcasm wrapped in a duster (a description that I am rightfully proud of), but we haven’t seen any of that rage since Rip woke up.  Even when the poor guy was face to face with Eobard, all he managed was a tired sounding “in the brig”.  It’s worrisome.

Rip - attraction

Okay, so I mentioned before that I officially claim Rip Hunter as an asexual character.  Dude fell in love with a disembodied AI, whose only visual image is a floating blue head.  He’s one of us.

That said, it’s clear that he has romantic attraction.  We see that with Miranda, Jonah, and Gideon.  It’s not a very large sample size, I’ll grant you.  But what can you do.

But based on those, I would say that Rip seems to be drawn toward passionate, somewhat domineering personalities (Gideon’s subtler about it, but it’s definitely there), with strong convictions.  And he seems to especially like beings with a wild or uncontrollable streak.  

So this is where I reiterate the headcanon that Rip is romantically in love with his entire damn team.

(I suspect he also may have a bit of an oedipal/electra complex.)

(Bonus, slightly disturbing thought: if you look at Jonah Hex and then you look at Mick Rory, then it starts to be possible that there may have been yet another element involved in Rip’s initial difficulty in dealing with Mick.  Just saying.)

 Rip - relationships (any/all kind)

Hm.  Well.  For a Time Master, whose ethos specifically forbids most types of attachments, Rip seems to have collected a lot of them.

Miranda and Jonas are obvious, of course.

But there’s also the team, who he loves so much that even when he’s amnesiac he’s trying to save them.

There’s mentor/father figure, Druce.  Mary Xavier.  There’s Gideon.  The JSA (at least Heywood and McNider.  Courtney seemed more distant.)  Jonah.

There’s even that fucked up obsessed villain dynamic that he has with both Vandal Savage and Eobard Thawne.

I mean, really?  That’s a lot of fucking relationships.  He’s really bad at the no-attachment thing, isn’t he?

(Awkward crossover AU idea: Rip Hunter in the old Jedi Order.  or possibly  Rip Hunter, the galaxy’s worst accidental Sith ever.)

 Rip -privacy and  Rip - secrets (both keeping them and being out of the loop)

I think privacy among the Time Masters must be a really interesting concept.  They have AIs that monitor dreams.  Councils that regulate romantic relationships.  Devices to literally invade people’s minds.

That’s not a society that puts a lot of stock in privacy.

But I’m reminded of something I read about Japan, when I was much younger, which discussed how even though physical personal space was very different there than in the United States (as anyone who’s ever been crammed into a Japanese subway can attest), many Japanese people had other ways to establish personal boundaries and maintain some measure of distance from one another psychologically, even if it can’t always happen physically.

And it makes me wonder if the Time Masters don’t have their own ways of psychologically creating some measure of privacy for themselves.

It may explain why Rip finds it so difficult to open up to his crew.  What do you keep for yourself in a society where even your dreams are monitored?

That said, to Rip’s credit, he isn’t prone toward hypocrisy.  He doesn’t seem to have much of an issue when the crew keeps secrets from him too.  (He was concerned about Sara’s bloodlust, but he didn’t seem to be upset that she didn’t tell him about it, for example.)

Rip - touch

I think this is one of the ways that the Time Masters really fucked Rip up royally from day one.  Because Rip is so standoffish most of the time, so rigid and closed off, that he pretty much breathes “don’t touch me” vibes.

But as has been pointed out and illustrated in lovely gifsets, Rip is remarkably touchy-feely when people are injured.  Shoulder pats.  Face holding.  Hand holding.  And it’s not a matter of him tolerating their need for comfort.  He’s the one who reaches out.

He’s the one that, as soon as he’s freed from the brig in his mind, immediately clings to Gideon (though when it came to the kiss, she pretty much jumped up to meet him half way.  But that’s a different bit of meta.)

And then there was that weird sort of lean/not-lean into Jonah Hex’s space when they’re bantering about laser guns.

I think ultimately that Rip is not touch-averse at all.  He’s touch-starved.  He wants to reach out to people.  He wants to offer comfort and receive it.   He’d actually really enjoy a shoulder pat or a hand-shake, or a god-damned real, corporeal hug.  But he doesn’t know how to ask for it.

He gives “don’t touch me” vibes because he doesn’t know how not to.  And that’s so very sad.

Rip - respect

Okay, this one is more tangential.  But I always find myself wondering about Magister Druce.  I mean, specifically, his role in young Rip’s life.  Because Rip respects him and trusts him so damn much for most of season one.  EVEN after being lead into an ambush.  EVEN after knowing about Chronos.  EVEN after he issues the Omega Protocol.

And has that actor EVER played a good guy?  Ever?

But Rip’s utter shock when he learns the depths of Druce’s betrayal is unmistakable.

And the thing is, I’m not sure that the regard is entirely one-sided.  I’ve mentioned before that the entire Oculus reveal was basically unnecessary.  Rip was captured and likely to be executed, exiled, or just imprisoned for life.  Druce had no reason to remove him from his cell and explain everything.  Unless he seriously thought something would be gained by it.  I wonder, if Rip had given into despair and surrendered, if Druce wouldn’t have actually brought him back into the fold.  I kind of think that was the intention.  (Especially given the parallel cuts to Mick’s re-brainwashing.)

It’s pretty clear that they were mentor and student at one time.  But it seems like a little more than that.  This isn’t just a student’s respect and trust for a mentor.  It’s bigger, blinder, more unconditional than that.  It’s a child’s trust, and as we’ve seen, Rip isn’t particularly good at trusting anyone.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Druce had been grooming him from a very young age.  He might have even been the one who initially found little Michael on the streets and brought him in.  It would explain a lot.  Particularly the level of self-loathing that Rip has for his younger self.  Mary Xavier wouldn’t have encouraged that, and instead seemed gently tolerant of Michael’s issues.  Druce, however, may have.

And of course, then it leads to more speculation.  Rip may not have trusted the Time Masters, but he trusted Druce.  How much did he trust him?  Did Vandal Savage know how to find Miranda and Jonas because Rip told Druce where they were?

Rip - love (all of them). 

All of the types of love or all of the characters?  

Okay, so, this is another “I blame the Time Masters” bit, but I suspect that eros and philia are really easily mixed up in Rip’s brain.  It’s what comes of a society that stigmatizes normal human connections the way it does.  

I’ve mentioned before that I imagine Rip sees gestures of romance in the same way that we look at overtly sexual acts, and I stand by that.  In a lot of ways, I think he’d be more comfortable seeing sexual acts, as that’s just primitive biology.  Romance and friendship, concepts that prize connections between people, that prioritize certain people over others or even the world…  those are truly dangerous for a Time Master.

And considering that Rip did help break time specifically for his team, the Time Masters may have had a bit of a point.

But anyway, this is yet another chance to state my sincere belief that Rip Hunter is deeply in love with his entire team.  Even Martin.  Even Mick.  And of course, Gideon.  And he has no idea how to begin to parse out these emotions or what to do with them.

I think the Time Masters probably have a really interesting stance on storge.  There are certain implications that it’s frowned upon as well.  Certainly Jonas was a problem.  And I suspect there’s a reason Rip had to cross his own timeline in order to seek his mother’s help.

The one storge type of relationship that seems to be tolerated is Rip’s regard for Zaman Druce.  But perhaps that makes a lot of sense.  If the young Time Masters’ are only allowed one outlet for human connection, they will likely be very dependent on it, and therefore more easily influenced.

Agape is probably the love most favored by the Time Masters.  But I think it’s the love that Rip is least suited to.  Agape requires a level of emotional distance that I don’t really think Rip has.  Rip goes all in.

Rip - disaster. 

I feel like that dash should be an equal sign.  And that pretty much says it all.  :-)

Rip - loneliness

One very consistent character trait of Rip’s is that, in the end, he really needs to have people around him.  We’ve seen what he does when he’s alone: he either ends up succumbing to despair or engaging in tremendously bad, self-destructive ideas.

The truly depressing part about Rip’s story so far, however, is that he starts out as a man who is (except for Gideon, to be fair) completely alone with his grief, rage and guilt.  He ends up gathering a makeshift family of misfits and assholes.  But he still ends up suffering alone.  

Rip - leadership

Wisecracks aside, I don’t actually think that Rip is THAT bad as a leader.  As we’ve seen in the Spear flashbacks and  in Fellowship: when there’s a clear goal, with a clear direction, with a team that’s willing to listen, he does fine.

Furthermore, there are a number of really good decisions that he made in season one that he never really gets credit for: 

For example, naming Jax as ship’s mechanic.  This wasn’t just a lucky spur of the moment decision.  It was a decision made in the context of a growing issue.

If you recall, the relationship between Martin and Jax was a pretty important arc in the beginning of season one.  Martin had kidnapped Jax to bring him along, to begin with, while Jax had expressed doubts that he’d be any use on this kind of team.  They were also dealing with Martin being overprotective and domineering toward Jax, as a result of dealing with Ronnie’s death.  Martin had to learn to trust and back off of Jax.

So looking at that, then we can see why naming Jax as the ship’s mechanic was actually a legitimately brilliant management decision.

Jax didn’t initially have a lot of self-confidence.  He saw himself as the normal guy.  An ordinary mechanic surrounded by super geniuses and assassins and so on. (Not that there is anything wrong with being a mechanic.)

But Jax was a mechanic and a very good one.  And he was much smarter than he gave himself credit for.  This made him an ideal choice.  (And since he’s patient and mature, he’s far better suited than Ray, who while brilliant and mechanically inclined, is a bit too erratic for this kind of job.)

So Jax discovers that he has it in him to be an awesome Chief Engineer.  Instant boost of confidence.

It also has nothing to do with Martin or Firestorm.  As we’ve seen with Ray, when you have powers or cool tech, it can be very easy to put all your self-worth into one specific role.  And when you’re partnered with someone who can be a little overbearing, like Martin, then that can be a lot of added stress or a recipe for co-dependence.

But this way, Jax has something that proves that he has value as a teammate besides just being Martin’s partner.  It’s something that’s all his.  And it gives him more of a way to argue on equal footing.

And it gives him a way to seek privacy and vent if he needs to.  Need some time alone?  Important repairs.

Another good decision that Rip made was to pair Kendra and Sara in White Knights.  This was, if you recall, right after the episode where Sara had revealed her issues with bloodlust.  And of course, we learn that Kendra’s having a great deal of difficulty managing her Hawk powers and memories.

Neither woman would have likely sought the other out on their own.  As we saw, both had a considerable amount of distrust for each other at the time.  Furthermore, Sara’s used to suffering in silence, while Kendra was understandably overwhelmed with the changes in her life.

They’re both good people though and even though they’re not likely to ask for help for themselves, both women were inclined to try to help someone else.

So Rip pairs them up, points out to each how she’s uniquely qualified to understand what the other is going through.   And voila, both women are able to help each other, and then embark on a lasting friendship.

I don’t point this out to give Rip credit for either Jax’s achievements or Sara and Kendra’s.  He is certainly not the reason that Jax was a good mechanic or the girls became friends.

But in both cases, he was the one to recognize the potential that these characters had, and pushed them into a position to discover that for themselves.

And that’s pretty good!

In the end, Rip’s biggest obstacle as a leader is, I think, a measure of confidence.  He doesn’t have the confidence to open up to his team.  He doesn’t have the confidence to exert authority over his team.  So he is never able to quite direct or control them successfully.

Rip - ever be ready/willing to have a relationship again?

That’s a hard question.  I think at some point in the distant future, he would be ready/willing to have a relationship, but honestly, he’s nowhere near that point right now.  He’s not quite the jagged chasm of despair that he was in season one, thank goodness, but I think he’s still a bit too fragile.

One of the reasons that I ship Time Hex is that I think it’s the only relationship that I could see actually working right now, because all the groundwork was laid a long time ago.  Even if you don’t think they had something going on then, there was still a level of trust and camaraderie that predates Rip’s current fragility.

Prior to Turncoat, I thought Time Canary had a chance to work too.  He’s still kind of broken, but she’s kind of broken too, so I thought they might be in a place that they could help each other.  But then there was evil Rip.  And even though I think Sara’s already forgiven him, and had basically as soon as they saved him if not sooner, Rip isn’t anywhere near ready to forgive himself.  

And really, I don’t think Sara would pursue it either right now, even assuming she’s interested.  She has some idea of how lost and fragile he is right now, and how hard he’s trying to adjust to the changes of the crew, his role and hers.  Pursuing a relationship right then and there would probably feel like a potential abuse of power.  And I think Sara is someone who is always very conscious of that kind of thing.

Oddly, I also don’t think Rip is ready for Time Ship at this juncture, and I kind of wonder if that wasn’t maybe some subconscious push for him to leave the ship.  Because he and Gideon have been partners for a very long time.  She’s a rock and a sole point of stability for him.  But suddenly, thanks to his own impulsive gesture, there’s something new and chaotic in the mix.  I don’t think he’s remotely ready to process that.

Rip - relaxation. 

I’m not sure that I believe Rip is able to relax.  Even before his family died.  He just seems like the sort of person who is constantly focused on a goal or idea.

I’ve mentioned that I don’t see Rip as much of a chess player.  I think of him more as someone who would be putting together a giant 5 billion piece puzzle, or making something.  Basically solitary and creative pursuits.

Rip - nemesis.

Hmm.  Well, so far we had Vandal Savage and Eobard Thawne?  I admit though, I’d love to see the introduction of some rival ex-Time Masters or something.

But really, I want the return of Zaman Druce.  He was such a great villain.  I’d love to see him cross swords with Rip again.  (Also, Leonard Snart would be back too.  I know a lot of folk would enjoy that.  :-P)